There is a genuine uprising, and no one can find the leader to shut it down.
by
The press, trumpeting the lurid and salacious details of the sexual assault charges brought against powerful men, has missed the real story—the widespread popular revolt led by women, many of whom have stood up, despite vicious attacks and the dictates of legally binding nondisclosure agreements, to denounce the entitlement of the corporate and political elites. This women’s revolt is not solely about sexual abuse. It is about fighting a corporate power structure that institutionalizes and enables misogyny, racism and bigotry. It is about rejecting the belief that wealth and power give the elites the right to engage in economic, political, social and sexual sadism. It challenges the twisted ethic that those who are crushed and humiliated by the rich, the famous and the powerful have no rights and no voice. Let’s hope this is the beginning, not the end.
“Women are carefully choosing the men who are at the pinnacles of power to address race and class and sex,” the feminist Lee Lakeman told me when I reached her by phone in Vancouver. “[These women] know what they are doing. You can’t take down someone like Harvey Weinstein without affecting a whole industry. Feminism has never been just about protecting our individual self. It is a collective resistance. It has a vitality we need to use to deal with these hierarchies.”
“We need to get ourselves behind these women who are taking on the potentates,” she said. “… We need to draw attention to the structures of power. Clearly, women don’t want only an end to sexual harassment on the job. They want meaningful, secure jobs. They want respect for their work. They want to be believed when they speak. They want credit for their ideas. There is a focus now on the jobs. There was a moment when we focused on husbands. Now we are focused on our place in the public sphere. This is a structural attack. And this is an alliance of younger women and older women. This alliance sends men a message. It may take us 20 years, but we will get to you. It says this behavior will not go unmonitored. We may not get every guy, but you could be the one we get. It allows women to experience an uprising, what it feels like. This feeds the revolt.”
The pathology of men who force women to watch them masturbate in the shower or who close their office doors so they can drop their pants or grope terrified and humiliated job applicants, interns or co-workers is emblematic of the narcissism and unbridled self-adulation that come with excessive power. These assaults are expressions of the widespread objectification of women mainlined by a pornified culture. Eroticism is not mutual in pornography or prostitution. The men get off by humiliating, degrading, insulting and physically violating women. The current revelations are not, in the end, even about sex. They are about the solipsistic auto-arousal that the humiliation and physical abuse of women, a staple of porn and prostitution, have conditioned many men to confuse with sex.
Those who engage in this behavior, and Donald Trump is the poster child for this cultural sickness, are so atomized and narcissistic that to themselves they alone exist. They are stunted, deformed human beings. They are incapable of genuine relationships. They lack the capacity for empathy or self-reflection. Their abuse of women, however, is only one example of the myriad abuses they feel entitled to carry out in their professional and personal interactions. And, sadly, surrounding them are many enablers, including some women, who bow before the same idols of power and wealth to perpetuate this cruelty.
“All men benefit from this gender hierarchy and these systems of oppression,” Alice Lee, the co-founder of Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution, based in Vancouver, told me. “Individual men collude in this oppression together, knowingly or unknowingly. The public discussion has yet to acknowledge this. ‘Nice’ men, or ‘progressive’ men, are trying to ignore their own complicity. This makes it harder to institute real systemic change. We will have to fight harder. Women are revolting and supporting each other to expose this collusion. They are demanding systemic change. But those men in power will never give up power unless they are forced to do so. [Women and the men who genuinely support them] need to work together to make systematic change in the workplace, in the justice system, in civil society and at home.”
Please continue this article here: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/12/04/womens-revolt-targets-far-more-sexual-abuse
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