Andrew Cuomo says he didn't know

Pro tip: Unless you're a sex worker, while at work, don't talk about sex.

We are all learning as we go, but it doesn’t take an international #MeToo movement to understand what is office-talk, and what emphatically is not.

Three women, including two former aides of Andrew Cuomo, have come forward to accuse New York’s governor of sexual harassment — from inappropriate questions to unwanted physical touch. The governor has denied some of the details of the accusations, but has said that, in response to the alleged inappropriate questions, that he thought he was acting as a “mentor.”

The state attorney general will investigate. Cuomo has said he won’t resign, and that, while he says he’s embarrassed about the accusations, that:

I never knew at the time that I was making anyone feel uncomfortable. I never knew at the time I was making anyone feel uncomfortable.

(He said it twice.)

Of course we will get to the heart of this, but for now, let’s break off the part where Cuomo says he didn’t realize the questions he is supposed to have asked one of his former aides, a sexual assault survivor, were inappropriate. Charlotte Bennett, a 25-year old former aide, has said in interviews that Cuomo asked her:

• If she’d ever been with an older man

• If she participated in open relationships

• If she was, given that she had once been sexually assaulted, “sensitive to intimacy”

She called Cuomo a “textbook abuser.”

Since October 2018, all employees in New York — including Cuomo — must participate in sexual harassment prevention training. Versions are available in English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Italian, Polish, Bengali and Haitian-Creole. If Cuomo, in fact, did not know he was crossing the line, then he wasn’t paying attention in training.

This is such an old, sad story, and you’d be hard-pressed to find women — and more than a few men — who don’t have a story like this. We are supposed to have come a long way (baby) but still we hear these accusations, followed quickly by a “But I didn’t know!”

For my own story, let me start by saying I wanted to keep the job, but when an over-solicitous boss kept asking me to dinner and talking about how his wife didn’t understand him, I couldn’t quit laughing.* I was about as far from sophisticated as you could get, but I knew where this was going. I didn’t go to dinner, and every time the guy would reintroduce the conversation, I laughed. I wasn’t being cynical. More, I was delighted that, right in front of me, here was something out of a movie. He eventually gave up.

It never dawned on me to tell any one about the guy’s sad campaign because in that time, a young woman knew that 1) she would be the target of this kind of behavior in the workplace, and 2) it was up to her (and her alone) to deal with it, which leads us to 3) how many young women (and more than a few young men) have been sidelined over the years because they believed 1 and 2?

These women have stepped into the spotlight to talk about a horrible thing. The Greek chorus has started. They, too, are following an old script. Women accuse a powerful man of bad behavior, and the chorus rises up: Did those women ask for it? What were they wearing?

To hell with the old script. I stand with those women.

*Reader? I did not keep that job.