Powerful Hollywood Women Unveil Anti-Harassment Action Plan

Both of these pieces need to be read in this order.  First, is this one titled, "700,000 Female Farmworkers Say They Stand With Hollywood Actors Against Sexual Assault." The second one is titled, Powerful Hollywood Women Unveil Anti-Harassment Action Plan.  It's exciting to see ideas and rhetoric—in this case, the #MeToo movement, addressing the issue of workplace harassment against women—turned into action because of the 700,000 female farmworkers' plea for visibility to the work conditions that they similarly face. 

Such an encouraging way to start the new year in this country.

Check out their website:  https://www.timesupnow.com/

Thanks to Emilio Zamora for bringing this to my attention.

Angela Valenzuela 

c/s

700,000 Female Farmworkers Say They Stand With Hollywood Actors Against Sexual Assault

By TIME Staff

November 10, 2017

In the lead up to “The Take Back the Workplace” march in Los Angeles on Nov. 12, Latina farmworkers have written a letter of solidarity to the brave women and men in Hollywood who have come forward with their experiences of sexual harassment and assault in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. The upcoming event is organized by the Feminist Majority Foundation, Civican, and We for She. It aims to shed more light on instances of sexual harassment in the workplace and call out those who commit it, allow it and help cover it up.
 

Dear Sisters,
We write on behalf of the approximately 700,000 women who work in the agricultural fields and packing sheds across the United States. For the past several weeks we have watched and listened with sadness as we have learned of the actors, models and other individuals who have come forward to speak out about the gender based violence they’ve experienced at the hands of bosses, coworkers and other powerful people in the entertainment industry. We wish that we could say we’re shocked to learn that this is such a pervasive problem in your industry. Sadly, we’re not surprised because it’s a reality we know far too well. Countless farmworker women across our country suffer in silence because of the widespread sexual harassment and assault that they face at work.

We do not work under bright stage lights or on the big screen. We work in the shadows of society in isolated fields and packinghouses that are out of sight and out of mind for most people in this country. Your job feeds souls, fills hearts and spreads joy. Our job nourishes the nation with the fruits, vegetables and other crops that we plant, pick and pack.
Even though we work in very different environments, we share a common experience of being preyed upon by individuals who have the power to hire, fire, blacklist and otherwise threaten our economic, physical and emotional security. Like you, there are few positions available to us and reporting any kind of harm or injustice committed against us doesn’t seem like a viable option. Complaining about anything — even sexual harassment — seems unthinkable because too much is at risk, including the ability to feed our families and preserve our reputations.

We understand the hurt, confusion, isolation and betrayal that you might feel. We also carry shame and fear resulting from this violence. It sits on our backs like oppressive weights. But, deep in our hearts we know that it is not our fault. The only people at fault are the individuals who choose to abuse their power to harass, threaten and harm us, like they have harmed you.
In these moments of despair, and as you cope with scrutiny and criticism because you have bravely chosen to speak out against the harrowing acts that were committed against you, please know that you’re not alone. We believe and stand with you.

In solidarity,

Alianza Nacional de Campesinas
Alianza Nacional de Campesinas is an organization comprised of current and former farmworker women, along with women who hail from farmworker families.

Powerful Hollywood Women Unveil Anti-Harassment Action Plan

By CARA BUCKLEYJAN. 1, 2018

 

Some of the women who have established Time’s Up, clockwise from top left: the actresses America Ferrera and Eva Longoria; the lawyer Nina L. Shaw; the actress Reese Witherspoon; the producer Shonda Rhimes; and the lawyer Tina Tchen. Credit Clockwise from top left: first two photos, Brinson+Banks for The New York Times; Oriana Koren for The New York Times; Jimmy Morris/European Pressphoto Agency; Brinson+Banks for The New York Times; Alex Wong/Getty Images

Driven by outrage and a resolve to correct a power imbalance that seemed intractable just months ago, 300 prominent actresses and female agents, writers, directors, producers and entertainment executives have formed an ambitious, sprawling initiative to fight systemic sexual harassment in Hollywood and in blue-collar workplaces nationwide.

The initiative includes:

— A legal defense fund, backed by $13 million in donations, to help less privileged women — like janitors, nurses and workers at farms, factories, restaurants and hotels — protect themselves from sexual misconduct and the fallout from reporting it.

— Legislation to penalize companies that tolerate persistent harassment, and to discourage the use of nondisclosure agreements to silence victims.

— A drive to reach gender parity at studios and talent agencies that has already begun making headway.

— And a request that women walking the red carpet at the Golden Globes speak out and raise awareness by wearing black.

