http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-faludi5oct05,1,5446714.story?coll=la-news-comment

Conan the Vulgarian
By Susan Faludi

Susan Faludi is the author of "Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man"
and "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women."

October 5, 2003

PORTLAND, Ore. ? Three days before The Times published its story detailing
Arnold Schwarzenegger's alleged groping of six women, a friend of mine who
works in the movie industry was sitting in my kitchen asking the question,
"Why doesn't anyone seem to care about Arnold's reputation for sexual
harassment?" She was puzzled and frustrated. "Everybody in the business
knows about it," she said, noting the several cases that she was privy to,
"but it doesn't even seem to register."

Now that it's made the press, will it matter? Probably not. So late in the
game, the revelations are easily dismissed as last-minute dirty politics,
much the way the eleventh-hour report of George W. Bush's drunk-driving
arrest never got any traction. And with the hours running down on the
preelection clock, Schwarzenegger was quick to acknowledge that he had
"behaved badly sometimes" and to say that what "I thought then was playful"
he now recognized had "offended people."

But who are these people? Who, besides the specific women who had to endure
an unwelcome paw up their shirts and under their skirts, is offended ? and
why are so many not offended?

Even before The Times' piece, Schwarzenegger's bad behavior toward women
had made the rounds. Premiere magazine offered chapter and verse on
Schwarzenegger's molesting tendencies two years ago, and the Oui interview
in which he bragged about nailing that babe in a gang bang has been
endlessly recycled. None of it seems to have had an effect on the very
constituency that expressed the most disgust over reports of Bill Clinton's
philandering: American men.

Tarred with the same sexual-harassment brush, Schwarzenegger and Clinton
emerged with mirror-opposite gender gaps. Clinton rode an ever-larger
female gender advantage to election in both campaigns (a whopping
17-percentage-point gap in 1996), while Schwarzenegger owes his lead in the
polls to a lopsidedly male following, with 45% of men supporting him in the
latest survey, compared with only 36% of women. Why the difference between
the two pols with the wandering eyes?

Given that Schwarzenegger owes his fame to Hollywood, maybe it's only
fitting to find the answer on the silver screen, in Neil LaBute's acute
dissection of American gender pathologies, "In the Company of Men." The
1997 movie told the story of Chad, the gotta-be-on-top corporate striver,
and the pact he coercively forges with his more sensitive and flabby
co-worker, Howard, to compete for the honors of seducing and then
humiliating a deaf woman.

Howard identifies with the woman's plight and falls for her; Chad,
meantime, goes in for the kill, humiliating both the woman and ? maybe more
to the point ? Howard. "Never lose control," Chad tells Howard. "That is
the total key to the universe."

Clinton was perceived by men as having lost this control, and worse, lost
it to a series of women. He may have been the aggressor, but as a seducer
he really meant to seduce, thus exposing an almost feminine sort of desire
and vulnerability. For this, he was humiliated, held up like Howard for
ridicule in male eyes. No wonder so many women empathized with Clinton: He
was essentially shamed like a fallen woman.

Schwarzenegger, on the other hand, is Chad the "playful" cad, going after
women, sniggering frat-boy style, for the score. Sex isn't even the prime
object here: The women in the Times story were manhandled, not seduced.
There is no warning, no courtship (unless you count such romantic come-ons
as "I'd love to work you out"); the hand darts into their underclothes like
a bolt from the blue, a preemptive strike. "Did he rape me? No," one woman
said, recalling the time Schwarzenegger allegedly grabbed her breast. "Did
he humiliate me? You bet he did."

Humiliation so often seems to be the theme in these tales of
Schwarzenegger's conquests, humiliation not just of women but ? perhaps
even more notably ? of the men these women "belong" to. One woman said she
was groped by Schwarzenegger when she went to Gold's Gym to watch her
husband, Schwarzenegger's bodybuilding rival, the former Mr. Universe Robby
Robinson.

"What he did was uncalled for, but I couldn't say nothing," Robinson said;
fear of exile from the bodybuilding business kept him mum. A similar
dynamic was at work in an episode recounted in an earlier Times story,
where Schwarzenegger was said to have used the wife of Don Peters, another
bodybuilding competitor, to shame her ? and him.

According to the article, after Schwarzenegger had bedded the woman, he
picked up a phone and, claiming he was dialing his lawyer to reschedule an
appointment, asked her to take the receiver. It turned out the number he
dialed was her husband's, and while she held the phone, Schwarzenegger
yelled into it these words, cleaned up by The Times' censors: "I just [made
love to] her! I just [made love to] her!" As Tina Turner would say, what's
love got to do with it?

A Schwarzenegger spokesman told The Times that the episode with Peters and
his wife was just a case of "locker room humor." Which actually explains a
good deal of Schwarzenegger's appeal to male voters. He comes out of the
testosterone-ruled world of weight rooms and action movies, where women are
the designated observers and adorners, and where men find their place in
the wolf pack through a well-established ordeal of hazing and humiliation.

The men who don't make it to the top in that world still have the
compensation of identifying with the one man who does, as long as they
don't identify with any of the women, as long as they don't "say nothing."
They still belong to the pack, by virtue of being male.

No matter how much sand gets kicked in their face, they still can fantasize
that one day they, too, like Charles Atlas, will do enough leg lifts to
rise in the ranks. At a time of deep economic and international insecurity,
the easy power of the bully boy is a siren call to the American male
populace, as evidenced by President Bush's continuing allure to the very
men whose interests are least served by his domestic and foreign policies.
The locker room game works as long as only men get to play, and only as
long as they agree to play by certain rules. One rule is that sensuality is
verboten, but aggressive jocularity is not. Humiliating women in a
"playful" way can signal a powerful rejection of "the feminine" and a
powerful reinforcement of male bonding.

That rejection of the feminine explains why, in the gubernatorial debate,
Schwarzenegger seemed inordinately fixated on shutting down Arianna
Huffington, (whose poll numbers barely registered in the contest). ). When
all that interrupting and haranguing didn't work, he resorted to a veiled
threat of physical humiliation, implied in the remark, "I have a perfect
part for you in 'Terminator 4.' " As much as Schwarzenegger denied it
later, it's hard to imagine what part he had in mind but the famous one
assigned the uppity female robot in "Terminator 3," whose face he buried in
a toilet bowl. And even that fate he evidently found to be insufficient
degradation; as he told Entertainment Weekly, "I wanted to have something
floating in there."

Funny, right? Not to Huffington. "It's a continuum of a lack of respect,"
she remarked to me a few days after the debate, "from not putting a single
woman on your economic team, to bullying a woman at a debate, to treating
women in such a humiliating way in the course of your daily life." Now
Huffington is out of the race and we're back in the all-male locker room of
American politics. Indeed, Schwarzenegger's public drubbing of his female
rival may have only elevated him in that boys-only arena.

Women's anger about rape and harassment is exacerbated by the knowledge
that their attackers are after power, not sex. In American politics, it's
the opposite. Harassment is deemed more acceptable if it's not about sex
but is part of a locker room power dynamic between the boys. The gender gap
is really between those afraid of bullying and those afraid of intimacy.
Women will forgive a politician's lapse if it at least seems motivated by a
susceptibility to desire or emotion. Men afraid of sensuality will forgive
the same act (and actor) as long as the behavior can be laughed off as
winner-take-all sport.


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Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium