Editor's Blog
Anita Hill Told the Truth
By Rob Okun
For those men who still don’t understand how other men can describe themselves as “male positive and pro-feminist” (as this magazine and a movement of men here and abroad do), look no further than what’s happened in the 20 years since Anita Hill testified that Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her when he was her boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The stakes couldn’t have been higher: it was October 1991 and Thomas, an African American, had been selected by George H.W. Bush to be a Supreme Court justice. For her part, though not auditioning for it, Hill was about to become the Fannie Lou Hamer of the gender justice movement. Her credentials? She had the audacity to claim that Thomas had repeatedly sexually harassed her and testified to that effect in vivid and graphic detail. If the hearings had been held, say 10 years ago instead of 20, it is highly unlikely he would have been confirmed.
After a rushed three-day hearing over the Columbus Day weekend, the Senate confirmed Thomas by a vote of 52–48, the narrowest margin in a century. In the end, Hill won the larger victory—bringing the long sordid history of sexual harassment out of the closet and onto a televised, national stage. By speaking truth to power, Anita Hill put a crack in the wall of male privilege rivaling the one in the Liberty Bell.
Legions of women resigned to the idea that being sexually harassed was just the way life is found in Hill a dignified, graceful champion who in breaking her silence gave permission for other women to break theirs. In the weeks, months, and years that followed their stories came pouring out. Don’t believe me? Ask your grandmother, your aunt, your mother.
While a tiny number of women before Anita Hill had challenged their harassment, the overwhelming majority said nothing. If they reported the perpetrator they put their jobs, housing, and friendships at risk. Then came Anita Hill. Of course women are still being harassed—ask your sister or your daughter. But things have changed. Because of Anita Hill. There are now strong laws against sexual harassment. Even though most of society does not—like a brightly lighted mall parking lot—continuously illuminate the dangers women and girls regularly face, it nonetheless no longer turns a blind eye.
When Anita Hill looked across the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room at the beginning of her testimony, 14 white male senators looked back. It’s painful to recall the way many of them treated Hill, then a University of Oklahoma law professor (now a highly regarded professor at Brandeis University and an accomplished author). Rude. Demeaning. Hostile. The way the bosses on Mad Men treat the women who are their secretaries. That there are still men who “just don’t get it”—the rallying cry of women outraged at the obtuseness of the senators—and who think that it’s all better now, that men bear scant responsibility for how other men treat women, is a painful reminder of how much farther men have to go. (And that begins with us, with me, in our own relationships, acknowledging the vestiges of privilege and entitlement that still hold sway.)
Maybe their journey to understanding would have been accelerated had they been in New York in mid-October to attend a conference called “Sex, Power and Speaking Truth: Anita Hill 20 Years Later.” They would have been in an audience of several hundred people when the memories came flooding back—made vivid as they watched a seven-minute clip from Julian Schlossberg’s documentary film about the hearings, Sex & Justice. They would have recalled—or learned about—the national conversation about sexual harassment that began then, about the audacity of out of touch middle-aged senators unsuccessfully trying to ask questions without revealing their heterosexual male sexual fantasies.
Ask a woman who trusts you about her story of harassment and see if you don’t feel humbled, sad, and inspired by what women have had to carry, and still carry, ever vigilant for their safety from sexual harassment and sexual violence.
Watching the hearings women looked at the 14 white men on the Judiciary Committee and saw a boys’ club that “too easily dismissed Ms. Hill’s accusations and did not allow the testimony of other women who might have corroborated or helped buttress her account to prove a case of sexual harassment,” as The New York Times wrote in a 2008 story about the hearings. What might have happened if those witnesses had been allowed to testify?
At the center of the hearings, was Joe Biden, then chair of the Judiciary Committee.
Mr. Biden was accused of treating “Mr. Thomas too even-handedly” because of the racially charged nature of the hearings and not intervening forcefully enough when Ms. Hill was being, well, manhandled. Remember Thomas’s complaint that he was the victim of a “high-tech lynching”? The counterargument—which never got as much airtime—was Ms. Hill as victim of a modern-day witch hunt.
