Brett Kavanaugh Meets #MeToo
TAA 0038 – C. Travis Webb, Seph Rodney, and Steven Fullwood discuss the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh in the light of the #MeToo movement. The conversation turns to issues of personal responsibility, power, integrity, and, as always, the history of civilization. This is part I of a multi-part discussion.
| C.T. WEBB 00:19 | [music] Good afternoon, good morning, or good evening, and welcome to The American Age podcast. And today, I am talking to you from Honolulu, Hawaii, and so it’s a six-hour time difference, talking to Seth and Steven. How are you guys doing today? |
| S. FULLWOOD 00:30 | Hello, hello. |
| S. RODNEY 00:32 | Yeah. I’m doing okay. I cannot complain. |
| C.T. WEBB 00:35 | Aloha [laughter]. This is the one environment where I can say that unselfconsciously. I cannot bring myself to say it out in public, so [laughter]. |
| S. RODNEY 00:45 | Cool. |
| C.T. WEBB 00:47 | So today, Seth– I’m sorry, Steven actually had suggested the topic of talking about kind of where the #MeToo movement is now in light of the Kavanaugh hearings and Dr. Ford’s possible testimony. We’ll see. I just saw an update on that right before we got started, and we can probably talk about that. And then he, sort of weaving them together with other topics, brought up the Soon-Yi Previn article on the allegations against Woody Allen. Obviously, much older than the #MeToo movement, but certainly Dylan Farrow’s letter kind of got scooped up into the #MeToo movement. And Ronan Farrow was a big instigator or– I mean, really broke the story on Harvey Weinstein, so. |
| S. RODNEY 01:34 | On Weinstein, mm-hmm. |
| C.T. WEBB 01:35 | Yeah, so. Steven, you laid out, I think, a pretty good little rubric outline of the discussion. So do you want to just kind of lead us into it, and we’ll have a conversation about it? |
| S. FULLWOOD 01:46 | Absolutely. So the reason why– oh, good afternoon or good morning or good evening. And so I’ve been following the story of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, and I thought it would be an interesting topic. And so I sent it out to both Seth and Travis, thinking that the hearings would be today but apparently not, because Dr. Christine Blasey Ford has made accusations that Brett Kavanaugh attacked her while she was in high school, when they were both in high school. And so in the news but timeless category, I wanted us to talk about sexual harassment or abuse and what our responsibilities are. What is the public’s responsibility? What is the US government’s responsibility? And so, in addition to that, as Travis mentioned, I’ve read the Soon-Yi Previn article in the New York Magazine, which is her first time speaking publicly about any of this. And it’s a really interesting article. I think you guys should read it. It’s free online. And the reason why this project bothered me is because I’ve known a lot of women– I mean, I know a lot of women who are either sexually abused or harassed or even raped. And I’ve been knowing this all my life, my 52 years, starting when I was a teen. And so I thought it was important for us to sort of talk about as men, as men who are different. We’re either different in terms of our race, in terms of our sexual identity. And I think it’s important to kind of think about how we contribute to a culture of abuse or don’t contribute to it. And so I wanted to ask you guys both to kind of consider what are your thoughts about the Kavanaugh hearings and Ford’s allegations. And so let’s solve this in 30 minutes or less [laughter]. |
| S. RODNEY 03:34 | Go. |
| S. FULLWOOD 03:36 | So what are your thoughts? |
| S. RODNEY 03:39 | Do you want to go first? |
| C.T. WEBB 03:39 | Seth, you want to–? |
| S. RODNEY 03:40 | I can go. |
| C.T. WEBB 03:41 | No, no. Yeah, yeah, please. I got it started, so. |
| S. RODNEY 03:44 | Okay. I have several ideas going around my head. I think one of the sort of more bird’s-eye view notions are that this in an ongoing problem for humanity– or rather, what’s happening with the #MeToo movement is representative of some deep failure of our general politics. I don’t want to let people like Brett Kavanaugh off or the Republican Party that is hell-bent on getting him onto the Supreme Court. I don’t want to let them off the hook. But I think it’s important to have a slightly more comprehensive vision of the political landscape and recognize that this particular instance is really representative of a large-scale failure of human beings being reticent to treat other human beings– to treat