Bold women on why we must reject victimhood.
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/meet-the-women-worried-about-metoo/20639#.Wjjh3jdOnIV
LIONEL SHRIVER SAYS
I am concerned that we are throwing knee-touching into the same basket as rape, which does a grievous disservice to mere knee-touchers and rape victims both. I am concerned that we are increasingly wont to confuse genuine abuse of power in the workplace with often distant memories of men who have made failed – ‘unwanted’ – passes. In the complicated dance of courtship, someone has to make a move, and the way one conventionally discovers if one’s attraction is returned is to brave some gentle physical contact and perhaps accept rebuff. Were I still a young woman looking for a partner, I would not wish to live in world where a man had to secure a countersigned contract in triplicate before he kissed me.
I am concerned that we are casting women as irremediably scarred by even minor, casual advances, and as incapable of competently and sensitively handling the commonplace instances in which men are drawn to them sexually and the feeling doesn’t happen to be mutual.
I am concerned that sex itself seems increasingly to be seen as dirty, and as a violation, a form of assault, so that we’re repackaging an old prudery in progressive wrapping paper. I am concerned that we are well on our way to demonising, if not criminalising, all male desire.
Turbocharged by social media, #MeToo may have gone too far. Rather than bringing the sexes together with improved mutual understanding, we are in danger of driving the sexes apart. If I were a man right now, I’d lock the door of my study with the intention of satisfying myself with internet porn for the indefinite future. Real women would not seem worth the risk of destroying my career. Is that what we want?
Lionel is an author, most recently of The Standing Chandelier, and winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction.
WENDY KAMINER
#MeToo is the unthinking woman’s anti-harassment crusade. It commands us to ‘believe the women’ unthinkingly, without considering the seriousness or plausibility of their claims. It calls every accuser a survivor, whether she alleges a sexual assault or a single, unsolicited advance. It ignores essential differences between work-related harassment that undermines women professionally and inconsequential social annoyances, threatening to police interpersonal relations outside the workplace. It celebrates conformity and demonises dissent, as you might expect from a movement based on proclamations of ‘me too’.
Thinking people make distinctions – between a hand on your knee and a grope up your skirt, between a sexual attack by a supervisor and a pat on the butt from a guy in a bar – just as they distinguish pickpockets from home invaders. #MeTooism condemns such distinctions as reflections of rape culture. At best, when we differentiate ‘sexual assault and sexual harassment and unwanted groping, [we] are having the wrong conversation’, Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand asserts, while preparing to run for president as the self-appointed avenger of all self-identified female victims.
This dangerous nonsense denigrates women – we are not all traumatised by every fool who cops a feel – and questions our claim to equality.
Wendy is a lawyer, author and a former national board member of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Claire Berlinski says…
The #MeToo movement has exposed allegations of very serious sexual crimes and the degree to which women are simply fed up. This is healthy, up to a point. But we are way past that point.
It has now morphed into a mass hysteria. Men have been accused of transgressions no reasonable person would define as a crime. And this crime comes with a swift and terrifying penalty, but has no clear definition and no statute of limitations. This is juridically and morally absurd. Nulla poena sine lege.
This crime, it seems, may be committed through word, deed, or even facial expression. It rests entirely on discerning what a woman feels, or will feel, even decades later. But discerning this is actually quite difficult. ‘It’s payback time for men’ is not a reasonable definition. We must now together reason this out. Nullum crimen sine lege.
The names keep coming. The heads keep rolling. A charge of creepiness is a death sentence. (De minimis non curat lex.) Once the charge is made, employers race to purge the creep lest they too be stained by his dishonour. ‘We are deeply disappointed by the reports that Mister Absolutely Unacceptable in this day and age failed to live up to our company standards’, begins the ritual. And you know damned well Mister Absolutely Unacceptable will never get his job, or his life, back. Audacter caluminiare, semper aliquid haeret.
This is not good for men. But neither is it good for women. Newton’s third law is not just about physics. There will be a reaction. And women as a professional class will find themselves figuratively screwed – not an obvious improvement in the screwing scheme of things.
Claire is a novelist and journalist. Donate towards her new book: Stitch by Stitch.
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