Diana Wichtel: Sleazeballs stuck in 1950s timewarp

COMMENT

Larry Flynt, Arnold Schwarzenegger and a porn star - you'd be hard-pressed to pick the odd one out, really - run for Governor of California. What, wasn't Anna Nicole Smith available?

Incredible. I've never been a big Ah-nold fan. The Terminator, maybe. But Kindergarten Cop? Hasta la vista, big guy. Still, his latest production, "Arnie and the Gropes of Wrath", has been unavoidable.

The other night at the movies, they were giving away toy Terminator 3 Arnies. He's looking at me out of one robotic eye as I write. Spooky.

Maybe that's what went wrong. He's played one too many robots. They always have scenes in those sorts of movies in which androids do cute, inappropriate things, like pouring coffee in their ear, shutting down all the spaceships systems and killing everyone or grabbing a woman's breast. They famously lack empathy and don't know any better. You don't want to get in their way when they're being playful.

Should we care about Arnie's groping when clearly not enough California voters did? In some ways, it's no big deal. There have always been gropers.

Get a bunch of women, any age, together over a bottle of wine and at some stage the gender war stories will come out. One friend was chased around the desk in an institution of higher learning every time she went to hand in an essay.

I once found myself pinned to a wall (Don't think of me as your tutor!) when I'd naively gone to have a coffee and discuss kinship systems among the Tikopia.

Then there were the times you'd be strap-hanging on a London tube so crowded you couldn't even turn around to see which sleazeball it was.

These days, we train our daughters to loudly say "Would the man behind me kindly stop pinching my bottom". In my day we were brought up to be nice and we mainly put up with it.

It never occurred to me to make a formal complaint, but then I never found myself in a situation I couldn't deal with.

I don't want to live in a world where you cast yourself as a victim of sexual harassment if a man says "You look nice today". But neither would we want to go back to accepting the sort of behaviour Arnie is accused of, as somehow biologically inevitable.

The Arnies of this world are stuck in a Playboy circa 1953 time warp, with an understanding of the opposite sex that could be best summarised as "Va-va-voom". Perhaps the slightly retro quaintness of his sleaziness makes his bad behaviour easier to forgive.

But he's kidding no one when he says he was just being playful. He was misusing his power. As one of his accusers put it: "What could you do? He was the highest-paid actor in the world. I was a peon."

At least he has taken a degree of responsibility, if not nearly enough, and apologised. Yet some commentators, some of them women, want to let him off the hook and blame women and their loose, modern ways for Arnie's wandering paws. If we're going to dress scantily and act like we enjoy sex, we should expect to be physically assaulted, apparently.

"It is unrealistic in human nature to look but not touch when goods are displayed temptingly within reach," said Rosemary McLeod in the Sunday Star Times. Well, break out the burkhas. And even they wouldn't necessarily get rid of gropers.

Arnie's bad behaviour spans a couple of decades. He didn't wait for Sex and the City or the g-string to come along.

In Victorian times, the unexpected sight of a female ankle was considered enough to inflame uncontrollable male passions. For decades women have gone to the beach in bikinis. Most men seem capable of managing the distinction between look and touch when it comes to women with whom they are not in an intimate relationship.

It's really not that difficult. Children learn by around the age of 3 where it is or is not okay to touch another person. Those who are still getting it wrong at Arnie's age are deeply sad and it's nobody's fault but their own. They are also very slow learners - exactly the sort of people we need in high public office.

So how on earth did he get in? Well, there was that key election promise not to make any more movies. And maybe we secretly like our celebrities and/or leaders to screw up. Look at the continued acceptability of Bill Clinton. Or even Paul Holmes who, if the political madness in the United States is contagious, could one day end up as Prime Minister.

At least after having to publicly fess up and apologise, they're less likely to suffer android moments when they think it's appropriate to praise themselves for being successful, popular and held in rather high regard.

It's easy to laugh. But there are things, apart from the general desirability of keeping one's hands to oneself, that our politicians could learn from this. The California experience demonstrates that if you show even a bit of humility in a tight spot, voters will forgive an awful lot.

In Arnie's case, they've possibly forgiven way too much. Can't wait for the sequel.