Michigan senator’s remark to female reporter was about sex, power, not harmless small talk

Every woman knows the code. “We could have some fun together,”  a man says to a woman he has just met.

“If I were only 20 years younger, the fun we could have,” an aging playboy says to a much younger woman who’s caught his eye.

In old black-and-white movies, the cliche went like this: “We could make beautiful music together.”

And in Lansing, Michigan on Tuesday, inside the Capitol building, state Sen. Peter Lucido, surrounded by a group of male high school students, told 22-year-old Michigan Advance reporter Allison Donahue, “You could have a lot of fun with these boys, or they could have a lot of fun with you.”

This isn’t pleasant conversation or harmless small talk. It’s not about playing checkers, chess or Yahtzee.

This dirty little leer of a comment is about sex and power and treating women as objects to be ogled and belittled.

Old boy’s club

On the face of things, it’s bad enough that the remark came from an elected official — the Senate majority whip for the GOP and an influential chair of multiple committees — who was being asked by the journalist to respond to a Metro Times report that he belonged to a Facebook group opposing Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

But to think that Lucido said those words in front of dozens of boys from his alma mater, an all boys’ Catholic high school, De La Salle Collegiate?

And not only did Lucido bring them into a controversy, he did it at a time when De La Salle is facing a hazing scandal. Presumably, the last thing the school would want now is this kind of attention.

State Rep. Peter J. Lucido (Photo: Michigan House Republicans)

The young men laughed, although it’s impossible to say  whether they thought the comment was funny, if they were being polite to a powerful alumnus, or if they just felt awkward about the whole situation.

After all, here was a male role model, at least in terms of political success, telegraphing to them that it’s OK to demean a woman. Imagine the unspoken pressure to stay quiet, if one of the boys had wanted to speak up and say there was nothing funny about it.

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Although Lucido aimed his comments at a female journalist, the incident could have happened with a woman legislator or lobbyist or congressional staffer, and Lucido’s snickering undertone would have been interpreted the same way.

As every woman reporter or columnist knows, angry responses from anonymous readers often include nasty words about your intelligence or your physical appearance or, more often than you can imagine, sexual slurs.

Barely trying to hide the sexism

Angry comments from public figures can take this ugly path, too. Just last night, when news broke about the documents from Lev Parnas given to the House Intelligence Committee, we learned that Robert Hyde, a GOP candidate for a U.S. House seat from Connecticut, appears to have been involved with tracking U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch’s movements in Ukraine.

This is the same Hyde who was asked to leave the race by leading Republicans and Democrats in Connecticut after tweeting about Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and oral sex. 

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After Harris stopped her presidential campaign in December, Hyde posted that Harris “went down, brought to her knees. Blew it. Must be a hard one to swallow.” The tweet later was deleted.

What’s the comparison here? Lucido said nothing explicit, nothing vulgar or obscene, if you parse the words. His allies could easily explain away the response as another example of the left-wing press trying to demonize a right-wing, or political correctness taking away the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech.

Yet the comparison is simple. Women know the code, whether it’s barely trying to disguise itself, as with the Hyde case, or it’s a sneer buried within a technically bland remark.

Women hear the code all the time. We’ve spent decades, some of us, laughing nervously at it or maintaining a stony silence, or, if we know the man who’s speaking well enough, snapping back at him to stop being ridiculous.

Well, the time is over for putting up with the culture that makes this OK, as millions of women have vowed ever since the culture-quaking rise of the #metoo and TimesUp movements.

The goal here isn’t only gaining more respect for women. It’s also about raising our young men — who look not only to their mothers, but their fathers, grandfathers, uncles, and male teachers and mentors for moral guidance — that treating women with disrespect is an awful thing to do.

Lucido apologized Wednesday via a formal statement “for the misunderstanding yesterday and for offending Allison Donahue.” He also told the Free Press he was “not talking about anything sexual,” but was “geeked up about the boys coming there,” and “I was there to have some fun.”

“It was blown out of proportion.” he said.

But even Lucido’s attempts to repair the damage raise troubling questions. After Donahue confronted him about the original comment, noting that he woudn’t speak that way to her male colleagues or someone older, he countered that he meant nothing by it, and was just trying to say that boys at a male school have little opportunity to socialize or even talk to the opposite sex.

“I said it to an all girls’ school last week, ‘How would you like to have all the boys from the Senate come over?’ It was nothing disingenuous. It was no harm.”

“All the boys from the Senate”? Was he referring to adult legislators? Does he think they should play some role in socializing with young girls? Does he consider himself a boy from the Senate? If linguistics textbooks need to illustrate the colloquial phrase of “digging the hole deeper,” Lucido’s attempts to explain himself would do fine.

Perhaps there will be no harm to Lucido’s career, or to his hints of ambitions to become governor of Michigan one day. But the days of wink-wink sexual harassment being ignored are over. Our daughters deserve so much better. So do our sons.

Julie Hinds is a pop culture writer for the Detroit Free Press, where this column originally appeared. Follow her on Twitter: @juliehinds

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