Andrew Cuomo, New York’s governor, stands accused of sexual harassment, and increasingly, people are calling for his head. His resignation, in disgrace, from office and public life.
Here’s my take:
Let me first frame this by saying that I have, like every woman I know, dealt with sexual harassment in multiple settings. I’m also a survivor of sexual assault. And I am a pretty loud voice on behalf of women.
That said, this situation makes me very uncomfortable.
First, in a general way, I am not okay with lives and careers being destroyed because accusations of either sexual harassment or assault have been levied at someone without due process. It is wrong. It weaponizes accusations like this, and it’s beyond naive to think that it won’t be politicized. Bottom line, one of the basic tenets in American democracy is the right to due process, and the right to defend one’s self against accusations of wrong doing. I am furious over calls for him to resign rather than submit (as he has asked for) to an investigation. This is a witch hunt. And I use that phrase consciously, with all that it reverberates with.
Second, while I am not happy with Cuomo if these accusations are true, there is a huge space between inappropriate and insensitive behavior and the kind of wrong doing that I think should end someone’s professional or political career. Nothing that I have seen reported, I believe, should do so for Cuomo. And the woman who has the brought the only accusations that I think Cuomo needs to answer for in any serious way, when she first reported her discomfort with him, told the women staffers she was reporting to that she didn’t want an investigation. They respected that — and I don’t believe it’s now fair to imply (or state, as her attorney has) that their failure to investigate was outrageous — they were respecting her wishes and her privacy. If they had investigated against her wishes, would they also have been savaged? I rather think yes.
In fact, a lot of it seems to be piling on — either for personal or political reasons — an effort to take someone down for absurd reasons. Putting your hand on the small of someone’s back should not be the end of a career.
Part of why this infuriates me is that I believe it does a few things beyond damaging someone’s life and work in ways that are far out of balance:
1. I believe it trivializes actual sexual aggression and violence
2. It suggests that women need to be, in some sense, wards of the system when greeted with attention they don’t want. In a weird way, it pushes a patriarchal idea forward that they cannot or should not be able to just have the personal power to shut it down. In the one case here with any weight, she was moved to a different division after she chose not to have an investigation. How is that inappropriate, after a reported conversation with no witnesses, no one else reading the situation, and no negative impacts on her career? There are nuances here. I believe we should be empowering women to speak up and push back — had she done so, and people ignored her, or she had been fired or demoted, then there would be a case. But that didn’t happen.
3. Is flirting, appropriate or inappropriate, the same as sexual aggression? This also makes me really uncomfortable. We live in a culture that is pretty messed up about sexuality and power, with some really puritanical narratives sitting under the surface. I believe, as a cultural mythologist who looks at stories like this, that part of our inability to see nuance in this is because we are often caught in those narratives — we decide, when it’s convenient, that sexual attraction is prurient. It’s titillating, it invites hugely judgmental responses, and allows us to take down people who we’ve seen in other moments as heroes — which is a psychological pastime that is pretty toxic.
And it bothers me that this is all happening against the background of savaging Cuomo over the pandemic and what happened at nursing homes — which to me feels overtly political.
I know Cuomo can be polarizing. I know he’s tough and at times grating. I also know he’s been extraordinarily effective as a governor, in part because he’s tough and at times grating. And I am angry on his behalf that as his response to the pandemic is being measured, it is currently only being viewed through this lens of what happened with nursing home management and reporting — and I’m not convinced that they did anything other than try to find a resolution to a horrendous problem. He and his staff were making thousands of decisions daily, trying to manage a catastrophic pandemic in the face of not only federal disinterest, but overt malice. They made thousands of good decisions. He was a voice of reason, of humanity, of compassion, and of hope in a time when there were virtually none. That should matter, too.
If he was found guilty of sexual assault, I would be agreeing that he should of course go, regardless of his handling of the pandemic crisis for good or ill. After an investigation.
But that isn’t what has happened here. Not even close. And so it feels to me like people are either taking political advantage of a rare moment of weakness on Cuomo’s behalf because they don’t like him. (I’ve had people who don’t like him say just that, actually — they’ve finally found something that could take him down. Which feels incredibly cynical to me.)
And I’m furious at Gillibrand, Schumer, and Delgado for jumping on this resignation bandwagon instead of calling for an investigation. Did they not learn anything over the savaging of Al Franken? People’s lives on EITHER side of such a story shouldn’t be destroyed. If we decide that’s appropriate, we have handed nuclear weapons to cynics who want to destroy people with any sort of political capital that feels competitive, and we’ve set up a situation where ultimately it will snap back on those who are earnestly actually trying to speak truth to power.
If someone is an ass, whack him upside the head. But don’t take him down. Or her. And right now, gender matters in our understanding of power and sexuality, but it won’t forever — as more women come into positions of power, unless we can find some nuance on this, accusations of sexual impropriety will be leveled at them. It’s already happened.
Unless we do what Mike Pence does, and never spend any time alone with anyone of the opposite gender, and/or we keep women out of access to or holding power — in any organizational context — we are going to have moments of discomfort with one another about what someone might have said or done to someone with a sexual undertone. We need to become grownups about this, think with context and nuance as we’re holding people responsibly, and not gleefully rush to destroy anyone in the middle of what are often really complex situations. Instead, we should be all trying to learn and assess and hold ourselves and everyone else accountable in a way that teaches and builds capacity for everyone involved. Scorched earth, no tolerance policies tend to backfire horribly.