Called Time’s Up, the movement was announced on Monday with an impassioned pledge of support to working-class women in an open letter signed by hundreds of women in show business, many of them A-listers. The letter also ran as a full-page ad in The New York Times, and in La Opinion, a Spanish-language newspaper.

“The struggle for women to break in, to rise up the ranks and to simply be heard and acknowledged in male-dominated workplaces must end; time’s up on this impenetrable monopoly,” the letter says.

The group is one answer to the question of how women in Hollywood would respond to cascading allegations that have upended the careers of powerful men in an industry where the prevalence of sexual predation has yielded the minimizing cliché of the “casting couch,” and where silence has been a condition of employment.

Time’s Up also helps defuse criticism that the spotlight on the #MeToo movement has been dominated by the accusers of high-profile men, while the travails of working-class women have been overlooked.

This was highlighted in November, when an open letter was sent on behalf of 700,000 female farmworkers who said they stood with Hollywood actresses in their fight against abuse. Time’s Up members said the letter bolstered their resolve to train their efforts on both Hollywood and beyond.

“It’s very hard for us to speak righteously about the rest of anything if we haven’t cleaned our own house,” said Shonda Rhimes, the executive producer of the television series “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Scandal” and “How to Get Away With Murder,” who has been closely involved with the group.

“If this group of women can’t fight for a model for other women who don’t have as much power and privilege, then who can?” Ms. Rhimes continued.

Other Time’s Up members include the actresses Ashley Judd, Eva Longoria, America Ferrera, Natalie Portman, Rashida Jones, Emma Stone, Kerry Washington and Reese Witherspoon; the showrunner Jill Soloway; Donna Langley, chairwoman of Universal Pictures; the lawyers Nina L. Shaw and Tina Tchen, who served as Michelle Obama’s chief of staff; and Maria Eitel, an expert in corporate responsibility who is co-chairwoman of the Nike Foundation.

“People were moved so viscerally,” said Ms. Eitel, who helps moderate Time’s Up meetings, which began in October. “They didn’t come together because they wanted to whine, or complain, or tell a story or bemoan. They came together because they intended to act. There was almost a ferociousness to it, especially in the first meetings.”

Time’s Up is leaderless, run by volunteers and made up of working groups. One group oversaw the creation of a commission, led by Anita Hill and announced in December, that is tasked with creating a blueprint for ending sexual harassment in show business.

Another group, 50/50by2020, is pushing entertainment organizations and companies to agree to reach gender parity in their leadership tiers within two years. It already can claim a victory. In early December, after Ms. Rhimes pressed him, Chris Silbermann, a managing director at ICM Partners, pledged that his talent agency would meet that goal.

“We just reached this conclusion in our heads that, damn it, everything is possible,” Ms. Rhimes said. “Why shouldn’t it be?”

There is also a group ensuring that minorities and gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people are heard. “No one wants to look back and say they stood at the sidelines,” said Lena Waithe, a star of the Netflix series “Master of None” and part of that working group.

Another group is devising legislation to tackle abuses and address how nondisclosure agreements silence victims of sexual harassment. “People settling out in advance of their rights is obviously something that can’t continue,” said Ms. Shaw, a prominent lawyer whose clients have included Lupita Nyong’o and Ava DuVernay.

Ms. Tchen is spearheading the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, which is administered by the National Women’s Law Center’s Legal Network for Gender Equity, and will connect female victims of sexual harassment with lawyers. Major donors include Ms. Witherspoon, Ms. Rhimes, Meryl Streep, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw, and the talent agencies ICM Partners, the Creative Artists Agency, William Morris Endeavor and United Talent Agency.

Time’s Up has also been urging women to wear black at the Golden Globes on Sunday, to use the red carpet to speak out against gender and racial inequality, and to raise awareness about their initiative and the legal fund.

“This is a moment of solidarity, not a fashion moment,” Ms. Longoria said. A vast majority of the women who had been contacted and planned to attend the ceremony pledged to participate, she said.

“For years, we’ve sold these awards shows as women, with our gowns and colors and our beautiful faces and our glamour,” Ms. Longoria said. “This time the industry can’t expect us to go up and twirl around. That’s not what this moment is about.”

Time’s Up was formed soon after The New York Times reported in early October that the producer Harvey Weinstein had reached multiple settlements with women who had accused him of sexual misconduct.

As more women stepped forward, and more men were accused of abuse, a group of female talent agents met at Creative Artists to discuss the problem and explore solutions. The group soon expanded to dozens and, eventually, about 150 participants (it has since doubled as the actresses who joined expanded to New York and London), who meet weekly at the agency and in living rooms across Los Angeles, as well as for daylong workshops.

