From the pages of The New Yorker, this is the weekly comment podcast.
In Limits of Power, Gia Tolentino writes about Harvey Weinstein and the impunity of powerful men.
In 2015, in a hotel hallway in New York, the movie producer Harvey Weinstein insisted that an Italian model named Ambra Battilana Gutierrez come into his room.
Gutierrez protested.
The previous day, Weinstein had groped her aggressively and she had returned to see him wearing an NYPD wire.
Now you're embarrassing me, Weinstein says impatiently on the recording.
Men who routinely humiliate women are easily embarrassed.
When their targets assert even a sliver of personhood, it registers as a flustering, impermissible offense.
Since the story finally broke, first in the Times and then in a piece by Ronan Farrow for this magazine, that Weinstein had buried decades of assault and harassment allegations with the help of settlements and legal threats, more than 50 women have come forward to accuse him of similar acts.
In Farrow's piece, three women allege that they were raped.
Weinstein has acknowledged misbehavior, but denied allegations of non-consensual sex.
The once invulnerable producer has been fired from his own company and abandoned by members of his high-profile legal team.
His wife is leaving him.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has rescinded his membership.
The NYPD has begun an investigation, and women will continue to come forward.
The attorney Gloria Allred, who represents one of Weinstein's accusers, recently described receiving a tsunami of calls from women, many of them speaking through tears.
Weinstein has been embarrassed again, this time comprehensively.
For years, for centuries, the economic, physical and cultural subjugation of women has registered as something like white noise.
Lately, it appears that we're starting to hear the tune.
What had been a backdrop is now in the foreground.
It has become a story with rotating protagonists, which never seems to leave the news.
In the past few years, women have accused Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly and Donald Trump of serial sexual misconduct.
Thanks to the advent of mainstream feminism, these women have been supported to an unprecedented degree by much of the media and the public.
At the same time, political backlash ensures hard limits for this support.
Cosby's reputation was ruined, and Ailes and O'Reilly were pushed out of Fox News.
Trump was elected president.
The increasing narrative clarity about male power does not always translate to progress.
For women, it feels all at once shockingly possible, suddenly mandatory and unusually frustrating to speak up.
We should pay attention to the dynamics that make this progress irregular.
Not all abusers meet with consequences, and not all women can attain firm ground.
Men are still more often held to a standard of consistency than of morality.
The liberal Weinstein, the moralizing Cosby and the family values promoting Fox News men were disgraced, in part because of their hypocrisy.
Men who never pretended to see women as equals or as worthy of respect can generally just keep on as they were.
This is why, a month before the 2016 election, the Access Hollywood tape didn't sink Trump's candidacy.
Pussy grabbing did not conflict with the image of a presidential candidate who stalked his female opponent on the debate stage and who once reportedly said of women, you have to treat them like shit.
Trump's former advisor, Steve Bannon, was charged in 1996 with spousal abuse, and that didn't pose much of a problem for him either.
Anyone drawn to Bannon's brand of brutal dominance politics is perhaps unlikely to disown him for grabbing his wife's neck and pulling her into a car, as she alleged.
The case was later dismissed.
Other forms of recourse may be possible.
After Trump called his accusers liars, one of them, Summer Zervos, a former Apprentice contestant, sued him for defamation with Allred's help.
As part of that suit, Zervos' lawyers recently subpoenaed the Trump campaign for a wide range of documents relating to his treatment of women.
But there are significant constituencies in America who are not yet interested in holding men accountable for abusive behavior.
And there are still huge swaths of women, the poor, the queer, the undocumented, who can't count on the security that feminism has conferred on its wealthier, whiter adherents, or trust that their victimization would even become news.
Nevertheless, the hunger for and possibility of solidarity among women beckons.
In the past week, women have been posting their experiences of assault and harassment on social media with the hashtag MeToo.
We might listen to and lament the horrific stories being shared and also wonder whom exactly are we reminding that women are treated as second class?
Meanwhile, symbolic advancement often obscures real losses.
The recent cultural gains of popular feminism were won just when male politicians were rolling back reproductive rights across the country.
The overdue rush of sympathy for women's ordinary encumbrances comes shortly after the Department of Education reversed Obama-era guidelines on college sexual assault investigations and and Congress allowed the Children's Health Insurance Program to expire.
On October 3rd, the House passed a ban on abortion after 20 weeks.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said that virtually all Republicans in the Senate support the legislation.
Being heard is one kind of power, and being free is another.
We have undervalued women's speech for so long that we run the risk of overburdening it.
Speech, right now, is just the flag that marks the battle.
The gains won by women are limited to those who can demand them.
Individual takedowns and hashtag MeToo stories will likely affect the workings of circles that pay lip service to the cause of gender equality.
But they do not yet threaten the structural impunity of powerful men as a group.
In 2014, after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri, the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement helped make the long-festering problem of police violence against black Americans already highly visible to a part of the population, an urgent matter for many who hadn't been forced to pay attention before.
But the country as a whole divided along predictable lines.
And progress on the issue is, three years later, difficult to discern.
On one side, the moral weight is crushing, the energy vital and sincere.
On the other side, there is disavowal and retrenchment.
Between those poles are plenty of people who would rather we just talked about something else.
This type of problem always narrows to an unavoidable point.
The exploitation of power does not stop once we consolidate the narrative of exploitation.
A genuine challenge to the hierarchy of power will have to come from those who have it.
That was Limits of Power by Gia Tolentino from The New Yorker magazine, October 30, 2017.
Narrated by Jamie Rennell.
Also in the magazine this week, Jian Fan on a scam in Chinatown.
Peter Sheldahl on the painter Laura Owens, Patrick Rodden Keefe on the Sackler family, Hilton Alls on Springsteen on Broadway, Joan Acosella on Martin Luther, Alex Ross on Ashley Fury, Amanda Petrusich on Viceland, Anthony Lane on The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and The Square, fiction by Joseph O'Neill, and more.
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