Politicians Behaving Badly

Men, Women, and the Politics of Sexual Harassment

Paulina Cossette, Stephen Craig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000768046
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Corruption politique et inconduite

This book examines citizens' attitudes about sexual harassment in the #MeToo era, seeking to determine how much these attitudes may have changed over the past few years. Using an innovative experimental research design, the authors look at how people react to allegations of harassment made against a fictional member of Congress. They consider whether those reactions vary with the offender's party affiliation, gender, and response to the allegations. Appropriate for students, scholars, and general readers alike, this book offers a timely analysis of an important political issue.

1

Politicians and Many Others Behaving Badly

Over the past few years, the American public has witnessed a virtual avalanche of stories detailing instances of sexual misconduct – including harassment, assault, and various other forms of abuse – allegedly committed by entertainment figures, media celebrities, corporate executives, political leaders, and even academics.¹ From Kevin Spacey and R. Kelly, to Matt Lauer and Bill O’Reilly, to Les Moonves and Steve Wynn, to Al Franken and Donald Trump,² images of predatory men, date rape drugs, and phrases like “grab her by the p***y” have become hauntingly familiar. Extensive coverage of these incidents in the press contributed to the explosive growth of the #MeToo movement, a grassroots campaign intended to both publicize and hold accountable the (mostly) men who have harassed and abused (mostly) women and gotten away with it because of the positions of power and influence they hold.

The phrase “me too” was coined in 2006 by Tarana Burke, a sexual assault survivor turned activist whose goal at the time was “to help young women of color who had survived sexual abuse, assault and exploitation” (Santiago and Criss 2017). It wasn’t until October 2017, however, that these words of support became a political rallying cry sparked by a New York Times story that revealed what many Hollywood insiders had known for years: Blockbuster movie producer Harvey Weinstein (Shakespeare in Love, Pulp Fiction) enjoyed inviting young actresses and assistants up to his hotel room and coercing or forcing them to engage in sexual acts (Kantor and Twohey 2017). The women were told that if they cooperated, they would be rewarded with favorable film roles that could boost their careers; if not, they faced retaliation by Weinstein with the loss of work and their professional reputations. Ten days later, the “Me Too” hashtag emerged when actress Alyssa Milano tweeted, “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.” The mantra quickly turned into a full-blown movement.³

The Weinstein story was followed in rapid succession by reports alleging that a number of other public and some not-so-public figures such as Dr. Larry Nassar⁴ also had a history of targeting women, often their co-workers, and subjecting them to inappropriate behavior that ranged from sexual comments passed off as mere jokes to physical abuse. Several high-profile journalists and media personalities such as Bill O’Reilly of Fox News (Steel 2018), Matt Lauer of NBC’s Today show (Setoodeh and Wagmeister 2017), Charlie Rose of CBS News (Popper 2018), and political analyst Mark Halperin (Schmidt 2017) lost their jobs after being accused by female staffers and colleagues of sexual misconduct. In the world of business and finance, billionaire casino magnate and former finance chair for the Republican National Committee Steve Wynn was said to have pressured dozens of female employees to perform sex acts, exposed himself, or engaged in unwanted touching (Goldstein, Hsu, and Vogel 2018). Former president of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team and Under Armour executive Terdema Ussery was accused by multiple women of subjecting them to unwanted advances and touching (McCann 2018). Les Moonves, who bridged the worlds of entertainment and business as CEO of CBS (and “a prominent voice in the #MeToo movement”), was accused of forcible touching or kissing during business meetings as well as making threats to derail the careers of any women who rejected his advances (Farrow 2018). Allegations of sexual misconduct have also surfaced in academia, with a “growing number of former students and faculty colleagues” stepping forward – at schools such as Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Virginia – to “accuse tenured professors of sexual harassment and, in some cases, sexual assault” (Anderson 2018).⁵

While the great majority of harassment victims are women, a few have been men. Actor Kevin Spacey, for example, was charged with misconduct by a number of co-stars and other young men (Puente 2017a), actors James van der Beek and Terry Crews revealed that they had been groped early in their careers by “older, powerful men” and high-level Hollywood executives (Smith 2017; Bradley 2018), and photographer Mario Testino was accused by 13 male assistants and models of behavior that included “groping and masturbation” (Bernstein, Schneier, and Friedman 2018). A number of former students alleged that renowned orchestra conductor and pianist James Levine pressured them to have sex with him or to participate in “mutual masturbation sessions” with other students (Tsioulcas 2018). In fact, while media coverage tends to focus on female victims, a large number of men also have experienced some form of sexual abuse or workplace harassment as either children or adults (Vitelli 2015; Scott 2017; Chandler 2018). While these men often are supporters of #MeToo, some of them wonder whether male victims “with similar scars will ever receive a comparable level of public empathy and understanding” (Associated Press 2018).

