Whatever Happened to #MeToo?
Part I: The Background
In 2022, the Southern Law Poverty Center conducted an extensive survey which revealed that, among other alarming facts, 46% of younger Democratic men believe feminism has gone too far. Moreover, and this is especially notable, only 4% of older Democratic men believe that feminism has gone too far (see below).
I’m not positive about the methodology of this survey and I haven’t seen the toplines, but even accounting for that, it’s evident that older Democratic men are still markedly more supportive and comfortable with feminism than younger Democratic men, and my hypothesis is that this substantial discrepancy has a lot to do with the #MeToo movement and the resultant social backlash.
I’ve previously posited that the 2016 election catalyzed our current era of feminist regression (and got called a TERF for it since words apparently don’t mean things anymore), and one other major catalyst for this backslide is the rise and fall of the #MeToo movement.
While the initial goals of #MeToo and #TimesUp, loosely speaking, to achieve accountability for men that use their positions of power to abuse others, were admirable, I honestly don’t believe much has materially changed for women since. In fact, I’d even posit that things from the perspective of feminism have gotten worse. For all that people criticize second-wave feminists, sometimes rightly so, the second-wave feminists were materially much more successful than any movement of feminism that came after them. They got Roe v. Wade passed (until it was overturned last year), and due to their efforts, women can now open their own bank accounts, and own property, and don’t have to stay in abusive marriages as they did for most of world history.
But today, I strongly believe we’re regressing and I’m not sure how to stem the backslide.
Part II: The Futility
I feel like the #MeToo movement was characterized by the façade of action towards feminist goals but ultimately hid the fact that no meaningful and enduring changes came about despite the strong and lingering backlash that ensued. In the wake of #MeToo, it was theoretically possible that a young Hollywood starlet could speak out against someone in the industry propositioning her. However, other than Harvey Weinstein, what rich and powerful man has actually faced consequences for his maleficence?
Donald Trump, accused of rape time and time again, was president of the United States and came within 42,918 votes across Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia from winning a second term (and that’s after half a million Americans died under his watch from COVID-19). Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court despite Dr. Christine Blasey Ford being testifying in front of the entire world, with even her father supporting Kavanaugh over his own daughter. Bryan Singer. Brad Pitt. Marilyn Manson. The list of men who got away with their abuse of women and other marginalized individuals goes on and on.
The dirty secret that nobody talks about is that men in general, of all races and all over the world, still deeply believe that getting access to beautiful women is a fair and just reward for reaching a certain level of status/fame/power. In addition, the stigma against “gold diggers” is also a factor: when women are abused by men with money and power, it compels many people to ask: what right does she have to complain about mistreatment when she chose to reap the bounties of his wealth and status, chose to go up to his hotel room, chose to have sex with him, to marry him? Just look at what happened to Nicole Brown Simpson.
Sometimes, one complies without the overt violence but in fear of it. Or sometimes, one initiates sex to try to stop or head off a beating. Of course, there are also the so-called good times—when romance overcomes the memory of violence. Both the violation and the complicity make one deeply ashamed. The shame is corrosive. Whatever the batterer left, it attacks. Why would one tell? How can one face it?
And then, the moment women began pushing back, nearly 25 years after Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered by her husband (who was then acquitted), there was an explosion of resentment among not only the rich and powerful, but among average, not famous men who saw what was happening and began thinking to themselves, “What if I’m next?” Obviously, this fear ignores the reality that most victims don't report their attackers, and even among those who report, most of the assailants don’t face consequences. But, the damage was done.
Part III: The Backlash
I’m very close with my father and have a lot of male friends. They’re all good, upstanding men, kind and respectful and I’d never dream of calling any of them misogynists. However, to a man, they’ve all asked me about the prevalence of false accusations, and about the possibility of the legal system being weaponized against innocent men by malicious women. Since the days of Adam and Eve, women, especially beautiful women, have been explicitly tied to dishonesty, to deceit, to guile. In other words, we’re assumed to be lying on principle due, so when the truth of our lived experiences challenges those in power, this presumption is magnified tenfold.
The dice were rigged against the #MeToo movement from the beginning but that said, I’m not arguing that the #MeToo movement was perfectly executed. Quite frankly, I think that it was more often than not, haphazard, unorganized, and often extremely counterproductive to its stated goals.
