The harassed become harassers
Pendulum risks swinging too far as protest spreads
The French equivalent of #MeToo is #BalanceTonPorc, which I translate as “squeal on your pig,” rather than the Guardian’s translation of “call out your pig.” But the message is the same — if you are a victim of sexual abuse or harassment (whether by a Catholic priest or a media celebrity or a Hollywood producer or a gymnastics doctor), don’t suffer in silence — go public and finger your man. Squeal on your pig.
Yet even these two spontaneous movements have met with scorn from within the feminist ranks and elsewhere in Europe, denounced as a “Middle Ages witch hunt” and “a new puritanism colored by a hatred of men.” Feminist social media campaigns like #MeToo and #BalanceTonPorc were similarly accused by French actress Catherine Deneuve along with about 100 other French women in a letter published last month in the French newspaper Le Monde of unleashing a “puritanical ... wave of purification.” Women had legitimate protests against sexual violence “particularly in their professional lives,” and the liberating effects of acquiring a voice against harassment had freed women to speak up. But now this liberation had turned into a witch hunt: “We intimidate people into speaking ‘correctly,’ shout down those who don’t fall into line, and those women who refused to bend ….. are regarded as complicit and traitors,” the letter stated.
So, is this the new status quo? The harassed become the harassers? It certainly smacks of a new puritanism in the United States, the land of the Pilgrims who escaped religious persecution only to form their own version in a new land.
Europe is quite a different story. Personally, I have always felt that the French have a much healthier, saner appreciation of the difference between the sexes and about the role of sex in life in general — less uptight than Americans, less liable to quickly label some version of sexual behavior as deviant or inappropriate.
In the status quo ante, many women did suffer in silence, obviously, and many men did overstep boundaries. But have we now thrown the baby out with the bathwater, as Deneuve and the other signers of the letter suggest?
The evolution of modern Western society has been a progression through social turmoil, wars, religious oppression, economic collapse, human exploitation, battles over a just wage and human rights, etc. At any given time, a chorus of critics has been ready to identify disturbing trends in social behavior.
At the end of the 19th century, Sigmund Freud was asserting that civilization breeds neuroses. Meanwhile, French sociologist Emile Durkheim was identifying the social malaise of anomie, a kind of ethical or moral disconnectedness in society where people became untethered from their social roots. While Freud was expounding on the role of the unconscious in determining human behavior, Durkheim was emphasizing the essential role of a collective consciousness — a binding force that we produce through our social interactions. Modern industrial society was antithetical to this kind of collective consciousness and social cohesion, resulting in the cult of the individual and a growth of
anomie, or a breaking down of the social bonds between the individual and the community.
Now, in 21st century American democracy, we witness further erosion of concern for what holds us together. The rise of identity politics (particularly in the 2016 elections) contributes to a further fragmentation of common bonds and interests, seeming to fulfill Yeats’ prophecy that “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. … The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
The #MeToo phenomenon is very much a product of its times, following the ubiquitous trend toward specialization of social and personal interests, facilitated by social media that encourage the formation of subgroups with very focused, almost hermetic, agendas. At their worst, such crusaders resemble “overeager hall monitors of political virtue who have turned Twitter into their own Solomonic court,” as Newsweek writer Alexander Nazaryan wrote.
To say this is not to deny the moral legitimacy of the #MeToo cause or to belittle the injustices suffered by so many victims of sexual harassment. But, as the social pendulum swings the other way, it does risk degenerating into the witch hunt derided by its critics.
For those of us with experience of growing up or living in other cultures, #MeToo does seem from the outside to be a very American response to a real social problem — noble aims, freedom (from harassment), cleaning up the workplace, giving women their rights, limiting inequities of power (of men over women). But it also has a very American whiff of puritanism — particularly when public allegations (both minor and major) of harassment are swiftly and terminally adjudicated via trial-by-media, sufficient to end careers and reputations.
So go ahead, squeal on your pig — but just remember, we are not all pigs.