Reah Bravo is a speechwriter and author. She used to work as a news producer for the PBS program Charlie Rose. She holds a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University and was a Fulbright Fellow in Bahrain.
Below, Reah shares five key insights from her new book, Complicit: How Our Culture Enables Misbehaving Men. Listen to the audio version—read by Reah herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. In the moment, we’re not who we think we are.
While reporting for Complicit, the most frequent thing I heard from those who had experienced sexual misconduct, or been privy to it, started with: “I always thought of myself as…” We all think of ourselves as morally consistent people who behave with intention. But in real-time and under disparate power dynamics, we don’t always react as we might expect. We get awkward, laugh, freeze up, roll with whatever feels natural.
As understandable as this might sound, we fail to adequately recognize the profound impact that these initial, in-the-moment, unintentional reactions have on how we move forward and how we process our experiences. We’ll sometimes unconsciously create explanations for our behavior, reinterpreting events in a way that enhances our sense of control.
For example, when I first began working for my former boss, the broadcast interviewer Charlie Rose, I would uncontrollably respond with nothing but smiles and precisely the receptivity he wanted—what I now know came from a place of both fear and cultural conditioning. All the while, though, I told myself something different and more comforting: that I was merely “managing” Rose with my feminine wiles.
But then there came an occasion when I simply couldn’t explain away my behavior, at least not in a flattering way. It’s a story I thought I’d take to my grave, not publish in a book.
After an evening work event in 2008, I was riding in the backseat of Rose’s chauffeured Mercedes. He was leaning into me, gripping the back of my hair, and asking me what I wanted. “Tell me, huh? Tell me what you want.” He often demanded affirmation from staff about how badly we all wanted to work for him and how devoted we were to his brand, but as he kept growling this question, I became unclear about the reference. Numb with exhaustion from work and the stress of trying to manage moments like these, I told him: “I have a small vagina.”
I had no idea why I said it, other than I’d begun watching Sarah Silverman’s new show, which was heavy on vagina jokes. Nor do I know how my vagina compares size-wise to those of other women. I did assume at the time, though—given his age and multiple open-heart surgeries—that Rose wasn’t a paragon of male virility and that maybe sex wasn’t that easy for him. Looking back, I’d like to think I was throwing the lewdness back at him, trying to make him feel like the weak one for once.
A better explanation, however, most likely concerns what I heard from psychologists I interviewed for my book: that to be human is to frequently be a crackpot. Without understanding this fact, shame and self-loathing set in that night. I was somebody who talked dirty to her older, lecherous boss, which made me somebody who deserved his treatment.
2. Our stories serve the status quo.
The clearest thing to emerge from my reporting is how much we all rely on inadequate stories to understand our complex lived experiences of sexual misconduct and workplace cruelty. In fact, we all generally rely on the same overly simplistic stories, derived from the same patriarchal culture that has shaped our very consciousness. We lack the language or conceptual framework to better understand what’s happening. And so, we fall back on concepts that concern things like consent and personal agency and use them in a way that protects the status quo.
I use the term patriarchal narrative to describe any kind of story, explanation, or assumption that works to justify the inequality in our culture’s gender binary—that leaves male entitlement and female subjugation the default social order. It’s amazing how quickly, and sometimes inexplicably, we default to them.
“Self-blame might be the most common, most effective, and most appealing patriarchal narrative because it makes things easier by putting them in our control.”
I spoke with an attorney named Meredith Holley, who started her dream job with a law firm known for civil rights litigation when she was 32. There, she would represent plaintiffs in many cases involving sexual harassment. Among the partners at the firm was a man who would touch Holley unnecessarily and make demeaning comments to her. He once compared her to the sweetness of some chocolate he was chewing, then made a veiled comment about wishing he knew what she tasted like.
