But it’s no joke.
Recently, we’ve heard many pronouncements in the media with respect to sexual assault and harassment cases within the entertainment and political industries. Predictably, the stories have sparked a national debate that has no doubt infiltrated all corners of our society, including the offices of psychotherapists. But what kind of debate is it? Is the media equipped to understand the intricacies of this subject?
Amid the disclosures, there are striking differences between our systems of deliberation. In the public sector/political realm, due process, democratic process, slows the roll, whereas in business it’s goodbye e-waste, farewell corporate chum. The men who misbehaved who thought they were important: they’re not. Impulsive, some might say, of the accused, but also of their judges. Decisive and just, others will opine. Meanwhile, what are therapists and others in the mental health industry saying on this matter?
Psychologist Kimberly Lonsway, research director of End Violence Against Women and cited in media reports pertaining to sexual assault or harassment, says “there is something unique about sexual assault in the way we think about it, which is pretty upside down from the way it actually operates. In so many instances, when there’s something that is characteristic of assault, it causes us to doubt it.” In making such statements, Lonsway reveals sympathy towards accusers, and casts doubters of their credibility as being in denial. That “something” she refers to: we are invited to ponder what it is, but upon pondering, to swiftly correct it.
Polemics like this lead me to ponder how limited the public debate is. It also reminds me of object relations tenets, particularly those relating to splitting, the intrapsychic defense perhaps best outlined by post-Freudian analyst Melanie Klein. In her theory, splitting is described as that which keeps separate “good” and “bad” within internalized objects (objects: parents). She did not mean good or bad in the moral sense per se, but rather gratification versus pain. And this splitting, she further theorized, seems both necessary and problematic. A child feels frustration based upon hunger, for example, and projects persecutory (or “annihilating”) anxiety onto a caregiver. To protect against the primitively inferred aggression of the object, the child introjects (internalizes) said aggressive qualities of the caregiver, and subsequently learns that he or she has the potential to do harm — harm that must be protected against. This dyadic blueprint foreshadows later dynamic relationships, including those with pronounced power divides.
This dynamic, part of what Klein described as a movement from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position, informs the developing mind as it grows through childhood and into an adult life, navigating conflict, while experiencing shame, guilt, envy, gratitude, blame… love and hate. By implication, such dynamics compel restraint and secrecy, because keeping good and bad separate includes protecting good from bad, which means titrating truth because truth hurts, as the saying goes. This further explains why people use chestnut phrases like “let’s not open a can of worms”, “this is not the right time to speak of …”, or the pithy, contemporary phrase, “don’t go there”. These phrases connote fear either of truth or complexity, followed by a strategic, if unconscious bias towards reductionist thinking, facile prescriptions for one and all. Good and bad. Us versus them. Black and white. Splitting.
The acknowledgement of harm suffered by scores of women at the hands of sexually harassing men in power seems necessary and just. At the same time, the following needs to be stated: this issue is not reducible to a singular truism. The matter of sexual harassment extends beyond that of sexual assault as a strictly physical act. It entails complex psychological factors, and aged social mores that shape the responses of men and women. But we are fearful of that complexity, it seems. Garrison Keilor, the amiable, long-time host of “Prairie Home Companion”, responded to reports of his misconduct with a measured apology for his groping wrongdoing, but he also pointed out that over the years many women had misplaced their hands while posing with him for photographs. On a radio report, I heard a journalist remark that the Radio icon’s comment was mistimed, implying it might be appropriate in another context, when the public is ready for a broader discussion. Why? I ask, believing that splitting ought to be challenged: why this offhand belief that human beings are limited as to what they can organize and weigh in their minds? Why this supposition that people can’t handle a fuller truth?
Before and since the zeitgeist revelations encircling Harvey Weinstein, I’ve heard men and women in my practice comment that both sexes flirt in the workplace. I raise the matter of flirting because it’s a conversation-expander: a grey area that defies simple rules as to what “crosses the line” in the matter of sexual harassment. These rules, this narrative as to what constitutes harassment, cuts across contexts, and is largely driven by women (e.g., men’s so-called catcalling, or whistling at women, counts as sexual harassment). However, a group of women sneaking looks at men, conspicuously whispering and giggling, does not. As a result, women, though they often report feeling reluctant to complain about the range of flirting-to-harassment behaviors, are motivated to do so. Men? For variable reasons, it seems to not occur to them to complain, even if they have cause. Though they may shame women with gossip — “slut shaming” as it’s currently dubbed — they rarely seek monetary or legal revenge. This is a reflection of men and women’s broader roles in society, perhaps.
Meanwhile, I’ve heard women admit that they flirt on the job, hoping to curry favor with bosses, even leverage advancement. Whether this works or not is another matter, and I’ve no wish to shame these women, or even caution them any more than I might a male client making analogous disclosures. However, due to the counter-shaming mandate that women ought not be slut-shamed, a once reasonable question — What is the responsibility of women who attempt to seduce employers for personal advancement? — is dismissed from the mainstream debate because it is deemed inherently sexist, and is therefore consigned to history, as if no one will think the question because media or academia have now told us the right way to think. It’s as if someone has decreed that it is men’s turn, and only men’s turn, to be held responsible for sexual harassment, as if anything more integrative would boggle our collective minds. Again, this “who’s turn is it?” reasoning seems childlike and false.
Advocates like Kimberly Lonsway seem motivated to narrow the discussion around sexual assault and harassment: to stir a binary perpetrator/victim focus to the issue, and to flip the old narrative wherein women were held singularly or dominantly responsible for sexual conflicts, especially those in which consent is the salient point of contention. In the current dialogue, the concept of consent is also tilted towards accuser-sympathy, as victims’ advocates attribute decades-long delays in complaint — “not fighting back”, or appearing to comply with abusers — to symptoms of PTSD, citing DSM criteria C and D (avoidance) patterns. On the one hand, this is a reasonable interpretation of a syndrome suffered by those who feel compelled to silence following or during an abuse pattern. On the other hand, if PTSD is to have legal currency such that consent can be rescinded retroactively, especially after decades, then the act of giving consent begins to lose meaning. This might result in the death throes of workplace romance between people at different organizational levels, which, in the end of the day, may be to the benefit of all. To give benefit of my doubt, I suppose that victims’ advocates would agree that each case should be judged on an individual basis, though given the tendency of some to assert truth based upon group identity — us versus them — I wonder if individuals and nuance will meet Orwellian fate.
References
Dewain, S. (November 30th, 2017). She Didn’t Fight Back: 5 (Misguided) Reasons People Doubt Sexual Misconduct Victims. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com
Klein, M. (1957). Envy and gratitude and other works: 1946-1963. New York: Delacorte. 1975
from Psych Central http://ift.tt/2ofdpd4
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