A Requiem on the Masculine Mystique
It seems that the ignominy of the Harvey Weinstein allegations has cast a shadow that looms like the sword of Damocles over power brokers in Hollywood, corporate America and Congress. The year after women, en masse, declined to endorse what would have been a watershed moment in Presidential politics--the election of Hillary Clinton-the "Me Too" hashtag has gathered inertia and rocked the sexist patriarchy of American culture.
The arc of power has always bent inordinately toward the male gender. Women have been subjugated to secondary, if not tertiary status across every strata of our culture that does not involve putative matriarchal functions. They have been commoditized, objectified and politicized since this country's inception. What makes the national inertia behind this repudiation of sexual harassment so refreshing is that it comes in the shadow of the banal narcissism that inculcated this "boys will be boys" ethos in which women were not only aware of the licentious environments that they could be subjected to in every arena, but the election of a President whose misogynistic behavior and edicts aggressively expanded the bandwidth by which this topic can be deliberated.
Women occupy executive boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies and Hollywood studios. They also serve as Presidents of major universities, four-star generals, commercial airline pilots, astronauts, and in the halls of Congress- all of which in as short as 50 years ago were untenable propositions. The patrician mindset that no only created glass ceilings for women, but condoned toxic environments (see Madmen or any television programming of a bygone era) in which women could be inundated with inappropriate comments, advances, touches and career-ending threats to yield to sexual propositions. In the same year that DC Comics' "Wonder Woman" became a box-office bonanza, a galvanizing and liberating force has empowered legions of women to come forth and say "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!"
What had ostensibly become an accepted yet derisive term-the casting couch- as a segue to sexual impropriety as standard procedure to get roles in Hollywood has become a flash point to remove the private shame of those who felt powerless in yielding to the hedonistic culture of pay to play with human flesh. To witness the ossification of a practice of abusing power as a modus operandi is revelatory. It also speaks to the dichotomy that so many men hold on to as cursory. When venerated journalist Charlie Rose was sacked at PBS because of salacious allegations, it shattered the veneer of the predatory boss or employer who fostered a zeitgeist of denigrating women. Far too many men are raised on an unhealthy diet of pornography and domestic violence as entertainment as part of their optics of men's interaction with women. I am not implying that those outliers alone inculcated the kind of toxic enclaves driving the national backlash that is reaping a whirlwind for those who engendered behaviors that were not only abusive but flat out wrong.
The rhetorical question is simply will this moment of reckoning become the touchstone to fundamentally and permanently shift the paradigm of the acceptable treatment of women in the workplace or will it be an aberration whose bandwidth will eventually shrink and slither back into the toxic quagmire that has too long been a part of the status quo. We shall see!
