Bombshell: Systemic Sexism and Individual Decisions

A Movie About Sexual Harassment

Sexual harassment is an important problem in our society today. The #MeToo movement has made it clear to all of us that sexual harassment is very widespread, and we are being asked to act to eliminate or at least reduce it.  Bombshell is a useful movie in this context because it presents the moral issues involved in sexual harassment in high relief.

The movie is about the lawsuit brought by Gretchen Carlson against Roger Ailes of for sexual harassment at Fox News. The lawsuit affected other women at the station, and one of those was Megyn Kelly. She had to decide whether to join the suit, which she ultimately did, and much of the movie’s plot revolves around the process she went through to reach that decision. Bombshell is powerful and disturbing because it raises difficult and uncomfortable questions. The performances by Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson and Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly are marvelous as is John Lithgow’s portrayal of Roger Ailes.

Writing this article has advanced my own education. I started to write it because seeing the movie was a consciousness-raising experience.  It brought home to me strongly that our society has systemic features that trap women – even powerful, successful women like Carlson and Kelly - in situations where they have to make decisions that they should not have to make. Our system forces them to decide whether to give up their ambitions for professional advancement or to cooperate in their own degradation. That is what happened to Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly.

Sexual Harassment at Fox News

Carlson and Kelly were journalists at Fox News, and Ailes was a founder of the station and its director for many years. Fox News was rife with sexual harassment. Women there had to conform to Ailes’s idea of sexiness, and he took advantage of his position of power to exploit them sexually in various ways. Some gave him oral sex, while others simply did “the twirl” to allow him to appreciate the beauty of their bodies. Kelly said in an interview that he tried several times to kiss her, and she pushed him away. She said that the last time she pushed him away, he asked her when her contract would end(!) Ailes’s behavior was apparently not motivated primarily by sexual desire. It was a display of his power. He needed the women to show that they knew that they were entirely at his mercy and that they had to find ways to please him and demonstrate their loyalty to him.

Power, Culture and Sexual Harassment

Bombshell shows us how sexual harassment depends on both individual decisions and underlying systemic bases. On the individual level, a person in power has to decide to use that power to harass subordinates sexually, and they have to decide to allow themselves to be harassed. However, such decisions can only occur in a system that gives some people power and allows them to use it to degrade others.

What was systemic about the situation at Fox News, and what was individual? The individual part is easy to see. Roger Ailes was a man who took advantage of his power to harass women, and they went along with the harassment in order to advance their careers. A different man might have behaved differently, and in fact, not every employer is as bad as Fox News was under Ailes. Moreover, Carlson and Kelly knew what the game there was, and they went along with its Faustian bargain in order to advance their careers. Not all women choose to do that.

To see the systemic part, we have to take a broader view. We have to see that in our society, large organizations are usually run by men, which means that in most organizations, women are subordinate to men and are therefore vulnerable to harassment. We also have to see that our society generally accepts the exploitation of subordinates by their superiors, even when it is clearly illegal.[1] The exploitation is not always sexual, and the exploiter is not always a man.[2] However, in a society where most positions of authority are held by men, they are usually the exploiters, and since women are usually in subordinate positions, they are often exploited.

Moreover, we must recognize that our culture favors sexual exploitation in other ways, as well. We idolize powerful men, and often, we say that power is an aphrodisiac. It seems “natural” to us that a young, attractive woman will be drawn to an older, powerful man, and when a powerful man marries a young, attractive women, we call her a “trophy wife.” When the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted during the Clinton presidency, no one in our society had any difficulty understanding how Lewinsky’s relationship with Clinton emerged. Some people disapproved more than others, but everyone understood the relationship.

Our daughters recognize this situation, and they learn to work within it.  They learn to maximize their attractiveness to men and to interact with them in was that flatter their egos.  Young women are aware of this dynamic, and they have mixed feelings about it. Once, I asked a lecture hall full of college students how many of the women among them had let men explain to them things that they already knew. All of the women raised their hands, and one of them said that she didn’t really like doing it but that it was hard not to do it because, “the guys ate it up.”

