6. Unfocused
There is a kind of man who is easily angered by women, and the kind of woman who angers him is one who isn’t focused on him the way he thinks she ought to be.
If you watch the trailer for the movie She Said, which is based on the book of the same title by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who broke the Harvey Weinstein story in The New York Times, one of the first things you hear is the voice of the actress Patricia Clarkson asking why sexual harassment is so pervasive and hard to address. According to the book, that’s the real-life question that Rebecca Corbett, the Times editor Clarkson is playing, set Kantor when she gave her the assignment to look into Weinstein’s abuses of power and, more generally, the abuse of women in Hollywood.
I think one answer has to do with the kinds of women who get harassed and the kinds of guys who target them. There is a kind of man who is easily angered by women, and the kind of woman who angers him is one who isn’t focused on him the way he thinks she ought to be. She isn’t relating to him as a man. As a sexual being. And that irks him or makes him feel slighted.
It's an adult version of what makes little boys pull our pigtails or put frogs down our backs when they want to get our attention. “Maybe he just likes you,” goes the age-old bromide that grownups use to respond to little girls who cry or complain. What people don’t realize about little-boy tormenters is that attention isn’t all they want. They want to punish the girls, too, for not being focused on them in the first place.
That’s why so much sexual harassment takes the form of men doing and saying things that women find disgusting: telling dirty jokes, commenting on a woman’s clothes or appearance, making crude remarks, commenting on body parts, touching us in places and in ways that a lot of people only like to be touched by other people they care about. These men aren’t flirting, and they aren’t clueless. They don’t want romance or to be friendly or affectionate. They want to make women uncomfortable, and they want to do it in situations where the woman can’t object because there’s a power differential or where she can’t escape because to do so would cause a scene. These men want submission.
So, do the math. Where do you tend to find women who are focused on something other than men? In the workplace. In any situation in which what women want is something else: a career, a job, the fulfillment of some dream. Women at work are focused on their jobs, women who want work are focusing on the jobs that they want to get, and that antagonizes some men, and the way they deal with their hostility is to do the kinds of things that are now called harassment. It’s not about being attracted to women or liking women or desiring women. It’s about showing women who’s boss.
There’s one last thing about Measure for Measure that fascinates me. Its heroine is rare among Shakespeare’s female protagonists in that she’s good at something. “She hath,” her brother notes, “prosperous art When she will play with reason and discourse, And well she can persuade.”1
Isabella thinks she’s passionate about virtue, but actually what she’s passionate about are words and abstractions. What we’re watching in the scenes in which she tries to persuade Angelo to pardon her brother is a man watching a woman fail to focus on him because she’s focused on something else.
One last irony that you often find in the sexual harassment scenario. If the target angers the harasser, there’s a strong likelihood that at some point he will turn the tables on her, claiming that she tried to seduce him and was rejected, and that’s why she’s telling this story.
But if you think about the kinds of women that harassers so frequently go after—the ones who are focused on something else—they’re the very last women that would be true of.
I count only two other Shakespearean heroines who have a specific skill: Portia, in The Merchant of Venice, who is good at arguing the law, and Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, who is skilled in medicine. (It’s interesting that all three appear in “problem” plays.)