Now the vice president, in the ensuing two decades Biden has put women’s safety—from domestic violence to sexual assault—at the top of his list of political priorities. Among the strongest of advocates working to enact the Violence Against Women Act in 1994, earlier this year he took the lead in passionately urging America’s schools—from secondary through university—to do more to prevent sexual assault.
Joe Biden isn’t the only man to have grown over the past 20 years. His notoriety, though, can be an inspiration to others. He now better understands the truth of women’s lives than he did in 1991. Here’s the question for the rest of us: Do we?
To Prevent Violence Insist Men Stop the Abuse
By Rob Okun
In the drive to end violence against women, even well meaning allies can take a wrong turn. Such was the case with a recent editorial in a small city newspaper in the progressive community of Northampton, Massachusetts, two towns over from where I live. Northampton has a rich history of working to prevent domestic violence, including longstanding collaborations among a variety of stakeholders from battered women’s shelters and the police, the district attorney’s office and, at 22 years, Men Overcoming Violence, one of the oldest batterer intervention programs in the country.
“Seeking safety for women,” was the headline of the August 1st editorial published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette (www.gazettenet.com) in response to the life sentence domestic violence murderer David W. Vincent III received. The brutal 2009 beating Vincent inflicted on his girlfriend, Rebecca Moulton in Pittsfield, Mass. (including never calling for medical assistance between the nearly eight hours following his assault and his own brother’s intervention), undoubtedly left many hearts aching and minds enraged. Unequivocally, the responsibility for what happened rests with Vincent.
“When their partners turn violent,” the editorial reminded readers “women are at tremendous risk.” Fair enough. What missed the mark—by a wide margin—was the final sentence placing an onus on women that rightly belong with men. “Unless we all help women understand the danger they face from violent partners and insist they seek safety (emphasis added), these tragedies will continue unchecked,” the editorial concluded.
Huh? It makes little sense to place the burden of preventing violence on the woman. Why “insist” she seek safety instead of emphatically and unambiguously demanding violent men stop abusing?
Becky Moulton, a “funny, creative, smart and sweet” woman, as the editorial described her, is more than a symbol of the domestic violence epidemic that continues to plague society. Her senseless murder presents us with an opportunity to commit (or recommit) ourselves to preventing such acts. That opportunity will be a compromised, though, if nonviolent men are not part of the effort.
It’s time to shift the paradigm from women seeking shelter from men’s violence to insisting angry men stop abusing their partners. And, we need that shift everywhere—our educational system, media, sports culture, government, the courts, faith communities—so we can collectively lay to rest a damaging, outmoded view of men and masculinity. That shift also means teaching boys and girls (and men and women) to look at relationships through the lens of equality. The old-school belief of men dominating women—that sanctions misogynistic music videos, produces television shows that objectify women and denigrate fathers, and fails to confront privileged men (most often, white) flouting their entitlement—all must be loudly and relentlessly challenged.
We’ve come a long way from the days of police turning a blind eye to family violence perpetrated behind closed doors. Still, we have to do more than just arrest and jail perpetrators, or order them into batterer intervention programs. We have to begin educating elementary school boys and girls about respect in relationships before their ideas about gender solidify.
Imagine besides clergy, policymakers, coaches, parents and teachers articulating a vision of a better world, a healed society, and a cooperative community, that the final sentence of a newspaper’s domestic violence editorial read: “Unless we educate boys and men about healthy relationships—including teaching nonviolent, conscious communication—some men will continue to believe dominating and abusing women is acceptable behavior and domestic violence tragedies will continue unchecked.”
Women have a right to expect that they no longer have to work to prevent domestic violence alone. Since the majority of men are not violent it is time for them to speak out about the abuse a minority of men perpetrate. Doing so is one way to honor the memory of Rebecca Moulton and offer a small measure of consolation to her family. To repair a culture of violence where domestic abuse murders too often still occur, can we do anything less?
What People are Saying
Michael Kimmel author of Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men
