As we digest the news that Mr. Big, Chris Noth, was allegedly starring in his own spinoff of “Sexual Assault and the City,” the arena of politics continues to vie with the entertainment industry for the nomination of the most pervasive sexual misconduct in a workplace.
New York politics, in particular, has emerged as the Marvel multiverse of sexual misconduct, spawning new franchises every year or so. Spitzer, Schneiderman, Weiner, Cuomo — the hits keep coming. And, of course, it’s not just New York. From Bill Clinton to Donald Trump to Brett Kavanaugh to Matt Gaetz and Tom Reed, powerful partisans on both sides of the aisle flout social norms and operate as though the normal rules don’t apply to them.
Sexual misconduct has become the most bipartisan activity of our time.
It remains pervasive in all workplaces. Yet in politics, a toxic brew of ego and entitlement, infused with power, makes for a particularly ripe environment for men behaving badly. It’s an outgrowth, I think, of campaign culture. Political campaigns are winner-take-all events, under high pressure, where pushing the boundaries of the rules is rewarded with the ultimate prize of high elected office.
Campaign workers, often strangers, are thrown together for a limited time, in a sweaty office for hours so long that the participants disappear from their actual family and friends for the duration of the campaign. If the campaign is successful and the candidate is elected, a good chunk of the campaign crew is dropped into the top level of government, the culture enduring as a permanent campaign takes root to keep hard-won power.
In that context, it’s little surprise that Andrew Cuomo, who successfully fought for tough sexual harassment laws in public, breathtakingly ignored them in private. While the 150,000 employees of the State of New York were required to undergo sexual harassment training, the “rules don’t apply to us” attitude in the former governor’s office meant that Cuomo could have a loyal aide take the training for him — and no one thought it was a problem, including a few women working for him who enabled the former governor to behave as he did.
A sexual harasser needs enablers, especially women enablers, and Cuomo, a powerful one, successfully recruited women for the job. He had and still has enablers, who on social media and on a website called Justice for Cuomo have been slut-shaming the 11 women who accused him of sexual harassment and other mistreatment.
Author Leora Tanenbaum coined the term “slut-bashing” — the precursor to the term “slut-shaming” — more than two decades ago in 1999, not long after Bill Clinton and his enablers slut-bashed Monica Lewinsky.
Obviously the intersection of power with sexual misconduct is not a new thought. This is what Dr. John Gottman, a University of Washington psychologist, told the New York Times back in 1991: “Sexual harassment is a subtle rape, and rape is more about fear than sex,” Gottman said when commenting on sexual harassment for an article about Anita Hill’s narrative of Clarence Thomas’ behavior during his confirmation hearing.
“Harassment is a way for a man to make a woman vulnerable,” he said in an article aptly titled “Sexual harassment: It’s about power, not lust.”
Once a woman makes an allegation against an elected official, the team pulls out the tried-and-true campaign playbook — opposition research, leaked stories, paid operatives smearing the accuser, who is treated like a political opponent gaining traction in the polls.
These campaigns are effective in influencing public opinion. In 2019, when a woman accused Donald Trump of rape, Soraya Chemaly of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project told NPR the “culture” in this country often “attributes lying to women who come forward…as opposed to having the woman’s testimony be considered valid, or even giving her the benefit of the doubt of the innocence of not being a liar.”
Perhaps the most encouraging development in breaking the hold of sexual misconduct in politics is the election of women as leaders. Three of New York’s top elected officials are women: Gov. Hochul, Attorney General Tish James and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins. Nine women are U.S. governors, the most the country has had, and a record number of women are serving in Congress. Still, those are relatively small percentages, and testosterone predominates in the halls of Congress and statehouses.
Ending sexual harassment in politics takes more estrogen and, as newly-elected Mayor Eric Adams points out in his effort to hire new leaders at City Hall, more emotional intelligence. Women, who rank higher than men on EI, should keep doing what they have been doing: fighting for a spot on a ticket and at the table, fighting to be treated with respect and as professionals, and fighting to be heard.
Hinton is the author of “Penis Politics.” She also was the former press secretary to former Gov. Andrew Cuomo when he served as U.S. HUD secretary and to Mayor de Blasio.
