The unsettling part of the #MeToo movement

Recently, a wry guy I know from my local Starbucks told me a joke. Jews, he said, have 500 words for snow: Oy, oy vey, oy freaking vey, etc.

That’s pretty much my reaction to #MeToo: Oy, oy vey, enough already.

It is with dismay that I read almost daily about the latest man “held to account,” as the public flogging is now called.

As the freelance journalist Claire Berlinski wrote recently for The American Interest magazine (well, in fairness, she just wrote it, and found when trying to get it published that no one else had the guts), “We are on a frenzied extrajudicial warlock hunt that does not pause to parse the difference between rape and stupidity.”

She writes about her “new powers” in the new age, how she could destroy the career of that Oxford don who at a drunken Christmas party “grabbed a handful of my bum,” or any number of men who have made lewd jokes, or propositioned her, or confessed their sexual fantasies.

She didn’t, and doesn’t, because, as she wrote, she was “amused and flattered and thought little of it.” And yes, as a don 20 years her senior, he had power over her, but she also had some of her own, “power to cause a venerable don to make a perfect fool of himself at a Christmas party.”

“Unsurprisingly,” Berlinski says, “I loved having that power.”

Who doesn’t love power, whether it’s the make-orbreak-a-career sort, or the sort wielded by just about all young women? It’s intoxicating, and the only trick is to use it, whatever its flavour, as kindly as possible.

Berlinski’s is a smart and occasionally very funny piece, and I was relieved to read it after the cheerleading commentary that provides the background music to #MeToo, with its ritualistic praise of accusers and painting of them all as terrified victims.

Now, a few of the men who have been brought down by the pack are alleged to have committed serious crimes such as sexual assault, and should be tried in a proper court, where they would have the protections given to the accused person in a democratic country and the required standard of proof is something higher than “I felt violated.”

It isn’t being a rape apologist to hope for that. As someone who covers the criminal courts, I saw the serial killer and rapist Paul Bernardo get a fair trial. If he was worthy of one, surely so is Harvey Weinstein. What unsettles me about #MeToo is that the norm it broadly describes — a desolate moonscape of predatory men, vulnerable women suffering a litany of abuse and indignity — is so contrary to my experience.

I don’t mean here that I am the lucky one who wasn’t physically assaulted, either. There are millions of women equally lucky. Most men don’t attack women, or flash their privates about or parade about the office naked, or masturbate as an opening gambit.

It’s how the less serious stuff is now being interpreted — the grabs or fumbles, the stolen kisses or passes, the come-ons — that really troubles me.

Negotiating the relationship between the sexes is tricky turf, always.

How do you know if someone is interested in you if not by how he responds to flirting, teasing remarks or eye contact? How can you tell if you want to have dinner with someone if you can’t try out a double entendre and see how she responds? How can any one grownup be genuinely traumatized by a grabbed knee, a look, a joke, even a proposition?

(There are now ads running on the Toronto Transit Commission system that mark spots on buses and carry a tagline, “This is where Marsha stared to avoid a leer.” Good grief.)

Are we to believe that women always get it right, that women don’t sometimes mistake ordinary friendliness for sexual interest?

I had dinner last week with two women friends. One was for decades a secretary at a newspaper.

She was brilliantly capable — she organized the predominantly male department and all of us in it — and hideously underpaid. She was the very sort of woman you would imagine male bosses preyed upon: She needed the job, she was cute as a bug, she was vulnerable.

Yet, she said, no one had treated her badly or unfairly (except to pay her less than she was worth), and if that was perhaps because of the immense dignity with which she carries herself, it is also because she worked for and with good and decent men.

The other woman is a producer in the traditionally male-dominated sports world, smart as a whip.

She had gone through none of the ordeals #MeToo would have us believe are universal. My own experience, as a female sportswriter decades ago, when the number of women covering professional sports could be counted on one hand, was similar.

We aren’t the freaks who escaped harassment. I suspect we’re the norm. And whatever percentage of the female population we are, we’d best start speaking up.

#NotMe.