A woman’s vulnerability to sexual harassment is increased by the premium we place on being “nice.” A woman in our society is supposed to avoid face-to-face conflict and to smooth over interpersonal interactions. So, when she is confronted with sexual harassment, she feels pressure to pass it off smoothly and to avoid embarrassing the man. She avoids making waves.

This situation puts ambitious women in a bind. We admire ambition and the restless striving that it drives.  We admire people who “make something of themselves” or who overcome difficult obstacles to become successful.[3]  However, an ambitious woman inevitably runs the risk of finding herself where Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly found themselves.  Roger Ailes used the power that our system had given him to force Carlson and Kelly to decide whether to allow themselves to be sexually harassed or give up their hope for advancement at Fox News.  They chose advancement. They allowed Ailes to harass them sexually because he could give them success in their careers, and indeed, he did so.  Both Carlson and Kelly went along with Ailes behavior for several years before they finally objected, and Carlson’s suit was originally motivated not directly by the harassment but by the fact that after all she had put up with, Ailes demoted her show to a bad time slot.

The Tragedy of Carlson and Kelly's Story

This brings us to the core of our topic: the relationship between systemic sexism and individual decisions. We hold people responsible for their individual decisions, and from that point of view alone, we can say that Carlson and Kelly knew what they were getting into. They decided to pay the price of success, and they can’t really blame anyone else when they had to pay that price.

However, we can now see why that point of view is wrong.  The women in Bombshell faced choices that were inherently illegitimate. No one should have to face the choices that they faced. They had to choose among the alternatives that were offered by Ailes because he controlled the conditions of advancement at Fox News. He had power, and they did not.[4]  The system at Fox allowed and encouraged him to offer the exploitative deals that he did offer.  The women had been trained to work to please men, and it exacted a high price for failing to go along with Ailes. 

So, they did what most of us do most of the time. They went along; they didn’t make waves; they allowed themselves to be coopted by the system; they accepted its benefits.  They were trapped in a system that forced them to make certain decisions, and like most of us, they were not heroes. They allowed the system to corrupt them. They became complicit in their own degradation until finally, they found the courage to fight back.

The tragedy here is not merely that the women were harassed. It is that they were forced to cooperate actively in their harassment. They had to become agents of the system that oppressed them. A survivor of the extermination camp at Treblinka, who had been a sondercommando, recounted that at a certain point in 1944, the supply of Jews to be gassed ran low. For several days, no trainloads of victims arrived, and the sondercommandos worried because they knew that if there was no more work for them, they would themselves be killed. Then, an SS sergeant came into the room where they were and said, “Tomorrow, the trains are rolling!” The survivor telling the story said, “You know what we did? We cheered. I die a little every time I think about it.”

The women at Fox News did not have to become murderers, but they did have to support and cooperate with the system that oppressed them.  Once we see that, we cannot unsee it. Once we see that we have a system that causes women to become complicit in their own degradation, we have only two choices: we must allow that to happen, or we must accept a responsibility to work to change the system. For me, only the latter is possible.

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[1] At Fox News, the Board of Directors did not discipline Roger Ailes until a lawsuit was brought against him.

[2] For example, the character of Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada and the character of Alma Coin in The Hunger Games are both ruthlessly exploitative.

[3] We have ambiguous feelings about ambitious women. Sometimes, we disapprove of ambitious, competitive women who strive for success in ways that we think of as masculine, but that is not an issue in Bombshell. The movie accepts the legitimacy of Carlson and Kelly’s ambition and focuses on the story of what happened to them along the way and on the way that they ultimately stood up for themselves in a hostile environment.

[4] When Carlson and Kelly arrived at Fox News, they were not the powerful women that they have since become, and they were more vulnerable than they would be now.