In rewriting these accusations as instances of "sexual misconduct," and not workplace harassment, women are returned to the unwanted role of sexual gatekeepers, which reduces women's power to their sexual availability (including, even, its absence). Calling out behavior that aims at or results in women's exclusion at work has already given way to debates about the meaning of hugs and kisses, and arguments about an allegedly brewing hysteria over sex. But women are not asking to be insulated from sex. Collectively naming sexual harassment is one way to combat male dominance as it is expressed at work, but that is not a collective panic about or refusal of sex.
[...]
As these stories continue to break, in the weeks since women have said they were harassed and abused by Harvey Weinstein, which was not the birth of a movement but an easy and highly visible shorthand for decades of organizing against sexual harassment that preceded this moment, I hope to gain back my time, my work. Lately, though, I have noticed a drift in the discourse from violated rights to violated
feelings: the swelled number of reporters on the beat, the burden on each woman's story to concern a man "important" enough to report on, the detailed accounting of hotel robes and incriminating texts along with a careful description of what was grabbed, who exposed what, and how many times. What I remember most, from "my story" is how small the sex talk felt, almost dull. I did not feel hurt. I had no pain to confess in public. As more stories come out, I like to think that we would also believe a woman who said, for example, that the sight of the penis of the man who promised her work did not wound her, and that the loss she felt was not some loss of herself but of her time, energy, power.
