Why Does Bill Maher’s Review of Hammer Sting So Bad?
Consent is not a level playing field. Stop talking like it is.
I don’t have any interest in entering the debate around the Armie Hammer controversy. But Bill Maher obviously did, and he claimed it was all about “feminism”. The problematics exposed in Maher’s segment on Friday, February 5, 2021, prompted me to take a closer look at consent in my personal history and question why it hurt so badly to see this man, along with his two-thirds male panel, debate consent without grace. It made me afraid not only about the impact of this story on myself, but the impact on those vulnerable people in the shadows navigating the grey areas of their own sexual histories.
I’m not interested in comprehensively unpacking the many problematic statements made by Maher, because there were many, but I do want to use a few as a jumping-off point for discussion around my own experience of consent and the problems with waving around sexual “autonomy” as Maher did without acknowledging the uneven landscape of sexual politics.
Despite the many privileges of growing up as a western white girl in an Australian private school, I still felt the power imbalance in my own sexual experience and I believe that imbalance in power that pervades sex universally needs to be handled with more care in debates around consent, certainly better than the display we witnessed from Maher.
The danger in advocating individual autonomy
Listening to Maher’s segment from the other room would not have prompted me to get up and go shout at the television a year ago perhaps. I would have taken it on and it would have deepened a narrative of shame I have been telling myself for years. I fear for those who will internalize that message of “It’s always your choice!” without considering the complex context of sexual politics. Maybe this is because of what Bill Maher calls “where feminism is”.
As I look around me, I get very conflicting messages about where exactly “feminism” is on these issues. I know we have this idea of being able to do, say, be anything, but besides that is intersectional feminism. Intersectionality asks “what are the inherent inequalities in the power in each situation?” No matter the reason for that power imbalance, it asks “where do we place our expectations of responsibility when the issues of abuse of power are raised?”
This is where my personal feminism is right now. I disagree with Maher’s assessment that the most important point to come out of the Hammer controversy is “can’t we all make our own choices anymore?” and I consider it an argument that ignores many of the gendered issues inherent in the debate.
Consent does not work in a vacuum
Earlier in Maher’s show, he said “you can’t raise your kids in a vacuum”. I could not agree more. By the time I was eight I had asked a friend what “rape” was and was told it was when someone tries to kill you with sex. With that violence entered my forming concept of sex. Despite being told and believing “my body, my choice”, by the time I was 12, my body had been touched without my consent and I was conditioned to pass it off as “that’s just what boys do”. That was unsurprising and accepted by me. But at 16, I was still surprised when my body was touched in a way to force my “consent”.
I am the first one to admit that I navigated my sexual liberation messily, embracing sex and romance as a new adventure that was not only available to me but that was expected of me. Broken down in codified bases that always seemed to be shifting, it was expected that men would try to take as much ground from me as they could, and I needed to decide how strongly I pushed back at every new advance. Frankly, it proved exhausting.
I can’t speak to the conditioning of my male counterparts. I know that they were raised on a dramatically different narrative. Whatever this narrative, I know it was not built on a robust education around consent.
Your sexual liberation did not happen in a vacuum
On top of navigating physical advances, there was the ever-present threat that violence could be, and often was, used against women to coerce sex. I grew up with stories of rape being embedded into my every day. Don’t catch a cab, you’ll get raped. Don’t drink more than you can handle, you’ll get raped. Don’t have an intimate partner, statistically speaking, you’ll get raped. That, or you’ll be murdered so your husband can avoid the divorce and claim your life insurance.
You never forget that this awkward geeky guy in your year is still stronger than you. Sex could be used against me by a boy my age, and it was. So, yes, I developed a really unhealthy view of sex that claimed the bravery of feminism and yet made so many concessions to fear of the patriarchy.
What is the flip side of that narrative? What did society expect from the teenage boys who thought my “no” was a challenge to try to change my mind? Where does that urge to persuade rather than respect come from, and why did each attempt make me feel as if it is a new threat that takes more energy and a little less safety to block? Those are the questions I ask now in the debate around my own stories of consent.
