Jill Filipovic DEC. 1, 2017
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Matt Lauer with Hillary Clinton at the NBC News “Commander-in-Chief Forum” in September 2016. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
Matt Lauer, like Charlie Rose and Mark Halperin before him, is a journalist out of a job after his employer fired him for sexually harassing female colleagues. It’s good news that real penalties are now leveled on men who harass — after centuries of the costs mostly befalling the women who endure harassment. But the deep cultural rot that has corroded nearly all of our institutions and every corner of our culture is not just about a few badly behaved men. Sexual harassment, and the sexism it’s predicated on, involves more than the harassers and the harassed; when the harassers are men with loud microphones, their private misogyny has wide-reaching public consequences. One of the most significant: the 2016 election.
Many of the male journalists who stand accused of sexual harassment were on the forefront of covering the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Matt Lauer interviewed Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump in an official “commander-in-chief forum” for NBC. He notoriously peppered and interrupted Mrs. Clinton with cold, aggressive, condescending questions hyper-focused on her emails, only to pitch softballs at Mr. Trump and treat him with gentle collegiality a half-hour later. Mark Halperin and Charlie Rose set much of the televised political discourse on the race, interviewing other pundits, opining themselves and obsessing over the electoral play-by-play. Mr. Rose, after the election, took a tone similar to Mr. Lauer’s with Mrs. Clinton — talking down to her, interrupting her, portraying her as untrustworthy. Mr. Halperin was a harsh critic of Mrs. Clinton, painting her as ruthless and corrupt, while going surprisingly easy on Mr. Trump. The reporter Glenn Thrush, currently on leave from The New York Times because of sexual harassment allegations, covered Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign when he was at Newsday and continued to write about her over the next eight years for Politico.
A pervasive theme of all of these men’s coverage of Mrs. Clinton was that she was dishonest and unlikable. These recent harassment allegations suggest that perhaps the problem wasn’t that Mrs. Clinton was untruthful or inherently hard to connect with, but that these particular men hold deep biases against women who seek power instead of sticking to acquiescent sex-object status.
A month ago, Rebecca Traister wrote in New York magazine that with the flood of sexual harassment charges, “we see that the men who have had the power to abuse women’s bodies and psyches throughout their careers are in many cases also the ones in charge of our political and cultural stories.” With the Lauer accusations, this observation has come into sharper focus on one particular picture: the media sexism that contributed to Hillary Clinton’s loss.
The 2016 presidential race was so close that any of a half-dozen factors surely influenced the outcome: James Comey, racial politics, Clinton family baggage, the contentious Democratic primary, third-party spoilers, Russian interference, fake news. But when one of the best-qualified candidates for the presidency in American history and the first woman to get close to the Oval Office loses to an opponent who had not dedicated a nanosecond of his life to public service and ran a blatantly misogynist campaign, it’s hard to conclude that gender didn’t play a role.
For arguing that gender shaped the election narrative and its result, feminists have been pooh-poohed, simultaneously told that it was Clinton, not her gender, that was the problem and that her female supporters were voting with their vaginas instead of their brains.
The latest harassment and assault allegations complicate that account and suggest that perhaps many of the high-profile media men covering Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump were the ones leading with their genitals. Mr. Trump was notoriously accused of multiple acts of sexual harassment and assault, and was caught on tape bragging about his proclivity for grabbing women. That several of the men covering the race — shaping the way American voters understood the candidates and what was at stake — were apparently behaving in similarly appalling ways off-camera calls into question not just their objectivity but also their ability to cover the story with the seriousness and urgency it demanded.
Sexual harassment at the hands of political journalists also pulls back the curtain on how too many of these men view women generally. The journalists in question are accused of a range of behaviors, some more serious than others, from drunken unsolicited kisses to, in Mr. Lauer’s case, sexual assault (in addition to exposing himself to a colleague and sending another a sex toy with a note detailing how he would like to use it on her). The theme running through nearly all of the complaints is a man in a position of power who saw the women around him not as competent colleagues or as even sovereign human beings, but as sexual objects he could either proposition to boost his ego or humiliate to feed a desire for domination.
It’s hard to look at these men’s coverage of Mrs. Clinton and not see glimmers of that same simmering disrespect and impulse to keep women in a subordinate place. When men turn some women into sexual objects, the women who are inside that box are one-dimensional, while those outside of it become disposable; the ones who refuse to be disposed of, who continue to insist on being seen and heard, are inconvenient and pitiable at best, deceitful shrews and crazy harpies at worst. That’s exactly how some commentary and news coverage treated Mrs. Clinton.
This has ripple effects for all women. Men are assumed to fail or succeed based on merit; they are mentored and supported by more senior men, and no one bats an eye. Young women, though, are often treated as suspect if more senior men take an interest in them (and too often, more senior men’s interests are suspect indeed, but it’s women’s reputations that suffer the stigma of being thought to sleep or flirt their way to the top rather than earning their perches).
When men see women as sex objects first and colleagues second, their actual talents, skills and smarts are easily overlooked. A boss who harasses the woman in the cubicle next to you may not be sexually coercing you or torpedoing your career, but his actions signal that he does not see women as competent co-workers entitled to a rewarding and effective workplace.
Some commentators, most notably Geraldo Rivera, have written some acts of harassment off as courtship gone awry. This is truly bizarre, and it illustrates just how tied we are to the idea that women are inherently inviting sexual aggression and that men are inherently sexually voracious and socially clueless. Women, and most men, know that courtship doesn’t typically take the form of unwanted grabbing or unsolicited indecent exposure. (“Mommy and Daddy fell in love the day Daddy called Mommy into his office and began vigorously masturbating at her” is not exactly a meet-cute story.)
This moment isn’t about a nation of confused men. It’s about a minority of men who choose to treat women alternately as walking sex objects or bothersome and potentially devious nags. It’s about a majority of Americans who give men a pass for all manner of bad behavior, because they assume men are entitled to behave badly but hold women to an entirely different standard.
That is why it’s so egregious that sexual harassers set the tone of much of the coverage of the woman who hoped to be the first female president.
These “Crooked Hillary” narratives pushed by Mr. Lauer, Mr. Halperin, and a long list of other prominent journalists and pundits indelibly shaped the election, and were themselves gendered: Hillary Clinton as a cackling witch, Hillary Clinton a woman it was easy to distrust because she was also a woman seeking power, and what kind of woman does that? Mr. Trump emphasized this caricature as part of his more broadly sexist campaign, but he didn’t invent it. Nor was he the only famous man going on television to perpetuate it — while revealing a deep disdain for women when the cameras weren’t rolling.
This story has been updated to clarify a characterization of campaign coverage.
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Originally Posted by Swordsmyth
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