The Problem with Harvey Weinstein is Us

By Catherine Frederick on October 13, 2017

In the past few days, a scandal involving a media mogul, Harvey Weinstein, has come to light. For years, he has been sexually exploiting the women who come to him seeking advancement in his field. It’s not a new story. Dr. Luke, Bill Cosby, and even our current President have all had these sorts of allegations come to light in recent years, with various levels of success in punishment following their reveals. These things come to light, people are horrified, people forget, and then it happens again.

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There are some things that are acknowledged as norms. Because of this, they are accepted and passed over as if nothing can be done about them, as if they will linger on in our society in perpetuity, the ghost of ages long past. ‘Boys will be boys,’ for example. It’s a phrase used when young boys act a certain way, and their actions are passed off as standard for their age and gender. Behaviors that were dismissed by this explanation included things like; pushing, pulling pig tails, stealing toys, calling people names, snapping the straps of girls’ bras. All of this was passed off as standard behavior.

It was a norm that was so socially accepted that no one really stopped to consider the message that it was a sending, because it was a message that was ingrained in the minds of children (and, therefore, future parents) before they were capable of critical thinking. In recent years, however, people have started to question the wisdom of giving little boys a free pass to act out their violent tendencies without addressing them in a constructive way.

Entire generations of men have grown up having gotten away with school yard bullying, their actions dismissed as a phase. Perhaps it is for some boys, but for others, it reappears later in life as a disregard for the personal property and space of other people (often women), and often culminates in behavior that we have seen playing out across our newspapers and in our tabloid in recent days. Whereas before, it was a boy stealing a toy that he wanted, it is now a man stealing his pleasure in an entirely different way.

Behaviors such as Weinstein’s, however, are not just childhood adages coming back to haunt us, but are also the result of things like conformity. Conformity is “behavior that matches group expectations.” That is not to say that people are saying ‘well, everyone around me is sexually assaulting women, so I have to do it, too, to fit it.’ Instead, it creates an atmosphere where, when one sees the rich and powerful doing it and getting away with it, it makes one much more likely to do it themselves.

It’s like smoking pot. If you were raised to think it was wrong, and you spend your whole life with those like-minded people, you will probably avoid pot until the day. If you find yourself falling in with a group that smokes pot, you might still be morally opposed to it and never try it. However, if, at some point in your life, even when you were raised to think it was wrong, were tempted or curious, you are more likely to try it once exposed, and, eventually, stop seeing as a bad thing altogether the more you do it without getting caught or without consequences to yourself. This example is, of course, absurd, because pot is a victimless crime and sexual assault is committed upon actual living, breathing people, but the general idea remains the same.

So, you place yourself in an environment where sexual harassment is not a great taboo, and people will find themselves slipping, because there is no consequence for your actions in a place where the victims have been conditioned to keep with mouths shut.

Hollywood is the special, cool kids club that we all wanted to be a part of in high school. In the world of Hollywood, where being a part of the ‘cool kids’ also means potentially making millions of dollars, there is also all the more reason to do exactly as you’re told, especially by the people at the top of the totem pole.

Women who want to make it big need to meet with producers, and if that producer tells you that he’ll hand you your hopes and dreams on a silver platter, it takes you a second to realize that it comes with a price tag. And once you’re part of the exclusive club, to stay there, you need to stay loyal.

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A single voice rising in protest can be stomped down, paid off, and blacklisted, and next thing you know, you’re out of your dreams with a settlement check and a gag order. These deals are insulated, and those on the outside know nothing about them until they know everything about them, and the time in between is when all the bad things happen to women that have no idea what’s about to happen to them.

People value a lot of things. They value honesty, integrity, loyalty. People aren’t really sure what to do when one clashes with the other. There have been many instances of people dismissing the dark dealings of others in the name of loyalty, even at the expense of honesty, because they don’t know which value is worth the most. As a result, they go with the easiest.

There’s a powerful person that perhaps they owe their career to. Turning against them with only one allegation would look bad to your friend who helped you, to your mutual friends who stuck with him, and to the public that has so far heard either nothing about this scandal or only the one solitary voice; the voice that PR reps will attempt to label as a lying gold digger. As a result, loyalty to a friend seems like the most obvious actions, and the one person brave enough to do the right thing gets drowned out by the noise of people patting themselves on the back.

There are many things within our society that are insidious, and start at a young age. The things that are so easy to dismiss as just something ‘everyone does’ appear in the future doing harm to people and our society in ways that we never could have imagined back when it was just ‘boys being boys.’

These cycles, however, aren’t self-sustaining. They can be stopped. It starts with parents teaching their children. It starts with not laughing at the sexist joke. It starts with respecting it when a person says know. It starts with believing a woman when they tell you something that has happened to them. And it starts with acting when something like this Harvey Weinstein scandal happens, instead of standing around and talking about how shocked we all are.

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