Me Too

Inspired by #MeToo, McDonald's Employees Protest Workplace Sexual Harassment
By CASEY QUACKENBUSH
September 19, 2018

McDonald’s employees in cities across the U.S. launched #MeToo-inspired protests on Tuesday against workplace sexual harassment at the fast-food company, Agence France-Presse reports.

Organized by a union called Fight for $15, an advocacy union for fast-food workers, the one-day strike unfolded in 10 cities — Chicago, Kansas City, Miami, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Orlando, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Saint Louis, and Durham — with the goal of instituting stronger protections for workers at the chain’s 14,000 stores across the U.S.

“Today, thousands of workers across the country have stepped out of the shadows and onto the picket lines,” said Chicago community organizer Karla Altmayer, according to AFP. “We can no longer accept that one out of two workers experience workplace sexual violence under their watch,” she said in reference to McDonald’s.

Rose McGowan apologized to Argento. It appears McGowan’s lover made a factual error in a statement.

(grimaces)

Sadly, senators will advance Kavanaugh’s nomination.

Ten days after Asia Argento threatened to sue Rose McGowan over “false statements” she made regarding the sexual-assault allegations against Argento, McGowan has released an apologetic statement claiming that she regrets spreading “a number of facts that were not correct.” An hour later, Argento tweeted that she “appreciated” McGowan’s apology, but that it was too little too late.

On August 19, the New York Times reported that Argento had made a deal to pay off Jimmy Bennett, a former co-star who accused her of sexually assaulting him when he was a minor — an allegation that Argento swiftly denied, which was in turn contradicted by a number of incriminating leaked text messages that TMZ published. Then, less than a week later, McGowan released a statement revealing that the leaked texts came from the person she had been seeing, Rain Dove; she also alleged that Asia told Rain that “she’d been receiving unsolicited nudes of Jimmy since he had been 12.”

More than two weeks later, Argento gave McGowan 24 hours to “retract and apologise for the horrendous lies made against [her],” which McGowan did not meet. (The next day, Argento tweeted that she had instructed a law firm to file a lawsuit against McGowan and Dove.) But on Thursday, long after she had missed the deadline, McGowan released a statement on Twitter, writing that she “misunderstood” texts that Argento and Dove exchanged.

“On 27 August I released a statement about Asia Argento, which I now realized contained a number of facts that were not correct,” she wrote. “The most serious of these was that I said that the unsolicited nude text messages Asia received from Jimmy Bennett had been since Jimmy was 12 years old. In fact, I had misunderstood the messages that Asia exchanged with my partner Rain Dove, which made clear that Jimmy had sent Asia inappropriate text messages only after they met up again when he was 17 (still legally a minor in California, but notably different from a 12 year old).”

She concluded the statement by expressing her regret for not correcting her statement sooner — an apology that Argento “appreciated,” but that came days too late, as the actress claims that McGowan’s allegations against her subjected her to harassment and led to the loss of a job.

“Although I am grateful to @rosemcgowan for her full apology following her groundless allegations about me, if she had issued it earlier, I may have kept my job on X-Factor and avoided the constant accusations of paedophilia which I have been subjected to in real-life and online,” she tweeted.

One minute later, she replied to her own tweet, “Now go on, live your life and stop hurting other people, will you Rose? Best wishes.”

As anyone following the #MeToo movement knows, Argento was one of the first women to accuse Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault and has since become an outspoken leader in the fight against sexual harassment and abuse. But what does it mean when one of the movement’s leaders becomes implicated in the exact kind of abuse she has spoken out against? How are we supposed to respond?

In lieu of a think piece, here’s a conversation between the Cut’s president and editor-in-chief Stella Bugbee and senior culture writer Anna Silman, as they attempt to wrestle with their complicated feelings about this difficult story.

Silman: I don’t know. I hope it will expand the conversation around the abuse of power and sexual dynamics. And like I said before, I think we need to sit with the uncomfortable feelings this provokes instead of pushing them away. We need to wrestle with the ambiguities and contradictions taking place around #MeToo, or else it threatens to turn the movement into a caricature that won’t be taken seriously. I think it behooves us to be transparent about what it feels like when it’s “our guy” who gets accused — because everyone who has been accused is somebody’s guy. Better to acknowledge the discomfort than pretend it doesn’t exist. I worry that there’s going to be cases even more painful than Asia Argento, ones that exist in more of a gray area than this one does, and we have to be ready for that.

Bugbee: If the facts are that she had sex with a minor who thought of her as a mother figure, paid him off, and then lied about it, it doesn’t seem very gray to me. What’s gray about it all is that we wanted to believe in Asia Argento. And now we can’t. And that means we have to think about who else and what else we can’t believe.

Silman: I think we just need to acknowledge that the entire way our society deals with sex and gender is screwed up, and there are so many victims and so much pain and so many ricochet effects, that it calls for a very far-reaching conversation that extends beyond what has been happening in the last year.

