On Feminism, Creeps, and New York City's Election Tomorrow

For a lot of people in public life women's rights are something to make a lot of noise about when it's convenient and sweep aside when it's not. Or so it seems with the rush to forgive and whitewash or just deny sexual abuse, when the abusers are men and the victims are women, all across the political spectrum. After all the current president of the United States has been charged by many women with groping, harrassment, and assault, and the same year he was found liable in a civil case for sexual assault more than 70 million people voted for him. Andrew Cuomo, who is running for mayor of New York City, was forced to resign in 2021 after it emerged that he had for years sexually harrassed and groped women he came into contact with in his job as governor of New York.

When that became public knowledge. he used his power to use the law and other powers at his disposal to intimidate and harrass the victims and try to discredit them. “He's continued to torment all of us even if we're not pursuing legal recourse,” Lindsay Boylan, the first of these women to speak out against him publicly, said. “Why is he doing that? Because he’s an abuser and a monster. And he knows the only way forward for him is to destroy the women who can prove what a monster he is.”  A New York City publication reports, "A review by The City of thousands of pages of court documents involving the most sprawling harassment suit that emerged against Cuomo paints a striking picture of how intensely his legal defense has come after any woman he sees as part of his downfall. And taxpayers have footed the bill, to the tune of $19 million and counting, under a state law that covers legal costs for public employees facing job-related suits."

That he's back and that a number of prominent Democratic Party politicians, including Bill Clinton, who undermined his own presidency with inappropriate workplace sex and lies about that sex, have endorsed him suggests that he and they don't think that an outrageous lack of respect for the rights of half the population is disqualifying.  Tomorrow when New Yorkers vote we'll find out what the public thinks, though the fact that these crimes that emerged in 2021 have received little coverage in mainstream media, despite their recentness and Cuomo's lack of repentance, seems to be part of why his candidacy has gotten as far as it has. (The New York Times issued a non-endorsement endorsement of Cuomo, seemingly panicked that a left-leaning Muslim might win.) Incidentally, Cuomo's case was investigated under the leadership of Leticia James, who became the state's top lawyer in 2018, when attorney general Eric Schneiderman, accused by multiple women of vicious intimate-partner violence and death threats, resigned after being exposed by Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow of the New Yorker.

I went back to James's report on Cuomo's serial sexual harrassment and it is gross, disturbing reading in which woman after woman came forward with accounts of --well, read the report for yourself at this link. Here's just the first of the thirteen women who went on the record. She remained anonymous publicly but was known to the makers of the report as she described: "touching and grabbing of Executive Assistant #1’s butt during hugs and, on one occasion, while taking selfies with him; and comments and jokes by the Governor about Executive Assistant #1’s personal life and relationships, including calling her and another assistant 'mingle mamas,' inquiring multiple times about whether she had cheated or would cheat on her husband, and asking her to help find him a girlfriend. These offensive interactions, among others, culminated in an incident at the Executive Mansion in November 2020 when the Governor, during another close hug with Executive Assistant #1, reached under her blouse and grabbed her breast. For over three months, Executive Assistant #1 kept this groping incident to herself and planned to take it 'to the grave,' but found herself becoming emotional (in a way that was visible to her colleagues in the Executive Chamber) while watching the Governor state, at a press conference on March 3, 2021, that he had never 'touched anyone inappropriately.' She then confided in certain of her colleagues..." 

“In my mind, I never crossed the line with anyone, but I didn't realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn,” Cuomo said at the time. In translation, he's saying he was exercising what were formerly considered his rights, in a world where women lacked the right to not be touched and spoken to inappropriately, in which the workplace could be and often was a hostile and degrading place for women, and in which men were free to make it so. Here it might be useful to mention that sexual harrassment in the workplace is not about out of control lust but about control itself, as an abuse of power and an exercise of it, meant to demonstrate the abuser can do whatever he wants, and the abused have no rights and what they want doesn't matter. Because we're a somewhat less hierarchical society than we once were, those abuses of power are (sometimes) less tolerated, and victims are (sometimes) more likely to have avenues in which to push back against violations of their rights. In other words, the line has been redrawn so that rights are more widely distributed, and while Cuomo surely knew this, he had also created a workplace in which he could get away with enforcing his own rules and overriding the law and the rights of others

