Making Sense with Sam Harris - #141— Is #MeToo Going Too Far?

Episode Date: November 5, 2018

Sam Harris speaks with Rebecca Traister about her new book "Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger." If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today's guest is Rebecca Traister. Rebecca is writer-at-large for New York Magazine and a contributing editor at Elle. She's a National Magazine Award finalist, and she's written about women in politics, media, and entertainment from a feminist perspective for The New Republic and Salon.

And she's also contributed to The Nation, The New York Observer, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, and many other magazines. She is the author of All the Single Ladies, Big Girls Don't Cry, and her latest book, which we discuss, is Good and Mad, the Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. Just a couple of things to be aware of here. We were talking past each other a bit. This was a conversation that certainly could have gone the way of my conversation with Ezra Klein. I'm happy to say it didn't. One technical limitation, which I mention at some point, there was a latency problem that sometimes happens in these remote podcasts where I can't interrupt a guest. So when you hear me try and it proves totally ineffectual, that's not Rebecca being especially vehement. She literally cannot hear my attempts to interject. So you'll notice that I gradually learned that and, for the most part, stopped trying. But it was a good conversation nonetheless. We get into the issues of Me Too

and race fairly deeply. She is quite a bit more woke than I am, no question about that. Anyway, more and more I think it's just important to attempt conversations like this, and this will not be my last attempt. So, please enjoy my exchange with Rebecca Traister. I'm here with Rebecca Traister. Rebecca, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. I think both of us come into this conversation with a little bit of trepidation because we're anticipating not agreeing about a very fraught topic. First, let me just say, I'm a huge fan of yours. I've been trying to get you on the podcast for...

In the midst of last fall, I know, was when you first reached out to me. Right. Yeah. So there's tremendous goodwill on my side. I don't view this as a debate. I largely view this as an opportunity for you to educate me. And let me also say that one of the things I write about in the book and that I wrote about, I think, in the midst of last fall, which was the sort of height of the flood of hashtag MeToo stories, was my own ambivalence. And I'm somebody, I don't think you could find by some measures, a stronger proponent of the process we're in the midst of and of coming to terms with the power inequities, sexual power inequities, gendered power inequities, racial power inequities.

I mean, this is the stuff of my work, right? I am a serious proponent of this process. And yet, as I write in the book, and I think I made clear back then, I also have a whole mess of conflicting feelings about them because this is really hard, discomforting work that we're doing in trying to challenge, you know, systems and rules that have been in place and that we have all grown up with. And it's very painful in many cases, and it's full of contradictions and conflicting feelings, even for somebody who, like me, is an extremely strong proponent of Me Too and addressing sexual harassment and sexual assault as structural systemic inequities. I think this will be a bit of a tightrope walk, but I'm just, most of all, I hope it's useful for everyone listening to us. Before we dive into the danger zone, let me just tell people who you are. Actually, I'd like you to describe how you see yourself as a journalist, but I'll just remind people that we are talking about your new book, which really could not have come at a better time. And that book is Good and Mad, The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. And I can only imagine how your publicity team felt when they knew this was dropping, right?

It was either the beginning of the middle or just the end of the Kavanaugh hearing, which must have made someone think that there is a God and he's working for your publisher. What's it been like to jump into the fray at this moment? And I guess before that, just tell people how you view your position and career as a journalist. Sure. I am a journalist. I am a writer at large for New York Magazine, where I've been for several years. I write about politics, media, and culture from a feminist perspective. I am both a reporter and an opinion writer, which gives me a degree of freedom. I report stories, but it's never a mystery, you know, what my politics are,

what my viewpoint is. I am the author of three books. The most recent is Good and Mad. And yeah, I mean, I think that you're right that, you know, the book-selling gods were probably pretty happy about the timing. I have to say, in all honesty, and I'm saying this not as somebody, I would never pretend to not be ambitious and not want to sell books. I want all those things. It has been a fraught time to be out here selling books in the midst of national calamity. And an extremely, extremely painful and extremely painful chapter in exactly the story that I work at telling about the United States and how power works here. One that is going to have, to my mind and, you know, from from my perspective, very long lasting consequences. The

appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is going to have an impact over generations, certainly for the rest of my life, unless surprising things happen. And so it's certainly fraught to be out here, you know, wanting people to read my book, wanting to talk about, you know, the book was finished in June, long before I could have anticipated even, you know, Kennedy's retirement. And I have very mixed feelings about the news cycle that has made it, you know, everybody says, oh, it's the perfect time for it to come out, and I am glad if it was, I have heard from some people that it was a useful tool to help them understand what was happening with regard to how Christine Blasey Ford expressed herself, how Brett Kavanaugh expressed himself, how power and anger were being received over the past few weeks, and I'm glad of that. But it is also, it's definitely fraught to be

out here selling books in the midst of this. Yeah. Well, so just to give you a little clearer sense of where I'm coming from, I think you and I have political goals that are very close to one another's. So the narrowest one being that I want almost anyone on earth to win the presidency in 2020 other than Donald Trump. Yes, we would. We are close on that, although my my range, almost anyone else other than Donald Trump. I have a whole number of other people. I really don't want to win the presidency. Yes. So one of my concerns here is that insofar as your framing of these issues seems likely to increase the chance of Donald Trump being reelected, I begin to worry there, and it sort of points at which I will flag that concern. There's also a larger goal, which I'm sure we share, which is to arrive at a society

where both real and perceived political equality is maximized. And it's important that it be both real and perceived because I think a real equality isn't good enough if people don't think they have it, or they don't recognize they have it. And I think there are situations in which that's already the case, and I think we may disagree about some of that as well. I'm looking forward to hitting these points, but let's start with your book. Just a bit of a history lesson here. What is first and second wave feminism? Well, I don't love the language of waves. I tend to use it mostly with regard to second wave because it's become a descriptor. But the way it's used casually is first wave feminism is the sort of suffrage movement, which takes roots in

the 1830s, coming out of the abolition movement and women who are involved in the abolition movement and some men, including Frederick Douglass, who begin to understand the problems of enfranchisement and full citizenship, you know, fighting for the abolition of slavery, understanding also that the franchise, and this is something Frederick Douglass would later write about with regard to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, that the franchise for women was key. And so the suffrage movement in the form that took it from the 1830s, when the first suffrage meetings came out of the abolition movement, through 1848, which was the year of the Seneca Falls Convention and the writing of the Declaration of Sentiments, which riffed on the Declaration of Independence, calling for gender equality and actually calling

out all the ways that women have been made dependent on men, moves through the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. And then there is an enormous split within the suffrage movement that turns on real racism, the fury of these allies who'd come together and work together. But when Black men, but no women, were offered citizenship and the franchise in the wake of abolition, some of the white women, including some of the leaders of the suffrage movement, notably Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the racism, which has presumably long undergirded even a lot of their progressive activism, they express fury at the idea that Black men would go ahead of them and become enfranchised, and they would not. And this

finds really racist expression. Susan B. Anthony writes about the indignity of having Hans and Ungtung vote before be able to vote and wield kind of electoral power over educated white women like herself. And the Cresce Mott is very, very ugly. And that split lasts decades. The groups break into two different of suffragists break into two different factions, two different organizations. suffragists break into two different factions, two different organizations. And they do eventually come together. But in fact, a lot of that maneuvering of white supremacy within the campaign to get white women the vote, I mean, it is officially the campaign to get women the vote, is based on an argument that white women's votes, which would be in support of their husband's politics, would cancel out the votes of African-Americans. That's, you know, a lot of the principle.

It's fascinating. In portions of that movement, even up until, you know, the year of his death, Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass, who are very, very close friends and allies, even through some of these horrible splits. You know, she asked him not to come to a suffrage meeting. He remained dedicated to the cause of suffrage throughout his life. She asked him not to come to a suffrage meeting in the South because she didn't want the presence of an African-American, a former slave, to undercut the message that she was sending to white women. The 1913 suffrage parade in Washington, Black women were asked to march at the end of the parade.

