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BROOKE GLADSTONE:  From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. Bob Garfield is out this week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Since we last checked in, the torrent of sexual assault and harassment allegations has shifted from Hollywood to Capitol Hill, both on the right.

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FEMALE CORRESPONDENT:  Happening right now, new sexual assault allegations against Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, a fifth woman now coming forward accusing him of sexually assaulting her when she was a teenager.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And also on the left.

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT:  US Senator Al Franken is facing allegations of sexual assault. A radio news anchor is accusing the former comedian of groping her and kissing her without consent.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Predation followed by defiance, in the first case, grossness succeeded by remorse, in the second. Meanwhile, the exhilarating, nauseating torrent of long-repressed rage spirals around us, stirring up the muck. Yes, this is a rape culture but, no, not all offenses are created equal. What is justice, what retribution? Will this moment of reckoning self-immolate before it affects real change? These are some of the questions we address this hour, questions New York Magazine writer Rebecca Traister has been pondering since she wrote a story about her own encounter with Harvey Weinstein.

REBECCA TRAISTER:  Starting that night, I began to get anywhere between 5 to 20 emails a day --

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Wow.

REBECCA TRAISTER:  -- mostly women, some men, as well, telling me about predation, harassment, assault, rape, in some cases, that they had suffered, some recently, some 40 years ago, expressing guilt over having not spoken up. Every day, my inbox is full.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Is it because there was a chance that this stuff would actually be printed, rather than just pushed aside? Is it because, as you wrote in your piece, they were seeing a Matrix moment, the fact that they were part of a much bigger pattern?

REBECCA TRAISTER:  I think it's two things. Yes, to some degree, it’s that people are willing to take their calls, reporters are interested, newspapers are willing to print this stuff on the front pages. The second thing is the Matrix moment, that now that the flood has started and we’re talking to our friends and our colleagues, we’re understanding the ubiquity. I say in my piece it’s like the house lights have come up and we’re seeing the scaffolding on which so many of our professional lives have been built.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Roger Ailes, the chief of Fox News, his villainy -- the employment of spies, payoffs, threats and behavior that goes into downright illegality -- that rivals Harvey Weinstein's villainy, almost, and yet, the floodgates did not fly open, at that point.

REBECCA TRAISTER:  Right, so I think that there are two reasons why. First, Roger Ailes controlled a massive arm of right-wing media in Fox News, so you had some significant portion of the country having the news of Ailes's villainy ignored or defended, right? So you take out a huge chunk of the population that’s even believing that that's a true story because there's an ideological incentive to not believe it. That's the first thing.

When it comes to Weinstein, the right wing is all in because he's a Democratic donor, so you get that section of the country back. Then you look at the left. A lot of this is coming out of, I believe, post-election rage. You had an example of a moment like this in the weeks before the 2016 election, when Donald Trump is caught on tape on Access Hollywood --

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

REBECCA TRAISTER:  -- bragging about grabbing women against their will and, at the same time, more than 20 women accuse him of unwanted sexual assault, really gross charges. There were social media campaigns, there was outrage, there was fury on the left. Of course, again, that fury didn't translate to a right-wing media, which was protecting its presidential candidate. But on the left, it felt like, okay, this is a transformative moment. We are seeing what Donald Trump did and we’re also having a conversation about how pervasive it is, and we have the tools at our disposal to get this man to not have a job, we can vote in the election. But, of course, it didn't work. The predator, the confessed predator --

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Yeah.

REBECCA TRAISTER:  -- gets the biggest job. And I think that the fact that a lid was put on the rage that was brewing then, a year ago, made the left just ready to explode.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  The biggest job, not necessarily the worst behavior, just behavior that is utterly unacceptable [LAUGHS] kind of put things on a spectrum, has created a, a lot of confusion. Isn’t this issue of, you know, if you give somebody a salacious look in an elevator, are you gonna be put on the same list as Harvey Weinstein?

REBECCA TRAISTER:  It’s not black and white --

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Right.