them as if they’re fully human. That’s ultimately the failure, for me. And there’s a way in which I was brought up– and I’ve said this to Travis before, privately, and I probably said it to you as well, Steven. And I do feel this, that there is a way in which I was brought up in a very middle-class, aspirational, Jamaican, Christian – what’s the word? – Christian in like an overdetermined way, right, like church, school, summer camp. I was brought up in such an environment where I don’t think I ever really learned to see women as full human beings, certainly not as human beings like other men– or, yeah, the way I view other men. So there’s this sort of systemic failure. And the #MeToo movement is something that is finally– is a sociopolitical movement that’s finally starting to come to grips with this persistent endemic failure. |
| S. RODNEY 05:53 | So I’m encouraged by the fact that people are actually motivated to spend a lot of time and energy outing people. I do think it’s important to punish people who have degraded and essentially limited the life chances of women because they wouldn’t sleep with them or wouldn’t give them some sort of sexual satisfaction. I think it’s important that those people be punished. I think it’s important for people to be made accountable. And I’m relatively sure that Brett Kavanaugh won’t be because, as someone I follow on Twitter Ethan Grey said, part of the reason that they’re not pulling his nomination is that they are signaling to their– that is, the GOP and the White House are signaling to their constituents that being a white man who can take advantage of other women and not be held accountable for that is a feature of their power, not a flaw. It is a feature of occupying that socioeconomic strata. So they want to make sure that people realize that if you occupy that strata, you won’t be held accountable for your actions, at whatever age you take them. I feel like the argument about him doing this when he was 17 is sort of ridiculous because we send people away for the rest of their lives when they contravene the law at 17. But we can get into that. And then I want to say one more thing – and I know I’ve been talking for a while – but before the podcast is over, I want to be able to actually confess to treating women in my life not in the way that I think that they should have been treated, because I think that I’m– and I’m not going to blame anybody else for this, but I’m certainly guilty of not treating them as fully human. |
| C.T. WEBB 08:06 | So I’ll play Seth’s role today and be a little bit more concrete than abstract. I’ll flip it around [laughter]. I straight up believe the accusation against Brett Kavanaugh. I look at him, and I see his comportment, and I’ve looked at some of his other speeches about talking about drinking culture at Yale, etc. I absolutely believe that. Certainly, in the ’80s and ’90s in this country – maybe it’s slightly less acceptable today but maybe only slightly – I believe that that type of conduct and understanding of women and their bodies and entitlement and sexuality and repression– his behavior makes perfect 100% sense to me. The entire episode I believe completely. So I think that should disqualify him to the court. I think he has lied under oath multiple times. I think that that’s been shown by the emails that have been released around him. For me, this isn’t an ideological thing. I’m open to slightly more conservative Supreme Court justices if only because I don’t think that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of social change. And so if someone is a qualified, apparently objective jurist and has worked their ass off and conducted themself with integrity, if they’re appointed by a Republican, to me, that doesn’t disqualify them. I think what disqualifies him is that he’s a liar. |
| C.T. WEBB 09:45 | And so, “Find someone else,” is how I feel about it. And I’m also not fully convinced that his nomination won’t be derailed. I think if I had to bet, I think the odds are that his confirmation will go forward. I do think that that’s probably the most likely outcome. I think there’s a chance that it doesn’t though. I think if Dr. Ford comes forward and actually testifies and comports herself in a way that I hope she is able to, that that could shift the votes of someone like Murkowski or Collins, maybe Flake even. I mean, I understand that you both probably are more skeptical about that. And, like I said, I would not bet on it, but I don’t think, for me, it’s a foregone conclusion. And then the other thing I’d like to toss into the mix kind of to open up the conversation is I think our calibration is way off, currently, as far as evaluating what is appropriate and inappropriate conduct and what is criminal conduct for men in relation to women. So what Brett Kavanaugh did or is accused of doing, allegedly did, is assault. That is different than pestering someone for a blow job, for example, which is what got Aziz Ansari pilloried. |
