The lure of the lecher

Simon Cowell and Dannii’s fling was no casting couch moment. But there are plenty of examples of men who do abuse power, says Suzanne Harrington

SO Simon Cowell and Dannii Minogue allegedly had a no-strings fling behind the scenes on X Factor. Is this the dreaded casting couch? Hardly. The ‘affair’ was reported as though it besmirched Dannii’s honour, with Cowell portrayed as an abuser of privilege.

While the media outrage found nothing solid, the suggestion was that Cowell should have kept the revelations quiet to protect Dannii’s virtue. The implication was he chose not to hush the story up, because it portrayed him, according to one paper, as “red-blooded”. David Walliams, however, recently teased Cowell about being gay and Cowell has said he is used to the joke, but unless you’re a professional footballer, it’s not like being gay is a big deal, so could the lack of an injunction be bed-post notching?)

Cowell’s alleged red-bloodedness is described in a new biography, Sweet Revenge: The Intimate Life Of Simon Cowell, by former BBC journalist Tom Bower. Bower writes that Cowell told an unnamed friend about the liaisons with Minogue. The X Factor boss said that he was attracted to Minogue. It was hardly the stuff of Cathy and Heathcliff: “There were a few bonks and then it petered out while I was in America.” Cowell apparently referred to Minogue as a “new toy” after adding her to the X Factor judging panel in 2007.

While none of this is pleasant — one imagines Cowell as a smirking badger with man boobs — it cannot be filed under abuse of power. Minogue, despite being ‘vulnerable’ after a separation from her long-term partner, is not a helpless, powerless woman. She is wealthy and successful. She is not a cleaner, an intern, or a nanny.

Male sexual abuse of power is as old as female sexual exploitation of lack of power, but rather more bullying and unpleasant.

The classic example is Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, the 21-year-old intern. Lewinsky was young, daft and inexperienced — and Clinton was the president of the United States. He abused his power to have sexual contact with her, because he could. She had no idea what she was getting into, and was googly-eyed with infatuation. His power turned her on — her availability turned him on. As the most powerful man in the world, he should have known better.

But it was consensual. An abuse of power, yes, but one in which both parties were momentarily willing.

Unlike the horrid case of Dominique Strauss Kahn and the hotel worker. Here, the power imbalance was grotesque — a rich, powerful politician, married to a devoted millionaire, with access to the best lawyers, who was accused of having raped an immigrant hotel worker when she came to do his room. While the impact of the allegations on Strauss Kahn’s political career was negligible, he was not convicted of any crime. Instead, the woman who reported the alleged rape was publicly derided and disbelieved.

That politicians may abuse their power sexually is nothing new. Roman emperors made a career of it, but it continues in the most innocuous places.

While big US guns like Thomas Jefferson and the Kennedy brothers were famous for, respectively, impregnating their slaves and having loads of sex with anyone they could (JFK used the White House swimming pool for liaisons with various women — two of whom were, famously, Marilyn Monroe and mobster mistress Judith Exner, and Bobby Kennedy is alleged to have tried to seduce his bereaved sister-in-law on board the presidential yacht soon after JFK’s death), sexual abuse of power happens where you’d least expect it.

Like Norway. Norway is one of the most equal places for men and women, who share power and responsibility fairly.

Yet, earlier this year, Norway’s Liberal Party was rocked by the scandal of its 43-year-old deputy leader raping a 17-year-old junior party member. And it was not a one-off. Another Norwegian politician, this time with the Progress Party, was recently charged with a long list of sexual misconduct, including filming men without their consent.

You do not need to be a politician to abuse your power. Even being connected with a politician is enough, as was reported in the Washington Post when a dozen secret service agents were removed from a trip to Cartagena in Colombia, where they had been sent to protect US president Barack Obama during a recent diplomatic visit.

“We left the boss down,” said army general Martin Dempsey at a press conference.

Their abuse of power? The secret service men had refused to pay for the services of prostitutes they had hired, and the prostitutes reported them to the police for non-payment. While prostitution is not illegal in designated tolerance zones in Colombia, not paying for services is — especially if you think that because you are connected to a president, you don’t have to pay.

Then there’s doing it with the help. Nannies are popular if you are powerful, rich, famous, or a combination of all three.

Actor Jude Law got it on with his children’s nanny, as did Arnold Schwarzenegger; Law was in a relationship with Sienna Miller, Arnie was married to Maria Shriver (ironically, a relative of JFK).

The nannies were employees, nothing more. David Beckham was alleged to have done it with one of his family’s employees, Rebecca Loos; she used the moment to gain some of her own limelight, albeit misguidedly, given that she ended up harvesting pig semen on reality television.

Tiger Woods brought about the end of his marriage by having lots and lots of liaisons — again, because he could.

It is expected of footballers to take advantage of their position — as young, fit and super-rich, they attract women who hope to snag a footballer boyfriend and access the kudos of extreme materialism. This is hardly an abuse of power, as it is transactional; both parties have clearly defined — ahem — goals.

The opposite extreme of this transactional dynamic is the clerical sexual abuse of children, where the abuser has all the power and the victim none; this is the worst kind of power abuse, because it involves the double whammy of powerful/powerless added to the ultimate imbalance of adult/child.

This is not to say that powerful men automatically abuse their power. While the majority of men are decent, respectful human beings, there are those who sexually harass, who intimidate, who boundary-bash, who use sexual misconduct to intimidate subordinates.

Why do some men do this?

“Power,” says Debbie Dougherty, a professor of communication at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and author of a report on the subject.

“It was the common answer. It came up repeatedly. However, what I found were multiple definitions of power.”

Dougherty conducted research into the sexual abuse of power, using workers at a large healthcare organisation as her discussion-group guinea pigs.

For men, she concluded, power comes from formal authority, which is why sexual harassment from a male boss or supervisor is seen by many men as different from sexual harassment from a male colleague of equal status (this is deemed more often as a ‘misunderstanding’).

Women do not see it like that, instead viewing all men — and not just those in power — as having the potential to sexually harass.

You don’t have to be in charge to be deemed potentially predatory. You just have to be male.