At the moment, Donald Trump was called on to show the most straight-forward sort of empathy for women, he revealed he had none. Presented with a hypothetical last week about how he would respond if his own daughter Ivanka were sexually harassed at work, Trump put the onus for changing the situation on the victim.
“I would like to think she would find another career or find another company if that was the case,” he said. The notion that harassed women can simply “go find another career”, like picking up an extra bottle of bubbly at the supermarket, is the thinking of a man who’s had everything handed to him, who inherited a fortune as well as his father’s business, and whose greatest existential threat in recent years has been determining how many millions and billions of dollars he’s really worth. The response signals an utter lack of understanding for what the woman in this situation might be going through. As Lisa Bloom, a civil rights lawyer who’s been representing sexual harassment cases for years, put it in a statement: “Women fought a generation ago and won the right to equal respect in the workplace. We do not have to choose between a good job and our dignity.”
But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised Trump seems to take the side of the workplace harasser, given a hypothetical on the matter. And the question was raised in the context of allegations levelled against former Fox News chief Roger Ailes, with whom Trump has a friendly (and politically valuable) relationship. Those affections were apparent when Trump said of the allegations on Meet the Press recently: “All of a sudden, they’re saying these horrible things about [Ailes]. It’s very sad. Because he’s a very good person. I’ve always found him to be just a very, very good person. And by the way, a very, very talented person. Look what he’s done. So I feel very badly.”
Ailes has denied any sexual misconduct, but the case is far from a matter of he-said-she-said. After former anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a suit against him last month, dozens of women came out of the woodwork with similar claims, and he now stands accused of more than 20 counts of sexual harassment. Another factor blurring Trump’s vision on the matter is that for him, sexual harassment charges are personal. Among Bloom’s clients is Jill Harth, a woman who recently spoke out about sexual harassment and assault claims against Trump she first filed in the 1990s. Harth, who recently described Trump’s treatment of her in an interview with the Guardian, said that the candidate’s most recent comments “continue to demonstrate his lack of understanding and empathy for women in the real world”.
Harth said one of the main reasons she wanted to start her own makeup business after leaving the pageant industry where she worked with Trump was “to have an element of control over former male superiors who abuse their power”. The woman thrust into the centre of the controversy by the recent comments — Trump’s daughter Ivanka — has previously come to her father’s defence, telling CBS after the New York Times ran a story critical of Trump’s personal treatment of women: “My dad is not a groper.”
It was actually that interview, Harth has said, that made her want to hire a lawyer and speak out about her harassment story to the Guardian. “What did she know?” Harth said in the interview. “She was 10 years old at the time. She didn’t know what her father was about, what he was doing, how he was acting.” This time Ivanka appears to be staying quiet, but Trump’s son has waded into the fray with the even more offensive assertion that “Ivanka is a strong, powerful woman. She wouldn’t allow herself to be subjected to it.”
The implication that those who are harassed are somehow complicit or asking for it, is classic victim-blaming behaviour. But as with his father, the notion that women should avoid being sexually harassed rather than insisting aggressors change their behaviour, is the sort of logic that may come naturally to a privileged man who’s never experienced harassment himself and has no idea how it actually works.
The younger Trump has tweeted in his defence that he thinks sexual harassment is a “no go” and “totally unacceptable behaviour”. But when the unacceptable occurs? Blame the woman. There is one twisted sense in which he’s right about how it would never happen to Ivanka, though. It’s not because she’s smarter or stronger or not-asking-for-it; it’s because she’s Donald Trump’s daughter. And she’s said as much herself.
In her 2009 book, The Trump Card, Ivanka wrote that as a girl she experienced sexual harassment “many times” in the form of catcalling from men on her father’s construction sites. “But in those cases,” she wrote, “the workers never realised I was the boss’s daughter when they started hooting and hollering.” After they found out who she is they apologised, she added. While she’s described harassment as “never acceptable” and said “we must stand against it”, she backtracked in the very same breath, seemingly shrugging off the behaviour as a joke or a quirk of the aggressor’s personality.
“At the same time,” she wrote, “we must recognise that our coworkers come in all shapes, stripes and sizes. What might be offensive to one person might appear harmless to another.” Here, the inclusive understanding language is insidiously being applied to the harasser, not the harassed. And to stop it, she suggests not that chauvinists change their behaviour, but that women dress more modestly. To ward off remarks, Ivanka “concealed my femininity” by dressing in black pantsuits and wearing her hair pulled into a bun.
Likewise, she believes it’s on the victim to “learn to figure out when a hoot or a holler is indeed a form of harassment and when it’s merely a good-natured tease that you can give back in kind”.
But sexual harassment is not a “good-natured tease”. It’s not a joke, and it’s certainly not a two-way street. It is not something that can be cured by a pantsuit or a woman tying her hair into a bun. It can only be cured by educating society — particularly men — about what constitutes harassing behaviour, and by holding them accountable for their transgressions. It isn’t taught in colleges or even, apparently, Wharton Business School, but it’s an education that it appears the entire Trump family sorely needs.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Lucia Graves is a Guardian US columnist. She was previously a staff correspondent for National Journal magazine and a staff reporter at Huffington Post.