How did Holley, a self-described feminist trained to address illegal discrimination, respond? By blaming herself. She told me that she figured she was wearing the wrong dresses, that she talked too much, or that she giggled too much—all things that she would never have assumed about a client. She was, after all, professionally versed in the real harm of such assumptions.
Self-blame might be the most common, most effective, and most appealing patriarchal narrative because it makes things easier by putting them in our control. We don’t have to address the larger sexism or injustice at play if it’s our fault. We just have to tell ourselves to do better next time.
Patriarchal narratives are not good for anyone—including men. They underlie an idealized version of masculinity that inspires emotional detachment and aggression, depriving men of meaningful relationships and love. In America, men are nearly four times more likely than women to take their own lives. The American Psychological Association attributes this statistic to the toll that notions of traditional masculinity take on men.
3. Generation X marks a precarious spot.
The #MeToo movement sparked a lot of discussion about generational divides. Frequently depicted as boomers against millennials, the two sides supposedly disagree over what’s abuse versus, say, life. In truth, no such generational divide holds up to scrutiny. Most differences described as “generational” have more to do with the stage of life—e.g., someone who has spent many years in the workforce holds different expectations about office conduct than someone younger who has just started their job.
Rather than fixating on generational divides, there’s far more to glean from historical moments of cultural change regarding narratives about personal agency and sexual consent. The 90s was one such moment, and it came down mercilessly on Gen X women coming of age.
In 2019, a friend from home messaged me to say that Luke Perry’s death inspired her to rewatch Beverly Hills 90210. The show was hugely popular when we were in high school. It addressed some serious issues, like alcoholism and suicide, but its cast of all-white female characters lacked depth and assertiveness. They also looked amazing in bikinis, save for the super smart, progressively minded editor of the school newspaper, who never wore them.
“I’m suddenly rethinking a lot about our formative years,” wrote my friend. “I was such a victim of needing to be the cool girl that I was a f–king misogynist.”
“Rather than fixating on generational divides, there’s far more to glean from historical moments of cultural change regarding narratives about personal agency and sexual consent.”
Indeed, the 90s helped to make us all f–cking misogynists. It was a cultural inflection point when media, entertainment, and politics became especially sexualized and when women’s empowerment was increasingly conflated with their own sexual objectification.
In 1994, my junior year of high school, the clinical psychologist Mary Pipher sounded the alarm in her book Reviving Ophelia that adolescent girls were now needing medical help because of a “girl-poisoning culture.” She linked the depiction of women in advertising, magazines, television shows, and movies to an inability of teenage girls to live authentically. A threatening, often contradictory world had emerged with many of the same harmful gender ideologies of past generations but with new, more insidious elements—elements now confronted by young women and girls who second-wave feminists had raised to believe that they were equal to their male peers.
Things got dicey for those of us developing our sexual agency in such a culture. Lynn Phillips is a social and developmental psychologist who began studying the heterosexual experiences of female college students, who she believed had learned to downplay male aggression while blurring the line between consent and coercion. Phillips wrote that “whereas feminist scholars may speak of male domination and women’s victimization as rather obvious phenomena, young women, raised to believe in their own independence, invulnerability, and sexual entitlement, may not so readily embrace such concepts, even as they are raped, harassed, and battered by men.”
In this new cultural environment, our sexual encounters became a zero-sum game. We were either up for sex or we weren’t. We were either in control or a hapless victim. Such conditions encouraged us to overlook questionable aspects of encounters with men as a form of self-protection. We Gen X women weren’t the first nor the last generation to experience sexual abuse, but we were uniquely equipped to downplay it when we did—the consequences of which we’re still dealing with today.
4. America is uniquely primed for workplace abuse.
I spoke with a German artist named Karin Bruckner, who moved to the United States in 1989 and shortly thereafter began working at the firm of the famed architect Richard Meier. Early in her job, and as reported in the New York Times, Bruckner was making photocopies in the supply room when Meier lumbered in, pressed his body into hers, and began rubbing himself up and down. She initially froze in shock, but once the moment was over, she went straight to a senior associate and shared what had happened. His response, along with most everyone else she told at the firm, was generally one of indifference.