Katie McGrath, who runs the production company Bad Robot with her husband, J. J. Abrams (both are also major donors to the legal fund), said that the women realized from the start that they needed to figure out “what we wanted out of this moment, and what was going to be required in order to shift and pivot from this horror to structural change.”

Several of the women said their work with Time’s Up presented a rare opportunity to meet regularly and pool efforts with other powerful women. In an industry overwhelmingly dominated by men, they said, they were usually one of the few actresses on set, or one of the few female writers or producers in a room.

“We have been siloed off from each other,” Ms. Witherspoon said. “We’re finally hearing each other, and seeing each other, and now locking arms in solidarity with each other, and in solidarity for every woman who doesn’t feel seen, to be finally heard.”

No one can predict whether this burst of energy will lead to lasting changes. Time’s Up members said the meetings had brought disagreements and frustrations as well. “It’s not as satisfying as finding a silver bullet,” Ms. Ferrera said. “We all recognize there’s no such thing.” But, she added, “not taking action is no longer an option.”

Ms. Rhimes said working with the group of women reminded her of a feeling she got as a child, when her mother took her around the neighborhood in a wagon to register black women to vote. “We’re a bunch of women used to getting stuff done,” she said. “And we’re getting stuff done.”

Follow Cara Buckley on Twitter: @caraNYT.

A version of this article appears in print on January 2, 2018, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: 300 Strong: Hollywood Women Unite to Fight Harassment. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

Media figure sexual harassers & the 2016 election

Great reflection by Kenneth Bernstein on media figure harassers' treatment of Hillary Clinton during the campaign.  He refers specifically to Lauer, Halperin, Rose, and Thrush.  In the wake of harassment charges against them, we can and indeed should re-think Clinton's loss with gender playing an important role.  

We are, after all, a partriarchal society.

-Angela

Media figure sexual harassers & the 2016 election

By teacherken  

Saturday Dec 02, 2017 · 7:17 AM CST

 

Let’s be clear —  there are many factors that contributed to Donald Trump winning an electoral college victory by a margin of under 100,000 votes in three states while losing the national popular vote by almost 3 million.   Thus it may seem unfair to pin Hillary Clinton’s loss on only one factor,
even though with a margin that close one might make  a very good case that change ANY of a multitude of facts, for example Comey’s second letter in late October on the emails, and the outcome would have changed and we would not now be facing our national horror show.

That is what Jill Filipovic does in today’s New York Times.  A contributing op-ed writer for the paper, her offering today is titled The Men Who Cost Clinton the Election and is well worth your time to read and consider.

Let me start by quoting in its entirety a paragraph that i think frames the case:

The 2016 presidential race was so close that any of a half-dozen factors surely influenced the outcome: James Comey, racial politics, Clinton family baggage, the contentious Democratic primary, third-party spoilers, Russian interference, fake news. But when one of the best-qualified candidates for the presidency in American history and the first woman to get close to the Oval Office loses to an opponent who had not dedicated a nanosecond of his life to public service and ran a blatantly misogynist campaign, it’s hard to conclude that gender didn’t play a role.

Filipovic uses the recent news about Matt Lauer as the starting point for her piece, and in her opening paragraph tells us

Sexual harassment, and the sexism it’s predicated on, involves more than the harassers and the harassed; when the harassers are men with loud microphones, their private misogyny has wide-reaching public consequences. One of the most significant: the 2016 election.

She immediately follows that with the words that begin the second paragraph:

Many of the male journalists who stand accused of sexual harassment were on the forefront of covering the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. 

Please keep reading.

She then goes through documenting what this represents, starting with the notorious back to back interviews Lauer did with the two nominees, where he constantly interrupted Clinton and spent far too much time on her emails and mainly served up softballs to Trump.  She provides similar criticisms of Charlie Rose and Mark Halperin while noting the role they played in influencing other journalists (this is of course particularly true of Halperin, who seemingly relished his role as agenda setter for the gatekeepers of the media).  She notes that Glenn Thrush had covered Clinton in her 2008 campaign, although without citing specific examples of his biss against Clinton.
The next paragraph from Filipovic is key, and the heart of the case:

A pervasive theme of all of these men’s coverage of Mrs. Clinton was that she was dishonest and unlikable. These recent harassment allegations suggest that perhaps the problem wasn’t that Mrs. Clinton was untruthful or inherently hard to connect with, but that these particular men hold deep biases against women who seek power instead of sticking to acquiescent sex-object status.