| S. FULLWOOD 11:12 | Right. For a hot [crosstalk]. |
| C.T. WEBB 11:13 | What was that, Steven? |
| S. FULLWOOD 11:16 | For a hot moment. |
| C.T. WEBB 11:17 | Yeah. That’s right. I mean, it was brief. But I don’t think those are the same thing. And just today, the editor of the New York Review of Books was forced to resign– |
| S. RODNEY 11:31 | Yeah. Buruma, Ian Buruma. |
| C.T. WEBB 11:35 | –because he published that essay by that Canadian journalist, I guess you would call him. And the essay itself was– it rang as not particularly self-aware of the severity of the things that he did. |
| S. RODNEY 11:56 | And quite self-serving. |
| C.T. WEBB 11:57 | Yeah. But should this guy have lost his job because he tried to open up the conversation about it, because he didn’t genuflect enough around the topic? Come on. |
| S. RODNEY 12:08 | Okay. Well, here, I beg to differ with you because I think it wasn’t so much that he didn’t genuflect in the proper direction but more the way that he answered the reporter’s’ questions after. He was questioned about why he allowed this interview to go forward. |
| C.T. WEBB 12:25 | Yeah. I saw it. I read the interview. |
| S. RODNEY 12:27 | Right. And he came off as smug, indifferent, and essentially more concerned with– |
| C.T. WEBB 12:35 | According to that reporter– |
| S. RODNEY 12:37 | No, no, no, no. |
| C.T. WEBB 12:38 | –and according to how that interview was read. But none were in the– I’m saying here’s the thing. As a caveat, who knows what the internal politics are at the New York– maybe this guy sucked at his job, and this was just a convenient way to let him go. I’m not suggesting– I don’t know. But the optics aren’t great because this was clearly, to me– he was not advocating– the question was this. We have people who have not been convicted by our legal system of sexual assault but have been pilloried in social circles. What space do these people occupy within our culture? That’s a valid question. That’s an important question. |
| S. RODNEY 13:18 | I agree. But the question was not addressed by the interview that took place within the New York Review of Books. That’s the problem. You see, you’re absolutely right, that question of what do we do with people like Aziz Ansari, who have not, from what we can tell, contravened the law. They haven’t assaulted anyone, but they’ve behaved in such a way as to make people profoundly uncomfortable with what is essentially the politics of sex, right? |
| C.T. WEBB 13:53 | True. |
| S. RODNEY 13:53 | The politics of bodies touching other bodies with desire. You’re right. You’re absolutely right. But he didn’t do it with that piece. And the problem with that is that you can’t– in this climate. And you’re right, Travis. There’s a way in which, in certain political climates, certain kinds of behavior are not sanctioned or rather are punished, which wouldn’t be in other contexts. So in perfect agreement with you there. Fine. Okay. I keep coming back to this conversation that I had with Sarah Pharaon, who is a– I forget precisely what her title is, but she’s someone acting in a supervisory capacity within the nonprofit International Sites of Conscience, I think is what the agency is called. And she made a presentation at the AAM conference a couple years ago. And she said about the political swing of the pendulum, that there are times when the pendulum will swing quite a bit ways to the left, and then there are times when it will swing back to the right. But we keep expecting, when that swing happens, for it to somehow end up somewhere more centrist rather than be sort of as is typical– I’m actually really butchering this analogy. I’m sorry. But essentially, what she’s saying is that we have unrealistic expectations about the sort of swing of our politics. We expect somehow for us to end up in a centrist place after we’ve been through, I don’t know, Jim Crow. It seems an unrealistic expectation for me. |
| S. FULLWOOD 15:50 | But I also– |
| C.T. WEBB 15:51 | Let’s let Steven go because he’s been so patient for a while. |
| S. FULLWOOD 15:54 | So I was thinking about– thank you very much for both weighing in on that. So I was thinking about how we moved from the confirmation hearings and Dr. Ford’s allegations to what happens to men who are accused of this. And I was wondering if this is part of the problem when discussing issues that affect women directly in terms of their believability and their inability or fear of coming forward to talk about their experiences because we have no process in place to evaluate this. And I think from Anita Hill in 1991 to right now – what is it? – two or three of the same people were on the confirmation hearings that interviewed her. These are all white males. There’s no women. They’re all from the GOP. I mean, Dr. Ford, through her lawyer, doesn’t want to do that until the FBI investigate. And I think, right now, they’re playing chicken with her, trying to see how serious she is about her allegations because she’s in this politically really uncomfortable position. They’re sort of re-abusing her – I’ll say it – by saying that there’s no time to do this. And so I just want to get back to kind of that, around censoring her. |
| C.T. WEBB 17:03 | Yeah. I mean, to address that, I think two things– well, probably more than two. But one, I think she just has– and I realize that there could be very vigorous pushback to this. I just think she has to be brave. Here’s the thing. I think that there is a double standard. I think that women get the shit end of the stick the vast majority of the time, basically, in civilization. You can go back 5,000 years, and women have gotten the shit end of the stick always, right? And there’s some academic arguments around kind of that civilization is based around this occupation of the female body and [crosstalk] probably some interesting conversations to have about that. So I believe that, right? I absolutely believe that. I don’t want to short sell the difficulty of being a women and having to deal with basically moving through a world in which people are more physically powerful than you, right? |
| S. FULLWOOD 18:12 | Right. |
| S. RODNEY 18:12 | Right. |
| C.T. WEBB 18:13 | And that power is flaunted and enjoyed by– |
| S. FULLWOOD 18:18 | Oh, yeah. And flaunted, yeah. |
| C.T. WEBB 18:19 | –those men [crosstalk] catcalling and things like that. |
| S. FULLWOOD 18:21 | Absolutely. |
| C.T. WEBB 18:22 | So I don’t want to– I want to be sensitive to that. I understand that. I don’t know what that’s like. At the same time, the only way that these things can be confronted and overcome is through bravery and some kind of fortitude that allows people to stand up and say, “Fuck no. I’m going to come forward, and I’m actually going to show you, and I’m going to say to you what you don’t want to be said to you.” I don’t think that’s easy, but I think if she doesn’t do this, then that’s it. And someone else needs to then do that in the future and do it again and again and again until there’s some kind of movement. |
| S. FULLWOOD 19:07 | And so my question to both of you is what are your predictions that she will testify, that she will contact the committee tomorrow at 10:00 AM [laughter], which is on the East Coast? |
| C.T. WEBB 19:17 | So last update was that she said she will. She’s still open to testifying, but she doesn’t want it to be Monday. That was like 5 or 10 minutes before we [crosstalk]. |
| S. FULLWOOD 19:27 | Oh, wow. So she’s still pushing. Okay. She’s still pushing back. What about you, Seth? Do you think that she will? |
| S. RODNEY 19:32 | Well, I want to add something to what Travis has suggested, which is that ultimately it’s on her. It’s on Dr. Ford to be heroic in this instance – and I think that’s a proper word – or the fight around Kavanaugh’s nomination won’t be decided in the favor of truth and justice. I do agree with that. And here’s the historical analogy, the civil rights movement. I constantly go back to the civil rights movement, but it sort of makes sense. I mean, it is the movement in the US where you have people literally putting their bodies at risk– |
| S. FULLWOOD 20:19 | Literally. Yeah. |
| S. RODNEY 20:20 | –consistently and being hurt, maimed, and killed in the process. |
| C.T. WEBB 20:25 | Absolutely. |
| S. RODNEY 20:26 | And it is only because they did that, arguably– I don’t know if I even need the arguably. It is only because they did that. |
| C.T. WEBB 20:33 | No. It’s only because they did. We still would have– everything would be the same if wasn’t for that. |
| S. RODNEY 20:37 | Exact. This is my point. |
| C.T. WEBB 20:39 | Everything would be the same. |
