When Power Wears a Friendly Face

I have been spending time lately with Iris Brosch, the photographer and artist who worked closely with Shere Hite for more than a decade. Together we are exploring how to bring more of that work — the photographs, the intimacy, the whole charged world of it — back into public view.

I knew about Shere Hite. I knew the Hite Report on Female Sexuality— the book that sold more than 50 million copies and defied male dominance over how women’s sexuality was defined and discussed. What I didn’t know was the full scale of what she had done, and what had been done to her in return. The more I looked, the more I understood why her work still unsettles people — and why it still matters.

Something else happened in the process. Iris and I kept talking, and the conversations started pulling at something personal. I found myself asking a question I had never quite asked before: where in my own life had male power pressed against me? Where had I felt it, even if I hadn’t named it at the time?

And yes, it happened. I was aware of it at the time — I just never spoke about it. Why? That’s harder to answer. I think the truth is simply that I was able to handle it on my own, without lasting harm, and that felt like enough. It was enough — until now.

What surprised me most was that it wasn’t only men who came to mind. There were women too — women who sensed that a man in the room was paying attention to me, and who responded not with solidarity but with something colder. They cut me off. Quietly, efficiently, without explanation. What I might have contributed professionally became irrelevant the moment I registered as competition.

I am going to write about a few of these moments. They are not all dramatic. But looking back with today’s eyes, several of them qualify — clearly and without much debate — as #MeToo.

One of them is a story straight out of Hollywood.

The Maserati

In the early 1980s I wrote my PhD on product placement and commercial sponsorship in television and film. It was early days — the business barely existed yet — and I was convinced there was something real there. After finishing my degree I moved to California, and from San Francisco I began approaching Hollywood studios with my ideas.

One of them, Pathé, picked up the phone. They liked what they read, bought me a flight ticket from San Francisco to Burbank, and invited me to come in.

I was in my late twenties. I boarded that plane feeling proud.

On the other side, a red Maserati convertible was waiting. So was the man standing next to it — short, heavy, completely bald except for a few long strands of hair plastered across his head with what must have been half a jar of gel, a cigar between his fingers. Not exactly the Hollywood I had imagined. But the Maserati? I loved the Maserati.

He had my thesis on the passenger seat. We drove to lunch at a hotel restaurant somewhere in West Hollywood — nice enough, the kind of place designed to impress. The conversation started where it should have, with the work. Then, without much elegance or transition, it shifted. He told me, plainly and without apparent embarrassment, that if I slept with him it might help speed things along professionally.

I remember sitting with that for a moment. I remember thinking: where does this rather unattractive, rather unimpressive man find the confidence to say this out loud?

I didn’t confront him. I didn’t make a scene. I finished my lunch, told him I wasn’t interested — in the business arrangement or the other offer — and left the restaurant. That same evening I flew back to San Francisco.

And I simply decided that Hollywood wasn’t for me.

What I didn’t see then — what I couldn’t allow myself to see — was what that decision actually cost me. I stopped. I dropped the business idea entirely. Not because it wasn’t good. Not because the timing was wrong. Because one ugly little man with a cigar had made the whole thing feel soiled.

I don’t carry bitterness about it. I don’t lie awake regretting the path not taken. But I see it clearly now for what it was: a door that got closed — not by me, not really — and an ambition that quietly folded in on itself without me ever naming the reason why.

That is what these things do. Not always with a bang. Sometimes just with a lunch bill and a flight home.

The Coach

But the Hollywood story wasn’t the first. Before Los Angeles, before the Maserati and the cigar, there were smaller moments. Quieter ones. The kind you file away without a label because you don’t yet have the language for what you’re seeing.

At school — Gymnasium — we had a teacher who taught sports and English. That combination was common enough at the time. He also coached our school basketball team, and we were good. I was younger than most of my teammates, but good enough to play with the older girls, which I did.

Over the years, travelling to championships and tournaments, I noticed something. The way he looked at certain girls. The way he talked to them, singled them out, paid them a particular kind of attention. I was young enough that I couldn’t fully name what I was seeing — but I saw it. Something in me registered it and filed it quietly away.

Years later, he was no longer our teacher. He played basketball at the same club I did, and we travelled together to a tournament in Austria. I was nearly eighteen by then. And there it was — direct this time, unmistakable. An invitation to his room. No pressure, no force. Just the clear expectation that I might say yes.

I didn’t go.

But what stayed with me wasn’t the offer itself. It was what it brought back — all those earlier moments at school, suddenly sharpened into focus. The looks. The favouritism. The particular warmth he directed at the older girls on the team. I found myself wondering, not for the first time, what had actually happened between him and some of my teammates. He had been their teacher. Their coach. Someone with real power over them — over their grades, their playing time, their sense of belonging to the team.

I never said anything. I saw it, I understood it, and I kept quiet. That was simply what you did.

The Head of IT

This one was closer to home. No Maserati, no Hollywood lunch. Just an office, a desk, and a man who had clearly been getting away with it for years.

I was writing my PhD thesis while working at a German television station in the early 1980s. In the department where I spent most of my time there was a man — head of IT. Good-looking in a way he was very aware of. The kind of man who moved through an office as though it were a stage and the women in it an audience he was performing for. Compliments, lingering conversations, a hand on a shoulder that stayed just long enough. Always on the edge. Never quite over it.

When I started appearing regularly, he turned his attention my way. He would sit on the corner of my desk. He made it quietly, persistently clear that certain IT requests might move faster with the right kind of encouragement.

He wasn’t subtle about it. He didn’t bother to be. That told you something — about him, but also about the environment that had shaped him. He felt completely safe.

I talked to my female colleagues about it. Their response was uniform and almost bored: yes, that’s him, they said. We’ve all been through it. There was no outrage in their voices. Just resignation, as though he were a weather condition — unpleasant, recurring, not worth reporting.

That puzzled me more than he did. Why had none of them gone to their manager? Were they embarrassed? Had some of them, in fact, chosen to engage with him on his own terms and now felt unable to speak? I didn’t know. I still don’t.

What I did know was that I wanted it to stop. So I told him — directly, privately, one to one — to leave me alone. He pushed back a little, then let it go. IT kept working smoothly. The world did not end.

But once again I had handled it quietly, on my own terms, in my own space. I hadn’t named it out loud. Hadn’t brought it into the open. Hadn’t asked why this man was still walking freely through that office making every woman who worked there feel like a variable in his personal equation.

I just closed the door on it and moved on.

That, I now understand, was its own kind of silence.

Full Circle

All these years later, I find myself coming back to a woman who did what I never quite managed to do — who spoke out, loudly and without apology, about the reality of female sexuality and the structures of male power that shaped it. And I find myself doing so alongside a friend whose art has been asking the same questions for decades, in her own fierce and uncompromising way.

Shere Hite was silenced for telling the truth. That is not a small thing. And it is not ancient history.

I am ready now — more aware, more willing to see clearly, and finally willing to say out loud what I saw and what I felt and what I quietly absorbed without naming. That readiness didn’t come from nowhere. It came from these conversations, from this work, from Iris.

The time feels right to bring Shere Hite back to the front stage. Not as a historical figure to be respectfully archived, but as a voice that is still alive, still necessary, still unsettling in exactly the right ways.

I am all in.

Thank you, Iris. For the work. For the friendship. For this.

©Iris Brosch