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#MeToo has made us better people, hasn’t it?
In November, the civil rights activist Tarana Burke who founded the movement said it had become ‘unrecognisable’, recast as a witch hunt. But, argues Holly Baxter, the truth is more nuanced
This time last year, the MeToo movement was already in full swing: Alyssa Milano had created the hashtag that launched a thousand truths; Harvey Weinstein had been fired three months before by his own production company; in the US the Women’s March had inspired sister marches across the world; 150 young American gymnasts had come forward with stories of sexual harassment by previously celebrated and now disgraced doctor Larry Nassar; Kevin Spacey’s scenes from All The Money in the World had been entirely reshot and his role in Netflix’s House of Cards written out; Louis CK’s film I Love You, Daddy had been dropped by the distribution company; Time magazine had named “the silence breakers” of the MeToo movement as their Person of the Year; Dylan Farrow had written her painfully angry op-ed in the LA Times about her father, Woody Allen; and hundreds of people had lost their jobs at some of the most powerful companies in the world – CBS, Fox News, Amazon, Uber – because of mounting allegations which accusers claimed had previously been swept under the rug.
Then, on the first day of 2018, the Time’s Up movement was formed by 300 women working in the entertainment industry. They all turned up at the Golden Globes one week later dressed in black.
We are now in very different territory. In November of this year, American civil rights activist Tarana Burke – seen by many as the founder of MeToo – said the movement had become “unrecognisable”. It’s been recast as a witch hunt, she said. Once victims of sexual harassment and abuse were silenced completely; now they are “heard then vilified”.
Is this what progress looks like? In some ways, yes. Christine Blasey Ford couldn’t prevent Brett Kavanaugh from being sworn in to the Supreme Court, but she was empowered to speak. Enough people listened to make her testimony an international event. Her words were repeated in London newsrooms, New York restaurants, Sydney bars, Parisian cafes. A week ago, she presented Sports Illustrated’s Inspiration of the Year award to Rachael Denhollander, the first gymnast to publicly accuse Larry Nassar of sexual abuse.
Much – perhaps even too much – has been said about male opposition to MeToo. Of course, a great many men have been powerful allies or even victims of abuse themselves – but then there are the men who have propagated that “witch hunt” mythology (helpfully ignoring the misogyny at the heart of actual historical witch hunts in doing so, but that’s another article altogether). These are the men who have held their hands up and said they “don’t even know how to approach a woman any more”, who have openly wondered whether asking a colleague out for a drink might constitute a HR issue, or whether something hyperbolically innocuous (opening a door for a woman, for instance, or complimenting her on her work) might “now be a problem”.
Yet as one widely circulating meme across social media put it, straight men suddenly understand the nuances of consent just fine when they step inside a gay club. So why the call for “consent classes” in universities, the careful pamphlets and worthy speeches explaining to fully grown men what differentiates rape from consensual sex? By entering into those conversations, it sometimes feels like we have gone backwards. What on the surface looks like an open dialogue about sex and bodily autonomy often becomes a way of absolving men of their previous sins, of agreeing with them that there was no way they could have possibly known they were raping or assaulting or intimidating their victims.
Now MeToo has happened, goes the narrative, you have the information not to do that any more: the excuses will be stripped away. And that leaves people like Blasey Ford or the accusers of Harvey Weinstein in a difficult position. While being told they are largely believed and being offered a platform to speak about their past experiences, they are simultaneously asked to swallow the idea their abusers might not have known any better without the safeguards of those consent classes and that extra sex education, because “boys will be boys” unless educated otherwise.
We paint rapists and abusers as bogeymen so routinely in society that family members and friends jump to their loved ones’ defence when they hear of allegations: this person, they say, who I have sat next to at dinner, shared a movie night with, joked with at work, confided in and trusted, can’t be the one you’re looking for
Still more confusing is what has been asked of women. Take the example of Senator Susan Collins, who cast the deciding vote in favour of Brett Kavanaugh (even as she stated that she found Blasey Ford’s testimony “compelling” and that she believed in the MeToo movement).
“Susan Collins you are a betrayer of women,” tweeted Molly Ringwald after the Supreme Court confirmation. That sentiment echoed across the internet and the media. It’s no secret that Collins was held to a higher standard than the men who voted the same way she did; people were incensed by her perceived treachery. Campaigns to fund her Democrat challenger in Maine brought in millions of dollars. What’s the use of being a woman in power, people asked, if you aren’t using that power to stick up for other women? Isn’t that your function? Or is it?