Bugbee: Actively wrestling with ambiguities means listening to men a lot more than we were willing to do in the past year. It’s hard to admit that we might not be able to count on the kind of emphatic clarity of the initial “reckoning” as it became known. For it to work, empathy must extend in all directions. This feels like a new chapter in the conversation.

What came across, listening to Ford testify, was her initial faith that the Republicans choosing Kennedy’s successor would want to hear from her, that she tried to figure out how to get the information to them before it was too late. Even after her own world failed to keep her safe, she expected to be heard. Maybe that’s because she comes from Kavanaugh’s world. And that’s why today is the day Republicans never wanted to come. (Only hours ago, they emptied out the trash can of their anonymous tips in the hope of muddying up the essential clarity of Christine Blasey Ford’s voice.)

It strikes me that Republicans are scared of Ford because she is essentially a class traitor. Two of the accusers whose names we know, Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick, were immediately marked as outsiders by the circle of old school friends and Republican operatives that closed around Brett Kavanaugh from the start. Deborah was, the Times reported, “the daughter of a telephone company lineman and a medical technician” — nearly a townie, half Puerto Rican, doing her time scrubbing dorm toilets and serving her classmates food while Kavanaugh was, according to his roommate, coating his dorm bathroom in vomit. Julie Swetnick was worse, by the lights of Kavanaugh’s Georgetown Prep defenders: “Never heard of her. I don’t remember anyone from Prep hanging out with public school girls, especially from Gaithersburg.” Talk about incriminating yourself.

It’s a lie, of course, but a telling one. I’ve been corresponding this week with a woman who went to nearby Walter Johnson High School and socialized with Kavanaugh at the time. She says that in the summer of 1983, when she went to Beach Week parties with the boys of Georgetown Prep, she rarely saw private school girls. “I think they kept us separated,” she said. “Like sheep.”

Christine Blasey Ford cannot be dismissed as a pretender to privilege, which I suspect is what scares Republicans so much. But for her decision to come out about Brett Kavanaugh and to remake herself as a California surfing mom, she is the archetypal Republican voter: A wealthy, white suburban woman, married, with children. Her parents are Republicans. Her father plays golf with Brett Kavanaugh’s dad at Burning Tree.

Women like Ford are the ones who have mostly raced to protect Brett Kavanaugh — not to mention Donald Trump — because admitting that there was something rotten in their culture would implicate them, too. What makes Ford different, it seems, is that she is ready to tell the truth that even the white woman on the pedestal is ultimately doomed to subordination, and if she gets in the way of the plan or breaks the code — well, she’s on her own.

Thirty-six Indian schoolgirls have been treated in hospital after they were attacked by a large crowd of teenage boys and their parents when they complained of sexual harassment.

Six boys and one woman were arrested in the north-eastern state of Bihar after the attack at a girls’ boarding school.

Police and witnesses said girls from the government school in Triveniganj – about 160 miles (260km) east of the state capital, Patna – had been playing in a sports area on Saturday night when a group of teenage boys began making lewd comments.

The girls argued back and some physically remonstrated with the teenage boys, who initially backed off. Police say a group of the boys and some of their parents returned about 20 minutes later carrying bamboo sticks and iron rods.

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“They dragged us by our ponytails, assaulted [us] with bamboo sticks and kicked and punched,” said Gudia, one of 36 girls who were treated in hospital after the attack.

“We were totally unarmed and had nothing to protect us. I saw many of my friends lying on the ground and crying with pain.”

The girls admitted to hospital were aged between 10 and 14.

Gudia said the young men were angry “because we had protested [against] their sexual advances”.

“They had been always teasing us and scribbling dirty words on the walls of our school,” she said, adding that she and other girls had tried to report the harassment to local government officials but were not taken seriously.

Police have arrested nine suspects. “Of the first seven arrested, six are boys and one [is a] woman,” Mritunjay Chaudhary, a district superintendent, said.

Most of the injured children were discharged from hospital and returned to the school accommodation. A local official said many of the girls were shaken and feared further violence.

“Apparently, they are suffering from psychological fear, but we are arranging shows of good entertaining movies on the campus to calm down their tension and dispel any such fear from their minds,” said district magistrate Baidyanath Yadav on Monday.

“We are also counselling them so that they could get better soon.”

Yadav said police were being deployed and that a higher fence would be put up around the school to prevent outsiders from entering the campus.

Sexual violence has become a major political issue in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, after an audit of 110 women’s care homes found varying reports of abuse.

The worst was at a home in Muzaffarpur district where auditors found “grave instances of violence”, including at least 30 girls who claimed to have been raped.

Women’s groups have led several protests against the findings, which have led to the suspension of more than 20 government officials and at least 14 arrests.

A woman in the state was also allegedly raped last week as she bathed in the Ganges, India’s holiest river.

The country has been reckoning with sexual assault since a 2012 gang-rape and murder that galvanised women’s movements and led to an overhaul of rape laws. Activists say attitudes are slowly changing, particularly in large cities, but that conditions are generally worse for women in remote and rural areas.