"I believe Anita Hill."
As I was going through storage boxes in my office last week (on international women’s Day, it so happens) I came across a cache of old political buttons.
One of them contained the simple message “I believe Anita Hill.”
The confrontation between Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas occurred almost a generation ago; there are political activists in our Coachella Valley today who were either toddlers or yet unborn when Anita Hill’s testimony painted an unflattering portrait of Clarence Thomas is a man who personifies and exemplifies Lord Acton’s famous dictum that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
As I held the “I believe Anita Hill” button in my hand, I recalled a somewhat unfortunate conversation I have had with a former friend of mine, like me, a gay man. What ended our friendship was his statement to me that women’s issues, which he described in a tone that can best be characterized as dismissive, did not matter at all to him.
Was his position simply the misogyny that sometimes crops up among certain isolated individuals in our own gay community? Or was it an indicator of a larger problem? Are we men, as men, so complacently accustomed to the idea of male privilege that, irrespective of our sexual orientation, we don’t feel as if we have a dog in the hunt?
As I was going through storage boxes in my office last week (on international women’s Day, it so happens) I came across a cache of old political buttons.
One of them contained the simple message “I believe Anita Hill.”
The confrontation between Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas occurred almost a generation ago; there are political activists in our Coachella Valley today who were either toddlers or yet unborn when Anita Hill’s testimony painted an unflattering portrait of Clarence Thomas is a man who personifies and exemplifies Lord Acton’s famous dictum that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
As I held the “I believe Anita Hill” button in my hand, I recalled a somewhat unfortunate conversation I have had with a former friend of mine, like me, a gay man. What ended our friendship was his statement to me that women’s issues, which he described in a tone that can best be characterized as dismissive, did not matter at all to him.
Was his position simply the misogyny that sometimes crops up among certain isolated individuals in our own gay community? Or was it an indicator of a larger problem? Are we men, as men, so complacently accustomed to the idea of male privilege that, irrespective of our sexual orientation, we don’t feel as if we have a dog in the hunt?
If so, we need to disabuse ourselves of that notion.
A generation ago, when Anita Hill was courageously calling out Clarence Thomas for his misbehavior, it probably would have been fair to say that there existed a consensus that the tide of history was moving in favor of full and unequivocal recognition of women’s first-class citizenship in the American Commonwealth. Despite setbacks such as the failure of the equal rights amendment, it did appear that within a relatively short time, women would finally be recognized as the authentic owners of their own bodies, receive equal compensation for work of equal worth, and be fully acknowledged in law as possessing rights coextensive with those of men.
Oh boy, were we ever wrong.
If anything, women in America have come under attacks of such force and magnitude as to justify comparisons between their attackers and the Taliban. Issues we had thought settled and closed, such as access to contraception, are now being re-litigated by social conservatives and presidential wannabes like Rick “Google Problem” Santorum. A woman’s right to make reproductive choices without state intervention is under coordinated attack across the country, and some right-wing commentators have even gone so far as to question whether women should have the right to vote.
So, you may ask, what do these issues have to do with us guys?
The short answer is: an awful lot.
Full disclosure: I may have a somewhat skewed perspective. When I first entered the workforce as a teenager, my supervisors were all women. It was not until I started working as a summer law clerk that I actually was supervised by a man. Several of my close female relatives, including my own mother, are or were in highly responsible executive positions. No woman in my extended family can ever be said to have been barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.
I may also have a skewed perspective because, in a socially conservative University in a socially conservative town in a socially conservative state during the Reagan administration, there were a number of us who were unafraid to be vocally and actively pro-choice; we understood and accepted the risk that standing out in freezing rain defending the Porter County Planned Parenthood facility in Valparaiso, Indiana proclaiming “this clinic stays open” might expose us to a certain degree of calumny from the anti-choice contingent.
And calumny we got.
I know what it’s like to be called “baby killer,” and to have my death prayed for; the thick skin I had to develop stood me in good stead during the years I spent on the City Council in Cathedral City, were being belabored was simply part and parcel of life for my colleagues and me.
For me, the issues at stake have less to do with pregnancy and contraception per se than with basic personal autonomy. As a man, I can’t get pregnant; as a gay man, I can state with some confidence that the likelihood of a pregnancy resulting out of some sexual encounter of mine is probably quite small, nay, nonexistent. But what I understand at a visceral level is that as and to the extent any government can control a woman’s bodily autonomy, whether by forcing her to carry an unwanted or unplanned pregnancy to term, or worse, depriving her of the ability to control through contraception whether a pregnancy even begins, that government can also control the extent to which I am able to live my life openly as an out gay man in the Commonwealth. The same people who want to abolish reproductive choice are those who would happily compass my vanishing under color of a verse in Leviticus.
Sadly, that’s an equation which some in our community don’t seem to get. Fortunately, most of us do, but it remains incumbent on all of us to be forthright in acknowledging that, as a matter of both principle and well considered self-interest, men, gay or straight, need to be with our sisters at the barricades supporting a woman’s basic right to be the mistress of her own body.
When Anita Hill dared to confront Clarence Thomas, she dared to take on an aspect of male privilege that depends for its existence upon an uncritical acceptance of the proposition that men have and should enjoy carte blanche to control women not merely by their actions, but also by their words. Clarence Thomas’ documented acts of inappropriate sexual harassment link him ineluctably to Rush Limbaugh’s slut-shaming of Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke. In both cases, the conduct in question reflected an atavistic assertion of straight male privilege to which the rest of us should take the strongest exception.
And while decent people throughout America have taken exception to Limbaugh’s despicable conduct, the fact that he felt emboldened enough to engage in it at all tells us that we --- especially men --- have a lot more work to do. As presumptive holders of a societal privilege that even now tends to attach more to men than to women, we have a heightened moral responsibility to call out the Clarence Thomases and Rush Limbaughs in our society who believe that being male constitutes a license to engage in what amounts to the verbal equivalent of rape.
Because almost twenty years on, because I still remember the truth-telling courage it took for her to confront Clarence Thomas, I still believe Anita Hill.
-XXX-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California. The views expressed herein are his own, and do not constitute legal advice. He STILL believes Anita Hill.
