For the record. I didn't call for Franken's resignation - nor do I think he should have resigned. BUT that is not because I believe he kept his hands to himself, but because I know that level of mini-aggression is present in far too many good men who have no clue their attention is unwelcome. We (and they) need to learn from it, rather than sacrifice them based on teh misguided principle that all sexually inappropriate behavior is equal.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/07/al-franken-jane-mayer-new-yorker-leeann-tweeden.html
While it’s fair of Mayer to document how Tweeden misrepresented Franken’s actions, she also includes another set of explanations that come off more like familiar attempts to discredit a victim of sexual harassment. Mayer notes that photographs show Tweeden and Franken laughing together at an event in 2009. (You’ll recall that Harvey Weinstein tried to use photos of smiling accusers as evidence of his innocence.) Mayer also explains that USO tours are full of bawdy sex jokes and that what Tweeden says Franken did—write a kiss into a skit specifically so he could kiss her—was actually the plot of that very same skit. The fake boob-grabbing was part of the skit, too. Mayer also points out that Tweeden “participated in other ribald USO skits,” including one that had her spank Robin Williams and another that had her agree to sleep with a soldier whose name she draws from a box. The joke is that Franken filled the box with slips containing his own name. Is the conclusion that we’re expected to draw here that a woman relinquishes the right to complain about offstage sexual harassment if she’s subjected herself to sexual objectification for onstage laughs?
Yes, Tweeden almost certainly lied about some things. It also appears that she tailored her accusation to damage a person whose politics she didn’t like. (Although it’s worth noting that, after Franken apologized to her, Tweeden said she didn’t want him to resign.) But when we’re thinking about Franken’s fate, it’s dangerous to overemphasize Tweeden’s motivations and trustworthiness. The key question here is whether Franken’s behavior, in aggregate, means he doesn’t deserve a place in the U.S. Senate.
I won’t pretend there’s a clear and obvious answer to that question, but I do think there’s a better way to try to answer it. Instead of dissecting Franken’s case for the purposes of exonerating him, we could be discussing what we should expect from elected officials who’ve been creepy and sexist. How can they atone for their behavior? What threshold of proof should we demand? Is being removed from one of the most powerful positions in America akin to “capital punishment,” as one of Franken’s former Senate colleagues suggests? If we strive to hold politicians accountable for past policy positions, can we not question the character of a man who, for many years, wrote, performed, and was seemingly personally gratified by the humor of sexual coercion and objectification? Alas, skits that promote rape culture in an institution famous for its epidemic rates of sexual assault were apparently not seen as troubling a decade ago—but it’s not too late!
It betrays a failure of imagination and a fundamental distrust of women’s activism to strive to limit the #MeToo movement to men accused of the most heinous sexual assaults. Near the beginning of her piece, Mayer describes Franken as a man “on the losing side of the #MeToo movement.” To me, this was a jarring, reductive framing of a powerful push for social change, one that has demanded women revisit, reevaluate, and lay bare their most painful memories. A grassroots movement against sexism and abuse has no winners and losers. Neither is there anyone at the top to adjudicate claims, dole out punishments, and make the rules. If Franken resigned too hastily, that’s not the fault of the #MeToo movement, nor of the female senators who were repulsed by a compromising photo and by an allegation from a Democratic Senate staffer some of them knew. Efforts to make sense of the accusations against Franken should be welcomed by people invested in justice for the accused and accusers alike. Efforts to frame the #MeToo movement as a dangerous zero-sum game should not.
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