Where does the #MeToo movement go after the silence is broken?
Will the #MeToo movement end badly?
Welcome to The Harassed Maid’s Tale. Our story opens on a young woman, a soldier in the #MeToo revolution, running blindly through a forest at night. Sirens are wailing, searchlights are sweeping the dark and a loudspeaker is blaring: “Give yourself up, course correction needed.” In a school gymnasium Sister Margaret, a septuagenarian overseer, is brandishing a cattle prod, greeting each captive woman as she’s brought in with two firm words: “Due process.”
Meanwhile a select group of powerful men-Machers — plot their return from exile, listening as the man known as H.W, the Supreme Predator speaks: “I want my life back. And I want a new bathrobe.”
All right, I’m no Margaret Atwood. This imagined reversal of the recent gains made by #MeToo is not going to happen. At least not like that.
Yet attention must be paid to where a genuinely exciting social movement goes from here.
Especially after a week that included Atwood, the revered author of The Handmaid’s Tale getting her feminist epaulettes torn off on social media for decrying what she saw as “vigilante justice;” and award-winning comedian Aziz Ansari being named, blamed and shamed in an online article for a bad date he characterized as “fun” but which the anonymous young woman involved put closer to excruciating because of his sexual agenda.
Atwood was disparaged by some on social media after writing an op-ed piece in the Globe and Mail entitled “Am I A Bad Feminist?” in which she asked for “accountability and transparency” referring to both a sexual impropriety scandal at UBC and the #MeToo movement.
Some of the attacks — “old cis white
Some attacks on Twitter seem to underscore a generational war
women are not to be trusted” — on Twitter seemed to underscore a generational war.
Young female activists, seizing the opportunity to make some real changes in society regarding how men treat women and others less powerful than they are, were, according to many older feminists, bypassing due process. “A war among women, as opposed to a war on women, is always pleasing to those who do not wish women well,” warned Atwood in her essay, basically calling on the movement to get its act together.
At one point though, she tweeted she was “taking a break,” apologizing in a you-hurt-my-feelings way: “sorry I have failed the world so far on gender equality.”
I don’t think it’s helpful to focus on who is a “good feminist” or a “bad feminist.”
In fact as I wrote on Twitter, you don’t need to be a feminist at all to experience sexual harassment or fight it. Or to believe in due process (long denied many women, especially in cases of sexual assault, and people of colour.) You have to believe in human rights and equality. You have to help create a fair system.
It’s disturbing that some women of my generation are complaining the #MeToo movement has turned younger women into fragile flowers or victims. It takes inordinate guts for anyone to come forward and accuse someone powerful enough to destroy them of harassment or worse.
If anyone wanted a model of a powerful young woman facing a sexual abuser, try Kyle Stephens, who stepped forward this week in a Michigan courtroom to read her victim impact statement to Larry Nassar, who served as the U.S.A. Gymnastics team doctor through four Olympics.
Nassar pleaded guilty to 10 counts of first-degree sexual conduct with minors. Stephens, who was not a gymnast but whose parents were family friends of Nassar, told the doctor, who had molested her beginning at age 6, “Perhaps you have figured it out by now, but little girls don’t stay little forever. They grow into strong women that return to destroy your world.”
It’s difficult to swing from this horrific and absolutely no grey area of abuse to a bad date. But that’s the whiplash going on right now.
Others have written in detail about an article published on Babe.net, which exhumed in shockingly intimate detail an excruciatingly bad date a woman pseudonymously named Grace had with the popular comedian Aziz Ansari, whose comedic shtick on his show, Master of None, is to deconstruct the dating world.
Grace’s account was complicated, gritty and depressingly familiar to many women. She claimed that Ansari had ignored both her “verbal” and “non-verbal cues.”
While Ansari said in a statement he thought there had been consent, his described behaviour seemed entitled and obtuse.
But it didn’t appear to rise to the level of assault, and therefore the question was how was it right — journalistically or morally — to publicly shame Ansari? It wasn’t.
The Babe piece sparked countless smart analyses, one by commenta- tor Ash Sarkar in the Guardian, who wrote “. . . the task isn’t to get men to see themselves as rapists, but to see their partner’s pace of desire as being of equal primacy to their own.”
You can have all the definitions you want but we are still far away from a universal understanding of consent.
We need to listen to both men and women.
And getting back to the issue of harassment, remember the words of law professor Anita Hill, spoken in 1992, shortly after she came forward to accuse then U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. He ended up on the Supreme Court where he still sits. But Hill ended up a hero whose words are as relevant today as they were back then:
“We need to be sure that we can go out and look anyone who is a victim of harassment in the eye and say, ‘You do not have to remain silent anymore.’ ”
What happens after that silence is broken is what we are still hashing out at the moment. Painfully, it seems. Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson.