37. Projecting prudery
Sexual misconduct: it sounds so prissy and puritanical. The very word “misconduct” reeks of priggishness.
Browsing recently through an old collection of essays on Measure for Measure, Shakespeare’s sexual harassment play, I was startled to find what happens between Angelo and Isabella referred to several times as an attempt at seduction. There were references to Angelo’s failure to “seduce” Isabella and references to Isabella not being “tempted” or “seduced”—as if the proposition Angelo makes to her is one that Isabella might reasonably have wanted to consider.
The collection I was reading was one in that series of “Twentieth Century Interpretations” that Prentice-Hall used to put out, volumes that reprinted scholarly articles focusing on a single work or author. To be honest, most of the essays in these collections were already outdated by the time the books had appeared. Still, it was instructive to see scholars having to fall back on such rubrics in a volume whose introduction contained a paragraph beginning, “Once Angelo becomes committed to the rape of Isabella…”. It was an index of the paucity of language available for discussing behavior that was rape-adjacent or rapeward-headed before the term “sexual harassment” was invented in the 1970s. Scholars attempting to discuss the plot of Measure for Measure had to fall back on concepts like a failure to seduce.
My brush with Twentieth Century Interpretations of Measure for Measure took me back to a point, a couple of months into the Me Too movement, when I’d begun to find the paucity of language that still surrounds sexual harassment exasperating. The problem was the phrase “sexual misconduct,” which was being widely used as a catchall for behavior that ranged from the objectionable or problematic to the illegal. I felt it was doing a lot of harm. Sexual misconduct. It sounds so prissy and puritanical. The very word “misconduct” reeks of priggishness. It seemed to evoke images of the hall monitor passing out demerits for gum-chewing in school and had the effect of minimizing whatever it sought to throw light on.
Yet there was no other way to characterize both serious and negligible forms of assault or language that encompassed both statements calculated to discomfit and statements calculated to coerce, no other way to describe any of the gateway behaviors that almost always lead to attempts at controlling or demeaning women. The phrase was particularly maddening because those projecting a notion of prudery onto the language of women, who at long last were being given an opportunity to chronicle experiences that dominate our lives, were the very people who themselves considered the patterns of behavior under discussion to be “misconduct.” It was the men—the men who did these things—who clearly thought they were wrong. Why else would they have been be so hellbent on concealing them?
Nowhere, was the language problem surrounding Me Too more vividly illustrated than in a scandal that erupted around Dustin Hoffman at the beginning of November, when a woman named Anna Graham Hunter published an article in The Hollywood Reporter detailing her experiences as a teenager being sexually harassed by Hoffman while working as a production assistant on a movie the actor was making. It was a television film version of a Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of A Salesman in which Hoffman had played Willy Loman. The essay was remarkable for a number of reasons. Chief among them, perhaps, was that Hunter had been able to offer a contemporaneous account of events from more than 30 years before, having chronicled her experiences at the time (along with her thoughts and feelings) in the form of dispatches sent to her sister.
Hunter was able to convey in granular detail the steadfast campaign of harassment that Hoffman had subjected her to (as a high-school senior) under the guise of camaraderie and good-fellowship as well as the emotional and psychological bind it put her in. The reader was able to perceive clearly the full range of behavior that constituted Hoffman’s low-grade sadism. It included repeatedly grabbing her ass, routinely subjecting her to intrusive questions about her (probably non-existent) sex-life; demanding intimate physical contact such as foot massages; and, in the most gratuitous incident, humiliating her in front of others by using a word that a nicely brought-up girl would never have expected to hear in mixed company or in a professional setting. There was even a canny move on Hoffman’s part intended to keep her from being able to process or deal with his behavior.
What the essay demystified most significantly was the way Hoffman had leveraged his celebrity and artistic renown, how he’d played on Hunter’s schoolgirl naivete—her admiration for him, her youthful excitement at being treated as a colleague by a star, and above all the intoxicating sense of arrival that all adolescents feel the first time someone treats them like a grownup—in order to keep her cornered and force her to endure whatever sadistic games he chose to play with her.
Nor did Hunter’s article fail to convey the precarious position Hoffman’s behavior put her in—or how much more frightening and damaging it might have been had she wanted to pursue a career in film.
January 31, 1985 Today, I realized some things about this business that scare me. First of all, Dustin’s a lech. I’m completely disillusioned. After Tootsie, I thought I wanted to marry him.
Elizabeth asked him what he wanted for lunch and he said, “Your left breast.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“OK, your right breast.”
“You pig.” She walked away.
Pam* [office assistant] said, “If [producer] Bob Colesberry had heard that, she would have been gone in a second.” …
Today, when I was walking Dustin to his limo, he felt my ass four times. I hit him each time, hard, and told him he was a dirty old man. … So would Bob have fired me if he’d seen me hit Dustin?
I’ll go out in the snow at 10 a.m. to get Kate [Reid] an anchovy pizza, and I’ll order lunch from three different places so she can entertain her friends with champagne and caviar, but I’m not going to let Dustin have his hands all over me. And I think it sucks if Bob Colesberry expects me to.
You can read Hunter’s article here. If you do, it may occur to you to wonder what if anything in Hoffman’s behavior constituted “sexual misconduct” or what was so wrong with any of the things that Hoffman did to afford himself a little amusement at an insignificant young woman’s expense.
February 4, 1985 Today this business got scarier. Or at least less appealing. This morning when I asked Dustin what he wanted for breakfast, he said something that beat even his lows. It was worse than anything anyone has ever said to me on the street. It was so gross I couldn’t say anything. I just turned around and walked out.
Then later I tried to get into a serious conversation with Frankie about why Dustin is like that. I don’t know how Dustin knew what we were talking about, but he shouted, “Anna! Are you badmouthing me? Anna! Get over here, Anna!” The whole crew was cracking up, and I ducked behind a set.
It would be remiss of me, in a narrative about sexual harassment entitled “Unrelatable,” not to point out that Hunter didn’t record what it was that Hoffman said that upset her so much—not even in a journal that she was writing for herself and her sister.
She did at the beginning of the Hollywood Reporter essay, though:
One morning I went to [Dustin’s] dressing room to take his breakfast order; he looked at me and grinned, taking his time. Then he said, “I’ll have a hard-boiled egg … and a soft-boiled clitoris.” His entourage burst out laughing. I left, speechless. Then I went to the bathroom and cried.
Hunter’s narrative goes on:
The first several times I told this story, I left out the soft-boiled clitoris. When I finally started including it, my voice sometimes broke. But it got easier. When I spoke to a reporter recently and she told me she would have to track down people from the set to verify my account, I felt queasy. What would they say? I could only imagine them shaking their heads: “She didn’t seem too bothered by it then. She sure laughed a lot.”
It’s one of the aspects of the sexual harassment phenomenon that really comes across in Hunter’s essay: the way it forces the target of a sexual harassment campaign to project an attitude or demeanor of insouciance—one that will almost certainly be used to downplay or deny what happened.
It’s implicit in the header photo that accompanied the article, which shows the 17-year-old Hunter standing with Hoffman on what looks like a bright, sunny day—so sunny that Hunter is squinting against the light. Hoffman has his arm around Hunter’s shoulders, and she appears to be laughing.
There’s another photo further down in the article, though: a reproduction of the page on which Hunter wrote most of that entry from February 4, 1985. What jumps out at you, because it’s so clear, is that you’re looking at the handwriting of a child.
When I tracked Hunter down to ask her permission to post the photos that illustrated her Hollywood Reporter essay, she shared something she hadn’t included there. She’d eventually asked Hoffman to stop groping her, and he had—she’d said that in the article. What she hadn’t said was that afterward he’d always called her “The Flying Nun.” As for her friend, “Elizabeth,” the other young woman who had stood up for herself, Hoffman had nicknamed her “Jane” as in “Jane Austen,” meaning “prude.”