If I’m not tied down, is it coercion?
Opening the segment on Hammer, Maher summed up his perspective: “if there wasn’t any physical coercion, why isn’t this just filed under, ‘That seemed like a good idea at the time — to let Armie Hammer eat me — but it really wasn’t.’ It seems like we don’t have any ownership any more of our own choices.”
When panelist, Time journalist Charlotte Alter, noted that some physicality occurred between Hammer and his accusers, ‘Did he tie her down and do that?’ was Maher’s answer. When Alter later noted the history of sexual oppression for women, Maher dismissed that as irrelevant to a 25-year-old woman.
Every 25-year-old woman carries a history of sexual oppression, and if you instead inherited and cultivated male privilege, don’t you forget that you carry that into sex also. Men enter sex not only with a legacy of white male violence behind them but statistics that indicate a present and reasonable threat. As Dennis so distastefully puts it in Always Sunny, it’s the “implication”.
I am a 32-year-old woman. I did not navigate my sexual liberation under constant coercion, but it did not exist in a vacuum. For those whose sexual liberation was born from privilege, by ignoring gendered power in sex, ignore that the legacy of sexual risk for women is not only the embedded historical context, but the present reality.
Distilling consent to an issue of physical coercion is dangerous
My first recognizable sexual assault, apart from the many gropes you are conditioned to take as part and parcel of high school, was at a party by one of the private schoolboys. What I remember was the shock in my adolescent body suddenly feeling unsafe as a force was used against my gesture of “no, thank you”. He pushed past my hand as if it were irrelevant to the present circumstance.
I felt safe enough to push back, but I was surrounded by peers, parents, lights, and safety.
It wasn’t always as safe as this. It was not always a boy’s hand pressing too firmly against mine. There were many times I felt unsafe to make decisions that I wanted to make at that moment because I was acutely aware of my vulnerability. My “no” was taken as a challenge to change my mind, whether that was done physically, verbally, or emotionally; whether it was a stranger or an intimate partner.
To distil the issue of consent to physical coercion gaslights women into thinking that other forms of coercion aren’t part of the equation, they don’t count when they need to be examined and addressed. What message of acceptable behavior are we encouraging by saying it doesn’t count unless it’s physical?
Perhaps my scars don’t warrant a #metoo moment for some, but they do indicate a toxic part of our sexual politics that needs to change. How we educate men to navigate “no” needs to change, and discussions such as Maher’s, that focus on further codifying that behavior and implicitly accepting it, hinders that progress.
We need to do better, right now
When we have contemporary discussions of consent, I am buoyed to see that an uneven playing field is often acknowledged and considered in arguments of whether an action would be viewed as consensual or not. I am also encouraged by those discussions that navigate the grey areas of consent with nuance. Maher’s segment did not fill me with hope, but instead, I felt the familiar ache of feminist fatigue.
As I look around me at the ravages of patriarchy and the many battlefronts of sex and gender equality, consent is one small piece of our problem-solving puzzle. I hope that consent is a different landscape for teenagers now, informed by the constructive discussions that are going on about this issue.
Maher’s discussion should be approached with caution and recognized for the destructive power that it wields. I agree with one of the brighter moments in the discussion, coming from Alter, when she raised whether it was such a bad thing that men are experiencing the reality of the inherent risks and consequences that women have been expected to bear under the oppression of patriarchy for centuries? This seems a more constructive discussion point that Maher hastily passed over.
It starts by acknowledging the power imbalance
I would rather we reduce the risks in sex for everyone through productive sexual education. But ignoring toxic narratives that are still bearing on everybody's conduct is not constructive, but destructive. Maher wasted an opportunity to highlight the complex layers of a debate involving consent.
I am no expert in how we address the insidious dynamics of sexual power imbalances, but I know that some part of it needs to focus on having more constructive discussions about the toxic cultural, social and political context in which sex operates. Views like Maher’s suggesting “everyone can just make their own choices” should not be amplified in this delicate discussion.
