When is an apology not an apology? Usually, these days, it seems. Dustin Hoffman is the most recent big beast to be sorry/not sorry. Fellow actor Anna Graham Hunter has said that Hoffman behaved inappropriately when she was a 17-year-old working on a television film he was making in 1985. Hoffman responded with a statement saying, basically, that if Graham Hunter has that impression, then he feels bad.
Not that bad though. Challenged about these and other sexual harassment allegations by talk show host John Oliver, the actor got very shirty. He made it clear that when he said “I am sorry” he meant that he would have been sorry if he had done what she claimed, but he didn’t. Hoffman had made the statement, he explained, because his media advisers said that would be better than getting into an argument. He doesn’t remember ever meeting the woman. The usual awful stuff. What was unusual is that Oliver called him on it.
Reminded by Oliver that Hoffman’s co-star in the Graduate, Katharine Ross, has also said that Hoffman had touched her inappropriately, Hoffman then said that Ross had neglected to place the touching in the wider context of the stressful situation they were in. Silly old Ross had related only how the incident had felt for her, instead of bearing in mind how it had felt for everyone else in the room.
Seemingly unable to understand that this didn’t make the touching OK, Hoffman then went on to ask why Ross was raking up something that happened 40 years ago. Oliver responded well enough, with an: “Oh, Dustin, Christ.” But a larger response is necessary.
Women are bringing up stories of inappropriate behaviour from 40 years ago, 30 years ago, 20 years ago, because women currently hope they have a “teachable moment”. Women are now giving examples of behaviour that they didn’t like at the time it was imposed on them, because back at that time it felt impossible to complain.
Back then, a pat on the knee – or the bottom – was considered to be a compliment that any woman should be happy to receive. The suggestion that a man would like to have sex with her? Better than Christmas! No greater tribute!
How the woman might actually feel about such “compliments” was not considered important. What women are saying now is that it’s the only thing that is important. What women are saying now is that it is not incumbent upon them to place the needs of men who wish to touch them or direct sexual innuendo at them above their own need to be respected as a human being rather than a sexual object, and that it never was.
What’s incredibly frustrating is that “40 years ago” or “different times” is only ever used as an excuse or a defence. There’s the vaguest of admissions that standards of behaviour have changed. But there is little or no admission that it’s right that they have changed and that they still have not changed nearly enough.
Hoffman is still insisting that his experience of touching Ross is more valid than hers. In doing so, Hoffman is unconsciously revealing that his fundamental understanding of when it is appropriate to touch women has not changed in 40 years. All he now understands is that those attitudes can get him into trouble these days.
Another woman, Wendy Riss Gatsiounis, has said that Hoffman sexually harassed her in 1991. Hoffman and his people seem unwilling to try the “if that’s her idea then I’m sad for her” line again. Are they still looking for a formula that makes the problem go away? Why wouldn’t they? Men in dodgier situations than Hoffman’s have succeeded before.
Somehow, these men who, as Hoffman claims, “have the utmost respect for women”, don’t seem to mind implying and suggesting that any individual woman who is critical of them must be a liar, an exaggerator or an exploiter.
Somehow, it’s unfair on men that women have stopped putting up with behaviour that everyone knows was rampant, but no one seems to have the courage to admit ever to having indulged in themselves, back in the bad old days of unreconstructed, chauvinist pig-ignorance. Which none of them ever personally subscribed to. Weirdly. Nothing and no one is important to these people, except their own unsullied reputation.
Basically, if no man is ever willing to admit that their attitudes to women and their bodies used to be wrong, but that they’re pleased to say these attitudes have been put right, then they are denying the lived experience of many, many women who have fought hard to be heard, over many decades. Which is most certainly not having the utmost respect for women. Or any respect for women at all.
If only these chaps considered for a moment that the skin of women is every bit as important as their own. Instead of concentrating only and ruthlessly on saving the latter.
• Deborah Orr is a Guardian columnist
