Economic Update: Revolt Against Sexual Abuse

Summary

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

Episode: Revolt Against Sexual Abuse
Date: December 7, 2017
Host: Richard D. Wolff
Guest: Dr. Harriet Fraad

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Overview

This episode of Economic Update takes a deep dive into the economic and systemic roots of the recent, global revolt against sexual abuse and harassment, featured most prominently in late 2017. Host Richard D. Wolff and guest Dr. Harriet Fraad, a mental health counselor and writer, examine how economic and social transformations have shaped gender roles and power dynamics, leading to both the perpetuation of abuse and the current pushback against it. The discussion grounds #MeToo within the broader context of workplace structure, gender ideology, and systemic change, exploring bold solutions far beyond “just say no.”

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Economic News and Updates (00:10–28:48)

The Tax Bill and Corporate Tax Cuts (00:10–07:20)

• Wolff criticizes the recent Senate tax bill, focusing on the drastic reduction in the U.S. corporate tax rate from 35% to 20%.
• He explains this triggers a "race to the bottom" internationally, as other countries (e.g., Israel) immediately lower their own tax rates in response.
  • Quote: “The flaw in this argument...is to not understand that other countries can do exactly what the United States is doing.” (03:50, Wolff)
  • This spirals into diminished public resources as all countries collect less from the wealthy and corporations.

Graduate Students and Education (07:20–11:45)

• The same bill proposes taxing graduate student tuition waivers as income, making advanced education more difficult to afford.
  • Quote: “The same tax bill that lowers taxes on corporations...has found a way to balance the books by slapping graduate students in the face with a new tax.” (11:11, Wolff)
• Wolff highlights declining U.S. rankings in advanced educational attainment.

No Real Recovery for the Majority (11:45–16:30)

• Wolff challenges claims of economic recovery, noting homeownership rates have fallen despite population growth.
  • 8 million more households but 400,000 fewer homeowners between 2006–2016.
  • 9 million households lost to foreclosure or short sale.
  • Quote: “That's not a recovery, ladies and gentlemen. That's a disaster.” (15:52, Wolff)

Worker Cooperatives – The Example of Valve Corporation (17:35–22:23)

• Valve’s horizontal, non-hierarchical structure is held up as a model that fosters creativity and worker empowerment, challenging the stereotype that co-ops stifle innovation.

The Nobel Peace Prize and Economic Power (23:20–26:50)

• The 2017 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
• Wolff links nuclear policy to economic decline in the West: as economic strength wanes, U.S., Britain, and France cling to military power.
  • “A lesson of history is you enter a dangerous period when economic decline goes together with holding on to your military prowess.” (26:30, Wolff)

The Reality Behind Starbucks' Progressive Reputation (26:50–28:48)

• Starbucks is criticized for scheduling practices that prevent workers from qualifying for benefits, exposing the limits of “progressive” corporate narratives when corporate structure incentivizes profit above all else.

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2. Main Theme: Revolt Against Sexual Abuse (28:48–55:42)

Why the Revolt Now? Economic Roots and Gender Roles (28:48–34:07)

• Dr. Harriet Fraad identifies economic shifts beginning in the 1970s (automation, globalization) as upending the male breadwinner model.
  • When men lost stable, well-paid jobs, women entered the workforce en masse, changing power dynamics at home and at work.
• The women's liberation movement empowered women ideologically, but no equivalent men’s movement arose to revisit male roles.
  • Quote (Fraad): “It was capitalist greed that motivated this huge change, but nonetheless it did.” (33:44)
  • Women, once economically dependent, now could support themselves, which destabilized traditional male dominance in both public and private domains.

Continuity and Change: Tolerance, Not Incidence, of Abuse (39:07–42:10)

• Sexual harassment and assault have always existed; what’s new is women’s refusal to accept it, empowered by economic independence and social movements.
  • Quote: “What's accelerated is women's courage to not tolerate this and to change the position from victim to accuser.” (39:34, Fraad)
• The household lord/serf dynamic is breaking down, with women demanding equality and partnership, not subordination.

The Limits of “Just Say No” Solutions (42:10–45:41)

• Wolff draws a parallel with failed “war on drugs” messaging, warning against simple moral injunctions as solutions.
  • Quote: “My fear is this will have no more effect on sexual assault and harassment than saying just say no has done anything for the drug problem in the United States.” (43:36, Wolff)
• Fraad calls for examining root causes and implementing structural changes, not just rhetoric.