A report on Fox News this week declares, "According to the poll, 43% of White men, spanning all age groups, say they are self-censoring their speech at work, and an additional 25 million men claim they’ve not been given jobs or promotions because of being White men." A few things to note off the bat: the Fox piece links to a New York Post piece which links to a YouTube video for a podcast series titled "White Men Can't Work," that says it's about about "the huge mental health toll on men – who are anxious about doing or saying the wrong thing at work. Self-censorship has become the norm." The language has slipped smoothly from white men to men in general, and there's no direct link to a poll that I could find. I'm pretty sure no one polled 25 million men, and the fact that some people think they didn't get jobs or promotions because of their race/gender isn't proof that it's so in this case.

They may be complaining that they were not automatically preferred, as white men were in most situations for most of this country's history. I mean this is a country in which the Ivy League universities didn't admit women until relatively recently, in which men still hold far more wealth than women, in which violence against women is an epidemic, in which women have still not held many positions of power – including president. A recent study notes, "In 1980, all of the top 50 Fortune 500 companies’ CEOs were white men" but as of 2023, white men, who are about a third of the US population, still held more than two-thirds of the positions. Women held eight seats, or 16% of the positions, while being 50% of the population; nonwhite women, who are about 18% of the population, held 4% of the positions.

The Trump Administration, by asserting that everyone who was not white and male, got their position through preferential treatment, is creating a new wave of preferential treatment for white men while pretending that white men are just more inherently qualified as part of their anti-DEI campaign (and if you're against DEO, you're pretty much for homogeneity/inequity/exclusion and it would be fun if someone would say that out loud). This was made most dramatic by the utterly unqualified Pete Hegseth, now Secretary of Defense, firing top military commanders who are Black or female earlier this year and insisting that women are not qualified to take part in combat. Hegseth, incidentally, has been very credibly accused of sexual assault by a work colleague who was trying to prevent him from harassing other women at a 2017 California Federation of Republican Women‘s conference.

Meanwhile, who doesn't self-censor at work, if self-censor means that you can't blurt out every inappropriate, offensive, irrelevant, and salacious thought you may have? I mean, it's called civilization because we're supposed to walk around wearing clothes, pooping only in private, and not saying and doing threatening, insulting, and offensive things to casual acquaintances and professional colleagues. The workplace is not your frat party or your therapist's office – or at least it shouldn't be, but it too often has been; see: Cuomo, Hegseth, Clinton, above. It's a place in which to behave with respect for others or it should be. It's generally assumed that women or Black men or gay men should not just blurt out any lurid sexual thought they may have and target white men for unwanted fondling and groping. But objections to white men doing some of these things – well someone remarked that for oppressors, not being able to oppress with impunity is perceived as oppression. On the other hand, if the poll cited by Fox asserts "43% of White men, spanning all age groups, say they are self-censoring their speech at work" does that mean that 57% are not censoring themselves, either because they don't find it hard (or "a huge mental health toll") to behave appropriately toward others or because they're getting away with acting terribly or some mix of the two?

I keep coming back to the ringing words of Hannah Jones in her introduction to the 1619 Project: "Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true." We are in a historical moment when some of us continue to fight to make them true, and some of us continue to make them false or, in the case of the authoritarian right, to abandon those ideals altogether. Politicians and voters who support disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo are choosing to make them false and empty. New York City can elect candidates who are in their ideals and their actions choosing to make them true in this era when "all men are created equal" has to continue to expand beyond men.

Even before this country was founded New York's own Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John on March 31, 1776, "That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity." In other words, why not give women some rights while inventing a new country and a new kind of courntry? He declined to do so, and we're still working on it. New York voters get to vote on it tomorrow.

p.s. Sorry about the typos in the emailed version of this, which I'm trying to fix in the version on this site.