This comment thread is a great example of the largrr culture-wide conversation about sexual harrassment that is going on right now.
In this example, a male senator forced woman into a kiss that she did not want or enjoy, and then made a “joke” in which he posed for a photo in which he positioned his hands over or placed his hands on the breasts of the woman (yes, she was wearing armor) who was asleep.
The woman has said that:
"she was in a skit with Franken in which his character tried to kiss her. She writes that she expected a stage kiss in which she turned her head, but that backstage he insisted they needed to practice the kiss. She demurred, but he insisted, she said.
He repeated that actors really need to rehearse everything and that we must practice the kiss. I said ‘OK’ so he would stop badgering me. We did the line leading up to the kiss and then he came at me, put his hand on the back of my head, mashed his lips against mine, and aggressively stuck his tongue in my mouth.
She said she pushed him away and warned him never to do it again.
And that :
she decided not to make a big deal of the incident so that the tour could go on, but that she was angry and told a few other people on the tour. Then when she returned to the U.S. and received a CD of photos from the trip, she saw one that depicted a grinning Franken either groping or pretending to grope her breasts as she slept on a flight.
“I’m still angry at what Al Franken did to me,” Tweeden wrote. “Every time I hear his voice or see his face, I am angry. I am angry that I did his stupid skit for the rest of that tour.”
For alot of people this is a black mark on the senator’s character and an indicator of how he relates to women that is contrary to what they had believed. They feel it calls his leadership skills into question and heshould resign.
A lot of other people have responded in some interesting ways.
They’ve said that the woman should not be upset because she’s posed nude, or that even though the senator used the script to force her to kiss him, she had agreed to help and shouldn’t complain about it.
I read comments that suggested she should have expected this sort of treatment because of where she was and who she was with.
Others have said that since he apologized, he is still fit to lead, and we should forget about it.
Some people argued that it wasn’t that big of a deal because he might not actually be touching her, and after all it was just a joke. They are worried that they won’t be able to make jokes anymore or go on dates if we start holding people accountable for things like this.
It’s important to examine the joke in the photo. The joke clearly isn’t meant to make the subject of the joke, a sleeping woman laugh. It’s more obviously for the benefit of the senator and the other men in the room, the punchline being:
If had the opportunity to grope this woman, I would! Wouldn’t you?
That’s not a joke. That’s a man using a sleeping woman’s body so that he and the other the people in the room can share a lechy “locker room talk” moment.
We’re hearing these stories because they involve powerful people.
But every single woman has experienced being made into a joke because of her anatomy or other people’s projection of their desire to fuck her and every woman has recieved the unwanted physical contact that is part of the same disregard for her humanity when men relate to her as a place to get sex from or an object to use to demonstrate their heterosexuality.
This conversation has been a long time coming, and now we’re having it because enough people are finally paying attention.
It’s time.