In Hollywood, similar whisperings started up: if Harvey Weinstein’s behaviour really was an “open secret” in the industry for decades, why didn’t women shout it from the rooftops the moment they got wind of it? Why did so many “collude in a culture of silence”? Why didn’t they act to protect others? Conservative pundits implied that it couldn’t have been “that bad” if no one had said anything; in a strange demonstration of the horseshoe effect, some leftists wrote that Weinstein’s behaviour had been so disturbing and so unacceptable that every woman who heard of it and failed to speak out should be held responsible for the continuing trauma of their peers.
“Why are they speaking now when they didn’t speak before?” asked one side. “Why didn’t they speak before when they’re able to speak now?” asked the other. Either way, the blame found its way back to women.
And then, of course, there were the real low points of MeToo: the ones where it felt impossible – and would indeed have been wrong – not to hold certain women responsible for the damage they’d done. In August, Asia Argento, the Italian actor who was one of the first to publicly accuse Harvey Weinstein of assault and who became the public face of feminist activism against sexual harassment, was revealed to have made a payment of $380,000 to 17-year-old fellow actor Jimmy Bennett a few years previously, after he accused her of assaulting him while he was underage. Bennett had played Argento’s son as a young child in The Heart is Deceitful Above all Things in 2004, and Argento continues to insist that Bennett’s accusations are false.
For those who had taken to heart the mantra of Argento and her peers – the mantra that came to define MeToo; above all else, believe people who say they have been sexually assaulted – this felt like an especially damning moment. Either you chose to believe Bennett was a liar, that the accusation wasn’t true, and that allegations against people who are liked and admired should be treated differently to allegations against people who seem dislikable or “the type”, or you believed Bennett was telling the truth, and had to accept someone who had been at the forefront of a movement rejecting sexual harassment was, effectively, hiding in plain sight. MeToo had a lot of villains, and Argento had briefly been one of its rare heroes. The loss of her status hit everybody hard.
I made a terrible mistake. When someone I knew, someone I loved as a brother, was accused, I did something inexcusable… It’s painful to realise that, while I thought I was self-aware, I had actually internalised the dominant male agenda that asks us to defend it no matter what, protect it no matter what, baby it no matter what
On 5 December, Lena Dunham – also a fallen feminist hero, once acclaimed for her unflinching portrayal of sexual politics as the screenwriter and star of Girls, her commitment to body positivity and her unapologetic warts-and-all onscreen nakedness (both emotional and physical), then gradually abandoned by her followers after years of problematic statements and odd moments of over-sharing about, amongst other things, her sister’s tendency to store pebbles in her vagina as a baby – published an apology to her former friend and fellow actor Aurora Perrineau in the Hollywood Reporter.
She hailed the successes of MeToo throughout 2018 – “Heroines have emerged. We are cracking open windows and breaking down doors. The air is circulating and the light is pouring in” – but acknowledged that also “there have been mistakes. There has been pain. And not just for men.” Dunham’s friend and cowriter on Girls, Murray Miller, had been accused of rape by Perrineau a year earlier. Almost as soon as the accusation began circulating, Dunham had released a statement saying she had “insider information” that led her to believe that Perrineau’s accusations were “one of the 3 per cent of assault cases that are misreported every year”.
“I didn’t have the ‘insider information’ I claimed [a year earlier] but rather blind faith,” wrote Dunham in her December apology. “I made a terrible mistake. When someone I knew, someone I loved as a brother, was accused, I did something inexcusable… It’s painful to realise that, while I thought I was self-aware, I had actually internalised the dominant male agenda that asks us to defend it no matter what, protect it no matter what, baby it no matter what.”
Men benefit from a society which excuses their behaviour by saying they are incapable of understanding, that casts a rape or an assault as a momentary mistake “anyone” could have fallen into. I have become complicit in furthering that, Dunham seemed to be saying, but I’ve realised it now. She mentioned she knew it might be too late to be welcomed back into the fold: many had branded her a “cancelled” person a year before and boycotted her books, her regular publication Lenny Letter (which subsequently shut down), and her hugely popular Twitter account. Like letdown parents, Dunham’s followers had moved from anger to disappointment – and many of them weren’t coming back.
It’s important to remember that a lot of people found themselves in Dunham’s position during the MeToo explosion. Their good friends, partners, brothers and husbands stood accused of past or present behaviours which seemed horrifying, alien, inconceivable. Remember the court statement of the father of Stanford University athlete Brock Turner, who was convicted on multiple charges of sexual assault after attacking an unconscious girl in an alleyway but only served three months of a six month sentence back in 2016? How he said his son had already paid a steep price “for 20 minutes of action”?