Ida B. Wells insisted on marching with her state's delegation. And so there's one moment of culmination, which is the passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment, which officially guarantees women the right to vote, but of course it did not apply to Black women or, at that point, Black men in the Jim Crow South. But at that point, up to 1920, you're looking at almost 90 years worth of a movement that has gone through many stages.

And that is the thing that's sort of traditionally referred to as first wave. But it's very hard for me to imagine it as a wave because it was almost a century. And many of the women who were behind the work of it lived and died without ever seeing any of their work come to fruition. And then, of course, it's another 45 years before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which theoretically guarantees full enfranchisement for African-Americans as well. So the project of getting that full enfranchisement, the franchise that was sort of conceived of in the 1830s and 1840s by abolitionists and suffragists, that takes, you know, more than a century. So it's very hard for me to conceive of that as a wave. The second wave is something that erupts in a kind of mass

way in the 1960s, in part in the wake of the publication of Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique, and then bubbles and becomes sort of more radical and becomes more tuned to doing the legal and political work of fighting to make new rules in the 1970s. And it sort of hits its height in the 1970s and results in all kinds of changes around hiring practices, professional discrimination, gender discrimination within workplaces, the reimagining of women's educational potential, the admittance of women into colleges and new professions, sexual liberation, the protection of women's reproductive autonomy. There are all these sort of legal and policy changes that are made during that period. Now, that altogether is a

fairly short eruption of a women's movement, you know, pretty much within about 20 years. And so to me, second wave is a much more specific. It was kind of a wave. It was a thing that happened in an amount of time we can kind of wrap our heads around. And so I tend I do use the term second wave, but I don't love waves in general because then it's like, when's the third wave? When's the fourth wave? And that's all that's far less distinct. So no one's talking about Me Too as third wave feminism? I think there are, but there were third. This is why waves aren't always totally useful. There was a group of women who in the 90s called themselves third wave.

They wanted to give, they were bringing forth what they felt was a new generation of feminism. Rebecca Walker, Jennifer Baumgartner, they wrote a book called Third Wave. Jennifer Baumgartner, they wrote a book called Third Wave. But then there was a sort of sense that slut walks, which really erupted far more recently, was a third wave. The sort of eruption of a feminist internet, a feminist media, which happened, you know, in the years sort of around 2004, 2005. Was that the third wave of feminism? One of the problems with waves is that you're always kind of looking to see when's the next wave starting. And often social movements aren't really discernible as contiguous projects until they're over and you're looking at them in retrospect or until they've paused. Because again, many of them have gone on not just for decades,

but for centuries. And you're able to sort of see more clearly in retrospect the path and pattern that they took. So that is one of the reasons that I tend not to use wave language to describe every iteration of a women's movement. I do think that the period that we're in is an eruption that, depending on what happens moving forward, we may look back on as, you know, the moment of commencement or perhaps a peak of what I hope will be a movement to alter gender power hierarchies. And Me Too as a hashtag is not that recent. Isn't it like 10 or 12 years old?

Well, it wasn't a hashtag. In 2006, Tarana Burke founded the Me Too movement. years old? Well, it wasn't a hashtag. In 2006, Tarana Burke founded the Me Too movement. It was specifically aimed to make clear the ubiquity of sexual assault, sexual violence, and especially in communities for women and girls of color. And that was in 2006. Now, And that was in 2006. Now, the term Me Too was appropriated in October of 2017, in the weeks after the publication of the stories about Harvey Weinstein's predatory, violent predatory behavior against so many women. And I believe it was the actress Alyssa Milano who maybe first used the hashtag MeToo as a way to try to get personal narratives of having experienced sexual assault or harassment, you know, on the Internet. And she very quickly,

