Rocky Berhe headshot
Three things are inevitable in a woman’s life: death, taxes and unjust scrutiny. The life cycle of the woman scorned occurs in four stages: the obscure underdog, the people’s princess, the reckoning and the downfall. Joe Biden is the leader of the free world, Clarence Thomas is still on the highest bench in the land and Anita Hill is where, again?
The story of Anita Hill haunts me. Only five years before the Supreme Court nomination hearing that would change Hill’s life, and two years after she left her position at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, sexual harassment was ruled to be a form of sexual discrimination under Title VII of the US Civil Rights Act. As Senator Arlen Specter said when asking Hill to explain conversations in her workplace about large breasts, “that is a word we use all the time.”
In October 1991, Hill testified for an all-white, all-male Senate judiciary committee. At the time, the committee was chaired by then-Senator Joe Biden, who chose not to call Angela Wright, another alleged victim of harassment by Thomas, to testify and bolster Hill’s claims. During her testimony, Hill was accused by Senator Flatch of plagiarizing incidents of harassment from the book, “The Exorcist.” Senator Alan K. Simpson suggested the reason for Hill passing a polygraph test was due to psychological delusion rather than honest testimony. Senator Howell Heflin asked Hill if she was a “woman scorned” or a “zealot civil rights believer.”
The testimony of Anita Hill went on to spark massive backlash amongst women, inspiring the creation of third-wave feminism. The political consequences were even greater. The year following the confirmation of Clarence Thomas was an election year that saw an explosion of women running for office and winning their respective elections. From the 102nd to the 103rd Congress, the number of women in office nearly doubled in both the House and the Senate.
The image of 14 white men questioning and poking holes in Hill’s character and mental stability is one I’m grateful I didn’t witness first hand. I don’t doubt this image is burned in the heads of every woman who watched with a similar story. I don’t doubt these women began questioning their own stories, whether they misunderstood their harassment, their stories would be believed or ultimately realizing they wouldn’t and it wouldn’t matter if they did.
Is that why we haven’t learned our lesson? Clarence Thomas still has jurisdiction over the bodily autonomy of every woman he allegedly harassed, and Joe Biden has yet to take personal responsibility for the nature of the Hill hearings.
Culture writer Rayne Fisher-Quann coined the term “getting woman’d” to describe the phenomenon where public consciousness aligns for the split second and sole purpose of destroying a notable woman’s reputation. “Getting woman’d” refers to the patterns observed on social media when the tide turns on a new, sometimes revived star.
This isn’t an argument for the notion that women can do no wrong. We are not obligated to support every woman without question or concern. But must we weaponize artistic critiques and conflate them with online harassment? In the case of Mindy Kaling, the internet not only conflated the two but combined them to form the necessary conditions for Kaling to be “woman’d.”
Initially, Kaling faced backlash from conservative media outlets for her “woke” Scooby Doo reboot, “Velma.” Her individual success had long eclipsed her work for “The Office,” and she was no longer our obscure underdog. Liberal fans of Kaling joined the backlash once the show was released to scathing reviews. Criticism quickly grew to her other work as people pointed out her main characters tended to fall into a specific trope that seemingly took inspiration from Kaling’s own experiences.
This discovery gave people the license to criticize Kaling and her characters without separating the two. The narrative was Kaling only casts white male love interests because she hates her race, which is why a white man fathered her children, or did he? Questions of whether her writing has been able to evolve with changing comedic trends quickly become “Who is the father of Mindy Kaling’s baby and is she on Ozempic?” Even when there is room for valid and productive constructive conversations, we can’t refrain from psychoanalytic criticism when discussing women.
The questions levied against Anita Hill seem to have permeated our culture in the deep, dark corners of Hollywood Studios, media conglomerates and government institutions. We claim that #MeToo was the reckoning our culture needed to finally realize the ubiquity of gender violence, but all we’ve done is co-opt the role Joe Biden played in the 1991 hearings. It is no longer acceptable for men in power to espouse their hatred of women; we are capable of doing that ourselves.