 |
|
|
wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." - John Adams - |
|
|
|
|
Posted on 10/08/2003 7:32:01 PM PDT by Pokey78
Clinton took a hit for less, so why did Schwarzenegger's groping have no impact at the polls?
Three days before the story broke detailing Arnold Schwarzenegger's alleged groping of six women, a friend who works in the movie industry asked me: "Why doesn't anyone care about Arnold's reputation for sexual harassment?" She was puzzled. "Everybody in the business knows about it," she said, noting the several cases that she was privy to, "but it doesn't seem to register."
Once it had made the press, did it matter? No. As predicted, Schwarzenegger has been elected governor of California. So late in the game, the revelations were easily dismissed as last-minute dirty politics, in much the same way that the eleventh-hour report of George Bush's drunk-driving arrest never got any traction. And with the hours running down on the pre-election clock, Schwarzenegger was quick to acknowledge that he had "behaved badly sometimes" and to say that what "I thought then was playful" he now recognised had "offended people".
But who are these people? Who - besides the specific women who had to endure an unwelcome paw up their shirts and under their skirts - is offended? And why are so many not offended? Even before the Los Angeles Times piece, which made the allegations public, Schwarzenegger's bad behaviour towards women had done the rounds. Premiere magazine offered chapter and verse on his molesting tendencies two years ago, and the Oui interview, in which he bragged about nailing that babe in a gang bang, has been endlessly recycled. None of it seems to have had any effect on the very constituency that expressed disgust over reports of Bill Clinton's philandering: American men.
Tarred with the same sexual-harassment brush, Schwarzenegger and Clinton emerged with mirror-opposite gender gaps. Clinton rode an ever-larger female gender advantage to election in both campaigns, while Schwarzenegger owes his lead to a lopsidedly male following. Why the difference between the two politicians with the wandering eyes?
Given that the former bodybuilder owes his fame to Hollywood, maybe it's only fitting to find the answer on the silver screen, in Neil LaBute's acute dissection of American gender pathologies, In the Company of Men. The 1997 movie told the story of Chad, the gotta-be-on-top corporate striver, and the pact he coercively forges with his more sensitive and flabby co-worker, Howard, to compete for the honour of seducing, and then humiliating, a deaf woman. Howard identifies with the woman's plight and falls for her; Chad, meanwhile, goes in for the kill, humiliating both the woman and Howard. "Never lose control," Chad tells him. "That is the total key to the universe."
Clinton was perceived by men as having lost this control, and worse, lost it to a series of women. He may have been the aggressor, but as a seducer he really meant to seduce, thus exposing an almost feminine sort of desire and vulnerability. For this, he was humiliated, held up like Howard for ridicule in male eyes. No wonder that so many women empathised with Clinton: he was essentially shamed like a fallen woman.
Schwarzenegger, on the other hand, is Chad the "playful" cad, going after women, sniggering frat-boy style, for the score. Sex isn't even the prime object here: the women were manhandled, not seduced. There is no warning, no courtship (unless you count such come-ons as "I'd love to work you out"); the hand darts into their underclothes like a bolt from the blue, a pre-emptive strike. "Did he rape me? No," one woman said, recalling the time Schwarzenegger allegedly grabbed her breast. "Did he humiliate me? You bet he did."
Humiliation so often seems to be the theme in these tales of the actor's conquests, humiliation not just of women but - perhaps more notably - of the men these women "belong" to. One woman said she was groped by him when she went to the gym to watch her husband - Schwarzenegger's bodybuilding rival - the former Mr Universe Robby Robinson. "What he did was uncalled for, but I couldn't say nothing," Robinson said; fear of exile from the bodybuilding business kept him quiet. A similar dynamic was at work in an earlier story told in the Los Angeles Times, when the actor was said to have used the wife of Don Peters, another bodybuilding competitor, to shame her - and him.
According to the article, after the actor had bedded the woman, he picked up a phone and, claiming he was dialling his lawyer to reschedule an appointment, asked her to take the receiver. It turned out the number he dialled was her husband's, and while she held the phone, he yelled into it these words (cleaned up by the newspaper's censors): "I just [made love to] her! I just [made love to] her!" As Tina Turner would say, what's love got to do with it?
A spokesman for the new California governor said the episode with Peters and his wife was just "locker room humour". Which explains a good deal of his appeal to male voters. He comes out of the testosterone-ruled world of weight rooms and action movies, where women are observers and adorners, and where men find their place in the wolf pack through a well-established ordeal of humiliation. The men who don't make it to the top in that world still have the compensation of identifying with the one man who does, as long as they don't identify with any of the women, as long as they don't "say nothing". They still belong to the pack, by virtue of being male.
No matter how much sand gets kicked in their face, they can still fantasise that one day they, too, will do enough leg-lifts to rise in the ranks. At a time of deep economic and international insecurity, the easy power of the bully boy is a siren call to the American male populace, as evidenced by Bush's continuing allure to the very men whose interests are least served by his policies. The locker-room game works as long as only men get to play, and only as long as they agree to play by certain rules. One rule is that sensuality is verboten, but aggressive jocularity is not. Humiliating women in a "playful" way can signal a rejection of "the feminine" and a reinforcement of male bonding.
That rejection of the feminine explains why, in the gubernatorial debate, the governor seemed fixated on shutting down Arianna Huffington. When haranguing didn't work, he resorted to a veiled threat of physical humiliation, implied in the remark: "I have a perfect part for you in Terminator 4." As much as he denied it later, it's hard to imagine what part he had in mind except the one assigned the female robot in Terminator 3, whose face he buried in the toilet. Funny, right? Not to Huffington. "It's a continuum of a lack of respect," she remarked to me a few days after the debate, "from not putting a single woman on your economic team, to bullying a woman at a debate, to treating women in such a humiliating way in the course of your daily life."
Women's anger about rape and harassment is exacerbated by the knowledge that their attackers are after power, not sex. In US politics, it's the opposite. Harassment is deemed more acceptable if it's not about sex but is part of a power dynamic between the boys. The gender gap is really between those afraid of bullying and those afraid of intimacy. Women will forgive a politician's lapse if it at least seems motivated by a susceptibility to desire or emotion. Men afraid of sensuality will forgive the same act (and actor) as long as the behaviour can be laughed off as winner-takes-all sport.
· Susan Faludi is the author of Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man.
Ya gotta be kiddin' me!!
Took a hit for LESS??
Becki
|
|
|
|
wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." - John Adams - |
|
|
|
|
No, clueless. He was perceived as a vicious biting rapist.
Didn't take long for this article to peg the BS meter.
My thoughts exactly. A great chance, LATIMES did a good job of fabricating. If not, Arnold, and the pubbies who fell for him, will have a lot of back peddling to do........
What psychobable. We were told by these idiots that clinton he was just a big ol' "lovable rogue." Now he's a fallen woman? LoL!
Can't wait for 'one free grope' Steinem to weigh in.
Wow, an amazing transformation from abuser of women to a vulnerable, fallen woman. He's his own victim!
Yes, but he didn't inhale.
K. Wiley - no action taken. A. Brodderick - No action taken ad nauseum.....
They said "it didn't rise to the occasion." I'm not sure what the meaning of "it" was.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.