Polly Vernon
THE ONLY TIME I have ever been tempted to use the hashtag Metoo
was last week, after reading author Katie Roiphe’s account of how she got destroyed on social media by feminists. Because: #Metoo, Katie Roiphe! #Mebloodytoo! While I haven’t ever been Metoo’d in the traditional sense – sexually harassed in the work place, you know – I have definitely been non- sexually harassed online by women so convinced they were right and I’m an arse, they felt entitled to destroy me. To vilify me. To e-shame me. To call me ‘stupid’, ‘vile’, ‘dangerous’, ‘sick-making’. For starters. My crime was writing a book questioning some of the tenets of modern feminism, suggesting not all of us felt violated every time a man checked us out in the street[ 1], and proposing that the en masse Twitter-punishing of any woman who stepped out of line according to the liberal orthodoxy social media was pushing, was gross. Naughty, naughty me!
Roiphe’s crime? To begin work, earlier this year, on an article that raised concerns about the #Metoo movement, asking things I’ve also asked (are we prepared to bypass due legal process in our eagerness to hear women, and accuse men? Is it useful to depict women as perpetual victims?)… Only before she’d finished the article (never mind sent it to US magazine Harper’s, who published it last week) Twitter had erupted, calling Roiphe ‘pro-rape’, ‘human scum’; and mounting a campaign to get advertisers to pull out of the magazine in protest. The heat of the Twitter rage came from a false rumour Roiphe planned to ‘out’ the creator of Shitty Media Men, a Google spreadsheet which invited anonymous users to contribute uncorroborated stories about misdemeanours committed by men they’d worked with. But – she didn’t.
Roiphe is no stranger to controversy. She’s been testing feminist doctrines for decades, ever since her first book – 1993’s
The Morning After – took on rape culture on university campuses, and earned her death threats. But, she said last week, she’s never struggled with a backlash like she did with this one. #Meeither, Katie Roiphe!
No one does spite like the online sisterhood. Feminist take-downs of other women are powered by a rabid, gleeful abandon which has to be experienced to be believed – except: you really don’t want to. Trust me on that. It’s taken me three years (since publishing my book) to risk saying the things I truly think about men, women, sex and feminism, again. Is this Twitter Feminism’s legacy? Shutting down the female voices that question it, championing only those that mindlessly echo it? If so: are we OK with that? Really? (Some of us think it a bit of a laugh, ahem.)