What #metoo missed
In which I criticize the much-maligned movement that "went too far" as not going far enough - or at least, not in the right direction.
The other day I experienced an incident of mild disrespect at work, ambiguously attributable to my gender, my colleague's peccadillos, or (I think most likely) my colleague's willingness to indulge those peccadillos when the person inconvenienced by them is a woman. I texted a friend to complain as one does, and she responded, seemingly apropos of nothing (the incident was wholly non-sexual), that she had some thoughts on the limitations of the #metoo movement. Oh? I said. You mean how the feminist cause that got even mild public traction before being overwhelmed by backlash emphasized its spokespersons’ sexuality and women’s vulnerability to rape, but didn’t touch all the other ways in which sexism limits our ability to live full lives that are not titillating to a male audience?
Yes, she said, exactly that.
The #metoo movement – by which I mean the period of brief but widespread collective participation in and attention to public testimonials of sexual trespasses and corresponding demands for professional and/or criminal consequences for the perpetrators of that violence or violation that began in October 2017 – had an ambivalent relationship to work. Tarana Burke’s original use of the term and of collective identification as a form of solidarity and demand was decidedly not tied to workplace harassment, specifically – the audience of the phrase as originally used was a teenage girl. “Me too” (without the hashtag) was an offering of intergenerational solidarity that paradoxically found strength in acknowledging the lack of resources for confronting the hugeness of shared suffering.
But the hashtag-metoo movement kicked off by actress Alyssa Milano was more equivocal about whether it was about sexual violence or workplace harassment. That the most prominent perpetrator at the time was Harvey Weinstein reinforced this ambiguity, because his sexual assaults were precisely tests for or extractions from women who were on the threshold of working with him (literally), or needed his money or approval or imprimatur to work for someone else. The biggest nonprofit formed to carry out the legal work of #metoo was TIME’S UP, which promised representation for women facing harassment at work.1
While the celebrity (Hollywood or legal) spokespeople of #metoo told stories of professional derailment or economic vulnerability, the swell of grassroots narratives covered far more ground. Extrapolated outward from the Weinstein victims as a shorthand for a putatively universal feminine experience, #metoo referred to an ill-defined set of transgressions. Did a sexist-but-not-sexual comment from a male colleague count? Assault by a stranger? Both? Was the object of critique all non-consensual sexual behavior, or all sexism in the workplace? Or only the overlap between the two? Or to put it more pointedly: Was it a movement about men’s abuse of other types of power to extract sexual gratification from women or about men’s intrinsic sexual power over women and the abuses that flowed from that?
Rebecca Traister grokked this tension right away. In a December 2017 piece for The New Yorker, she argued that for most women, it was not the physical violation itself that was the problem, but what that violation revealed, namely, that they were objectified by individuals who were supposed to relate to them as minds (not bodies), and that rather than professional equals, they were (subconsciously or explicitly) understood as objects of sexual gratification. #Metoo, Traister argued, was about work, about professional opportunities and equality, and sexualization was (one of) the means by which men maintained power in those spaces. In an alternate universe the experiences encompassed by #metoo could have expanded outward to include other kinds of workplace interactions and structural inequalities that minimized or objectified women in the Kantian sense (making them men’s tools), costing women status, money, and time compared to their male colleagues.
This is not where the media covering #metoo conversations wanted to go. In January 2018, an article about a woman’s experiences with comedian Aziz Ansari set off a furor. The article described in detail an evening that began as a date but ended as “the worst experience with a man” the woman had ever had. It was an account of how men, through deliberate ignorance of social cues, create situations in which women feel violated, and suggested (through the inclusion of much-maligned details about ordering wine at the restaurant before any sex stuff started) that sexual violation exists on a spectrum with other seemingly trivial attacks on a woman’s autonomy. The piece’s critics described it as an account of an awkward date where the two parties had different levels of physical interest and one party failed to articulate her desires or limits. The article’s defenders were wildly outnumbered by the critics, which quickly took a tone of defensiveness around Ansari himself: You can’t seriously cancel a guy for this?! I mean, compared to Weinstein…2
This backlash (like so much other #metoo backlash) was very obviously a case of doth protesting too much. Insisting on the non-wrongness of Ansari’s behavior suggested a personal investment among the “anti-cancel” contingent in achieving his acquittal in the court of public opinion. But it also operated as a different kind of confession. Celebrity conduct is routinely scrutinized and mocked on the internet. Equal or greater attention may be paid to wardrobe choices or supposed feuds. Readers of the babe.net piece were always free to conclude Ansari did nothing wrong and the pseudonymous woman was the villain of the piece, as they might after reading any other first-person account of a “celebrity encounter.“ To complain that publishing the woman’s experience itself constituted cancellation is to presuppose much of the audience will, actually, find the described conduct distasteful. Those objecting most vociferously to the piece not only wanted, through Ansari’s vindication, social consensus that such behavior was more-or-less permissible, Ansari’s defenders (subconsciously or otherwise) needed to frame the article and its response as a referendum on cancellation (and not the underlying conduct) because the conduct, in fact, spoke for itself.
