“Women, you have to treat ’em like shit.” —Donald Trump, New York magazine, November 9, 1992
After centuries of indifference to or even tacit (and sometimes open) sanctioning of sexual harassment, abuse or assault, we are suddenly in the midst of a cock conflagration. Powerful men in Hollywood, politics, journalism and many other fields are being pilloried, sacked or jailed for piggish or even criminal behavior toward women.
To understand how this bonfire started, we must speak frankly about the Garden of Dicks, a mythical place in the caveman lobe of the male brain. Like that other primeval paradise, the Garden of Eden, men have tried for millennia to create it here on Earth.
The Garden of Dicks is a Hooters. It’s an NFL locker room. It’s the Vatican. It’s the Rolling Stones’ private jet. It’s Harvey Weinstein’s suite at the Tribeca Grand Hotel.
It’s a top modeling agency in New York City run by a man who, after years of preying on his models, was disgraced for having sex with underage girls. He excused himself by saying, “I’m a man, and I have urges.”
It’s a corner office at Fox News decorated with the memorabilia of great power—including a brick from Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan—inhabited by a muttony executive who relentlessly propositioned female colleagues, grabbed kisses, demanded sexual favors for jobs and said things like, “You know, if you want to play with the big boys, you have to lay with the big boys.” And, “Well, you might have to give a blow job every once in a while.” Down the hall, that executive’s pasty star was allegedly sending gay porn, jerking off on late-night calls to female underlings and making numerous other unwelcome sexual advances.
It’s an online “review board” where an estimated 18,000 men, many of them reportedly white-collar tech workers, ranked the sexual skills of trafficked Korean women.
It’s a beauty pageant afterparty, where a 1997 Miss USA contestant met the pageant’s owner. "He kissed me directly on the lips,” Temple Taggart told The New York Times about her encounter with the man who is now president of the United States. “I thought: Oh my God. Gross. He was married to Marla Maples at the time. I think there were a few other girls that he kissed on the mouth. I was like, Wow, that's inappropriate.”
In the Garden of Dicks, the sense of entitlement regarding female bodies is so massive that many men assume women will “let you do anything,” as Donald Trump has suggested on more than one occasion. "They'll walk up, and they'll flip their top, and they'll flip their panties,” he once told radio host Howard Stern.
In the Garden of Dicks, a man can say something like that and believe it, because there’s always a Stern or a Billy Bush to snicker and egg him on. “I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married,” Trump said to a fawning Bush on a hot mic en route to filming an Access Hollywood segment over 10 years ago. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Then there was the Republican presidential debate in March 2016—four men on a stage—when Trump boasted on live, prime-time TV about the size of his penis.
In the Garden of Dicks, it’s always about the dick.
In the Garden of Dicks, plausible deniability is taken for granted. When 17 women came forward during Trump’s campaign last year to allege he had done that pussy-grabbing, forced-kissing, tongue-down-the-throat thing to them, he called them all liars. "The events never happened. Never. All of these liars will be sued after the election is over,” he said during a speech in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, weeks before he was elected. His fans roared like beasts.
Trump still hasn’t sued those “liars.” Perhaps because he was so busy moving into the Oval Office, where he immediately set up a Rose Garden of Dicks. His former chief adviser, Steve Bannon, called House Speaker Paul Ryan “a limp-dick motherfucker,” and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “a spineless cocksucker.” Unofficial adviser Roger Stone lost his Twitter account for calling Trump critics “cocksucker” one too many times. And Trump installed a communications director who exited shortly after calling a New Yorker reporter and saying, “I’m not Steve Bannon. I’m not trying to suck my own cock.”
In the Garden of Dicks, women come and go, working, serving and servicing—trying to earn a living wage, searching for a husband or a job, looking for venture capital or just a good time, seeking an advanced degree or a part in a movie. Often, we have no choice. We enter a room and instantly know: Oh, it’s that place. There’s always something unnerving in the air, like the men there have just laughed at a joke we aren’t supposed to hear.
And, eyes averted, we carry on.
Coming to a Head
Trump’s victory in November was an insult to all the women who had accused him of sexual assault or harassment and been called liars. It was also a nightmare made flesh for the millions of women who heard echoes in Trump’s degrading remarks about women of the harassment or assaults they’ve endured. Many called his triumph a repudiation of feminism. And yet, a year after his ascension, his pungent brand of misogyny is besieged. For the first time in history, powerful men in a multitude of fields are being smacked off their perches because of their rapacity, while women all over the world are finally speaking out.
This uprising has been a long time coming. Forty years ago, legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon wrote a seminal paper for a law school class called “Sexual Harassment of Working Women.” In it, she argued that sexual harassment violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal law that prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin and religion.
In 1986, the Supreme Court ruled that sexual harassment can be an actionable form of sex discrimination and that harassment can include creating a hostile work environment through rape and other unwelcome sexual aggressions. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) defined sexual harassment as “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature.”
After that ruling, women filed more and more cases claiming they’d been harassed in the workplace. Corporations responded by offering diversity training, and a whole new legal subculture developed to sue and to defend the accused. Along with that came forced arbitration, which dramatically lowered the number of cases that went to trial. Good for men, bad for women.
Thirty years after the Supreme Court’s ruling, sexual harassment remains rampant and under-reported. The vast majority of incidents—75 percent—are never reported because of fear of retaliation, a fear that, according to surveys and the responses to women who have accused public figures like Trump, Weinstein and Hollywood director Brett Ratner, is well founded.
During the decades when sexual harassment law was being framed in the courts, Trump was crafting his persona as a preening predator. He demeaned women in public forums and bragged about sexual assaults. (For some, that is part of his appeal.) He also backed fellow harassers. He hired the disgraced and deposed former Fox executive Roger Ailes as a campaign adviser. “Some of the women that are complaining, I know how much he helped them,” Trump said on NBC, as sexual assault allegations against Ailes started piling up in July 2016. While massively popular Fox host Bill O’Reilly was being pushed off the air amid revelations that the company had paid tens of millions to settle sexual harassment claims against him, Trump told The New York Times, “I don’t think Bill did anything wrong.”
There is one sexual predator Trump has not stood up for, though: The man whose attacks on female celebrities and young underlings were so numerous and so familiar in style and substance that he spawned an online revolt, hashtagged #MeToo. Harvey. And just like that, Weinstein and the million-strong #MeToo movement baked up the perfect cake to serve on the anniversary of the election of the nation’s first Pussy Grabber in Chief.