{"id":70227,"date":"2017-04-20T17:33:02","date_gmt":"2017-04-20T22:33:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=70227"},"modified":"2017-04-20T17:33:02","modified_gmt":"2017-04-20T22:33:02","slug":"bill-oreilly-was-paid-more-to-leave-fox-than-fox-paid-the-women-he-harassed-is-this-progress-yes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2017\/04\/20\/bill-oreilly-was-paid-more-to-leave-fox-than-fox-paid-the-women-he-harassed-is-this-progress-yes\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill O&#8217;Reilly was paid more to leave FOX than FOX paid the women he harassed. Is this progress? Yes."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes you have to take the long view.<\/p>\n<p>This week Bill O&#8217;Reilly &#8212; arguably the most powerful political commentator in America &#8212; was let go from his position at Fox News. The dismissal came grudgingly. News broke that he and Fox had paid out $13 million dollars to women claiming O&#8217;Reilly sexually harassed them; Fox didn&#8217;t budge. They renewed his contract. There was outcry and protests. The company yawned. But when advertisers started dropping The O&#8217;Reilly Factor, they caved. O&#8217;Reilly is gone.<\/p>\n<div class=\"getty embed image\" style=\"background-color: #fff; display: inline-block; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; color: #a7a7a7; font-size: 11px; width: 100%; max-width: 594px;\">\n<div style=\"padding: 0; margin: 0; text-align: left;\"><a style=\"color: #a7a7a7; text-decoration: none; font-weight: normal !important; border: none; display: inline-block;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.gettyimages.com\/detail\/669920082\" target=\"_blank\">Embed from Getty Images<\/a><\/div>\n<div style=\"overflow: hidden; position: relative; height: 0; padding: 66.666667% 0 0 0; width: 100%;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"display: inline-block; position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; margin: 0;\" src=\"\/\/embed.gettyimages.com\/embed\/669920082?et=hFpxuzAbQO9TWLdxuFgZpw&amp;tld=com&amp;viewMoreLink=off&amp;sig=XM4OMnhf-Zq1CKLjj087EzQWlZ4unAgafCbjY6R1h6g=&amp;caption=true\" width=\"594\" height=\"396\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p style=\"margin: 0;\">\n<\/div>\n<p>Fox clearly didn&#8217;t care about women &#8212; not &#8220;women&#8221; in the abstract, nor the women who worked at\u00a0their company\u00a0&#8212; but they did care about their bottom line. And so did the companies buying advertising space, who decided that it was bad PR to prop up a known sexual harasser.\u00a0Perhaps the decision-makers at those companies also thought it was the right thing to do. Who knows.<\/p>\n<p>Is this progress?<\/p>\n<p>Donald Trump\u00a0is on record gleefully explaining that being a celebrity gives him the ability to get away with sexual battery. That&#8217;s a crime, <a href=\"https:\/\/definitions.uslegal.com\/s\/sexual-battery\/\">defined<\/a> as\u00a0unwanted contact with an &#8220;intimate part of the body&#8221; that is done to sexually arouse, gratify, or abuse. He&#8217;s president anyway.<\/p>\n<p>And O&#8217;Reilly? He walked away with $25 million in severance, <em>twice<\/em> what all of his\u00a0victims together have received in hush money.\u00a0Fox gaves Roger Ailes much more to go away: $40 million. Also ousted after multiple allegations of sexual harassment, his going away present was also twice what the women he had harassed received.<\/p>\n<p>Man, sexism really does pay.<\/p>\n<p>But they&#8217;re gone. Ailes and O&#8217;Reilly are gone. Trump is President but Billy Bush, the <em>Today<\/em> host who cackled when Trump said &#8220;grab &#8217;em by the pussy,&#8221; was fired, too. \u00a0Bill Cosby finally had some comeuppance after decades of sexual abuse and rape. At the very least, his reputation is destroyed. Maybe these &#8220;victories&#8221; &#8212; for women, for feminists, for equality, for human decency &#8212; were driven purely by greed. And arguably, for all intents and purposes, the men are getting away with it. Trump, Ailes, O&#8217;Reilly, Bush, and Cosby are all doing <em>fine.\u00a0<\/em>Nobody&#8217;s in jail; everybody&#8217;s rich beyond belief.<\/p>\n<p>But we know what they did.<\/p>\n<p>Until at least the 1960s, sexual harassment\u00a0&#8212; along with domestic violence, stalking, sexual assault, and rape &#8212; went largely unregulated, unnoticed, and unnamed. There was no language to even talk about what women experienced in the workplace. Certainly no outrage, no ruined reputations, no dismissals, and no severance packages. The phrase &#8220;sexual harassment&#8221; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.calstate.edu\/HR\/SHLaw.pdf\">didn&#8217;t exist<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In 1964, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, it became illegal to discriminate against women at work, but only because the politicians who opposed the bill thought adding sex to race, ethnicity, national origin, and religion would certainly tank it. That&#8217;s how ridiculous the idea of women&#8217;s rights was at the time. But that was then.\u00a0Today <a href=\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/families\/2017\/04\/18\/millennials-not-pushing-the-envelope-not-rejecting-the-gender-revolution\/\">almost no one<\/a> thinks women shouldn&#8217;t have equal rights at work.<\/p>\n<p>What has happened at Fox News, in Bill Cosby&#8217;s hotel rooms, in the Access Hollywood bus, and on election day is proof that sexism is alive and well. But it&#8217;s not as healthy as it once was. Thanks to hard work by activists, politicians, and citizens, things are getting better. Progress is usually incremental. It requires endurance.\u00a0Change is slow. Excruciatingly so. And this is what it looks like.<\/p>\n<span class=\"ft_signature\"><em><a href=\"http:\/\/lisa-wade.com\/\">Lisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/American-Hookup-New-Culture-Campus\/dp\/039328509X?ie=UTF8&amp;*Version*=1&amp;*entries*=0\">American Hookup<\/a><em>, a book about college sexual culture; a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Gender-Interactions-Institutions-Lisa-Wade\/dp\/0393931072?ie=UTF8&amp;*Version*=1&amp;*entries*=0\">textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/lisa-wade.com\/intro\/\">Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a><em>.\u00a0You can follow her on <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/lisawade\">Twitter<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/lisawadephd\/\">Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes you have to take the long view. This week Bill O&#8217;Reilly &#8212; arguably the most powerful political commentator in America &#8212; was let go from his position at Fox News. The dismissal came grudgingly. News broke that he and Fox had paid out $13 million dollars to women claiming O&#8217;Reilly sexually harassed them; Fox [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":70229,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[12508,36,98,23633,55,2095,2102,2094,2098,23680,2100,253,85,283,76],"class_list":["post-70227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-activismsocial-movements","tag-economics","tag-capitalism","tag-economics-corporations","tag-gender","tag-gender-feminismactivism","tag-gender-history","tag-gender-politics","tag-gender-prejudicediscrimination","tag-gender-sexism","tag-gender-work","tag-history","tag-politics","tag-prejudicediscrimination","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2017\/04\/7-1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70227"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70228,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70227\/revisions\/70228"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}