I’ve returned from successfully moving in my daughter to college! The day I returned I tested positive for Covid, so I’ve basically been sleeping my way through processing tons of emotions. But I’m starting to feel better and am excited to be returning to writing.

When you’re processing traumatic events like sexual harassment or other types of workplace abuse, we all eventually ask questions designed to identify our role in what happened. Asking those questions is uncomfortable and unpleasant.

Nowadays, most of us know that we aren’t responsible for our own abuse. While it’s natural to ask what you could have done differently to change what happened, we know that there are larger forces at play that caused those things to occur: the patriarchy, internalized misogyny, or the culture. Yet despite the fact that these concepts have become a familiar part of our vocabulary, it can be difficult to understand the role the concepts play in our own lives.

In addition, there can be a considerable amount of shame in facing our own acceptance of those larger forces. Even if we’re comfortable talking about these big issues on a macro or societal level, it’s far more difficult to look at the extent to which we’ve internalized these things, and to see them in ourselves.

For those reasons, Reah Bravo’s new book Complicit: How Our Culture Enables Misbehaving Men was not a pleasurable read. In addition to having a real problem with many of her sweeping conclusions, the book is fundamentally contradictory—a contradiction you can see in its title. After all, complicity implies a shared responsibility for what’s happened, and yet the book purports to explore how “our culture” enables misbehaving men. That’s why I called this issue “How We Enable Misbehaving Men”— because that ambiguity about who “we” are shows up in every chapter.

To understand what I mean, let’s dive into the book.

Some Context

Reah Bravo is an American speechwriter currently living in Brussels. Earlier in her career, she worked for Charlie Rose, and was one of the women who came forward to tell the story of what she experienced.

Given this background—and knowing the truly horrific things Rose was exposed as having done—the title of Bravo’s book—Complicit—immediately makes you uncomfortable. How on earth could a victim of sexual harassment be complicit in her own abuse?

Perhaps for this reason, Bravo begins her book with a lengthy introduction. The first sentence of her book is: “Enough time has passed that I can say I regret calling Charlie Rose a sexual predator.” A few paragraphs later, Bravo explains that, while “Charlie was indeed a kind of predator, and I had been his prey,” as she spent more time analyzing what happened to her, she started to see “an ecosystem that we had both done our part to sustain.”

Thus, she wrote the book to reckon with “why, instead of immediately putting a forceful end to Charlie’s inappropriateness, I exhausted myself with pleasantries and attentive smiles. Why did I answer his lewd phone calls, silently endure his groping, and ignore it when he popped out naked in my presence? Why did I put up with it, even once?”

Ultimately, she decides that she was complicit in her own suffering. When Bravo says “complicit,” this is what she means:

In short, Bravo means that “the soft power of the patriarchy had its way with me, inspiring me to undermine my own potential as well as that of other women.” Despite the fact that her so-called complicity was unconscious and conditioned, she has written Complicit to seek to understand her role in it.

Bravo further labors to clarify that not everyone who has experienced workplace abuse is complicit in that abuse. She acknowledges a difference between women in a position like Bravo’s and women who endure abuse because they have no other financial option. The personal stories in her book focus “on women who are like me: educated, white, straight, and cisgender” because, while these women are subjected to the patriarchy, it also bestows benefits on them.

The Book Itself

Complicit has seven chapters, each of which explores an aspect of our culture—and in Bravo’s view also ourselves—that enables misbehaving men.

The first chapter, called “The High Price of Our Free Will,” talks about how (particularly American) themes of agency and free will lead us to underestimate the power of social systems. She says that, when women are told that we can do whatever we want, “it entices us to perceive systemic social problems as a question of individual aptitude—of one’s strength, savvy, or goodness.” p.20

Her second chapter talks about the “The Harm in Harmonizing.” It’s about the harm to ourselves and to society as a whole when we adapt to inappropriate, cruel, and inhumane workplaces. She attributes our willingness to adapt to the human desire to belong, amplified by the fact that studies show that the more “adverse, inane and indeed abusive” (p.59) a workplace is, the stronger our bonding can be. She also discusses how women (subject to the qualifications stated in her introduction) “safeguard the male sense of self” in order to protect systems of power. p.72

The third chapter, called “The Myth of Who We Are,” explains how we don’t always act in a way consistent with what we believe ourselves to be. We believe ourselves to be strong, powerful women, and yet submit in the face of sexual harassment at work, believing that we can even control the actions of known predators.

The fourth chapter, entitled “Consent Contextualized,” talks about the many contexts in which consent is not actually consent, such as when the power differential is too great or when women say it’s consensual to protect themselves from the fact that it’s not. When, as Bravo puts it, “our so-called consent was elicited by the murky and threatening externalities of a patriarchal world.” p.102

Chapter Five, “Footsolidering in Stilettos,” talks about how women “steadfastly march to narratives that keep our own subordination and broader systems of injustice in place.” p.124 She talks about how white women benefit from aspects of the patriarchy. She then discusses how women often pay a lot of money to fit into male-dominated workplaces.

Chapter Six is entitled “Show No Weakness” and talks about how our culture’s worship of toughness and “hard work” can lead us to accept cruelty and exploitation in the workplace.

Chapter 7, entitled “It’s Time We Talk About Narcissism,” discusses how male narcissism “reveals as much about us and our neoliberal, celebrity-driven, patriarchal society as it does the men in question.” p.167

As you may be able to see from these brief descriptions, Bravo frequently intermingles discussions of larger societal forces with discussions of general psychological principles. And rather than restricting herself to societal forces solely relevant to the workplace, she explores pop culture, female archetypes, and images in literature, music, and film. She also mixes in stories about her experiences working with Charlie Rose as well as ones from women she interviewed who had been sexually harassed by Rose or other men.

Perhaps the best example of this disconnect—from my least favorite chapter in the book—is in Chapter 3. Bravo starts out with a personal story about Charlie Rose, moves into a discussion of female archetypes dating back to ancient Greece, and then discusses how we tell and process our own stories. She talks about studies that explore how our brains fill in information we lack, and then moves to “tonic immobility” in rape victims. She then talks about the image of the “sensuous woman.” Then she concludes with a multi-page discussion of how images in the 1990s (90210, anyone?) made women into “fucking misogynist[s].” p.90.

There’s just so much there—and it’s not explored with much discipline.

Concluding Thoughts

Complicit is a very short book. Its text is just 196 pages. Yet there were many times I felt the book would have been far better as a long personal essay without all the research. (The book has 28-pages of notes at the end.)

I don’t write this with any type of malice. Bravo, understandably, conducted a deep search for explanations of what she experienced working with Charlie Rose. But the broader cultural explanations often clash with the more psychological ones. And there is a real danger in citing to general psychological propositions as an explanation for a cultural phenomenon simply because those propositions echo your own experience.

As I alluded to at the outset, these problems seem to emanate from the book’s title. Even understanding Bravo’s use of the term complicit, I’m much more comfortable with the notion that women have internalized societal messages about themselves than that, by internalizing those messages, we have become as guilty as those who created the system that manufactures them in the first place. Finally, if we do bear some responsibility for internalizing society’s messages, I don’t think Bravo has made the case that the field of psychology fully explains why we have.

Using the word complicit comes with baggage that you can’t erase by redefining the term. I came away wishing that Bravo had taken on that baggage head-on.

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