Germany clearly had its share of misbehaving men, but these things seemed to play out differently in America, where she described a powerfully individualistic, competitive, achievement-oriented cultural force at play. “You know how an American refrigerator is so much bigger than a European Fridge?” she asked me. “The same applied to the whole phenomenon of what was happening [at the office].”
I knew what she meant. I’ve now lived and worked outside of the U.S. for more than a decade, and I believe Americans are uniquely conditioned to overlook sexual misconduct and other professional mistreatment.
“We wear it as a badge of honor, an indication that we have what it takes.”
We’re a hyper-individualistic country driven by a foundational faith in free will and the American dream. We’re a society centered around work as the most important means by which we prove our inherent worth, making careerism a form of tunnel vision. Add to this cultural context extreme income inequality and precious little social safety net, and we are all the less inclined not just to call out workplace abuse but even recognize it. In fact, sometimes the abuse itself becomes a heroic element of our personal story. We wear it as a badge of honor, an indication that we have what it takes.
Polling consistently shows that Americans are outliers in myriad respects—including our faith that hard work pays off, our belief that we can control our destinies, and a kind of disturbing pride in being overworked. But particularly resonant for me was research indicating that Americans are far more likely than people in other countries to resort to self-blame for our hardships. It’s simply not in our nature to fault the larger context or system at play.
5. We have to talk narcissism.
For all its popular usage—and misusage—narcissism is an undeniably useful framework for understanding how the unthinkable comes to pass in workplaces. Not every sexual harasser or abusive boss is a narcissist. Nor is every narcissist a sexual harasser or an abusive boss. But time and time again, people described to me the behavior of their male superiors in terms that fit a narcissistic picture of abuse—one I knew all too well having worked for Rose.
Now, I’m not looking to make armchair diagnoses regarding narcissism as a personality disorder. I leave that to the medical professionals. Rather, I’m using narcissism and narcissistic as descriptors of personality traits that, when attributed to the person in charge, prove incredibly detrimental to our collective capacity and well-being. We all get by with a dollop of self-delusion. But for a narcissist, the gap between their real and ideal self is so big that the rest of us get stuck treading in its absurdity, losing our moral bearings along the way.
In my book, I tell the story of when the CBC celebrity and broadcast personality Jian Ghomeshi became worried that the Toronto Star was about to publish accusations against him of sexual abuse. He decided to get ahead of the story by calling a meeting with his network’s executives, to whom he explained that he’d been with women who sometimes liked things rough in the bedroom and that he sometimes obliged them. To illustrate this, he shared photos of a woman’s bruised and broken rib, along with lewd text messages on his company phone.
It turns out the Star wasn’t about to publish the story, but after what he had just provided his bosses, his contract was nonetheless terminated. Exactly the kind of scrutiny into his treatment of women that he was trying to avoid was ignited, along with a trove of allegations that he was mentally and physically abusive to his staff. Whether Ghomeshi thought of himself as a man with unquestionable morals or whether he simply felt entitled to do as he pleased, his self-delusion illustrated the wrecking-ball force of male narcissism in workplaces.
One of his former producers, Rachel Matlow, described Ghomeshi’s meeting with executives as the perfect encapsulation of him as a boss, saying: “A narcissist can’t help but think they have the power to drive not just the narrative but the reality.”
Narcissistic men often do drive the narrative, be it with their temper, impulsiveness, vindictiveness, manipulativeness, shrewdness, or lack of empathy. In our individualistic, work-driven society, their grandiose notions of self-importance often get construed as markers of what it takes to succeed—indicators of true leadership and male genius. Narcissism reveals as much about the men in question as it does about us and our vulnerability—individually, institutionally, and culturally—to an extreme level of male self-aggrandizement.
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