REBECCA TRAISTER:  -- like kill the witch, right --

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Right.

REBECCA TRAISTER:  -- which is how those who are defending against this treat it, as though, oh no, the next guy who, who tries to ask a woman out is gonna be thrown in the stocks. There has not been an example that I can think of, so far, and it could happen any day now, but so far there has not been an example of somebody who has been grossly punished for something that seems like a totally minor infraction.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Gay Talese said that Anthony Rapp, talking about being 14, assaulted by Kevin Spacey, Talese said in a particularly infelicitous phrase, I think, he should just suck it up.

REBECCA TRAISTER:  Mike Barnicle, the journalist, who is a regular on Morning Joe where Mark Halperin, who has lost his perch on Morning Joe but he was also a regular, they were colleagues, Mark Halperin who was accused by multiple women, while he had professional power over them, young ambitious women in the news business, against their will pressed his penis against them in the office. I mean, this is not a gray area, what Mark Halperin has been accused of and, to some extent, has admitted to, that happened on multiple occasions to women he had power over.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

REBECCA TRAISTER:  And he, very appropriately, I feel, lost his deal with HBO, he lost his perch on, on Morning Joe. And Mike Barnicle sort of bemoaned this and said, sure, what he did was bad and, of course, he should face consequences, and then he said, but does he have to be killed, how many times does he have to die? And I read that and I was like, he hasn’t died.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Exactly.

REBECCA TRAISTER:  No one’s sentenced him to death.

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BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And you and many others have made the point that he's lost his job. But we need to weigh loss against loss, which is hard because it's very difficult to measure the opportunity cost of so many women denied raises, denied employment or discouraged right out of the business because of these often traumatizing events.

REBECCA TRAISTER:  Right, and it’s also just trying to conceive of it is something that happens across industries to all kinds of women whose names we don't know, who aren’t beloved actors, who aren’t on our television sets every morning the way the individual accused men are, right? And so, it's very easy for us to immediately feel, for example, the way that Gay Talese talks about oh, poor Kevin Spacey and this great actor, his career brought down. Kevin Spacey has now also been multiply accused of molesting young boys against their will, of serial assault against underage boys. Imagine the harm done to them. The difference is Anthony Rapp is an exception because people do know who he is. Lots of the people who Spacey is accused of having hurt --

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

REBECCA TRAISTER:  -- are guys we don't know. So it's harder for us to get to the point where we think, oh, poor nameless men who were damaged --

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Right.

REBECCA TRAISTER:  -- and in the case of the women, Mark Halperin, who are these women? We don't know who they are.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Right.

REBECCA TRAISTER:  We can imagine, oh, this is Mark Halperin, his face I know, and I feel sorry about what’s gonna happen to him because he exists in our imagination, in part, because he’s had a powerful career, and that’s part of the point. Men are more likely to have a claim on our affection and our sympathy. And I don’t think it’s wrong. I want to be really clear. I do not think there's anything wrong with considering the fates of these guys and feeling sympathy for them. We understand that it is okay to have anxiety about hurting the people, even who deserve to lose their jobs.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

REBECCA TRAISTER:  But we don't reflexively engage those same, same sympathetic impulses toward the women who were never allowed to become the faces on your television and movie screens. We don't know who they are but their families have been damaged too, their wages lowered, in many cases, driven out of the profession. There is a researcher who has said that 50% of women who face harassment change jobs within two years of that harassment and, if the harassment is particularly bad, that’s 80%. We, we always wonder about wage gaps and why aren’t there women in these professions. Many of them are driven out by these kind of pervasive ubiquitous circumstances, and we don't spare a lot of our sympathy worrying about the kind of economic, social and professional impact that that’s had on those women.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  When you're seeing the Matrix moment, it's often the victims who are doing the soul searching and they're asking, am I complicit, was I working the system? You have to live within the system, how did that shape my own behavior? What do you make of that reckoning?