I think, was told about, you know, in some cases, appropriation of the work of those who've come before and have had less power, you know, can be unconscious or something that they haven't learned. And Alyssa Milano was told about Tarana Burke and learned about Tarana Burke's leadership and very quickly made sure that everybody, that she was very public in saying, look, this is actually work that was pioneered by and led by Tarana Burke, who should be leading us now. And so it is now better understood that the hashtag MeToo movement, you know, is a descendant, comes out of Tarana Burke's movement, which she is still leading. I would say that the hashtag MeToo movement, it is in part in response to the stories of not women and girls of color, but in many cases, the origins of it were with stories being told by very powerful white women, actresses, and performers who've made some of the first allegations against Harvey Weinstein. And also, under the umbrella of the hashtag MeToo movement, the conversation has broadened to not just be about sexual violence and assault, but about workplace harassment and discrimination. really at great length throughout your book, we all have this sense that anger is an unreliable

guide to action. Obviously, it can get you started doing something, but I think many of us worry that it's often not informed by a lot of wisdom or careful thinking and is just by its very nature hostile to those things. I think you start your book with a reference to the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who has written about the disutility of anger. And I must say, I share that bias. It's not to say that I haven't found anger useful, but I feel that I've experienced its limitations just as a source of creative urgency. And I do perceive it a little differently than I think you do in public. Because one point you make repeatedly in the book is that anger tends to look great on men and terrible on women, and that this reveals a double standard that we have that we

shouldn't have. And the examples you use of it looking great on men, I just don't perceive the men that way. I mean, I think, you know, for instance, like, you know, Kavanaugh, I think you, I think it was in some of your press, you talk about his anger working for him, but Blasey Ford was just totally measured. And had she erupted in anger, it would have been a disaster. But I just thought Kavanaugh's anger looked terrible and almost derailed him. And I thought Lindsey Graham's anger looked just... I mean, he became this absolutely repellent character the moment he erupted in an arguably totally disingenuous way. Conversely, the video of the women getting both angry and upset in other registers with Jeff Flake

in the elevator, that played very well for those women. I thought that worked. It wouldn't have worked, frankly, for a man. Had Jeff Flake been cornered in an elevator by angry men, the threat of violence would have been so salient that it just would have seemed totally uncivil. I view anger a little differently here. I just put that out there. I don't actually think you do. I don't think your points, your points actually echo some of the things that I have been saying. Again, the book doesn't deal with Kavanaugh because it was published just a few days after Christine Blasey Ford's testimony. And one of the things I've been remarking on

is pretty close to what you just said, that in this particular political moment where, in fact, we are adjusting our ears and eyes to broader ranges of expression from a broader range of people, it's a long process. The example of the two different kinds of anger, the people speaking to the Judiciary Committee, to the powerful people in the room, and specifically to the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, who are the ones who had the power in that instance,

were very traditional forms of anger. We knew that Christine Blasey Ford could not be angry because it would have undercut her point, right? And one of the things I've been saying is that Kavanaugh could, as a powerful white man, and this has to do with who's presumed to be irrational to begin with. You were describing how you view anger as fundamentally unstable in some way. Women begin with a presumption that there's something emotional or irrational in them. You know, this is attached to notions of what femininity entails. And white men in particular are presumed to begin with a measure of rationality, right?

They are normative citizens, are normative leaders, are normative human beings, are white men in the popular consciousness in politics. And so historically, their expression, women's expression of anger only serves to amplify the notion that she is fundamentally unstable or irrational, that she shouldn't be believed, that this is coming out of a place of instability and therefore sort of unreliable or not credible. Whereas for men, the expression of anger can amplify their rationality to show that they're extra passionate about whatever it is they're presumed to be telling you information about. And when I first saw that night, when I went home after the testimony, based on these presumptions of how anger can work for a man like Brett Kavanaugh, but would never have worked for Christine Blasey Ford, I felt like, oh my God, it's over. This is going to work in his favor. It is going to be what the committee

needs. And based on Lindsey Graham's own response, I felt like it's clearly what the committee wanted to see, what the powerful people who are going to make this decision, the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, you know, the president to the degree that he has power over his party, it's going to please them. And I felt like it did. But then there were these days where some things happened that showed me that things were changing a little bit. That anger, which I agree with you, I saw it as fucking irrational. And all the things, all the attributes that people historically have tied to women's anger, I thought it was infantile, tantrum, hysterical. I mean, to me, it was completely out of place. It was deeply

irrational, Kavanaugh's expressions of anger. He looked like a fool. But the thing that I felt was that for the powerful people he was addressing, moving up, you know, up in power, the people who were going to make the decision about his lifetime appointment, it would be effective. But then there was, it turned out after, you know, people thought about it for 12 hours, that it was kind of mocked. Saturday Night Live mocked it in a way that matched the way that I'd seen it and that you just said that you saw it, you know? It was hilarious, yeah. As funny, as undermining, as, you know, and I thought, oh my God, this is interesting because this tells me that there's something in how we're receiving this powerful white man's anger that is different from what historical models would tell us. And at the same time,

Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher yelling in that elevator was so powerful for so many people. Now, I would argue, and did then, that in part, that anger was powerful because it was communicative and connective and expressive for millions of people who didn't have power in that instance, who were not on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who were not powerful members of the Republican Party in the position of deciding how they were going to vote. That anger was the expression of and cathartic and communicative, you know, for so many people who weren't in that elevator, who weren't in that Senate chamber, and that that was a power that is key to some, to the potential social and political power of a mass movement that is looking for people to give voice to their frustration and

their dissent. And that's part of why those women in the elevator played such a powerful role. those women in the elevator played such a powerful role. But what was the result? The result was that his anger did do what it needed to do for the powerful people who were able to make the decision. And they made very clear that that anger, which was designed to amplify the point that he had been wronged, was the communicative force that was going to undercut their assertions that he'd been wronged. These areative force that was going to undercut their assertions that he'd been wronged. These are the Republicans who have since talked about how he was the victim of a mob, how he was, we feel, you know, Donald Trump saying, I feel so sorry for his family. That is all, all of those are cues that came out of his angry display on his own behalf. So you,

I agree with you that the sort of precarity with which I felt for a couple days his anger might not have worked for him was symptomatic to me of the fact that we are in the process of hearing different people's anger differently. And I agree. But ultimately, it served its purpose, which was to persuade the people who had the power to appoint him to the Supreme Court of the United States to do so, and then to take his angry model for what had happened to him and repeat it to the world and affirm that as the story of what had happened, which was that Brett Kavanaugh had been attacked and that it was his anger that was righteous in the end. that Brett Kavanaugh had been attacked and that it was his anger that was righteous in the end. And those who had stood in the way of his further accumulation of power had aggressed upon him.

I wonder if there's a difference in the way feminine anger can play on both sides of the aisle politically. So I'm thinking of Sarah Palin, who I don't know that she actually ever communicated raw anger, but she was definitely put forward. I'm thinking of her appearance at the Republican National Convention. This is before she had been discredited in all those sit-down interviews with people like Katie Couric, but it was really the apogee of her political fame. And I remember being, frankly, terrified by that performance because I thought it was so good and effective for her crowd. I mean, I thought this is how right-wing Christian theocracy starts. But one thing that was interesting to spectate on there is that, especially in light of what we're talking about, is that there seemed to be an immense hunger for a woman

in that role to take a very hard swing at the left and communicate a wrathful, triumphant, but feminine war cry against liberalism and everything else that she was castigating. liberalism and everything else that she was castigating. Is that not in any way a counterpoint to this perception that women can never strike this note credibly? No, the way that they are encouraged to strike it has always been when they are striking it fundamentally in defense of white patriarchal power, which is what Sarah Palin was doing. It's what Phyllis Schlafly was doing. It's what the angry women who opposed school segregation in the South, the white women, were doing. This is one of the only ways in which women's anger and ferocity on a public stage is, in fact, fetishized by the powerful. Because if it is on behalf of that power, and in fact, a power that, you know, via its policy and ideology

seeks to subjugate or repress women. It's very useful to have a woman going out there and making the case for it. And you'll note that the way they make the case for it, Sarah Palin's anger was always expressed in maternal terms, which hearkened back to the traditional valuation of a traditional white femininity as a mother. So she was the pit bull hockey mom, and she led the Mama Grizzlies during the during the Tea Party move, which was a hard right move for the Republican Party, rooted in an enormous amount of misogyny. And so much of what drove the Tea Party once in Congress was, you know, shutting down Planned Parenthood. And Sarah Palin gave, you know, ferocious voice to this right wing faction. ferocious voice to this right-wing faction. But she did it using terms and, you know, in a style that affirmed her as she wasn't threatening the power structure. Women who are angry on behalf of left politics and left policy that aims to alter who has power in this

