Mr. Bean, who is an invention of the comic Rowan Atkinson, had the measure of Mohammed Al Fayed. When they met at Harrods, Al Fayed, who was as hungry for celebrity endorsement as he was for young women, stuck his hand out in greeting. Mr. Bean also stuck his hand out: then he put his finger to his nose and waggled it, as children do to show contempt. Sometimes popular culture – and children of popular culture – can tell the truth. Sometimes only they will.
The emerging Al Fayed scandal has an awful familiarity: as soon as you hear it, you know it is true. My response is less grief than ennui, and, as ever, a sense of the wreckage of women’s common dreams: being treated as worthless can ruin you. At least twenty women, one as young as fifteen, say Al Fayed attacked them at locations including Harrods, the ghastly Knightsbridge emporium he owned until 2010. It’s said that Harrods will sell you anything, and he seems to have taken that principle to heart. It is likely he will join the growing gallery of the famous and unpunished twentieth century predator: the CPS declined to charge Al Fayed, who died last year. How many more are still to come?
When a scandal like this erupts it is usually treated as an anomaly, because that is easy to ignore. Denial seems essential: not for the victims, but for a society that wants to pretend it is not a haven for predators and, by doing so, becomes one. Before she died in 2017, Jill Saward, who was raped inside her father’s vicarage at Ealing when she was 21, told me that people don’t want to believe their fathers, husbands and sons are capable of assault, and the price of this shared delusion is paid by young women. Saward’s face was put on the front page of a tabloid just four days after she was raped. She was attacked, and then commodified, like a creature in a fairy tale. Myth is, by nature, distancing. That is what it is for.
When I was young, being female was not something to enjoy, but to navigate carefully
When I was young, being female was not something to enjoy, but to navigate carefully: there was always a terrible jeopardy in it. When I look back on the mild workplace assaults and the insinuations — so long ago I feel they were directed at a different woman — what strikes me most is how little they had to do with sex. I don’t think men who harass women at work want sex: at least not principally. It is a function of inadequacy and the dominion that masks it: putting you on your knees, where you belong. On my first day at a national newspaper, a journalist told me I looked like Monica Lewinsky. Then he asked me if I wanted a cigar: you might remember what Clinton did to Lewinsky with a cigar. I knew enough to smirk, because I also knew that if I complained, I would be the one to be expelled. Sexual harassment was part of a zero-sum game: men protecting their power, lest women take it from them.
I was drunk for my 20s, and, in a desolate way, that protected me from the emotional impact of sexual harassment. If you are dangerously emotionally cauterized you can’t be hurt further, and I feel for women more innocent, and more badly harmed. Don’t be fooled by the outrage Al Fayed’s exposure will, so briefly, incite. It is part of the cycle, which always ends where it begins. I will go so far as to say it is part of the denial. He will be portrayed as a singular monster with singular vices. He wasn’t.
I met him once, at a dog fashion show at Harrods. Models were hired to accompany the dogs down the — what? — dog walk? and I watched Al Fayed insinuate his way into their dressing room. Twenty years later I remember their shared glances, and obvious unease. They feared him. When I see a man like that with a young woman, I want to tell him, urgently: that smile is not desire, it’s embarrassment. But that is only since I progressed beyond the age of common lust. It’s another truism of being female: by the time you have the voice to name it, no one can hear.