Whether or not one immediately agrees with this assertion, it seems fair at this point to acknowledge that we should at least consider the possibility that this was the case.  I can remember when watching Lauer’s interview of Clinton of why he was clearly so hostile to her, something that was obvious in his tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language, at least to this white male who admittedly was a Clinton supporter after seeing her 11 hour performance in the Benghazi hearings.
Let me skip ahead a bit, to shortly after the first paragraph I quoted, where Filipovic in a few words, from one short paragraph followed by the beginning of the next, puts the case into sharp focus:

For arguing that gender shaped the election narrative and its result, feminists have been pooh-poohed, simultaneously told that it was Clinton, not her gender, that was the problem and that her female supporters were voting with their vaginas instead of their brains.
The latest harassment and assault allegations complicate that account and suggest that perhaps many of the high-profile media men covering Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump were the ones leading with their genitals. 

When I read those words what immediately popped into my mind was an interchange Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had after during an address at Georgetown she had said she would be happy when there were nine female Justices on the Supreme Court.  When challenged about that by a journalist, I remember her responding that no one seemed to think it was a problem when there were 9 men.
What both the words from Filipovic and from Ginsburg reminded me that too often we who have the privilege of being white men think from the perspective of that privilege and do not recognize the perspective of those excluded from that privilege — women, people of color, and so on.  Having benefited from the privilege, we sometimes are oblivious to the harm it does, and thus at first refuse to accept when it is challenged.   Sexual harassment being a part of society from which we potentially benefit fits into this picture.
Returning to Filipovic’s words, let me offer another complete paragraph that is key to her piece:

It’s hard to look at these men’s coverage of Mrs. Clinton and not see glimmers of that same simmering disrespect and impulse to keep women in a subordinate place. When men turn some women into sexual objects, the women who are inside that box are one-dimensional, while those outside of it become disposable; the ones who refuse to be disposed of, who continue to insist on being seen and heard, are inconvenient and pitiable at best, deceitful shrews and crazy harpies at worst. That’s exactly how Mr. Lauer, Mr. Halperin, Mr. Rose and Mr. Thrush often treated Mrs. Clinton.

Here as a man, albeit a supporter of Clinton, I can look back at note that I wondered at the time why some of these men were so hostile to Mrs. Clinton, although I did not necessarily recognize that it could have been a result of their attitudes towards women.  My failure to even consider that possibility is, I suspect, something that might actually have been fairly wide-spread among MALE supporters of the Democratic nominee, although I would not be surprised to find that the female supporters discussed it — among themselves.
In examining what happened, Filipovic wants us to see it as part of the larger problems still inherent in too much of American society:

When men see women as sex objects first and colleagues second, their actual talents, skills and smarts are easily overlooked. A boss who harasses the woman in the cubicle next to you may not be sexually coercing you or torpedoing your career, but his actions signal that he does not see women as competent co-workers entitled to a rewarding and effective workplace.

Filipovic is not arguing that the problem is universal, nor am I — note I said in “too much” of American society, not all, or even most.  Filipovic addresses this in her third from the end paragraph:

This moment isn’t about a nation of confused men. It’s about a minority of men who choose to treat women alternately as walking sex objects or bothersome and potentially devious nags. It’s about a majority of Americans who give men a pass for all manner of bad behavior, because they assume men are entitled to behave badly but hold women to an entirely different standard.

Please note the distinction.  The bad behavior is by a minority of men.  It is, however, a majority of Americans, male and female, who give those men a pass.  Martin Luther King Jr. told us that “In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”  When we remain silent in the presence of wrong words and actions, when we acquiesce, we give increased license — in this case to that minority of men who behave badly.
But clearly it happened.  Clearly we can now, at least in retrospect, see that man whose personal behavior and attitudes towards women is not something we should tolerate were a problem, which leads to the words in the penultimate paragraph of this pointed piece, that itwas

 so egregious that sexual harassers set the tone of much of the coverage of the woman who hoped to be the first female president.

Which sets up the final paragraph, which I will push fair use in sharing in its entirety, noting now that when you finish reading it, stop, think about it, and read it again.

These “Crooked Hillary” narratives pushed by Mr. Lauer, Mr. Halperin, and a long list of other prominent journalists and pundits indelibly shaped the election, and were themselves gendered: Hillary Clinton as a cackling witch, Hillary Clinton a woman it was easy to distrust because she was also a woman seeking power, and what kind of woman does that? Mr. Trump emphasized this caricature as part of his more broadly sexist campaign, but he didn’t invent it. Nor was he the only famous man going on television to perpetuate it — while revealing a deep disdain for women when the cameras weren’t rolling.