country are inherently a threat, and thus their anger is immediately marginalized and vilified. Whereas women whose anger is on behalf of a power structure are very valuable to that power structure. There are rewards on offer to them. There are vice presidencies on offer to them. You know, Phyllis Schlafly wrote a book called, in her, she led an army of angry white women, angry about the alterations to a patriarchal power structure that had been made by those feminists during the second wave. She led an army of women who were angry about those changed rules and expectations and opportunities in an incredibly successful, incredibly canny, tactically brilliant move against the ratification of the ERA. And she

won in 1982. And in doing so, she and that army are the ones who dealt that second wave feminism, it's kind of symbolic final blow. And she did that while angry, but also her book was The Power of the Positive Woman. And if you listen to people who worked with Phyllis Schlafly, she said, we always had to smile. We were doing this with smiles on our faces, again, kind of reaffirming. And she herself, as a woman who was constantly out on the road, was also affirming the values of traditional stay-at-home maternity, right? This was the figure that she embodied. And if you're embodying that figure, if you're embodying that figure of the woman who is valued on traditional patriarchal scales and your anger is on behalf of those traditional patriarchal powers, then that anger is not going to be viewed or treated as the same kind of threat to that power as if you're Flo Kennedy or Fannie Lou Hamer or Bella Abzug or Hillary Clinton. All right. So you mentioned Clinton. I want to talk about both Clintons because I think so much of the current moment

can be interpreted in light of their influence. But let's start with Bill Clinton, because it seems to me that he hangs over the whole Me Too moment like some kind of toxic waste that you keep finding where you don't expect to find it. He's the quintessential example of the problem, right? I mean, you're talking about male entitlement and bad behavior. He checks all those boxes. Whatever you want to say about Donald Trump in that area, Bill Clinton can ride alongside him all the way. And some of the leading feminists of the time proved, I don't think hypocrites is too strong a word

to describe how they took his side against his legitimate accusers. And to some degree, this continues to this day, although I think opinions are probably changing quickly. It does continue to this day in the sense that, I mean, I know Monica, I don't know her well, but we've met a few times. And I noticed in the news probably not more than a year ago that she got disinvited at a conference that she'd been asked to speak at because then they've later secured Bill Clinton. They didn't want to put Bill in an

awkward situation. That was within the past six months, I think. Yeah, right. But that's different from leading feminists supporting Bill Clinton, which is part of what was happening in the 90s that you're pointing to. Let's say that, you know, I think it was a magazine. You know, they're very different scales of the kind of thing you're talking about, right? Let me just add one more piece here, Rebecca. The response to him was certainly problematic from a feminist point of view. And most consequentially, in the 2016 election, because of how Hillary had played that political moment when she was first lady and defending her

Lothario husband from, you know, all of his legitimate accusers. I mean, she had, you know, I don't think this is debatable. I mean, she had bullied these women. She had lied about, you know, or certainly seemed to have lied about things she must have known were true. And in large measure, this is, I mean, I think her failure to become president was probably overdetermined, but this has got to be one of the reasons why she's not president. Because, I mean, at that moment in that debate with Trump, where she was there on the stage going up against

one of the most unethical people on earth, and she couldn't make a peep about it because of how badly her husband had behaved and how badly she had behaved in defending him. You know, to some degree, we have to perform an exorcism on the Clintons to get to a reset with respect to the current moment politically. Sure. I think that we have to perform an exorcism on a lot of, you know, we have to perform an exorcism on the way patriarchal power has left, again, systemically women dependent on men in all kinds of ways. So not just as husbands, but as leaders of political parties. As, you know, part of what happened, I very much agree with a portion of what you, the story you just told, right? So the way that I have long understood what happened

during Bill Clinton's administration with regard to the, you know, and for me, the big way in which it was deeply problematic from a feminist point of view is that Bill Clinton gets elected the year after Anita Hill's testimony. And Anita Hill's testimony against Clarence Thomas is such an important point in feminist history. It's coming, it is coming on the heels of the 1986 Supreme Court decision that finds sexual harassment in the workplace to be a form of sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. This is after more than a decade in the courts, you know, starting in the mid-70s, where women of color filed some of the first suits, Michelle Vinson, Carmina Wood, about sexual harassment they'd sustained in the workplace.

