... and ain't i a woman?: Cover-up
The huge headlines, reams of articles and hours of TV commentary devoted to the accumulating accusations of sexual harassment against US President Bill Clinton are becoming boring.
This is unfortunate because, despite (or, more accurately, because of) the media's extensive coverage, the real issue is being progressively covered up.
The cover-up is in the "angle", as journalists say. "White House sex scandal", "All the president's (alleged) women", "Clinton: irresistible to women?": each headline reduces the issue of sexual harassment to one of sex. Sex, after all, sells.
Sexual harassment, however, has very little to do with sex.
Sex is a private matter. So long as it involves no coercion, what people (including the US president) do sexually is entirely their business. Every attempt by politicians, the media or society's self-appointed moral guardians to pass judgment on or penalise individuals for their sexual behaviour or preferences must be resisted.
Contrary to the media's portrayal of this issue, however, Clinton is not being accused by the women concerned of "sinfully" pursuing "too many" extramarital sexual encounters. He is being accused of sexually harassing women on his staff.
Sexual harassment is about power, the power of one group of people over another: men over women, employers over employees, teachers over students, white over black. It is not about flirting, or making a sexual approach, or having a sexual relationship with a workmate or anyone else. Specifically, it is punishing, or threatening to punish, someone because they will not accede to the harasser's sexual demands.
Sexual harassment is possible and endemic in our society because it is based on inequalities upheld by social institutions: the family, which renders women economically and psychologically dependent and vulnerable; the wage labour system, which divides people into bosses and workers; the education system, in which all students are accountable to their teachers' authority; the legal and "welfare" systems, which judge people of colour as less civilised or responsible than whites. Unlike sex, sexual harassment is a public and a political issue.
The women's liberation movement campaigned hard in the 1970s and early '80s to force public acknowledgment that sexual harassment is a product of systemic inequality and discrimination, and that a just society should neither ignore nor condone it, but legislate against it.
To succeed in that campaign, the movement had to expose as fallacies the myths that underlie justifications for the sexual exploitation of women: "Men just can't help themselves, it's their sex drive"; or "she encouraged him by being friendly or dressing provocatively"; or "she read too much into it", or "misinterpreted it", or "must have fantasised it"; or "she really didn't mind his advances, until she realised she could gain something by protesting against them".
Two decades later, these lines are being routinely reasserted by the media. "Why did Kathleen Willey give Clinton a present after the alleged incident?", they ask. "Why did she wait so many years to make her accusation?" "Why did Paula Jones agree to go to Clinton's hotel room in the first place?" "Is Clinton addicted to sex and in need of psychiatric help?".
Every one of these questions, and many more like them which saturate the newspapers and TV shows, implicitly excuses the accused harasser. Every question exploits (and reinforces) sexist stereotypes to blame the victim. Most importantly, every question ignores, indeed conceals the existence of institutionalised power inequalities and their influence on the day-to-day actions of those without power.
That's a cover-up, and it must be exposed.
By Lisa Macdonald