XPost: school.teachers, ny.syr, alt.politics.obama
XPost: soc.women

Sexually charged emails. Allegations of unwanted kissing and
touching. A letter in which powerful people leap to the defense
of the accused.

As Zoe Greenberg points out at the New York Times, the story
sounds a lot like those we’ve been hearing since the current
#MeToo movement began. But the players are different: In this
case, the accused is feminist scholar Avital Ronell, and the
person reporting harassment is a male former graduate student,
Nimrod Reitman.

Reitman, now a visiting fellow at Harvard studying the drawings
of Sigmund Freud, says Ronell, a professor of German and
comparative literature at New York University, subjected him to
sexual harassment, sexual assault, and stalking while she was
his academic adviser. In May, a Title IX investigation found her
responsible for harassment, though not the other charges, and
she’s been suspended. Now a group of scholars, including
renowned gender theorist Judith Butler, have written a letter
arguing that she is the victim of a “malicious campaign” by
Reitman.

Ronell is not the only woman to be accused of sexual misconduct
since the rise of #MeToo last fall. While male perpetrators can
enjoy special protection from consequences by virtue of their
gender, reports of female sexual harassers are a reminder that
people of all genders are capable of abusing their power.

Ronell’s case has all the hallmarks of a #MeToo story
Though Reitman filed his Title IX claim before the rise of
#MeToo, and says he was not inspired by the movement, his report
has much in common with the stories that survivors — many of
them women — have been telling since last fall.

Ronell’s behavior started in 2012, Reitman says, when she
invited him to stay with her in Paris. There, he says she asked
him to read to her while she took a nap, then pressed herself
against him, put his hands on her breasts, and kissed him. The
next day, he says he told her, “what happened yesterday was not
O.K. You’re my adviser.” But the advances continued, with
groping, unwanted kissing, and emails calling him “my most
adored one” and “cock-er spaniel.”

Reitman says he put up with this behavior because Ronell had
power over him as his adviser, Greenberg reports. He also says
that when he did complain to Ronell about her harassment, she
retaliated by sabotaging his job prospects. Graduate students
can be especially vulnerable to harassment by their advisers,
who often wield enormous control over the direction of their
careers.

Ronell’s response to the allegations also echoes those of other
powerful people — many of them men — accused as part of #MeToo.
She has asked why Reitman didn’t speak up if he was
uncomfortable, and argued that he was just upset because of his
intellectual inferiority: “His main dilemma was the incoherency
in his writing, and lack of a recognizable argument,” she said
in an interview that was part of the Title IX process.

Ronell also says her emails to Reitman were welcome at the time.
Noting that Reitman is gay and she is queer, she told the Times
the two shared “a penchant for florid and campy communications
arising from our common academic backgrounds and sensibilities.”

Finally, the letter written in Ronell’s defense is reminiscent
of those written on behalf of men accused of sexual misconduct,
from Al Franken to Junot Díaz. The signatories — including
Butler, philosopher Slavoj Zizek, and literary theorist Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak — acknowledge that they have not actually
been able to read the confidential documentation of the Title IX
case. Nonetheless, they write:

we deplore the damage that this legal proceeding causes her, and
seek to register in clear terms our objection to any judgment
against her. We hold that the allegations against her do not
constitute actual evidence, but rather support the view that
malicious intention has animated and sustained this legal
nightmare.

Women can abuse their power too
Ronell is one of a few women publicly accused of sexual
misconduct since the rise of #MeToo last October. Cristina
García, a California state Assembly member, is the subject of
multiple reports of groping or unwanted advances. In May, an
investigation found that “the most egregious allegations could
not be substantiated,” according to the Los Angeles Times, but
Garcia has been removed from all legislative committees and has
issued an apology. Andrea Ramsey, a former congressional
candidate from Kentucky, dropped out of her race in December
after the Kansas City Star asked her about allegations that she
had harassed a male employee (she said the allegations were
false). And Timothy Heller, a female singer, said in December
that singer-songwriter Melanie Martinez had raped her.

Men — especially wealthy, white men in positions of power — can
enjoy protections that make it easier to get away with sexual
misconduct. Harassment can flourish in male-dominated
environments; as sociologist Frank Dobbin has noted, the
presence of women throughout a workplace hierarchy appears to
help protect other women from harassment. And since men are, on
average, much richer than women, they’re more likely to be able
to buy their way out of harassment allegations using
nondisclosure agreements and other legal techniques. But that
doesn’t mean men are the only ones who commit harassment.

Nor are feminists incapable of committing sexual misconduct — or
of defending those accused. Several of the men accused of abuse
or sexual misconduct in the current #MeToo era, like Díaz,
Franken, and former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman,
have been public supporters of women’s rights. And while it may
be doubly disturbing for some to see Judith Butler, whose 1990
book Gender Trouble had an enormous influence on feminist
thought, defending someone accused of sexual misconduct, recall
that several celebrities who have voiced support for #MeToo or
Time’s Up also signed a 2009 petition in support of Roman
Polanski, who was convicted of unlawful sex with a minor (though
at least one, Natalie Portman, has since apologized).

Survivors’ testimony as part of #MeToo has exposed the ways that
harassers abuse their power, taking advantage of situations in
which their victims can’t report for fear of damage to their
careers. While it’s still more common for men in American
workplaces to have power over women, the reverse, of course,
also occurs. And while the #MeToo movement needs to take on
gender inequality, it also needs to acknowledge that in
America’s precarious and hierarchical work culture, employees
often have few options if their superiors mistreat them — and
this can make anyone who needs a paycheck vulnerable to
harassment, regardless of gender.

Fire the mentally ill bitch. Any heterosexual would be fired
and on the street already.

https://www.vox.com/2018/8/14/17688144/nyu-me-too-movement- sexual-harassment-avital-ronell
 

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