A couple brief thoughts on the “Pence Policy” and the post-Weinstein moment

The last month or so has been an incredible time to be alive. The United States has seen a reckoning when it comes to powerful men who abused their power in some of the most vile ways imaginable. They have run the gambit from not-at-all surprising (Louis C.K.) to actually-kind-of shocking (Matt Lauer).

But this isn’t about those men.

It’s about the fallout from those men.

There was about a week or so during the 2016 election cycle in which a story about Mike Pence’s policy regarding meetings with women came to light. The jist: “Pence told The Hill that he never eats alone with a woman other than his wife and that he won’t attend events featuring alcohol without her by his side, either.”

My family leans very heavily to the left. My parents have always voted for democrats, we live in the state of Vermont, and it’s not just a white-guilt-Get-Out liberalism that runs through our family — my mother, father, sister, brother, and I truly care about progressive values.

That’s why I was quite surprised when at a recent family dinner my “Pence’s policy in regards to women is trash” opinion was met with pushback across the board. My father referenced having a somewhat similar policy, and my sister believed that if the trade off had to be similar policies popping up around Washington in order for these women to be believed without question, it was a fair trade off.

At the time, I couldn’t quite place what bothered me so much about Pence’s policy. We all agreed it was patently ridiculous on the surface, but we disagreed on whether it might still be necesarry.

I’m still unsure of the necessity of the policy. My opinion at the time was that if you are a truly good man, you should be able to eat with whomever you like and not have to worry about people believing possible allegations to emerge from those meetings. The pushback was that this was naive, and that there were cases where a man’s reputation could be gouged regardless of all prior context. I’m still not sure I buy that, and I believe that The Boogeyman Of The False Accusation is more of a myth than a reality. But again: I may be naive.

And it’s not the main focus on this article. The main focus of this article is what I thought of later in the week but hadn’t been able to articulate that night. It’s what really bothers me most about the Pence policy, and specifically in the post-Weinstein moment we’re having right now. It is this:

This should be an incredible moment for women. It should be a moment in which a tiny portion of the patriarchy is being toppled, and more and more women are moving into positions of power, as it becomes clear that many men sadly do not have the strength of character to handle positions of power.

Instead, I feel as though the result of this flooding of long-overdue allegations will be more and more men implementing policies similar to Pence’s. And that hurts women. A lot.

What was supposed to be a moment to shatter the Boys Club like a Miley Cyrus-led wrecking ball, is instead going to be a moment when “Boys” (a word that in and of itself makes my skin crawl a bit with visions of post-frat 50-year-olds holding onto their high-school quarterback golden years) huddle together more than ever. If you were going to make a new hire, would you lean towards the candidate you could never eat alone with, or the one with whom you never had to even have that thought? It’s just another hurdle that women have to clear, and another advantage for men. The crazy part is that, if that is the end result, it is coming in what is supposed to be a stepping stone moment for the entire gender.

Hopefully I’m wrong about this potential backlash, but it certainly seems plausible. And that would be a truly unfair outcome for the brave women who have put their names forward in the past few months in hopes of moving our country forward.