How Men Like Harvey Weinstein Implicate Their Victims in Their Acts | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/how-men-like-harvey-weinstein-implicate-their-victims-in-their-acts
There are also, already, so many women accusing Weinstein, all speaking of such similar incidents, which occurred at such similar places within their respective careers, that the comet trail of each act contributes to a collective pattern. The case has illuminated the very ordinary reality of being a young woman with a desire to succeed, perform, and please others, who is sexually targeted by a powerful man in her field—a man who aims to use his position in a way that will affect her career and her selfhood whether she relents or escapes. These, too, are open secrets among women: what that moment feels like, what you think about when you consider your options, why you carry this stuff with you for so long.
This is, I think, the primary reason that some women maintain relationships with their attackers. When you are treated like an object, things about you that you cannot change are reframed. If a man interprets your youth as sexual vulnerability, he can make it seem that you have no choice but to be sexually vulnerable—after all, you have no choice but to be young. And so you might conclude that you need to redeem the encounter within a narrative that you may not like but in which you can at least actively participate. This might mean engaging in consensual sex afterward, to make you feel like you wanted it the first time, though you know you didn’t. Or staying friendly with the man in the hopes that you’ll find out that he actually did value you, and he wasn’t just hoping for access to your body. Or even trying to get something out of the transaction, whatever you can. This looks like weakness, but it’s an attempt to gain control. The Weinstein case has reminded me of how hard, maybe impossible, it is to separate yourself from all the things that have been forced on you—an encounter, a body, a sense of complicity, or simply the banal old scripts that make it all seem so sickeningly predictable. You were young and he was powerful; the story writes itself.