Structural Economic and Social Solutions (45:41–54:24)

• Hierarchical workplace structures, with male order-givers and female subordinates, foster environments ripe for abuse.
  • Changes to workplace organization (e.g., democratic cooperatives) would dilute these power imbalances.
  • Quote: “Had that been a co-op where everyone was an equal…the employee was also the employer…this becomes much more difficult.” (47:22–47:25, Wolff)
• Fraad advocates changing early childhood education and care:
  • Increase pay and prestige for childcare workers (mostly women).
  • Normalize cross-gender roles in toys and upbringing; encourage emotional expression in boys.
  • Equip men to be nurturing, thereby reducing aggression and the need for dominance.
    • Example: Norway’s mandatory paternity leave and family leave for either parent, government-supported.
    • Quote: “The military has a horrendous level of sexual abuse… one out of four women is accosted and sexually abused in the military.” (50:28, Fraad)
• These address the deep roots of abuse—economic hierarchy and gender stereotypes.

Social Movements as Drivers of Change (54:24–55:32)

• Reliance on corporations or markets for solutions is misplaced given that their structures are part of the problem.

  • Systemic, structural shifts must be demanded through organized social movements.

  • Memorable Moment:

  • Wolff: “It’s the social movement, in this case, led by those that are revolting against old patterns of sexual harassment and abuse that we have to look to, to impose on the world through persuading people structural changes that can really alter this behavior.” (55:14)

  • Fraad: “Not just verbiage, not just. It was Nancy Reagan—‘just say no’ to drugs. Of course, they’re much worse than when she said it, because you have to change the structural problems in order to make a change.” (55:19)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the societal impact of economic decline:
  “You enter a dangerous period when economic decline goes together with holding on to your military prowess.” (26:30, Wolff)

• Describing the transformation in women’s role:
  “The majority of American women are now single and by choice...we needed partners in the home, partners in tenderness...” (36:07, Fraad)

• The limitations of piecemeal solutions:
  “Just say no. Exactly. And no matter how many years this has obviously been a failure in terms of solving the problem...My fear is this will have no more effect...” (42:35–43:36, Wolff)

• On co-ops as a solution to workplace harassment:
  “Had that been a co op where everyone was an equal or where the employee was also the employer...this becomes much more difficult.” (47:22–47:25, Wolff)

• A call for real structural change:
  “Of course, they’re much worse than when she said it because you have to change the structural problems in order to make a change.” (55:19, Fraad)

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Timestamps for Critical Segments

• 00:10–07:20: Corporate Tax Cuts and the Race to the Bottom
• 07:20–11:45: Taxation of Graduate Students, U.S. Education Rankings
• 11:45–16:30: Homeownership and the Illusion of Economic Recovery
• 17:35–22:23: Valve Corporation – Worker Co-op Innovation
• 23:20–26:50: Nobel Peace Prize, Nuclear Weapons, and Economic Power Shifts
• 26:50–28:48: Starbucks Labor Practices – The Real Story
• 28:48–34:07: Fraad on Economic Roots of Changing Gender Roles
• 39:07–42:10: Shifting Tolerance of Sexual Abuse
• 42:10–45:41: “Just Say No” and the Limits of Moralizing
• 45:41–54:24: Workplace Hierarchies, Gendered Upbringing, and Concrete Reforms
• 54:24–55:32: Social Movements and Structural Demands

