Katha Pollit: Mr. Schwarzenegger Gets a Pass

On Thursday, The Los Angeles Times published a 3,700-word front-page article in which six women accused Arnold Schwarzenegger of humiliating them with crude pawings and taunts. At the last minute, will the Barbarian be turned back at the gates? Don't bet on it.

For the charges to sway the recall at this late date, it will take more than the ad campaign being mounted by women's groups. Politicians and the press would have to treat the story as a major scandal with potentially devastating consequences for California, the nation, morality and Western civilization. One wonders what would happen if even a fraction of the energy expended on Bill Clinton's sex scandals was applied to Mr. Schwarzenegger.

Instead, reaction as been strangely subdued. Thursday night's "Hardball" was typical. Chris Matthews, who chose the curiously sweet, rather affectionate word "fondling" to describe Mr. Schwarzenegger's behavior, seemed mostly interested in getting Senator Dianne Feinstein to compare the actor's grotesqueries to Mr. Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky. The senator was so intent on being statesmanlike that she didn't even point out that Ms. Lewinsky — unlike the the women in The Los Angeles Times article — volunteered herself.
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Why is it so hard for commentators to come right out and say: here is a man who seems to have a long history of contempt for women, who uses his celebrity to get away with sexual humiliation — why does he belong in public life? Would that sound too square, too P.C., too, um, feminist? From the newsstand crammed with leering lad magazines like Maxim to all-male, all-the-time talk radio to the self-congratulatory misogyny of "The Man Show," aggressive male chauvinism is back in style, and Mr. Schwarzenegger is its standard-bearer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/opinion/05POLL.html

"This is unprecedented gutter, last-minute, gotcha journalism by the largest newspaper in the state," said Rob Stutzman, a spokesman for Mr. Schwarzenegger. "They're unfit to own a printing press, and we're not going to take it."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/national/05CALI.html?ex=1065931200&

They're not going to let the LA Times own a printing press??

yeepers ..

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It's been that way with Mr. Schwarzenegger and the press from the start. Neanderthal, callous behavior with women? Hey, we were all young once! Boasting of pushing Kristanna Loken's head in a toilet bowl in "Terminator 3?" It was just a joke, man. The stories fail to build, because they're reported in a way that minimizes them. A crowd of bodybuilders piling on a single woman is described as "group sex"; 25-year-old accusations are chewed over while fresh ones are ignored; crudely sexist treatment of women is dismissed as normal for movie stars, and therefore irrelevant to Mr. Schwarzenegger's political career — even though his celebrity is the basis of his political career. Or maybe the story just doesn't get picked up: The Wall Street Journal wonders why no one has made anything of the curious fact that the candidate hired a consultant whose two former wives testified that he beat them.

What's going on here? If Arnold Schwarzenegger were a Democrat, the right-wing news media — the tabloids, the shock jocks, the Bill O'Reillys and the Rush Limbaughs — would have sent him back to Austria long ago. (If he were a woman, needless to say, he could never have gotten into politics in the first place.) But the so-called liberal (actually centrist) news media is either too squeamish to paint Mr. Schwarzenegger's behavior in all its glory or too blasé and faux hip to care.

Why is it so hard for commentators to come right out and say: here is a man who seems to have a long history of contempt for women, who uses his celebrity to get away with sexual humiliation — why does he belong in public life? Would that sound too square, too P.C., too, um, feminist? From the newsstand crammed with leering lad magazines like Maxim to all-male, all-the-time talk radio to the self-congratulatory misogyny of "The Man Show," aggressive male chauvinism is back in style, and Mr. Schwarzenegger is its standard-bearer.