#metoo? It is much more complicated than that
Can sexual harassment really be resolved with a clumsy hashtag campaign, wonders Rowan Pelling
Iam usually a decisive person, but I dithered for days over how to respond to #metoo. Facebook and Twitter were plastered with the hashtag this week after an appeal to women to recount their own Harvey Weinstein-esque tales of sexual abuse. I felt curiously resistant.
For a start I dislike the constant pressure to simplify complex issues and suggest intractable problems can be resolved with the press of a few keys. Rare is the month when I don’t receive a flood of Facebook messages urging me to signal my support for, say, breast cancer. I defy the urge to say: “My mother died slowly and painfully of breast cancer, so I don’t feel I can be any more aware of the horrors involved.”
Then there is the fact that, unlike many of my friends, I have never experienced any form of serious sexual assault. I was reluctant to turn the conversation to “me” when so many truly terrible stories are entering the public domain. I happen to know one of Harvey Weinstein’s alleged victims, the ravishing actress Lysette Anthony, who said this week she was raped by the producer in the Eighties.
That’s not #metoo – that’s my jaw dropping in horror at what happened to one of the strongest, savviest women I’ve ever met. Model Penny Lancaster, too, made headlines a few days ago after revealing that she was sexually assaulted and attacked as a teenager by a man she had been working for.
So my first instinct was not to sit down, as others had done, and compose a list of all the pawing, pouncing and perving I’d ever experienced. Because on some levels, yes, of course, “me too”.
I was brought up in a pub, so could hardly escape having a barmaid’s weather eye for gropers. Ever since I grew breasts, I’ve been your standardissue recipient of unwanted paws on the chest or bottom and even straight up my skirt once by a businessman acquaintance some 25 years my senior. And at the tail-end of a party many years ago, a very stoned man (someone who was usually considerate) pushed me up against a wall and very nearly raped me. I had to fight to convince him that no meant no.
While at university, I marched a friend to the dean after she tearfully told me she’d been coerced into sex – the accused later came up to me and spat on my shoe. Not hers, but mine, the reporter and enforcer. The truth is, it’s never occurred to me that any woman outside a nunnery hadn’t experienced those kinds of infractions.
I can see my experiences of being manhandled makes my philosophical conflict about #metoo harder to understand – and also to articulate.
I do “get” that the whole point is to make the entire world recognise this kind of lecherous attention is utterly, depressingly and gut-wrenchingly habitual. I suppose you could best define my feeling as a deeply ingrained resistance to viewing myself as a victim, when I have never suffered unambiguous criminal assault. Yes, I know: many would say the hand up my skirt was a sex crime, but in truth it felt like a drunken fool besmirching his own dignity and right to respect. I ticked him off and moved seat.
Many people have expressed their belief women don’t report harassment because they feel deep shame. But I’d guess just as many haven’t dwelt on leering lunges because, like me, they were raised to shrug off all kinds of routine indignities, many of them not sexual (bullying, hypocrisy and mansplaining), in order to focus on progressing with their career. Just as professionally successful immigrant groups tend to minimise the impact of racism and bias to rise to the top, so my generation of women learned to shrug off sexism so you weren’t derailed from the task at hand. Once you’re the boss, no one messes with you.
On top of all this, there’s the fact that the worst cases of sexual abuses in my close circle happen to have been suffered by men. I am close to two individuals who were repeatedly abused (raped, by most people’s definition) at boarding school, one by a master and one by an older boy. Their pain and suffering is still evident after decades and their contemporaries have no idea it ever happened. Then there’s the still unfolding scandal of abuse that occurred within the Catholic Church, to children and young men and women. Wherever one person has power over another, there’s the potential to abuse it.
However, as the hours ticked by and my Facebook feed filled with sad and humbling stories, I found my resistance to #metoo start to crumble. I was not only appalled by the abuse that had been perpetrated against women I thought I knew well, I was amazed by how many men had no idea of the sheer humdrum, weary process of elbowing away unwanted advances and ignoring lewd comments.
Furthermore, as editor of an erotic literary magazine – The Amorist – I felt it would be a dereliction of duty not to comment on the ugly side of sexual relations.
No one longs more than me for the dance of desire between consenting adults to be a beautiful one – but it’s sadly evident that’s not always the case. And I could see that perhaps it was not hyperbolic to claim that a seismic shift was occurring – that the western world was finally admitting, for all its pretence of equality, that casual sexism was as endemic as cockroaches.
So I finally decided to address #metoo on Facebook, but with the qualifying elements I’ve mentioned above, citing my desire to see a wider debate and a more profound, nuanced discussion. As much as anything else, I feel the great mass of caring, decorous males should be acknowledged for the chivalrous way they deal with partners, mothers, daughters and colleagues. There’s a sense at the moment that any man who has ever offered genuine gallantry may find the roaming eye of the mob trained on him. A publisher friend of the utmost uxoriousness recently told me he was called a “perv” because he’d told a young woman she looked gorgeous (and, yes, since you mention it, I often tell men they look lovely – so there).
Many of the women I’ve spoken to this week have had the same conflicting emotions about #metoo. On the one hand, we applaud the bravery of those who have survived psychological and physical abuse; on the other, we don’t want to be coerced into discussing incidents that are trivial by comparison and haven’t caused us lasting harm.
We know our gender undoubtedly bears the brunt of routine street and office-level harassment and jibes, but on a hidden and more brutish level, children and men suffer, too.
The fact is, all the Weinsteins, the gropey bosses, the abusive priests, the pervy schoolteachers and the manipulative sexual partners of whatever gender are guilty.
Anyone who smashes and grabs another’s person should be brought to justice.
Anyone who smashes and grabs another person should be brought to justice