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Conclusion

Wolff and Fraad compellingly link the #MeToo revolt and broader resistance to sexual abuse to deep structural changes in the economy, gender roles, and socialization. They argue that real progress depends on transforming workplace hierarchies, gender norms, and social organization—not just changing laws or attitudes. Only when movements focus on these roots, they contend, will the cycle of abuse break—and with it, the economic and social systems that have enabled it.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, jobs, incomes, debts, our own, those for our kids. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and I hope that that has prepared me well to offer these economic updates to all of you. Before jumping into today's updates, one announcement. On the second Wednesday of every month, year round, I offer a public lecture in New York City to any of you and indeed to the general public who might be in New York City that occasion. The next one is on Wednesday, December 13. What I do in those meetings, and they all take place at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square, a very historic part of lower Manhattan. The exact address, 239 Thompson St. 7:30. Wednesday, Dec. 13. There I have a chance to meet you. I have a chance to go into the kinds of things we do on the radio, but with greater detail. It's a chance for people interested in the greater New York area, but for also for people who might be visiting New York City to get together in the same sort of way that we do on this program. So if you're around December 13th, join us at the Judson Memorial Church, Washington Square. 7:30. The big news, of course, is the tax bill that was passed by the Senate a while ago that is being processed as we speak and being made into law because the Republican Party that has supported it and the president who has supported it are in charge of both houses of Congress, etc. I won't bore you because I'm sure many of you are well aware with all the problems of that tax bill, many of which are going to play out over the months and years ahead. But I wanted to go after one because it's already in evidence. Perhaps the single most important feature of the bill was reducing the corporate tax rate in the United States. The percentage of of the profits a company makes that it must pay to Uncle Sam in taxes in the initial phase of the bill, from 35% to 20%, that may still change. There are last minute adjustments that could change it, but not by much. A colossal cut, almost 50% if it stays at the 20% new level. And the idea is simple. As the president and others have said, if the United States lowers the tax rate on corporations, the idea goes, American companies will have less reason to leave the United States to go to countries where tax rates are lower. And by the same logic, companies now located in other countries where tax rates are lower will now have a reason to come back to The United States, because we've lowered them here. The flaw in this argument, which is not complex to understand the flaw in this argument is to not understand that other countries can do exactly what the United States is doing. So, for example, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, within one day of the United States Senate's going along with cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20%. Within one day, the Prime Minister of Israel announces they're going to cut their tax rate on businesses, too. And when asked why, his answer was as obvious as what I'm telling you now. We don't want Israeli companies to leave Israel to go to America. We want the opposite. So if Americans lower the tax rate, we'll lower it, too. You know what this is called in economics? It's called the race to the bottom. Each country competes with every other country by trying to attract and hold businesses by offering the lowest possible tax rate. So country one lowers it, so does country two, which leads country three to do it, which pressures country four to follow suit. And then country one goes even. And pretty soon the corporations are laughing all the way to their banks as the countries compete with one another to charge less and less from the people who have the most, the big companies. And of course, as each country is forced by this competition to lower its tax rate, it has less money with which to provide public services to its people. You can see where this goes. And here again, notice the problem isn't this or that corporation or this or that politician. This is a system that works this way. The race to the bottom, crippling government's ability to provide public services is part of what we are living through and will continue to live through unless and until the criticism of a system that isn't working for most of us becomes a movement to go beyond, to do better than a system that works this way. The tax bill has other features that do require even a brief comment. I have worked in universities all my life, and so I've been surrounded by graduate students. Those are people who've completed four years of college, gotten their bachelor's degree, but now want to go on, get a master's degree, a doctoral degree, and so on in order to qualify, to build up their credentials, to get a better job, pure and simple. It's very expensive to go to school. Has been. It's become more expensive in the last 20 years. Many students already have debts just to get a bachelor's degree. And if they go on to graduate school, well, then they have to borrow some more, any little bit helps because their families are squeezed by the economic difficulties of capitalism. For most people over the last 25 years, it's hard. One of the few benefits that the tax law gives to graduate students as they become more credentialed, more qualified, more skilled, more trained, has been to give universities the incentive and the wherewithal to give students waivers on their tuition payments. In other words, if you want to get your education, go beyond a bachelor's degree. We here at whatever the university is, will say, okay, we'll give you that training, make you a more productive contributor to the society, and we won't charge you the tuition we would otherwise have required. At least if you're skilled, if you've passed some exams, if you are eligible. What the new tax law does is slap you in the face. The new tax law, as proposed by the House of Representatives and and supported by the Republican leadership and the President, would require a graduate student who is relieved of paying tuition so that he or she can get their additional skills and training to declare on their income tax the dollar value of the tuition waiver and then pay Uncle Sam a tax on the money they didn't have to pay as if it were income. In other words, graduate students are going to discover they have a new expense to get a graduate education. The same tax bill that lowers taxes on corporations that are rich and lowers taxes on rich people has found a way to balance the books by slapping graduate students in the face with a new tax. For them, it's a tax increase in order to pay for the tax decrease for corporations. Scratch your head a bit. It's the least you can do as you think about what that means. So let me give you another statistic about American college students. As you think about it, the United States is not in the top 10 countries in the percentage of people 25 to 34 who have some kind of advanced degree. We're not in the top 10 we once were, but we aren't anymore. And why is anyone surprised? And if you think we're not in the top 10, but before this new tax increase on graduate students goes into effect, imagine where we will be when it does. The next update. This has to do with an ongoing project I have on this program which is to give you some of the evidence that we are not living in a recovery of the economy. Or to be more accurate, there isn't a recovery for the top 10%, the richest people in this country who need it least, and there isn't a recovery for the other 80 to 90%, the people who need it most. And if it strikes you as bizarre to have an economy that gives a recovery to those who need it least and deprives those who need it most of one, well, then you are becoming a critic. The system. So here's the evidence for this week about there being no recovery for most people over the years between 2006 and 2016, the decade marked by the great collapse of 2007 and 8, and everything that's happened since. We have 8 million more households in America just by the growth of population. Keep that number in mind. We have 8 million more households. How many homeowners do we have? 400,000 fewer. Let me do that again. Between 2006 and 2016, 8 million more households, but 400,000. Roughly half a million fewer homeowners. You know why? Because people can't afford to own their own home the way they once could. The proportion of home ownership has dropped from 69% of households to 63. Now. That seems small to you. Six percentage points. Let me translate it into the. Nine million families have have lost their homes through foreclosure or short sale, which is the same between 2006 and just 2014. If we extended it through 2017, it would be beyond 9 million. 9 million people thrown out of their home over the last decade, maybe even 10 million. For those of you who've never had this experience, let me assure you it is a trauma. It's a trauma for the parents, it's a trauma for the children. It is a blow to your financial well being from which many people cannot recover. They can't recover the money lost in the house where they made payments for years, but then they lost the house and with it, all the payments. It's a trauma psychologically for parents who promised the American dream to their children, promised it to one another, weren't able to do it. That's not a recovery, ladies and gentlemen. That's a disaster. And the disaster continues. We have fewer homeowners in a country that has 8 million more households. That means we're not even keeping up with what we've had. It's a sign of an economy not experiencing recovery. Before I go on with these economic updates, a reminder. We maintain two websites that are designed to serve your interests and needs. These websites allow you to communicate with us what you like and don't like about the program. These websites allow you to follow us with a click of the mouse on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and so on. These websites are ways that we have to supplement what we do on this program. And the whole point is to partner with you, to give you ways of spreading the word, sharing what you learn, what you hear on this program with other people. Friends, family, co workers, neighbors make use of this material. That's why we gather it, process it and present it. And for those of you that are listening to this program, but you might want to see it as a television program, let me remind you that you can easily do that by going to patreon.com p a t r e o n patreon.com economicupdate and follow the television version of this program in that way. Returning to our updates, I wanted to make you aware of something called the Valve Corporation. V A L V E the Valve Corporation. It is a major player in producing video games, computer games here in the United States, where it has been really successful and built quite a reputation as an innovator. As a place where creative individuals with new and different ideas can create games to entrance and educate millions of people around the world. Why am I bringing it to your attention? Because it teaches a lesson about the difference between organizing an enterprise in a hierarchical capitalist way. You know, with shareholders, a bunch of them who own the bulk of the shares, who choose the board of directors, usually 15 or 20 people who make all the decisions. What's going to be done, how it's going to be done, where it's going to be done, and what's done with the profits. All of that tiny group of people at the top making the decisions for all the employees who can number in the hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands. Valve Corporation doesn't believe in that very successful corporation. Here's what they say and you can go to their website if you're interested and find out valvesoftware.com they organize in a different way. They don't want capitalist hierarchy. And what really caught my attention was their statement, a hierarchy is good if you want control to repeat the same thing over and over again to predict exactly what's going to happen. That's why armies are organized that way. That's what they say at Valve. How do they organize everything? We want to get the maximum creativity of our workers. Hierarchy is no good for that. So we set up our business horizontally. They even call it Flatland. At the Valve Corporation, every worker has his her own desk. Every desk is on wheels. Every worker works in and how and with whom he or she wants to on a project he or she designs for themselves or together with other workers, they move from one project to another. This has been incredibly successful for them. In other words, the capitalist hierarchical way of organizing an enterprise, in their view, stifles creativity and productivity. Innovation requires the freedom of an equal, cooperative, fluid arrangement, giving workers much more power individually and in groups over what they do, how they do it, where they do it, with whom they do it, and then of course, they can participate in deciding what is done with the fruits of their labor. Some of you have worried that a worker co op is somehow not going to be good for innovation. Valve Corporation believes it's exactly the other way around. And they've organized themselves with great success by giving workers freedom to cooperate with one another without the hierarchy of conventional capitalist enterprises. The next update is a little bit political, but it sheds light on an economic reality. Every year, the Nobel Prize Committee awards something called the Nobel Peace Prize. It's not a prize for physics or chemistry or biology, the way they give most of their prizes. It's a prize for a person or an institution that in their view, those of the people in Norway who give the award advance the cause of peace. And this year, this autumn of 2017, the Nobel Peace Prize was given to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. Not a well known organization, but one that has been working for a long time and has been campaigning for the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which was adopted by 122 nations in July of this year. And they're working hard on spreading it. When they announced that they were going to have the usual ceremony in Norway to award the prize, which they do with all the prizes that they award each year, a remarkable thing happened. The embassies of three countries that are owners of nuclear weapons said they wouldn't send the ambassador, which is normally what you send. Britain, France and the United States will not send an ambassador to the celebration, a sign that they are not happy and disapprove of giving the Nobel Peace Prize to the Committee to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. Two other nuclear powers, Russia and China, made a different decision. The Russians announced they will send their ambassador. The Chinese haven't made their announcement yet, but are expected to send their ambassador. What's going on? Well, what's going on is about economics, not about nuclear weapons. Something has happened to change the world in the last 25 years, in case you haven't noticed. Let me drive the point home. The center of economic growth, the center of economic exploding productivity has moved eastward. It's not located in Britain or France or the United States. More and more it's located in China, in India, in Brazil, and a whole lot of other places that we used to think of as the quote unquote, underdeveloped part of the world. Developed and underdeveloped are changing places. It's what happens in human history. It always has. Those who have been the least come to the front of the line and vice versa. The problem with the decline of the economic well being in Britain, France and the United States, that declines means that folks living in that country, and particularly political leaders, find their economic power shrinking, which makes them fixated even more on whatever powers they have that aren't shrinking. And one of those is nuclear weapons. What you see if the decision of the United States, France and Britain holds is a disinclination to give up the nuclear weapons, which is a dominant, powerful position held onto all the more because the economic foundation of these societies is slipping, is changing, is eroding. And I would be irresponsible if I didn't tell you that one of the lessons of history is you enter a dangerous period when economic decline goes together with holding on to your military prowess. That's not a happy prospect. And it's one we need to be very careful about. And it's highlighted by this story about this year's Nobel Peace Prize. The last update we will have time for is about someone you, the Starbucks Corporation. Why am I talking to you about Starbucks? It's not about the coffee. It's about the economics of Starbucks. Back in 2013, a stock tracking firm, Motley fool by name, tried to explain why it had decided to say that Starbucks is one of America's best companies to work for. In those years, Starbucks had a great reputation. It treated its workers well. The reason we knew that was it said so all the time, over and over again. And it liked to tell the story of their former chief executive, a man named Howard Schultz, who attributed to his father's shaky job. The father never knew when he would be paid or not paid. Troubles when he got hurt on the job. And the story was told, I believe in Fortune magazine and elsewhere, that Mr. Shultz was determined to never reproduce for his employees what his father had suffered on the job. Nice story. I wish it were true, but it isn't. And that needs to be understood. And I'll tell you why when I finish telling you the facts. The problem at Starbucks is part time labor. You only get many of the benefits that Starbucks talks about if you work 20 hours or more. But getting to work 20 hours or more is not easy. Turns out Starbucks needs a lot of workers at certain hours of the day and not many workers at other hours of the day. So they insist on having schedules that are weird and changing from day to day, week to week, and plugging their workers in when it's convenient and profitable for them to be there. And that means many workers don't get the number of hours a week they need to qualify for the benefits that they like to talk about. Two thirds of the company's payroll is part time workers. And According to a PBS Frontline report, if you want to work 32 hours a week, for example, to secure your access to health care, you have to make yourself available for 70% of the hours that the store is open, allowing them to plug you in how, where and when they want you to. Now put that together with the average pay for a Starbucks barista ready $9.50 an hour, including tips. Well, folks, if you work in the places where Starbucks are concentrated, you know, New York, Washington, Seattle, places like that, you can't live very well, if at all, on $9.50 an hour with tips when you're working 20 or 30 hours a week. But the problem is if you don't know from week to week when your hours are, it's even harder. You can't have a second job because you can't fix your schedule. It puts you in an impossible situation. And why do I tell you this? To show you that Starbucks had a reputation it didn't deserve. No. You probably guessed that. I don't want to criticize Mr. Schultz or anybody else at Starbucks. Starbucks is doing what the system has it do. You want to make money? You're a profit making corporation. You have shareholders to please, bankers to pay interest to. You do what's profitable. That's what you're there for. That's why you went to business school. That's why your job as executive exists. If you don't want the outcome of Starbucks, the reality that's so different from the reputation, it's the system you got to deal with, not the particulars of this or that practitioner. We've come to the end of the first half of Economic Update. Thank you very much for staying with us. Please stay with us for a short interlude when we come back with the second half. Welcome back to the second half of Economic Update for this early part of December. Because it's the first program of December, we will of course have, as we always do, a visitor in Dr. Harriet Fraad. She is a mental health counselor in a private practice in New York City. She is also a certified hypnotherapist. And in addition to her monthly appearance on this program the first of each month. Dr. Frad writes for Truth Out Alternate, the psychohistory journal and Rethinking Marxism. She's a prolific writer and it is a pleasure as always to welcome her to Economic Update. Thank you very much for coming on the program. Thank you.

[B]

Glad to be here.

[A]

Well, as we discussed before, we wanted to spend this program talking about something that is sweeping not only across America, but around the world, and that is a kind of diversified revolt, one could even say against sexual harassment, sexual assaults. And since I know from my own life and from what I've been reading that this is a problem of very long standing that has affected almost every kind of workplace, every kind of living residential place. The question that's on my mind and I think on many of our viewers and listeners, why is this happening now, this revolt? What is it about this time we're living through that makes women especially, but also some men able and willing and determined to come forward and say, we've had enough, we don't want this. We suffered from this. This has to stop. And since this is a program in economics, let me ask you, is there a place for economics in fashioning an explanation for why this is happening?

[B]

There are two major places for economics. One is that there's a phenomenon that's changed the world and that is particularly, I'll focus on the United States. In the United states in the 70s, the invention of computers and their ease, multinational communication systems of all kinds and robotization and mechanization allowed the kind of jobs that gave white men a family wage, that allowed them to support dependent wives and children. And that was we were a much more white nation then. Luckily, we're more diversified now. But that therefore the mass of women were in the position of serving men in the household. The men provided the means of buying the household and sustaining it, and the women provided services, cleaning inside the house, cooking inside the house, childcare, sexual services, which is important in this case, and also emotional services of taking care of men and children and making social situations in which men could bond with relatives, friends, et cetera. Well, that started to go in the 70s and it's gone. Jobs, male jobs have been computerized, robotized, mechanized, outsourced, and women have had to pour into the labor force. Women of all kinds, African Americans were always in the labor force out of economic necessity. Now it's all women, all women, except the very rich. And so that if I could just.

[A]

Interrupt so that just to get it clear that the computerization, the relocating jobs to low wage Areas around the world either depressed the wages or took away the jobs or both, particularly the good jobs, the well paid jobs, the industrial jobs, the unionized jobs that were held disproportionately by white men so they couldn't anymore be the head of the household as they had been.

[B]

The economic position that they earned by getting one wage supplement for maleness and another for whiteness was gone. And women poured into the labor force in order to sustain themselves and their families alongside men. Now women's roles changed and with it, the gender stereotype for women was transformed because we had to work outside the home as well as within it. And at the same time, the women's liberation movement, which became the feminist movement, was also saying, let's get out of the kitchen, we can do it for ourselves, we can have a full life. There wasn't an equivalent men's movement saying, hey, you don't have to be so uptight and feel fit a macho stereotype. You can now be tender, you can now raise children, you can now be vulnerable. That wasn't there. So women poured into the workforce and that was wildly instrumental in changing personal life. It's ironic that it was capitalist greed that motivated this huge change, but nonetheless it did. And so women.

[A]

You know, forgive me as a teacher. Capitalist greed, you mean it was the profit motive that led companies to computerize, to move to where wages were cheaper?

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

So it's the logic of capitalism's focus on the bottom line always get more that transforms, even though it wasn't their intent. Not at all the household and therefore the gender relations in it.

[B]

Exactly. And so that what happened was women's changed roles outside the home obviously affected their roles inside the home. We also had a movement to help us be a full person at that time. And so women were much less excited about coming home from a full time job and then taking care of the childcare, the cooking, the cleaning, the, the laundry, the children, the sexual needs of their partners, which, you know, and part of the nuclear family that existed was the sexual rights of men to own the sexuality of their wives. And a male dominance built on men's economic position. It wasn't till 2005 that marital rape became a crime. And it's still very hard to pursue. But 2005 is very recently, 12 years ago, you owned your wife's sexuality and if you wanted to have sex with her, she had nothing to say about it. Doesn't mean that everybody had that kind of relationship. But legally that is an indication of women's positions. A Lot of men still feel because they're economically dominant, they have the right to access women's sexuality. So Harvey Weinstein, who's the poster child of sexual assault these days, he had it over these young women who wanted jobs in the films so that he felt he could barter his powerful position in either giving them a livelihood or denying them a livelihood. All he had to do was say, somebody's difficult, don't hire her and their career would be finished. Or the person who has economic dominance in the tech sector, whose funding you want in order to set up your own app. The people who are the dominant customers in hotels where the maids are in danger of being raped, the customers at diners like Roy Moore, could sexually access or felt they could sexually access the waitresses. And waitresses felt they ought to be more sexual in order to get a tip. It went all the way down the line. Well, that's called into question now that women are able to support ourselves, by and large. And even though we don't make what men make, we make about 81% of what men make for full time, work even less for part time. But we're talking about full time. Then women have decided to go it alone. The majority of American women are now single and by choice. And that's because as our roles changed outside the home, we needed partners in the home, partners in tenderness, partners in kindness, partners in childcare, partners in a whole bunch of things. That's why there's a very amusing product from the Cambridge Women's Pornography collective of these hunky men doing housework. I love to get that last speck of dirt, or I love to get these hard to reach corners. Or it's a woman in a bubble bath with a hunky man bringing her wine and said, oh, you've had a hard day at work, dear. And so on. That's the porn, the forbidden pleasure to have an equal who actually takes care of you and which is rare. And so that gender relations were strained. And so you had two economic forces. The economic force within the family of the man as the lord of the manor and the woman as the serf. And outside, as women entered the capitalist sector to work outside the home as well as within it. So that those are two huge economic changes that happened.

[A]

Are you saying that when the women went out to work out of necessity to make up for what the men were losing in terms of job opportunities, wages, are you saying then that the women, when they came home, were no longer willing to accept the subordinate role within the household that had been the tradition.

[B]

That's right. They no longer thought of this guy as the lord of the manor. He's a fellow worker like her. And so that. So that men's position was no longer economically deserving of their lordship. At the same time, the women's liberation movement was saying, as Annie Lennox sang, women are doing it for themselves and that we can do it all and we do not have to be subordinate to anyone. So there were two, the economic and the ideological.

[A]

But I guess my question is, if women were rejecting the subordinate role of the traditional household as they were forced into the labor force or wanted to go in the labor force, then why would sexual assault or sexual harassment accelerate? Or did it?

[B]

It didn't. It didn't.

[A]

Is it just that it's being.

[B]

It's uncovered? What's accelerated is women's courage to not tolerate this and to change the position from victim to accuser. Instead of sitting with the shame of being accosted, they are yelling shame at the men who assaulted them. That's a very different thing. This has been a constant. Judy Garland, way back when, wrote about how her life was destroyed by Mayer, who kept of Metro Gold and Meier Studios, who kept trying to access her sexuality and pushing her relentlessly. That was a constant. What's changed is the tolerance for it. And that's changing because women don't have to put up with that anymore. Because between the empowerment of the women's movement and the economic empowerment of jobs, it's no longer. Men are no longer the king of the household, able to sexually take what they want literally in the vulgar way, grab a piece when they feel like it. It's not. That isn't the relationship women want anymore, and they're not willing to stand for it. Now that has changed. Women's gender considerations and roles have changed. Men's have changed a lot less.

[A]

So there's an imbalance in a way. The men, perhaps understandably, don't want to give up what they had as a certain position and the rights that go with it. But they are trying to connect to women as friends and lovers and wives who are determined not to continue. And that puts them at loggerheads, in a sense.

[B]

Well, they're not trying to connect. Trying to connect as friends in a mutually agreed upon relationship is not what we're talking about here. We're talking about forcibly assaulting women as your right as a man. That is contested everywhere, and that conflates with the power position of men. And so that, you know, Roy Moore could say to his 16 year old waitress. No one will believe you if you report this. I am a powerful man, Assistant district attorney at the time, you're nobody. And they would be frightened. Same thing with a 14 year old, you know. But women now feel entitled to talk and that's a very different thing.

[A]

Okay, let me take this in a slightly different way and I'm being intentionally a bit provocative. I've always been amazed over the decades now that we've had a so called war on drugs at the number of people who basically seem to think that the way to deal with it is to say to people, just don't do drugs.

[B]

Just say no.

[A]

Just say no. Exactly. And no matter how many years this has obviously been a failure in terms of solving the problem. There's still people who seem to think that saying don't do it because it's not right or it's not good or it's immoral or that they don't get it. Here's my concern and I wonder how you think about it. A good bit of the reaction to women coming forward now, and some men too about sexual abuse and sexual assault has led people to say we should be telling one another don't do it, don't be this way, don't act this way. My fear is this will have no more effect on sexual assault and harassment than saying just say no has done anything for the drug problem in the United States. What are we going to do about that? I guess I'm asking you a very difficult. Don't we have to do something more than say this isn't proper, baby, of.

[B]

Course you have to look at why did this happen and what can we do to change it? Because why it happened is not only because of the economy but because of gender. The male gender role, which has posited men as being without needs except for the need for sex, which has been much inflated, has meant that men should go it alone. They should be independent of others. They shouldn't need each other, they shouldn't be tender, they shouldn't be kind. Boys are given guns to play with. Girls are given dolls. Boys. Sports like football or ice hockey are violent. Men's sports like shooting, football, ice hockey, baseball isn't violent. But you know, there's an awful lot of boxing. Those fit a male stereotype of someone who's not allowed any emotions except anger. Not tenderness, not need, not longing, not sensitivity. And so men have had to adjust to women's needs and they don't want to. And part of the way they're forcing Women to comply is sexually, because they're asserting the one need that they're allowed within a rigid male stereotype, which is a need for sex. And they're trapped because on the one hand, men are allowed to be manly, wanting sex. On the other, needing the approval of a woman to have sex doesn't feel so manly. However, if you foster it, if you assault someone, you take what you want, and then you're a real macho guy. And so that part of it is the male gender stereotype and the contradiction in a terrible position. And when men have power, they abuse that position.

[A]

Well, can I just at that point, because there the economics comes back in. If you organize the workplace in a hierarchical way so that a small number of people at the top are the order givers, literally, who give you the job or take it away, who give you the promotion or take it away, who favor you with this or that circumstance or deprive you of it if you do that. And the majority of the people underneath the order givers are women and the order givers are men, which is more often than not the case. You have set up a circumstance in which this gender issue is going to work out to the disadvantage of the women. They're going to be, as we now see, compromised and forced, directly or indirectly, over and over again, because they're stuck in a work situation from which there is no escape. You leave one employer, you go to the next one could be the same thing. Yes.

[B]

And a lot of employers are quite explicit at Fox News. The women had to have clear glass desks and had to wear heels and skirts so you could see their legs under the desk. It was a sexual setup, which was then continued with people like Bill O'Reilly and Roger Ailes into sexual assault and rape. It was a rape culture. Now, that was a good example. Had that been a co op where everyone was an equal or where the.

[A]

Employee was also the employer.

[B]

Right.

[A]

This becomes much more difficult.

[B]

And you can't command people or rob their sexuality or take power over them the same way. You know, it's. Some of it is a hierarchical organization with no accountability. That's what happened with the Catholic Church. Those priests had no accountability, and they had the hierarchy behind them, and they abused hundreds of thousands of children.

[A]

And it also goes back to your story about the household. If you have set up a household with a man in the dominant financial position and the man in the dominant ideological, then you know, he literally has access to his wife's sexuality as part of the institution.

[B]

That's right. And so that a co op would do a lot to change that. There would also be gender norms that can be changed. You really would. There are two things that happen to little boys to hurt them terribly. In my eyes, boys are brought up in the matriarchy because child care workers are paid terribly and most men don't participate equally in child rearing.

[A]

So it's women who prevail there who prevail.

[B]

And boys survival, as well as their most humiliating, helpless, needful moments are in the hands of these matriarchs. That creates a lot of hostility and anger towards women. For girls who are also brought up by women, they can identify with the mother and they can see that they will be a mother someday. And so that they have a gender identity that can include all of these motherly qualities. For boys who either have no father present or largely absent fathers, a male identity is built on the idea that I'm the not woman, not needful, not dependent.

[A]

I am the other to the woman I'm surrounded by.

[B]

I am her and I am not her very negative gender identity. And that could be changed if you raised child care workers now are paid less than parking, attendance. They have some of the worst paid jobs in our society.

[A]

And they're overwhelmingly female.

[B]

And they're overwhelmingly female. If you raised the salaries of childcare workers and if you made that an important and dignified job and if you did something about the games, you didn't just sell the rock em sock em robots in the boys aisle, but the dolls and you had building blocks for both and you had trucks and cars and so on for both. You could help boys acculturate into being people with emotional needs, emotional variety, and.

[A]

Not to be ashamed of them. That's right.

[B]

The most macho sectors in the society also, not coincidentally, have some of the worst records of sex abuse. So for example, the military has a horrendous level of sexual abuse. One out of four women is accosted and sexually abused in the military. And also that's true of sports, the violent sports. NFL doesn't let you. You know, there's people that eliminate you for kneeling during the anthem, but not for raping your girlfriend or punching her out and raping her or whatever variety of violent crimes male athletes commit. The idea of forcibly accessing and dominating a sexuality so you don't have to show your need, but your command is something that's male. That's why none of these sexual abusers are female, even if they're in dominant positions in a corporation.

[A]

So if I could Distill this. Two things you would recommend to deal with this that are not about saying just don't do it, but rather, let's call them structural changes.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Would be a cooperative workplace and a cooperative child care system. So that cooperative in the sense of all workers equally sharing male and female in the workplace and likewise childcare of both genders cooperating to take away the matriarchy negational notion of femaleness as you've explained it to us. So these are concrete social changes which a society that took seriously women's revolt against sex abuse would do. A society that doesn't take it seriously, I think is one that limits itself to these injunctions to behave better.

[B]

Right. What you really can have. Jackson Katz, who writes about the masks of masculinity, talks about a different kind of male. What you also want to go to the toy companies and not have such sex as toys, but allow both genders of children to participate in nurturing, to play with dolls as well as trucks and so on and get the guns out of the aisle. That's one of the reasons that all the mass shooters are male, because that's not part of the female gender enculturation. So you'd have a tripartite strategy, you'd have the co ops as your economic structure and you would do something about the ideology of gender and child rearing and you'd include fathers. You know, one of the things that Norway does, which I think is excellent, to try to lessen sexual abuse and make the sexes more equal. In addition to all the social benefits they give, paternity leaves are required. You can't get extra credit at work because you don't take your paternity leave with your child. That's very important. So that the early bonding is both parents, not just one. And either parent can apply for family leave for a sick elder or for a child. Those are very big things that can be done. And the government pays for the maternity and paternity leave, so the company doesn't do without. And of course, in a nation that speaks, spend 770 billion on war, which we're already dominant in that one area in the world can afford.

[A]

This seems to me, and we're running out of time, but it seems to me that we can't expect corporations that are run as capitalist, hierarchical corporations to help us in this regard. Their very structure is part of the problem, not the solution. And we can't expect toy companies to make toys for what ought to be the way we run things. They make their money by pandering to what exists. In other words, it's the social movement, in this case, led by those that are revolting against old patterns of sexual harassment and abuse that we have to look to, to impose on the world through persuading people structural changes that can really alter this behavior.

[B]

To make the demands. To make the demands that these problems.

[A]

Be addressed in a serious way.

[B]

Not just verbiage, not just. It was Nancy Reagan just say no to drugs. Of course, they're much worse than when she said it, because you have to change the structural problems in order to make a change.

[A]

Thank you very much. Obviously, this is an enormous topic and this revolt is in early stages indeed. You and I will probably come back and talk about it in the months to come.

[B]

I hope so.

[A]

Good.

[B]

Thank you, everyone.

[A]

I hope that you have found something useful in this discussion of an urgent current problem that's in everyone's mind and on every headline, virtually day after day. It is my hope that this program, in this way and in others, is something you can benefit from, partner with and help us reach people with the ideas, the insights and the criticisms that motivate everything we do here. And I look forward to speaking with you again next week, Sam.