| S. RODNEY 20:40 | This is my point. It is only because they did that and they made those sacrifices visible that anything changed. |
| C.T. WEBB 20:48 | Absolutely. |
| S. RODNEY 20:48 | So as much as actually I deeply resent the fact that she has to do that, that she has to be heroic, when these fucking men all day long can talk shit about someone whose shoes they’ve never worn. |
| C.T. WEBB 21:06 | Absolutely. |
| S. RODNEY 21:07 | I deeply resent that. I deeply resent Chuck Grassley– |
| S. FULLWOOD 21:10 | Me too. |
| S. RODNEY 21:10 | –having the cojones to say, “I believe Kavanaugh. It sounds like she was mixed up. Oh, no, blah, blah.” |
| C.T. WEBB 21:19 | Exactly [laughter]. |
| S. RODNEY 21:21 | What kind of cartoon fucking villain are you? You are ridiculous. And that you get to have this position of power and spray your absurdity all over us, I find reprehensible. |
| S. FULLWOOD 21:39 | As you should. |
| S. RODNEY 21:40 | But, I think, ultimately, she does have to testify. |
| S. FULLWOOD 21:45 | My prediction is that she will. |
| C.T. WEBB 21:47 | I think so too. That would be [crosstalk] too. |
| S. FULLWOOD 21:48 | Because I do think the notion of bravery is there. Yeah. I think that she will. I think that she will see what the stakes are, and I’m sure she knows already. She’s a pretty smart person. And I think that those 900 women who signed that letter at her college, those women that went to school with her and those women who are going to school now, along with this watershed of support that she’s getting, I think that she will– I’m trying to think of a word that’s not sexist or has [laughter]– |
| S. RODNEY 22:23 | Or genderist. Yeah. Right. |
| S. FULLWOOD 22:24 | She will man up. She will woman up. |
| S. RODNEY 22:26 | You don’t want to say that she’s going to man up [crosstalk], right? |
| C.T. WEBB 22:28 | You don’t want to say man up. You don’t want to say balls. You don’t want to say– there’s all these things that [crosstalk] [laughter]. |
| S. FULLWOOD 22:31 | No, no, no, no. I’ve been thinking about saying ovaries for the longest time. I tried that for a little while with other people. And it was funny because it was just like a big question mark in front of their faces because I was using something that I thought that they would catch on to– but, at any rate. |
| S. RODNEY 22:44 | What was the phrase that you used, Steven? I missed it. |
| S. FULLWOOD 22:46 | Ovaries. |
| S. RODNEY 22:48 | Yeah. That’s what I do too. I say, “Yeah. Let’s find our collective ovaries and get it done.” |
| S. FULLWOOD 22:53 | Language is hard to change. And if you’re born into it and you simply accept it and never examine it, you just are subject to it. You know? |
| C.T. WEBB 23:02 | Yeah. For me, it’s something around childbirth. I mean, I was in the room when my son was born. And shit, I would not want that done to my body [laughter] so. |
| S. RODNEY 23:14 | Ooh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can I get meta for a second here? Because Steven had a really great point that was a sort of rhetorical cul-de-sac we entered, well, maybe for a variety of reasons. But we ended up talking about men who are in some ways victimized by the #MeToo movement, right? And there’s this other thing that’s happening in conversations around essentially women’s victimization that I also really don’t like, which is something we just did, which is we got into the nitty-gritty of the plot. We’re like, “Oh my God. Will she testify? What do you think? This is going to happen la, la, la. Forces were arrayed. The hero has to come save the–” And mind you, I understand why we need to do that. And we do. I recognize that. But what I don’t like is precisely this move that our mainstream media typically takes, which is that it’s then treated like a sporting event like, “Will she? Won’t she? What’s on the Republican side? What’s on the Democrat side? Who’s the secret weapon?” And I feel like we do that kind of almost procedural analysis in order to avoid the sort of deeper, moral, ethical, and political analysis, which is what we should be doing. |
| S. FULLWOOD 24:37 | It takes a moment to crawl out of that hole, though, because that’s kind of how we’re trained to look at things like this and also for things – I’m speaking about [rural US?] – that we feel we don’t have a stake in, right? And so when you go wide, you see the larger picture. They want to get him on immediately. They want him before the midterms, all of that. You can see the wider picture and, for those of you who have memory past 20 years, what it’s been looking like for other women, not just in this arena, but also the #MeToo movement and also before the #MeToo movement, where you had these moments of, “Oh my God, something’s breaking. The ground is sort of breaking up around these ideas.” But then– |
