MeToo

The Impact of Rape Culture in the Media

Meenakshi Gigi Durham

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781509535200, 9781509535194
• eBook ISBN: 9781509535217
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the wake of the MeToo movement, revelations of sexual assault and harassment continue to disrupt sexual politics across the globe. Reports of widespread misconduct—in workplaces from doctors' offices to factory floors—precipitate firings, legal actions, street protests, and policy punditry.

Meenakshi Gigi Durham situates media culture as a place in which these broader social struggles are produced and reproduced. The media figures whose depravity sparked the #MeToo movement are symbols of the complexities of sexual desire and consent. Pop culture fuels controversies about rape culture; social media users have launched feminist resistance that turned to real-world activism; and investigative journalists have broken stories of assault, offering a platform for survivors to speak truth to patriarchal power. Arguing that the media are a linchpin in these events, Durham provides a feminist account of the interrelated contexts of media production, representation, and reception. She situates the media as the key site where the establishment of sexuality and social relations takes place, and traces the media's powerful role in both reifying and challenging rape culture.

This timely and stimulating book will be of interest to students and scholars of media, communication, gender studies, and sociology, as well as to anyone concerned by the current state of sexual politics.?

1
Rapacity

Monsters, Inc.

The real and radicalizing fury at the heart of the #MeToo movement was inflamed, in part, by the fact that we knew and admired—even loved—the men who betrayed us so: the genial and jocular Bill Cosby, whose portrayal of Heathcliff Huxtable defined devoted fatherhood; the charming, dimpled Matt Lauer, whose celebrity interviews were as invigorating a start to the day as a strong cup of coffee; the Grammy Award-winning hip-hop artist R. Kelly, whose songs enlivened weddings and parties; the brooding genius Harvey Weinstein, who entranced us with cinematic gems such as Shakespeare in Love and Good Will Hunting. The list goes on, of course, in what Carina Chocano has described as “a carnival of exposure” where “we’ve watched the stones overturned to reveal more and more supposedly great men as criminals, perverts or frauds.”¹

It’s worth noting that almost all of these “great men” worked in the US media industries, either on- or off-screen. While women of color were aware that Tarana Burke had mobilized grassroots activism around the issues of sexual abuse and harassment at least a decade earlier, the rallying cry of MeToo exploded into a powerful global social movement only after these American male media figures were publicly identified as sexual predators.

A key factor in the phenomenon was the shock generated by the revelations of our media heroes’ metamorphosis from good guys into ghouls. These men had risen to the top of their professions and were acclaimed as role models and superstars. But their charismatic public façades concealed hearts of darkness, secret lives of depravity and deceit. Their reported transgressions evoke ancient tales of shape-shifters and werewolves—seemingly respectable humans who transform at will into craven beasts capable of brutal savagery.

In fact the metaphor of the monster has come up frequently in the narratives of women who were attacked by these men. In her autobiography, the actor Rose McGowan referred to Harvey Weinstein only as “the Monster;”² the actor Salma Hayek declared: “Harvey Weinstein is my monster, too;”³ the artist and model Barbara Bowman said of Bill Cosby: “He is a monster. He came at me like a monster.”⁴ The anthropologist David Gilmore observes that monsters represent “human qualities that have to be repudiated, externalized and defeated, the most important of which are aggression and sexual sadism, that is, id forces.”⁵ On his account, monsters “live in borderline places … parallel to and intersecting the human community.”⁶ They erupt into human lives out of nowhere, wreaking destruction and causing mayhem. Most frighteningly, they walk among us undetected, waiting for the opportunity to ambush an unsuspecting victim.

We are chillingly aware now that sexual predators hide in plain sight in our workplaces, our schools, our hospitals, our churches, our neighborhoods, and our homes; they are our colleagues, supervisors, mentors, teachers, priests, doctors, relatives, and friends. Their presence and their predations are not new: women, children, trans and nonbinary people, and even some men have been molested and harassed by clandestine sex criminals for years, even for centuries. But our public recognition of these offenses and our public confrontations of them and challenges to them are relatively recent, having been galvanized by the media men whose iniquities set off the social media storms that grew into an anti-rape revolution.

#MeToo was prompted by the burgeoning revelations of serial sexual assault by Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. At the same time, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting carried out by the New York Times and the New Yorker magazine documented Weinstein’s long history of sexual predation, and that story was bookended by mediated callouts of other media celebrities—Cosby, Lauer, Ailes, Kelly, and many others. These men were all based in the United States, but because of the global interconnections of the contemporary media environment they were well known in many other countries, and exposés of them as sexual offenders hit the headlines the world over. Even as these revelations were unfurling, media men in various nations and regions were also being identified as sexual predators: the BBC’s Jimmy Savile, Canadian radio host Jian Ghomeshi, Indian Bollywood star Nana Patekar, Japanese television reporter Noriyuki Yamaguchi, and Mexican television director Gustavo Loza, to name just a few. The ferment in the media industries was the epicenter of the ensuing spillover of reports of sexual assault, abuse, and harassment in practically every industry and every aspect of contemporary life.

It is indisputable that sexual assaults and harassment occur in virtually every profession, because gendered and sexual power dynamics characterize every workplace; it is also true that many powerful institutions, including prestigious universities and the Catholic Church, have deliberately moved to cover up decades of atrocious sex crimes. But in media organizations the structures of gender, sex, and power that enable these situations tend to be very close to the surface, particularly in areas such as television and film. In these industries, not only is patriarchal power firmly entrenched, but the beauty myth—as Naomi Wolf dubbed it⁷—determines careers, especially for women. The fact that the initial wave of #MeToo outcries was entirely from women who named male perpetrators signals a need to rigorously examine the specific structures, processes, and practices that create contexts in which men can enact gender violence with apparent impunity.

This is not to say, of course, that all men are sexual predators, or that all men who work in the media industries espouse predation. On the contrary, many media men have worked actively to uncover and address these crimes, for example the journalist Ronan Farrow, whose reporting of the Weinstein allegations won a Pulitzer Prize for public service. Men, and people of all genders, are allies in the battle against sexual violence. And, of course, not all sexual assault survivors or victims are women. With this caveat, it is still important to acknowledge that the dynamics of gender and sexuality in media (especially television and film) industries are archetypal in terms of emphasized heterosexuality and retrograde gender roles, and in this respect these industries provide a strong analytical site in which it is possible to examine the power systems that give rise to sexual harassment, assault, and abuse at work in other contexts. This is borne out by the fact that a much higher percentage of women experience sexual harassment and assault in the media industries than in any other white-collar profession.⁸

I will begin here with some key questions that have driven public discourse on the sexual misconduct of men at the top of media professions. First, why did these men repeatedly engage in sexual aggressions against the women in their workplaces? And, second, how did organizational systems and structures enable this sexual misconduct to recur, without acknowledgment or redress, over the span of years, even decades?

It would be easy to dismiss these sexual assaults as individual aberrations, isolated acts to be chalked up to personality problems. Yet the frequency and scope of such behaviors call for a different level of analysis. The very similarity of pattern across the assaults reported via #MeToo speaks to the existe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• 1. Rapacity
• 2. Representation
• 3. Resistance
• Coda: Reformulating Desire and Consent
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement