The Olivia Benson Constant

by David Benjamin

“Women endure entire lifetimes of these indignities — in the form of catcalls, groping, assault, oppression. These things injure us. They sap our strength. Some of the cuts are so small they’re barely visible. Others are huge and gaping, leaving scars that never heal.”
— Michelle Obama

MADISON, Wis. — The worst boss I ever had was a tall, well-dressed smoothie named Karl. To the world outside our office, he was a paragon of charm and deference. Behind our closed doors, he delegated to me a barrage of duties large and small, some of which fell readily and manageably within my job description. Others were bewildering. They either exceeded my expertise, stretched my capabilities or were, simply, impossible for anyone to do.

They were booby traps. Like most bullies, Karl was a facade. He had talked his way into a lofty position but harbored the nagging anxiety that people even higher up would see through his verbiage to the insecurity, pretense and ineptitude beneath. Unwittingly, I represented the thing he feared the most. I posed the possibility of competence. What if I was good at my job and people noticed? What if — even worse! — they started drawing comparisons?

Justifiably, Karl lived in mortal terror of being shown up. His defense was to set snares for me, assign jobs that couldn’t be done, find fault, browbeat and set me up for a fatal employee review. Luckily, thanks to my formative experience with bullies in grade school, I caught on to Karl and bailed out before he could declare me a putz, rip off my epaulets and defile my resumé.

Since then, I’ve had more bad bosses, but not nearly as many as my wife, who suffers from five devastating handicaps. To wit, she’s a) a girl, b) short, c) Asian, d) immeasurably likable and e) smarter than every male boss on the face of the earth. All of her dimwit overlords would have loved to fire her, but they lived in mortal terror of being exposed — by her absence — as unfit for all the jobs she’d been doing in their names.

So, she stayed — in a constant state of prejudice, condescension, belittlement, insult, pettiness and lame-ass boys-club banter —responding with a dignity which, if I were in her place, would defeat my patience and get me canned. The one offense her bad bosses did not commit was the sort of “sexual” harassment that involves groping, ogling, carnal innuendo and outright solicitation.

Ironically, this posed a problem. Since none of her bad bosses ever committed any overt physical offense against her body, she had scant foundation to complain about the gender discrimination that has dogged her entire career. Women can complain about their ill treatment in a hostile working environment, but — according to traditions established by men — their grounds are limited to sexual transgression.

Even then, a lone girl is SOL. By my estimate, the minimum number of violated women necessary to wake up the authorities to gross sexual harassment is six.

Which brings us around to the front-runner for 2021 Worst Boss of the Year, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose body count is currently eleven. As the minions of New York Attorney General Letitia James rattled off their accusations against Cuomo the other day, I noted that every complaint had been lodged, of course, by women and that the governor was being cubbyholed — in public perception — as a horny old guy who couldn’t keep his paws to himself. None of the charges against him seemed to quite edge upward in the criminal code to the level of sexual assault. No bodice was ripped. No skirt was soiled. No woman was raped. No accuser could produce a witness to her violation.

When there is a rape, according to the Olivia Benson Constant, the crime is not about sex. It’s about power. When an assault falls short of forcible penetration, when the woman simply straightens her dress and walks away flustered, angry, confused and uncertain about what to say, to whom to say it and whether she should say anything at all (would anybody believe it?), it isn’t about power.

It’s about sex. It’s about the woman.

Yes, yes, I know. It’s still about power. It’s even more about power than an outright act of rape, because in so many cases, this sort of gender-based indignity — unwitnessed and uncorroborated — occurs repeatedly to the same victim. She hesitates to speak because she needs the job, because it’s gonna be his powerful word against hers and because she knows she’ll be accused of cocking a hip and batting her eyelashes alluringly.

As he tunes out the chorus of former friends and erstwhile allies calling for him to resign his office, Andrew Cuomo can take solace from the example of a fellow New Yorker and perhaps the most prominent sexual predator of our time, Donald Trump. The blizzard of complaints against the Donald from dozens of women, including his alleged rape of E. Jean Carroll, dwarfs Cuomo’s record of diddling, fondling and delivering unwelcome smooches. Yet, Trump has been able to sidestep, fend off, laugh off or frustrate every accusation, even while boasting that, yes, he loves to back a girl against the wall, against her will, and stick his tongue down her throat.

“I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.”

Shucks, I’m just a guy in the grip of my gonads.

But Trump, like Cuomo, and all those big lugs who used to pound on me on the playground, are not about sex. They’re about domination and submission. Trump made a show, and reaped a small fortune, from bullying both men and women — purely for the sake of cruelty — on TV. In the White House, Trump turned Cabinet meetings into round-table novenas during which each acolyte vied to outdo the groveling, brown-nosing and self-abasement of the next guy over.

If Andrew Cuomo is as much a bully as the torrent of charges against him suggests, he’s not much different from old Engine 45. It’s inconceivable that Cuomo limited his abuses and humiliations to female subordinates. With guys, his intimidation was likely more blunt and manly, marked by the sort of mirthless joshing and butt-slapping that arrogant princes impose on their underlings.

“Am I right, Bing? Am I right?”

“Oh, sir, yes sir!”

If Cuomo was true to the code of Karl and the Donald, his emasculation of men passed through a tissue of insinuation that posed — if you crossed the boss — the ineluctable certainty of unemployment and unemployability, of a ravaged reputation, political exile, economic ruin, family heartbreak and banishment from the country club. You might not be a girl, but you still had to bend over.

At the moment, notwithstanding the valiant efforts of Letitia James, it appears as though the Cuomo scandal — even if he ends up resigning in seeming disgrace — is going to go down as (merely) the latest case of celebrity sexual misconduct.

Sex, not power.

Cuomo’s political colleagues will, of course, shun him lest they be defiled by his proximity. But, to his legion of fellow bullies, as well as to much of the news-consuming public, he’ll be remembered ambivalently as the tough, demanding and old-school boss who was brought down in his prime by a handful of thin-skinned tootsies who couldn’t handle the rough-and tumble of Empire State politics.