| S. RODNEY 25:17 | [crosstalk]– |
| S. FULLWOOD 25:18 | –we rush back in to fill that hole or fill that crack with what’s uncomfortable, what we feel is messy, and also what calls us to responsibility regardless of who you are. Do you know? So– |
| C.T. WEBB 25:35 | Yeah. You know, talking about sort of the nitty-gritty details of the story, something that occurred to me, Judge, the other guy that was supposedly in the [crosstalk]. |
| S. FULLWOOD 25:43 | Oh, yeah. |
| S. RODNEY 25:43 | Mark. Yeah. |
| C.T. WEBB 25:43 | Yeah. When I heard that story, to me, you know what that sounded like? This whole him jumping on them, and they fell to the floor and broke– to me, that sounded like someone that was trying to stop something but didn’t have the fortitude to actually stop it. |
| S. FULLWOOD 26:02 | Oh, wow. |
| C.T. WEBB 26:04 | And this is a lot of times how conscience works. When you don’t feel like you quite have the character or the power to stand up, you try and sort of subtly derail things or steer it away. I think that guy knows. I think he remembers it. I think he knows. I think it wouldn’t surprise me at all if that sort of monkeying around and jumping on them was a way to break that situation up. Obviously, I’m not in that room. It was 40 years ago– however many years ago it was, but not quite 40. |
| S. RODNEY 26:41 | 36. |
| C.T. WEBB 26:41 | Yeah. Yeah. I am, I think, probably a bit more optimistic than the two of you around– maybe not than you Steven, maybe a little bit more than Seth. |
| S. FULLWOOD 26:56 | I’m usually the optimistic one, yep. |
| C.T. WEBB 26:57 | I think that it is very possible to train men and women to own their power and their responsibility to one another to not conduct themselves in this way. I don’t think we’re that far. You, Steven, your son is a man now. My oldest son is a man. My youngest is five. I can say unequivocally that there’s no way that my oldest son would ever be in a situation like that and would do something like that, not because he hasn’t had acquisitiveness towards women or because his body is not filled with desire, but because he understands that that’s another human being. That’s not just another– that’s not just another woman. That’s another person, another person that’s born and is going to live and suffer and thrive and die, and that the gender, whatever is going on between your legs, has nothing to do with that. It’s an accessory to an existential fact. And I think that that is something that we can teach people. |
| S. FULLWOOD 28:04 | I’m putting my eggs in that basket. I’m interested. I have nothing to lose. I do– |
| S. RODNEY 28:12 | So I wanted to say one of the things that occurred to me when we were thinking about this and exchanging emails, talking about this via email, was I remembered a situation I had when I was in grad school back at UC Irvine. And I was dating, well, sort of dating as– eh, yeah, I was dating a woman who was also– I think, yeah, she was also a student. And we were playing around, horsing around one time. And this was after we had– I don’t think we had had sex, but we had kissed, touched, that sort of thing. And we were playfully bantering, and I playfully slapped her face, not hard, but just sort of as if in punishment for something she said, right? |
| C.T. WEBB 29:08 | Mm-hmm. |
| S. FULLWOOD 29:08 | Mm-hmm. |
| S. RODNEY 29:09 | And she looked at me, and she said, “Don’t do that.” And I remembered in that moment feeling really embarrassed and feeling like, “Why is it that I thought that would be okay?” And as I’m saying it now, I think part of the reason I thought it was okay was that this is a game that men and women– this is, I think, where it gets– to borrow a word from Steven, I think this is where it gets really messy. Men and women play around with power, with overpowering each other, with expressing power over the other person in the sort of continuum of sexual play, right? |
| C.T. WEBB 29:55 | Absolutely. |
