It’s six months since #MeToo began trending on social media. Since then, those two little words have sparked a conversation about the sexual harassment of women that has spread across the globe and into every walk of life. Half a year on it’s time to take stock and ask what women have gained from this movement.
The accusations made against Harvey Weinstein by numerous actors and employees and reaching back over decades are by now skin-crawlingly familiar. Yet the New York Times story in which actress Ashley Judd and others first publicly detailed Weinstein’s alleged sexual misconduct, leading to his resignation just three days later, could have made headlines for a week and then been consigned to history. Instead, the story continued apace and the list of victims—and those accused—grew.
One week later, actress Alyssa Milano tweeted: “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.” Milano hadn’t realized she was employing a phrase first coined by activist Tarana Burke as a means of offering solidarity to women victims of sexual violence. More than a decade later, and with celebrity backing, #MeToo spread rapidly to become a global movement that extended far beyond social media.
Joining in with #MeToo is an attractive proposition. Women sharing their stories become part of a community (albeit one that exists more in their imagination than in reality); they gain validation for their suffering and the moral beatification afforded to innocent victims. Significantly, #MeToo doesn’t appear to be about women wallowing in victimhood; on the contrary, it seems empowering. The more high-profile men that were accused, found guilty following trial by social media, and left with livelihoods and reputations ruined, the more the #MeToo movement grew emboldened.
No doubt some men have abused the power they held over women: they should be tried in a court of law and, if found guilty, punished accordingly. But those of us seriously concerned about women’s rights need to move beyond the euphoria of belonging to a powerful movement and honestly appraise the impact of #MeToo. When we do, we find a number of reasons to be concerned.
#MeToo has become an orthodoxy intolerant of criticism or even question. Women who have suggested that it may have gone too far, that conflating rape with crude flirtation risks trivializing serious incidents and falsely demonizing innocent men, have been hounded for thought crimes. Katie Roiphe prompted outrage when it was rumored she might go public with a list of “shitty media men” that had been widely circulated among writers and journalists. Roiphe recalls that “Before the piece was even finished, let alone published, people were calling me ‘pro-rape,’ ‘human scum,’ a ‘harridan,’ a ‘monster out of Stephen King’s “IT”‘ a ‘ghoul,’ a ‘bitch,’ and a ‘garbage person.’” Catherine Deneuve and over 100 other prominent French women were met with a similar tsunami of name-calling and criticism following their public letter comparing #MeToo to a witch hunt. The result has been a censorious closing down of debate through a crude division between “good women” who stick to the #MeToo script and “bad women” who digress.
