How will #MeToo go down in history?
If you were putting together a #MeToo time capsule, what would you put into it and when would you allow humanity to reopen it?
I’ve got lots of suggestions for what could go into such a capsule. I just don’t have a clue when in the future it would be instructive to open it.
For those of us who would want such a capsule to be opened only after we’ve achieved a world in which sexual consent is universally regarded as a human right, sexual harassment is considered as socially and legally unacceptable as impaired driving, and women and men work together in an equality-based environment in which neither views the other as sexual prey, well, good luck.
Since last October, when accusations of decades of gross sexual improprieties committed by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein were documented in both the New York Times and the New Yorker, I don’t think there has been a day in which someone somewhere hasn’t come forward with detailed and wrenching allegations of harassment, abuse and assault, many of which have derailed the careers of powerful important men.
Just this past weekend, a Liberal MP announced he was facing an allegation made by a woman of something he did that was improper — reportedly groping a woman’s backside — during a Halifax party policy convention that featured a workshop on sexual harassment. He said he is “co-operating fully.”
For those who view the tumultuous #MeToo movement as not just an alleged grope-by-grope timeline, but a way to address deeply rooted power imbalances in the relationship between men and women, this incident wouldn’t make it into any time capsule. It’s too commonplace.
But the Canadian contenders for history-making #MeToo protagonists would certainly include Albert Schultz, the once-burnished-now-banished co-creator of Soulpepper Theatre, and recently deposed Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown, whose hasty distraught press conference after he was accused of sexual impropriety with young women was so inept as to be considered political suicide. Brown has now launched an $8-million defamation lawsuit against CTV, which made the original allegations public, claiming they were false.
You would also have to include some of the many reasoned and passionate commentaries that argued there was no “due process” in these and other cases.
Of course I would throw into the #MeToo time capsule the pink pussy hat made famous at the January 2017 Women’s March.
Millions of women marched in Washington D.C. and around the world, in strong response to the election of U.S. President Donald Trump whose attitude toward women is embodied in both his past shameful remarks about grabbing them by the p---y, and his current increasingly desperate legal battle with adult film star Stormy Daniels. So far he is not winning.
Women in that first march carried signs with pointed slogans like “Think outside my box.” (Sorry, this time capsule cannot be sanitized.)
At some point, maybe as soon as the American midterm elections next November, the images from that march may be as historically significant as those of the white clothed suffragettes from the late 19th and early 20th centuries demanding the right to vote.
I would definitely place inside the time capsule the Pulitzer Prize citation when, in last week’s thrilling #MeToo moment, the coveted award for public service journalism went to the writers of the original stories about Harvey Weinstein and other powerful men in both the New York Times and the New Yorker, documenting widespread allegations of sexual abuse and subsequent cover-ups.
The Pulitzer committee lauded journalists Megan Twohey and Jodie Kantor of the New York Times and Ronan Farrow for the New Yorker and their teams for bringing “powerful and wealthy sexual predators … to account for long-suppressed allegations of coercion, brutality and victim silencing, thus spurring a worldwide reckoning about sexual abuse of women.”
Twohey and Kantor’s moving acceptance speeches also belong in the #MeToo time capsule, in which they talked about their very young daughters and how as Kantor said, they would eventually “tell them the story of our investigation … and how one day we were working on an incredibly tough story, and then just a few days later, we started to see change happening all over the world.”
Twohey added that the “easiest part” would be telling their daughters “about the women who came forward, because those women will already be inscribed in the history books, their names synonymous not with humiliation or victimhood, but with courage, truth and optimism that things can change.”
Well, we will have to see whether history will indeed enshrine all the women who came and continue to come forward. Without them, there would be no #MeToo movement.
Just as quickly as history was made, some of it may now start to be unmade as disgraced and powerful men such as Weinstein, television anchor Matt Lauer and comedian Louis C.K. are all reportedly plotting comebacks after less than a year in purgatory.
Weinstein has demanded that a court release a cache of emails so he can “exonerate” himself while a comedy club owner predicted to the Holly- wood Reporter that Louis C.K., who brazenly masturbated in front of his female colleagues, would be back on the circuit within a year “making fun of his mistakes.”
The list of powerful #MeToo cultural artifacts grows ever larger, including The Female Persuasion, a new best-selling novel by American author Meg Wolitzer that opens with a male college student groping a young woman and describes how it sets her on a course that changes her life and puts her in contact — and eventual conflict — with one of the older leading feminists of her time.
The #MeToo time capsule is still open, waiting to be filled.
Maybe there will come a time in which all its many artifacts and allegations will be regarded as quaint relics of the past.
I wonder.