Protecting Our Daughters: Harvey Weinstein, Stanley Milgram, and the Cult of Compliance

Dana Goswick (University of Melbourne)

The 2022 film She Said  includes a 2-minute wire tape recording in which you hear the actual voices of Harvey Weinstein and Ambra Gutierrez.  Weinstein is trying to persuade Gutierrez to come up to his room; she is resisting.  When I heard this wire tap, I immediately thought of three things: (1) Look how similar the language Weinstein uses to persuade/force Guiteirrez to his bed is to the language Stanley Milgram used sixty years ago in his obedience to authority experiments to persuade/force men to electrically shock other men.  (2) Look how similar the language Weinstein uses is to the language I use to persuade/force my daughter to get her immunization shots.  (3) Is the way we raise our daughters -- particularly e.g., when we force them to do things with their bodies they don't want to do (such as getting shots, taking baths, combing their hair) inadvertently making them more vulnerable to predators like Weinstein by teaching them resistance is futile?  In this talk I examine (i) the ways in which we persuade others to do things that, reflectively, they don't really want to do, (ii) why people generally comply so readily, (iii) the after-effects of complying, and (iv) how we -- as individuals and as a society -- can inure ourselves from complying with commands we don't really want to obey.