REBECCA TRAISTER:  Well, that is exactly one of the costs. It's one of the additional tolls that is paid by the people who have less power in a situation. It is true this is a moment unlike any other, where some of the bad actors, themselves, are doing some of the accounting, but a huge amount of painful reckoning is being done by women who are wondering what their roles were, wondering to what degree they profited or lost professionally from their participation in this kind of behavior or their refusal to participate in it.

I find it very sad because I do think there are a lot of men who are scared. A lot of them have spoken to me, oh no, what if I did something, and there's this fear that there’s going to be retribution, that they’re going to be asked to pay for it. And that's good. I, I think it's important that men are, are sort of coming to terms with this, but I don't yet know how many of those men are also thinking, what damage did I do? There's a kind of like, oh my God, I was a part of this or I profited from it, but I don't yet think that there's a huge amount of consideration for what happened to the woman that I did this to, what became of her, did I fundamentally alter the circumstances of her life, of her work, of her economic stability, her social or emotional stability? I haven't yet heard a lot of that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  You write about a generational divide --

REBECCA TRAISTER:  Mm-hmm.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  -- in response to all of these revelations. What do they say about what we've been conditioned to accept as normal?

REBECCA TRAISTER:  So, on the one side, are older women who came of age in the years before Anita Hill's groundbreaking 1991 testimony against Clarence Thomas, in which she accused Thomas, who was then nominated for the Supreme Court, of having sexually harassed her when they worked together. He, obviously, got confirmed for the Court anyway, but her testimony was a real shift in an American understanding of what sexual harassment was and that it wasn't just how guys were in the office but that it was actually -- it was a behavior that did material damage to women as a class.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And you have quoted the sociology professor, Heather McLaughlin at Oklahoma State, who found that about half of women in their late ‘20s who experienced harassment started looking for a new job within two years and, for those who endured more serious harassment, the figure’s around 80%, and many opt to leave their professional altogether and to start over in less male-dominated fields where the pay is lower. All that stuff, I don't know whether that relates to women post- Anita Hill or pre-Anita Hill.

REBECCA TRAISTER:  Well, I think her study is of women post- Anita Hill but the difference pre-and post-Anita Hill that have been observable to me is that women raised in an era before sexual harassment was identified as something that did damage to women and, and was, in fact --

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

REBECCA TRAISTER:  -- and some of them criminal just expected this to be the way that men behaved toward them in the office. And, in fact, some of them sort of pride themselves on having gotten through it themselves and, oh, come on, come on, toughen up. And I don’t, I don't mean to say this critically. I think it is the way that generations of women were raised, okay, you can go into the workforce but you should know they're gonna grab you, they’re gonna harass you and you can -- you have a series of choices in how you want to deal with it.

But then post-Anita Hill, there is this assessment that, in fact, this behavior is wrong and that it shouldn't happen; it's unprofessional to criminal. And women raised with those attitudes, thinking, my opportunities are not supposed to be determined just by men and certainly not by their sexualized behavior toward me, those women are more likely to say, this is not okay.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  So that suggests that this wave we're experiencing now could actually auger change? Or is it just part of an ebb and flow?

REBECCA TRAISTER:  This moment will fade. And I write in the piece about my fears about tremendous backlash and punishment for this moment.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

REBECCA TRAISTER:  We know, looking at the history of social change in this country, that when there is a huge leap when it comes to talking and understanding, you know, gendered and racial disadvantage, you get slapped back, and I am very fearful about what form it will take. At the same time, these explosive moments, even if there is retribution that follows them, even if there is backsliding, they’re part of the process of forward motion. And this one is gonna be formative for a lot of people. I think that you're going to see a generational shift that's gonna play out over decades. There will be retribution and backlash but I also think that we will look back on this moment as being formative, in the long term.

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BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Rebecca, thank you very much.

REBECCA TRAISTER:  Thank you, Brooke.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Rebecca Traister is a writer at large at New York Magazine and The Cut. Her recent article is called, “Your Reckoning. And Mine.”

Coming up, the reckoning continues. Why didn’t we believe Juanita Broaddrick? Because we preferred not to. This is On the Media.

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