When rapists and sexual harassers aren’t monsters, they’re sexist jocks in the collective imagination; they don’t look like Louis CK or Aziz Ansari, two comedians who had hitherto made their careers out of being the geeky, cheeky types, the perpetual self-deprecators
The wording was so dismissive of the victim’s trauma that it seemed obscene – but the idea that a father couldn’t wrap his head around his son being a rapist is hardly surprising. We paint rapists and abusers as bogeymen so routinely in society that family members and friends jump to their loved ones’ defence when they hear of allegations: this person, they say, who I have sat next to at dinner, shared a movie night with, joked with at work, confided in and trusted, can’t be the one you’re looking for.
Certainly, no one expected men who had made their careers out of being the awkward, loveable nerds – the ones who never “got the girl” – to be named as one of these bogeymen. When rapists and sexual harassers aren’t monsters, they’re sexist jocks in the collective imagination; they don’t look like Louis CK or Aziz Ansari, two comedians who had hitherto made their careers out of being the geeky, cheeky types, the perpetual self-deprecators.
Louis CK stood accused of, and later admitted, masturbating in front of women, most of whom were in some way dependent on his approval for the furthering of their careers, in hotel rooms or rooms outside of comedy gigs. Somewhat bizarrely, his friend and fellow comedian Sarah Silverman admitted she was aware of this “quirk” of CK’s behaviour long before the allegations surfaced. He’d acted in the same way around her.
“When… he asked me if he could masturbate in front of me, sometimes I’d go, ‘Fuck yeah, I want to see that!’,” she said on the Howard Stern Show in October. “Sometimes I’d say, ‘Fucking no, gross’ and we’d get pizza.”
Other women came forward to say Silverman’s flippant treatment of the issue was less than helpful; she subsequently apologised, but added on her Hulu show that the accusations had made her “angry” for the victims as well as “sad, because [Louis CK is] my friend”. It’s a difficult line to walk. How do you centre victims in the conversation while mourning for a friendship now forever tainted? How do you respond to those victims’ voices when your natural, intuitive reaction is to defend the person you used to love and respect and, as an extension of that love and respect, believe entirely incapable of doing twisted and predatory things to people who had far less power than them?
Aziz Ansari’s story is a very different one, and it came to light after a blog posted on babe.net titled: “I went on a date with Aziz Ansari. It became the worst night of my life.” In the article, a woman using the pseudonym Grace described a first date with Ansari that descended quickly into a distressing, drawnout sexual encounter which she clearly believed to be non-consensual. Ansari released an immediate statement saying that everything on the night had seemed OK to him, “so when I heard that it was not the case for her, I was surprised and concerned”. He later said he was a big supporter of MeToo, while reiterating that everything between him and Grace had been “completely consensual”.
In Hollywood, similar whisperings started up: if Harvey Weinstein’s behaviour really was an ‘open secret’ in the industry for decades, why didn’t women shout it from the rooftops the moment they got wind of it? Why did so many ‘collude in a culture of silence’? Why didn’t they act to protect others?
Just a month before, a New Yorker short story titled ‘Cat Person’, which depicted a similar situation to the one described by Grace, had gone viral, a tale of an overeager, slightly resentful, seemingly sweet but inexperienced man turning into a sexually aggressive, sarcastic misogynist once given the attention of a woman. The response was huge: people who had felt they couldn’t speak of their experiences because the person who’d made them uncomfortable “wasn’t that kind of guy” flooded the Twittersphere. No longer, it seemed, would the “hey, but I’ve never been a ladies’ man” excuse paper over the cracks in male behaviour.
When men respond to allegations like Ansari did – by professing they wholly support the “long overdue” MeToo movement yet remain mystified how they made victims of women they thought were equal partners – it can, of course, feel disingenuous. The “feminist bro” has been one of the more unexpected things to come out of the popularity of MeToo, and you’ve probably met one: he’s the type of leftie right-on guy who knows his Germaine Greer from his bell hooks and talks feminism with faux-concern as a kind of chat-up strategy. The Feminist Bro Twitter account offers a treasure trove of true-to-type quotes, such as “Get your laws off MY girlfriend’s body! I’m the only one who can touch that thing”, “‘Well-behaved women rarely make history,’ is what I tell my girlfriend when she won’t do butt stuff”, and “Mansplaining is offensive. Let me tell you why”.