The offenders in most of these cases were themselves men, though there are instances where prominent women are alleged to have crossed the line. Recent examples include Italian actress and #MeToo advocate Asia Argento, who had a sexual relationship with an underage actor and musician and paid him $380,000 after his lawyers initiated legal action (Severson 2018); Frankie Shaw, creator and star of Showtime comedy series SMILF, who was accused by employees of the show of abusive behavior and staging “inappropriately handled sex scenes” (Masters 2018; Drysdale 2019); and Avital Ronell, a professor of German and comparative literature, who was suspended by New York University for having sexually harassed a male former graduate student (Greenberg 2018).⁶ On the political front, state assemblywoman Cristina Garcia (D-California) was accused by several staff members of inappropriate behavior; one said that she fired him after he refused to play a game of spin the bottle with her, while others said that she “talked about her sex life in front of employees, drank alcohol at work, and told staffers that they were expendable” (K. Phillips 2018). Ironically, Garcia was one of the “silence breakers” named Person of the Year by Time Magazine for 2017, thereby recognizing the growing influence of the #MeToo movement and others on American culture.⁷

In the following chapter, we will review the academic literature that deals with the electoral consequences of scandal. For example: Are politicians who find themselves embroiled in a scandal situation more likely than their scandal-free counterparts to be defeated at the polls (either primary or general) when they seek re-election? to experience diminished vote margins when they do win? to resign rather than risk electoral defeat? or, at the very least, to become less popular and/or receive lower performance evaluations from their constituents than was the case prior to scandal allegations becoming public? Many of the studies that we will discuss are based on people’s reactions to scenarios in which fictional politicians are accused of engaging in some sort of misbehavior. Looking at real-life scandals, however, it is clear that only a few of them involve female offenders (Marion 2015; Mandell 2017). This may be in part because women are more honest than men – as we will see, many people believe that to be true – but, when it comes to sex-related scandals, and specifically sexual harassment, there is another possible explanation: power. According to Abigail Saguy (also see Higginbottom 2018), Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at UCLA,

One of the reasons it is men who harass women, and sometimes other men, is that this is about power and overwhelmingly (workplace) upper management is male, so the positions of power are disproportionately occupied by men and the bottom is disproportionately occupied by women.

Puente 2017b

A similar disparity has been evident in the political realm since our nation’s beginnings, with men occupying the overwhelming majority of elected positions at all levels. With both numbers and power on their side, it is hardly surprising that the alleged wrongdoers in almost all scandals involving sexual harassment and assault have been men (on the other hand, see Stemple and Meyer 2017). Yet women are increasingly moving into positions of authority in every walk of life from politics (Cooney 2018) to the board room and, without necessarily assuming the worst, the gender disparity in scandal allegations could become smaller as a result in the years to come – or not (see Stolberg 2011). This is one of the topics we will explore with our data analysis in Chapter 5.

Sex and the Supreme Court: Brett Kavanaugh and Anita Hill

As accusations continued to fly throughout 2018, perhaps the biggest story of the year involved the nomination of Washington, DC Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the US Supreme Court. When President Trump named Kavanaugh, there was considerable buzz about the latter’s conservative credentials and whether he might one day provide the deciding vote to overturn the landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade protecting a woman’s right to obtain an abortion. Just days before the Senate Judiciary Committee was set to vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination, reports surfaced that psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford had written to her congresswoman, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-California), stating that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party over 30 years prior when the two were in high school (Wolf and Hayes 2018; DeBonis 2018). Both Professor Ford and Judge Kavanaugh ended up testifying before the Judiciary Committee in what was a tense and often emotional day on Capitol Hill. After waiting for a week during which the FBI conducted a limited investigation, the Senate ultimately voted 50–48 to confirm Kavanaugh.⁸

For those born before the mid-1980s, these events likely felt like déjà vu. But many young people today barely remember, or perhaps have not even heard of, the confirmation hearing that first brought sexual harassment to the public’s attention. In July 1991, President George H. W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to succeed Justice Thurgood Marshall on the United States (US) Supreme Court. At the time, Thomas had been serving as a judge on the US Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia Circuit for about one year. Before that, he was a legislative assistant to Senator Roy Danforth (R-Missouri), assistant secretary in the US Department of Education during the Reagan administration, and chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) from 1982–90. Having been confirmed by the Senate for his appellate position just a year earlier, it seemed initially as though Thomas would encounter few problems in becoming the second African-American (albeit one whose partisan affiliation and ideological leanings were far different than those of his predecessor) to sit on the nation’s highest court.

About this time, however, stories began circulating behind the scenes on Capitol Hill stating that Thomas had a history of sexually harassing female co-workers. Investigations by Senate staffers led them to University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill, who previously had worked with Thomas at both the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights and the EEOC. Although Hill was reluctant to come forward and preferred to remain anonymous, she eventually agreed to provide her name to the Judiciary Committee and to the nominee. Thomas refuted the claims and, after looking over Hill’s statement, the White House concluded that there was no reason for concern. The hearings moved forward as planned, focusing entirely on Thomas’s legal views, and ended on September 20 with the public still in the dark regarding the harassment charges. But behind the scenes, some Democratic senators had begun to worry about the potential fallout if Hill’s accusations were ignored; a group that included Edward Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) urged Judiciary Committee chair Joe Biden (D-Delaware) to look into the matter and he, in turn, asked the White House to authorize a further FBI investigation. When the committee met a week later to consider the nomination, Biden encouraged his colleagues not to “personalize this battle” by dwelling on the candidate’s “character” – a plea that seemed odd to some observers given that Thomas’s character had not been publicly raised as an issue up to that point (Mayer and Abramson 1994; Totenberg 2018).

On October 6, the story broke laying out Hill’s charges an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• 1 Politicians and Many Others Behaving Badly
• 2 The Political Cost of Scandal
• 3 Surviving Scandal (Or Not): Image Repair
• 4 Sexism and Sexual Harassment in the #MeToo Era
• 5 The Consequences of Harassment: An Empirical Test
• 6 The Politics of Sexual Harassment: Unanswered Questions
• Appendix A: Tables and Additional Analysis
• Appendix B: Survey Questionnaire
• Index