Feminist Fuck No: It’s Not The Penis That Makes Men Sexual Harass Women, It’s Power

Early this week, Democratic candidate for Michigan’s Attorney General Position, Dana Nessel, released a provocative ad for election campaign asking: which candidate do you trust most not to show you their penis in a professional setting?

Nessel’s answer is, on its face, simple: the candidate you can trust the most to not flash you their dick is the candidate that doesn’t have one. Therefore, you should vote for her — and support the idea of an “all-female ticket” for the Michigan Democrats in 2018, with a push for women to serve as the State’s Senator, Governor, Attorney General and Secretary of State.

But there’s a crucial point Nessel misses: no men in elected offices doesn’t mean that there will be no people with penises. It simply means there will be no male privileged and male-identified people in positions of power harassing women with impunity. Although Nessel could be referring to solely the fact that she doesn’t have a penis, she is transphobic and flat-out incorrect in pushing a rhetoric implying that any woman candidate wouldn’t have a penis, and therefore wouldn’t be able to flash it at her unwilling co-workers. Trans women exist, and their biological makeup doesn’t make them prone to sexual harassment in a professional setting. Though this was probably not Nessel’s intention, the narrative this ad pushes grossly resonates with current hysteria over trans women in women’s bathrooms or locker rooms or other female spaces. And it ignores a critical point: what women are systemically and universally terrified of isn’t so much the penis as the ways in which cis men wield them against them, and use them as instruments to sexually harass and assault us.

That isn’t to say Nessel doesn’t make a wider point about men, as opposed to people with penises. While her campaign, with its biological essentialism, also excludes a critical discussion of trans men and masculine presenting nonbinary people and how they fit into gendered power dynamics in the workplace, there’s an important question she asks about giving cis men even more power in the workplace and in politics. The wave of allegation upon allegation that has hit us from the start of the #MeToo campaign — in Hollywood, in politics on the right and the left, in journalism, in the lives of working-class women and in literally every other professional and personal sphere imaginable — has reminded us of the pervasive toxicity of cis men. Nessel’s campaign makes more sense when you phrase it like this: which cis men, if any, can we trust anymore? Al Franken was one of the first public cases for the center and left to confront sexual harassment among their own. And it was followed by exposure of many more men on the left in politics and journalism: including socialist commentators, feminist favorites and the slew of ‘woke’ men and masculine presenting folk on twitter leveraging their anti-oppression politics to charm and coerce young leftist women on Twitter into their bedrooms.

On this blog, we’ve repeatedly articulated that our politics are intersectional; merely supporting a female political candidate on the basis of her identity as a woman  — especially when the candidate is a neoliberal, or a white feminist, or actively oppresses other women of more marginalized backgrounds  — is not a feminist act. That should remain true for all of the popular women candidates, whether it’s Kamala Harris snubbing the rights of Palestinian women and trans women, or Hillary Clinton confessing to using slave labor on her private property. Nessel herself is a troubling candidate for other reasons, too; on this blog, we have expressed some skepticism at the politics of any ‘good’ prosecutor. And her analysis of men in power ignores that women can be perpetrators of gender-based violence as well.

But Nessel’s question, if rephrased, is harrowing and timely: as much as we cannot support women just on the strength of being women, how much can we trust and support any (but especially cis) men in positions of power at all?  How do we move on after allegation after allegation and harrowing personal experience after experience to distinguish between the men we can trust to not flash us in the workplace and the men we can’t? What indicator can we use, when we can’t use someone’s political position, anti-oppression politics, or passion about feminism to tell? And what work do men need to figure out how to do before they earn the right to win back our trust?

These are questions that are essential to us to ask as we face two long and difficult election years ahead in 2018 and 2020. And they must stay on our mind as we’re confronted with elected offices, newsrooms, corporate HQs, and entertainment centers filled with sexual harassers and rapists. Yet we — and Nessel — should ask this question in a way that doesn’t exclude already marginalized women in our own communities. We can fight for the importance of substituting men in positions of power with women without throwing our trans sisters under the bus, and without oversimplifying important conversations that need to be had about gender, masculinity and power. Perhaps a more inclusive tone wouldn’t have been as catchy and attention-grabbing as “vote for the candidate who doesn’t have a penis” — but the cost of what that witty catchphrase implies may be too high for employing it to be worth it.

Header image via.