Back in 1987, when Estrich wrote her elegant, tightly argued book Real Rape, she was pretty hard-core. She wrote that not only does "no" mean "no" when it comes to sexual advances, but that "yes" sometimes means "no" as well: "Many feminists would argue that so long as women are powerless relative to men, viewing a 'yes' as a sign of true consent is misguided. For myself, I am quite certain that many women who say 'yes' to men they know, whether on dates or on the job, would say 'no' if they could. I have no doubt that women's silence sometimes is not the product of passion and desire but of pressure and fear." But that was then, and this is now.
As it turns out, Estrich's unlikely support of Schwarzenegger has a precedent: When Clinton had his difficulties with Paula Jones, Juanita Broderick, Kathleen Willey, Monica Lewinksy, et al., Estrich rallied to his defense. She said in Slate and elsewhere that she was sure that he would not have done it. Why? For one thing, "Bill Clinton was my friend." For another thing, "He didn't have to." This type of reasoning would never have made it past the Estrich of Real Rape, the Estrich who passionately supported Anita Hill, the Estrich who coined the phrase "the nuts and sluts defense."
The hysteria surrounding sexual crimes had abated. All of a sudden, the idea that the office was full of lurking male sexual predators ready to pounce on delicate, offended career girls was no longer everybody's obsession. People began to wish that the "personal" could be personal again. Writers from David Mamet to Michael Crichton wrote works of art devoted to the excesses and absurdities of the feminist preoccupation with sexual harassment. By the time a towheaded 6-year-old was suspended from school for kissing a little girl on the cheek, most of the country had come to think the women's movement had gone too far; and the movement retreated from the absolutism surrounding issues like sexual harassment and date rape; feminist pundits began to muse on the paradoxes of sexual power.
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