In 2018, Moira Donegan started the “Shitty Media Men” list, wherein people could anonymously detail allegations of sexual misconduct against men in the media industry. However, Stephen Elliott, a name on the list, sued Donegan for defamation and ultimately, the case was settled in a six-figure payout from Donegan to Elliott. As Elliott said, it was “enough money that it's basically an admission of guilt, and it feels like a victory.” The fact of the matter is that there was no proof of the allegations against Elliott or the vast majority of the other men on the list, and in country’s legal system, people are innocent until unequivocally proven guilty. Obviously, privileged people can get away with things that less privileged individuals can’t (wealthy and powerful people can hire lawyers, defeat and stall prosecutions, and disseminate narratives that smear the victim through their media connections), but ultimately, a series of accusations which can’t be substantiated will only result in massive backlash against the accusers, which it unequivocally did.
The #MeToo movement also forced people to grapple with the delineation, and there is a definitive line, between bad sex and sexual violence. We can and should talk about how women are sometimes coerced into consenting to sex they don’t want to have, and how women aren’t socially conditioned to seek out sexual pleasure and have sex they don’t enjoy even while their partners don’t even register their apathy. But, the conflation of bad sex and sexual violence by supporters of the movement was another major factor leading to the massive social reprisal against it. Just look at Aziz Ansari: he was never charged for assault, largely because any accusation against him would have immediately fallen apart in any court of law, and the court of public opinion acquitted him, and many like him too.
Part IV: The Personal
However, what personally put me off the most about the #MeToo movement was the implicit expectation that as a woman, and one of privilege at that, I’m expected to share my own history of being victimized by sexual violence for the greater good so to speak. Even during the height of the movement, during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings as a matter of fact, I refused. I saw what was happening to Dr. Ford, the way she had to quit her job and move houses and how she’s in hiding to this day due to the barrage of death threats against her and her family. I saw how millions of women, both famous and civilian, shared the worst things that have ever happened to them, publicly bled out their trauma, all to get justice for neither their victimization or their disclosures.
As I’ve said time and time again, I don’t believe in self-flagellation of any sort. One of my bigger flaws is that I don’t feel any sort of responsibility to the collective, which is also why I’m not a socialist. I flat out refuse to emotionally exert the effort to hemorrhage my secrets, hoping against hope of convincing the world to see victims of sexual violence as human beings.
I’m not collateral damage for the greater good.
Part V: The Conclusion: Where do we go from here?
This is an answer that nobody is going to like but we have to go back to the drawing board, except this time, things are in an even more precarious state than prior to #MeToo, especially in the context of social trust. Anybody who actually cares about bringing about justice for victims of sexual violence and isn’t just doing it for clout needs to be methodological and planned, prepared for the backlash that will ensue in a way that nobody was last time. Due process is alive and well, as is freedom of speech and as Moira Donegan found out, defamation laws.
It’s not that false accusations are now or have ever been abound, but the reality is that those who are aiming to change the world order are always held to much higher standards than those who want to retain the status quo. That’s why liberals are expected to be of unimpeachable character while there’s a lot more leeway for conservatives. It is perhaps unfair that the victimized must be of unassailable character in a way that the victimizers aren’t, but sometimes, the only way to transform society for the better is to follow the rules of society when it’s at its worst.
All that said, there has been some notable progress in this realm. R.Kelly was convicted and jailed, largely through the diligent efforts of Jim DeRogatis for the better part of 20 years, a law that prohibited secret arbitrations of sexual misconduct claims was passed due to the advocacy of Gretchen Carlson, and gun to head, I honestly think that Gen-Z’s reticence to sex, while annoying and cringeworthy in in Puritanism, is still superior to the “blowjobs are empowering” brand of feminism that millennials were sold. It’s an obvious overcorrection that’s exaggerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but I would rather teenagers wait to have sex than have a lot of sex they don’t want to have in guise of empowerment or independent or even simply garnering validation from their peers. I trust that like every generation prior to them, young people will figure it out and everything will ultimately even out, or so I need to believe.
The "believe women" frame always made me really uncomfortable. It's the kind of brittle framing that can be disproved with just one counter example, when we are in a very vulnerable position and need something robust.