They're borrowing from civil rights laws and discrimination law that's just been made in the wake of the civil rights movement, applying it to their own harassment within their workplaces. in the wake of the civil rights movement, applying it to their own harassment within their workplaces. Those cases work their way up through the court. In 1986, you have the Supreme Court decision. And then five years later, Anita Hill testifies. And the power of Anita Hill's testimony on our view of gendered and racial power in this country was enormous. And we know one version of it, which is that the next year after a view of the whiteness and the maleness of the Senate Judiciary Committee, then on both sides of the aisle, right, Democrats and Republicans who just had white men listening to and treating this woman with disrespect, scorn, disbelief.

That view of our representative and governing body, you know, was part of what enraged a generation of women, what propelled a lot of them to seek elected office the next year. We got the year of the woman. In retrospect, it seems very small, but in fact it was four women elected to the Senate, including the first African-American woman ever elected to the Senate in the history of the woman. In retrospect, it seems very small, but in fact, it was four women elected to the Senate, including the first African-American woman ever elected to the Senate in the history of the country, Carol Moseley Brown. You can draw direct lines. You know, Carol Moseley Brown held a seat

that later Barack Obama held. He later became our first black president. It was the year that Dianne Feinstein was elected. She, of course, was the ranking Democrat during the Kavanaugh hearings on a Senate Judiciary Committee. You know, Barbara Boxer was elected. Kamala Harris now holds Barbara Boxer's seat. Kamala Harris was on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Patty Murray, who has talked sort of most vocally about how anger at the Hill hearings in part motivated her run for the Senate. You know, this was a this was a change with long lasting effect. with long lasting effect. I would also say that it was the cusp of sort of hammering home what sexual harassment meant, what it was, what it entailed, how it was a form of discrimination, which had been decided by the Supreme Court, but hadn't really been made clear.

It was a form of power abuse, of gendered and sexual power abuse. And that conversation was really crucial. And then the next year, we elected a president who was the first Democratic president in 12 years and on whom all kinds of people on the left, on the Democratic side, however you want to describe the politics at the time, were dependent. It had been 12 years of Reagan

and Bush. And here was the guy who was our first Democratic president. And his behavior was in line with old expectations and mores about how men behaved with regard to women, right? This is part of, look, Ted Kennedy during the Anita Hill hearings was also silenced in part because of his history. Yeah. Or did his nephew, wasn't his nephew being prosecuted for rape? His nephew was on trial, I believe, at the exact same time as the Hill hearings for rape. And Ted Kennedy himself, of course, had left a woman to die in Chappaquiddick and had a terrible reputation for womanizing. So many of our leaders left and right. reputation for womanizing. So many of our leaders, left and right, I mean, this was part of the association of male sexual power and power abuse with public and political power is really deep

and long lasting. Bill Clinton happened to become president at a time exactly post Anita Hill hearings when those when our expectations and the rules were changing and that was being hammered home to us. That was I mean, this is a man, you know, who had he served as president 20 years earlier, probably wouldn't have been called out for any of this behavior because it was presumed to be part of how power worked and how patriarchal power worked. As it was, he was called out. And many of the people who, including some prominent feminists, now some feminists, I want to point out, Andrea Dworkin was incredibly critical of Bill Clinton, right? There were feminists who were furious and who were very clear that Bill Clinton had abused power in his

relationship with Monica Lewinsky. And there were feminists who believed the other women who told stories about him. But many mainstream feminists did defend him. And part of how we get there is looking at the realities of dependency. When you have men who have, white men who have disproportionate shares of power, including political power, so that they are disproportionately the leaders of their party. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along

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