Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Speculation swirls around Vice President Kamala Harris as Dems consider changing their ticket, the new stadium for the Kansas City women's soccer team keeps selling out, and we share an excerpt from former Charlie Rose producer Reah Bravo’s new book, Complicit—an examination of how culture enables ‘misbehaving men.’ Have a fabulous weekend!
- Victim or villain? For so long, the women who accused high-profile men of sexual abuse were maligned. From “conniving whores” to “wanton bimbos,” these women saw their character assassinated after coming forward. In the media, it’s become our responsibility to correct the narrative.
That process has included exploring the circumstances in which sexual misconduct occurs: learning about power differentials, NDAs, the ruthlessness of workplace cultures, the career-crushing price of seeking recourse. What’s more, from Harvey Weinstein to Matt Lauer to Steve Wynn, we’ve heard story after story of ghastly behavior—serial sexual assault, trapping women with secret desk buttons, exposing themselves during pedicures.
Yet a lingering question is how sharing these stories has empowered their victims.
Our cognitive biases can fail women, whether they get our sympathy or our loathing. We can believe women—indeed, we can deeply empathize with women—while still unintentionally framing their abuse in terms of their own inherent weakness relative to men.
Few know this better than Abby Schachner, who in 2003 called Louis C.K. to invite him to her upcoming comedy show, only to have him masturbate over the phone. She never wanted to tell her story and only did so to lend credibility to fellow comedians who had committed to going on the record with their own accusations against C.K. Schachner didn’t consider herself a victim; she used the phrase “unfortunate recipient.”
Schachner sought to give her story nuance and ample context, but soon learned how little control she had over the narrative when the New York Times published the story. Some assumed the incident was what forced her out of comedy, when she said a variety of factors led her to leave the industry. Other women I interviewed echoed Schachner’s frustration that the story of their mistreatment had been reduced to hapless victimhood.
And it turns out, there’s something to their feelings. In 2019, a team at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science’s Language Technologies Institute analyzed 27,602 English-language news stories related to #MeToo drawn from 1,576 media outlets. The articles were examined for veiled biases—the subtle, more difficult-to-detect ways that women and their accused harassers were portrayed. Researchers mapped out how the verbs used depicted individuals in terms of their power, agency, and relatability.
Data showed that although stories were generally sympathetic to women who had experienced sexual harassment, the women were overwhelmingly portrayed as having less agency than men and significantly less power. The men were consistently presented as powerful, even after accusations had been leveraged; they remained strong, while the women remained weak.
“The goal of the movement is to empower women,” the lead researcher, Yulia Tsvetkov, said about #MeToo. "But according to our computational analysis, that’s not what’s happening in news stories.”
Women have been broadly depicted as lacking personal agency and power. The perception of a woman’s inherent weakness is psychological fodder for victim-blaming. Her abuse becomes the natural consequence of her own frailty—the best she could muster in a world of male dominance and desire. As we continue to ensure that women who come forward with accusations of sexual misconduct are believed instead of vilified or shunned, we would be wise to remember that simplistic explanations for abuse are never the most empowering.
Excerpted from COMPLICIT: How Our Culture Enables Misbehaving Men by Reah Bravo, published by Gallery Books, a division of Simon & Schuster.
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