“See I believe in money, power, and respect. First You get the money. Then you get the (expletive), power. After you get the (expletive) power (expletive) will respect you.”
– From “Money, Power, Respect” by the Lox, 1998
Those on the right say liberal-leaning folks are not outraged enough. Those on the left tell those on the right to not cast the first stone as they live in a glass house. African-Americans bemoan the fact that Cosby was treated differently and Christians attribute all that to the moral decay in Hollywood.
All because of one man – Harvey Weinstein.
Well, to the right I say, “Remember ‘Grab them by the p****’!” To the left, well, he gave you guys a lot of money and championed your causes. Could it be you looked the other way too long? To my fellow blacks, “Have you listened to the misogyny in hip hop music lately?” To those holier-than-thou Christians, “Remember the priests and the boys?”
So if it is not a right or left, black or white, moral or immoral issue, what is it then?
Let’s go all the way back to 1887 and read an opinion in a letter the historian and moralist, John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton, expressed in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton:
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
That is it folks – POWER!
The issue of the powerful preying on the helpless for sex is as old as humanity itself.
Genetically, the primary goal of every organism is to propagate itself. It is no different with humans. For this primary purpose, males are hardwired to donate sperm at every and any opportunity whereas females have the ability to pick the best mate. Just as with animals who prefer the stronger type who can protect the female and her offspring, so is it with women too. They tend to go for the powerful who can protect them. It follows then that the more powerful men in society are going to have access to more women and sex.
As stated earlier, power tends to corrupt those who wield it. This is through the growing of an ego that tells them they are irresistible and sexy. They develop the notion that they can have all they want, when they want and how they want it – a condition what one author calls “Sexual Hubris”. Could it be a function of people who never had now having access to all or is it an inbuilt issue of character? Is it an issue of opportunity like Bill Clinton famously explained, “…Because I could!’?
Whatever the cause, if one then combines the budding ego, the access to women and the fact that power is a rather potent aphrodisiac, we have all the makings of predatory behavior.
Yet this behavior is not confined to only men, even though they make up most of the culprits. Women have also been shown to become power-drunk and predatory.
Remember the biblical story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, Zuleika? To borrow an expression from Michael Che of SNL, “…she tried to weinstein Joseph for a piece of his harvey”.
When he fled, she got him jailed. This was around 2000 BC!
A survey by Professor Joris Lammers, of Tilburg University in the Netherlands,of more than 1,500 readers of a business magazine found that powerful women also tend to prey.
A psychologist, Larry Josephs describes a measure that is used to rate this pathology – “ the dark side”. He finds it in both sexes.
“It is a combination of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy,” he once wrote.
It explains quite well the behavior of men like Caligula who had sex with his sisters while his wife watched, Elagabalus who set up a brothel in the palace in Rome and pimped himself or the 18th-century Moroccan ruler Moulay Ismail who fathered 888 children with his 500 concubines. King Solomon is said to have had a 1000 wives and concubines and in 8 BC China, the emperor had one queen, three consorts, nine wives of second rank, 27 wives of third rank, and 81 concubines. My own maternal great-grandfather had 8 wives!
In modern times we have our Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, John Ensign, JFK, FDR, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Tiger Woods, the FOX News executives and Harvey Weinstein.
Yet not all powerful men are dogs. The missing link is self-restraint, a quality one learns growing up. Some never do and if they do become powerful men, all hell breaks loose. So it’s a question of character as well as sexual make-up. Then is the empathy factor as well as a respect for those weaker than, especially women. In a place like Hollywood, this is especially precarious. Like a former editor of the Hollywood Reporter, Janice Min, once wrote:
“The fundamental predatory nature of Hollywood is young, attractive people — largely females — putting themselves in front of men to be judged and appraised and chosen. All this calls for a certain level of character in powerful men that may be hard to find.”
And it is not only in Hollywood.
We turn a blind eye to the indiscretions of our young athletes, call them “jocks” and excuse it as locker room behavior. Sometimes coaches even get these young men strippers and prostitutes! In all industries across the US, there are powerful men and some women, abusing their power and preying on young men and women who need their favor to get ahead in their careers. I bet this is the same story all over the world to varying degrees.
No decree from Congress or executive order form 1600 Pensylavania Avenue can outlaw this behavior. No amount of outrage can stem it. The only things that will save us from this scourge are things that we need for everyday life – character, self-restraint and empathy. It will behove all powerful men and women to acquire these traits then something interesting happens when that power flees. All those women and men flee too!