The Collective Sins of the Male Gender Visited on One Man: The Martyrdom of Harvey Weinstein
by John Lawrence, 2/20/2020
As part of the redefinition of male sexuality, we have the example of Harvey Weinstein, a man who thought he was having consensual sex except he wasn't. So has even the meaning of consensual sex been reversed? What does it even mean any more if someone wakes up the next day and decides that the sex they had the night before was not consensual? I'm sure that many of the women who had sex with Harvey Weinstein had in the back of their minds that it might lead to a job in the movie industry or even a role in a movie. Isn't that the way Hollywood's famous casting couch worked? When those potentialities didn't eventuate, some might have reinterpreted what just happened as sexual predation.
Marilyn Monroe wrote in her memoir, "My Story," “I met them all. Phoniness and failure were all over them. Some were vicious and crooked. But they were as near to the movies as you could get. So you sat with them, listening to their lies and schemes. And you saw Hollywood with their eyes — an overcrowded brothel, a merry-go-round with beds for horses.”
“The womanizing habits coming out that Harvey was prone to have a long history in the film business,” film critic and historian David Thomson said. “Attitudes change. We’re shocked now.”
“Once upon a time,” he said, “the general feeling was that women going into the movies to get a job as an actress … should not be surprised if they were propositioned, if they had to do pretty nasty things to get ahead. It happened across the whole film business. It’s regrettable.”
Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive and a professor of critical and media studies said that “Louis B. Mayer was known as an unbelievable satyr, the Harvey Weinstein of back then. Harvey Weinstein was doing it at a time when you couldn’t do it any more. You had the women’s movement in the late 1960s, early 1970s."
So what about the situation when a man using all his powers of persuasion convinces a woman to have sex with him. You might even consider this a seduction. She might have thought that this relationship was going somewhere - he might have even suggested that - and when it didn't, she might have felt betrayed. Who wouldn't? If she had certain expectations, if she had been led to believe certain expectations, and then, when they didn't pan out, she might have reinterpreted the sex part of it as predation or harassment. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. No one is angrier than a woman who has been rejected in love. She may have not even been thinking that her partner was going to give her a job or a role in a movie. She just may have been visualizing a relationship leading eventually to marriage and a family. That may not be what the man had in mind. So in her mind he was a scumbag. In his mind he was an excellent salesman, and , like all salesmen, he was essentially selling himself.
Mores change; sexual morality changes. Not too long ago it was considered sinful to have sex outside of marriage. "An American Tragedy" by Theodore Dreiser told the story of a woman, not only betrayed but pregnant and drowned by her lover. It's a recurring tragedy in American life. It was made into a movie, "A Place in the Sun" starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters, the pregnant woman betrayed. It was based on the real life murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette in 1906 which resulted in Gillette's conviction and execution by electric chair in 1908. The birth control pill changed sexual mores again. It was now possible to have sex without the potential consequence of pregnancy. I suppose Harvey Weinstein and many other males figured that they were off the hook, that now sex without responsibility was really possible. This after all is what most males wanted. Women went along because they didn't have to fear getting pregnant, and their expectations might have been that sex was the initial part of a relationship that would go somewhere.
Somewhere along the line women started to feel taken advantage of. Most of them wanted something more than a one night stand. No matter how long the relationship lasted, when it ended they felt resentful and bitter. All of these feelings have been collectively visited on the head of one man - Harvey Weinstein - for whom consensual sex is not an argument considered by a court of law to have any validity any more. You can't go back and prosecute Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer, but you can make Harvey pay for all the collective sins of the male progenitors of the movie industry and by implication all the rest of the males that were influenced by the Playboy philosophy that Hugh Hefner so ably represented. The #MeToo movement sounded the death knoll for consensual sex.
Once again sexual mores have shifted. There is no such thing as consensual sex, or, if there is, it is no longer a no fault situation. Fault and blame is to be attributed, most likely from the woman to the hapless man who thought he was off the hook because he thought the sex was consensual. Even if the sex has not led to pregnancy, a man can no longer be assured that there are no consequences. Jealousy rears its ugly head. Resentment rears its ugly head. Women and men are definitely not on the same wavelength regarding sex. Women feel taken advantage of even when they evidently consented. Consensuality is no longer a meaningful term. In fact it is meaningless, and in the case of Harvey Weinstein, he must become a martyr for the male sex for all their sins, for all of the outrages that have been visited by men on the female sex.