As “being woke” has become mainstream, even fashionable, some people are wearing the trend awkwardly, without feeling the pressure to contribute to (or even believe in the values of) the movement beyond a few virtue-signalling posts on social media and perhaps a word about gender equality at the student union bar. A cynic might even say that professing your feminist nature is also a brilliant cover for any sexual misdemeanours you might commit along the way: everything becomes a “heartbreaking misunderstanding”, and every woman you’ve spoken to with seeming sincerity about MeToo and the importance of emboldened feminism becomes your supporter. Woke people will be woke, right (and if they’re not, they didn’t mean it)? It’s the new “boys will be boys”.
If you’re a truly woke feminist, of course (male or female), you don’t speak of victims but of survivors. The term is not without its controversies – “I’m not a sexual assault ‘survivor’, I’m a victim”, wrote Danielle Campoamor in Harper’s Bazaar in May, to a mixed reception – but it has become a standard part of the MeToo lexicon. You can see the appeal: it has overtones of triumph, of success against the odds. It brings to mind Destiny’s Child dancing in combat gear in the music video for 2001 mega-hit Survivor, or Christina Aguilera at the peak of her career thanking her abuser for making her strong in Fighter.
These girl power anthems released less than a year apart in the early noughties, embody the defiance that was supposed to be central to MeToo: women rising up together, wearing black on the red carpet together, hitting back at male privilege together, taking down the system together. It hasn’t all happened that way. Uncomfortable truths have been brought to the forefront. Not every woman has been an ally, not every bad man has lost his job or his power.
The right-wing reaction to MeToo, especially in the dark corners of the “alt-right” cybersphere where “snowflake” is every second word, has forced some parts of the movement to reshape itself into something which doesn’t always feel entirely honest. Bleeding-heart liberals have a “victim culture”, say alt-right trolls. Actually, we have a survivor culture, reply the MeToo champions, and thus they leave behind the people like Campoamor, who was sexually assaulted when she was 25 and rejects the idea that she will ever “heal” completely or achieve a rape story with a happy ending. “Survivor” puts what’s happened in the past and turns victims into sages with valuable experience rather than human beings who have been hurt, she argues. To me, it also feels like it removes the attacker’s agency: a person “survives” a natural disaster, whereas a “victim” requires a perpetrator. And the idea that rape “just happens” to women who are unlucky, careless or indiscreet is one we’ve been fighting in feminism for decades.
In many ways, then, 2018’s MeToo demanded more nuanced questions and answers than it did in its infancy in 2017. Valuable questions have been asked about how specific issues affect certain groups of women, and how the movement can prevent itself becoming a cheerleading exercise for wealthy, middle-class white women with established public platforms working in prestigious jobs. Terminology has come under scrutiny. Whether to always believe first and ask questions later has been challenged (and largely been accepted as a good idea, considering the appallingly low rape reporting and conviction rates which plague almost every country in the world). The responsibilities of women to other women have been explored, stretched, shouted, tweeted and painfully picked apart under a powerful lens. We have ostracised those who have done wrong, but we have not yet come to an agreement about when or how rehabilitation takes place (for those like Bill Cosby, Kevin Spacey and Harvey Weinstein, it’s generally accepted their crimes should be career-ending, but for those like Louis CK, Aziz Ansari, Lena Dunham, Asia Argento, Matt Lauer and Johnny Depp, opinions are still split across multiple lines).
Who are we, after all of this has happened? Hopefully, we are better people. Hopefully, we are more informed. Hopefully, we have contributed to a positive change in society and one that sticks, rather than sliding backwards the moment the hashtag has stopped trending on Twitter. Hopefully we have not lost our compassion for each other, and hopefully we can accept disagreements within the movement so long as no one takes a position which nullifies the movement’s aims.
Most of all I hope that we can talk about sexism openly. That we can now accept misogyny isn’t just found in a dark alleyway when a stranger jumps out at an innocent victim, or in cases of female genital mutilation, or in countries where abortion is banned, or where women are forced to wear hijabs or told they can’t go to the beach wearing burkinis. It is also found in the bedroom of the Nice Guy who thinks he deserves a girlfriend, in the boardroom when one token woman is enough (so long as she laughs along with the right jokes), in the publication which depicts a campaign like MeToo as a conspiracy plot against men rather than a female-led discussion.
Post-MeToo, we are in a state of flux. We don’t yet have all the answers. We don’t yet have the future which Tarana Burke dreams of, “a world free of sexual violence” after an outpouring of “collective trauma”. We don’t yet have equality. But if we accept that nuance is our friend rather than our enemy, and bravely move on from the slogans into the difficult conversations, I still believe we have a very good chance of achieving it.
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