| S. RODNEY 29:56 | And I think that, for me, it was I didn’t have the tools. And we had talked during the father episode a lot about how do we get the tools? I didn’t grow up with the tools by which to one, understand that I was dealing with a full human being, and two, to understand sort of how to negotiate the ins and outs of power in a sexual play sort of context. And so I have to say there have been times when I’ve just gotten it wrong. And what really has impressed itself on me in the #MeToo movement is how, when men not only just get it wrong but are apprised of the fact that they are using their power in a way that negates somebody else’s power, that they don’t have that moment of introspection where they go, “Oh, yeah. That was wrong. I hurt someone. I limited somebody’s life chances.” There’s been this whole apparatus around men, privilege and their use of power. And what #MeToo has done, if nothing else, is that it’s begun to make that apparatus evaporate. It’s begun to say– well, no, no, just support, rhetorical support for that, I think, is going away. |
| S. FULLWOOD 31:20 | But I would say [it surfaced it?] to make it visible because first you need to make it visible for people to actually see the apparatus. Do you know what I mean? And I think conversation like this and movies and other kinds of cultural things really kind of surface what this apparatus looks like. And so I want to turn just a bit to Soon-Yi Previn’s article. |
| C.T. WEBB 31:42 | So why don’t we make this a segue and do a part two on this? Because I actually think there’s some good stuff here, and Seth had actually opened up by saying that he wanted to talk about– I don’t think you’ve done that yet, right? Have you? You said you wanted to talk about–? |
| S. RODNEY 31:54 | Well, I just kind of did that with that [crosstalk]. |
| C.T. WEBB 31:56 | That was that? Oh, okay. |
| S. RODNEY 31:57 | Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. |
| C.T. WEBB 31:58 | So the woman you abused when you were playing around? |
| S. RODNEY 32:01 | Yeah. |
| C.T. WEBB 32:01 | That [crosstalk] [laughter]. |
| S. RODNEY 32:04 | No. But you noticed I was willing to accept it? I was like, “Yeah. I kind of did abuse her,” but she stopped me. |
| C.T. WEBB 32:12 | Well, but you were in a dynamic sexual play, and I think there are people that like stuff like that. There are men and women that go on both sides of that power dynamic that play with their physicality. The whole thing is it just has to be a willing participant, you know? Being body tackled into a room blaring rock and roll music and having your mouth covered while men are fondling with your bathing suit, clearly, you are not a willing participant in that situation. |
| S. FULLWOOD 32:43 | Clearly. |
| C.T. WEBB 32:44 | But, Steven, I want to let you close out and maybe segue us. And then maybe next week, we can talk about– because I think there’s some other– I think there’s a meaty discussion in there as well. |
| S. FULLWOOD 32:54 | Oh, absolutely. Thank you for that. So I just want to say thank you very much. I have a lot more to say about these kinds of things because I think that, in a short time like this, we’ve been able to kind of bring some things up and make some great examples. But I’m excited and also encouraged about what you said, Travis, about this next generation. It makes me think of something that Cynthia Heimel, who recently departed– she was a columnist for The Village Voice. The Heimel Maneuver, Tongue in Chic were two of her columns, and she recently passed. And she said that– well, people who would tell her, “Where did feminism get you guys now?” And she goes, “Okay. Well, fuck you.” And she goes [laughter], “My son and his friends grew up with these single mothers trying to do this kind of work. And so they saw us doing this work and hopefully they absorbed it.” And it made me think I’m much more optimistic about the world changing than it is not, even though the press seems to always want to jam it down our throats that it’s impossible, through the kinds of reporting that they do and the kind of perspectives they take. So just thank you both for commenting. And just thank you. |
| C.T. WEBB 34:03 | Yeah. No. Thanks for the conversation. |
| S. RODNEY 34:05 | Indeed. |
| C.T. WEBB 34:05 | Seth, did you want to finish with anything? |
| S. RODNEY 34:06 | No, no, no. I think that we can end there. |
| C.T. WEBB 34:09 | Okay. So next week, we will pick up our discussion with the #MeToo movement, men in the #MeToo movement, and Soon-Yi Previn and Woody Allen. And I know there’s going to be some good stuff there as well, so. |
| S. RODNEY 34:19 | Indeed. |
| C.T. WEBB 34:20 | Thanks very much for the call, guys. |
| S. RODNEY 34:22 | Okay. Thank you. |
| S. FULLWOOD 34:22 | Great. Thank you. Take care. [music] |
References
First referenced at 00:47
Soon Yi Previn
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