Relatedly: Anyone who invites a debate on the relative severity of shitty conduct under the auspices of figuring out “where to draw the line” is looking for advanced permission to walk up to that line. Despite literally passing a PhD qualifying exam in the Old White Dead Guy version of AITA (a/k/a Anglo-American moral philosophy), I refuse to play this game.
Nevertheless, I think Ansari’s case sits uneasily as a “#metoo” because the contested conduct did not occur in a professional context or indeed in any power relationship exogenous to the gender dynamics of the date itself. The piece gestures at age and celebrity status, but Grace (the pseudonymous woman) didn’t need or even want anything from Ansari; the power he wielded was the power of any guy on a date. This made it more likely that dudes were going to jump in to his defense (one didn’t have to be a boss to be a baddie, now), but also raised an awkward question: With workplace harassment, it was very clear how such abuses, whether or not meeting a legal definition of assault, nevertheless limited the professional possibilities of the victims. They also made subjugation to sexualization or physical intrusion a condition of economic self-sufficiency or public participation. What was Ansari’s shitty behavior on a date stopping Grace from doing?
Where the dating sexual violence happened on a college campus, an activist movement that pre-dated #metoo but was assimilated into it had an answer. The “Title IX” movement (not a formal title, but the shorthand many activists used), aimed to make good on the promise of the eponymous provision of the Education Amendments of 1972 that prohibited sex-based discrimination in any education program that receives federal funding. Vulnerability to sexual assault on college and high school campuses prevented women and girls from accessing educational opportunity on equal footing with their male peers; schools therefore had a responsibility to keep their students safe. The paradigmatic Title IX case was that of a student (usually, but not always, a girl or woman) who was sexually assaulted by another student, who reported that assault, and who was faced with institutional indifference. There were of course, both Title IX cases and very public Title IX backlash involving professors who were accused of exploiting or abusing their students. But much of the attention focused on cases of peer-on-peer violence: For example, Emma Sulkowicz’s mattress project at Columbia.3 The schools failed to prevent assault, but they also failed to address it once it occurred; victims suffered from forced proximity to their rapists even after they formally reported. Advocates’ practical demands therefore heavily emphasized measures that would fully exclude (expel) or at least limit the movement and access of perpetrators within the institution.
None of this was wrong, or unreasonable – it is, inarguably, difficult to do well in chem lab if you are assigned your rapist as a lab partner, or to feel safe in your dorm room if someone who assaulted you while you were blackout drunk lives next door. But there were tensions. First (and I think most troublingly) the way class and race absolutely suffused the project. Others have written about the role of race in which perpetrators end up facing consequences under TItle IX proceedings. But that isn’t really a fair critique to lay at the Title IX advocates’ feet; any invocation of U.S. institutions will have disproportionate racial impacts because U.S. institutions are, with very few (if any) exceptions, deeply racist. More fundamental, I think, is the role of class. For Title IX to apply, a school must have some degree of control over the circumstances in which the sexual assault occurs. On stereotypical campuses, where students live cloistered in dorms, this is easy to establish. Commuter campuses, where rapes may occur between students at off-campus parties? Less so.4 Title IX as a cause presupposed and leaned heavily upon university’s ability to police the boundaries of their physical communities, and on the college or university campus as a closed space capable of protecting its members while they were inside. The project offered no remedy to the women outside of the campus who might be victimized by the rapists expelled from it.
My point is not that college kids who rape their classmates shouldn’t be expelled, or that (as an empirical matter) such college kids are being railroaded or treated unfairly, or even (as a normative matter) that they deserve more due process than they would get if they faced expulsion for run-of-the-mill plagiarism (if, in fact, anyone is expelled for plagiarism anymore). Again, people are kicked out of school for all sorts of reasons, and the obsession with ensuring they are not kicked out of school for sexual misconduct under ambiguous facts is a tell. But there is nevertheless a tension between the theory that sexual violence is a problem because it operates as a barrier between women and access to education and the ways in which eliminating this barrier for some women requires operationalizing all the exclusionary mechanisms of U.S. higher education. Like Ansari, the men subject to Title IX proceedings had not abused institutional power to extract sexual gratification; they were deploying physical power or social norms around sexuality and gender themselves to do so.
The move toward these kinds of stories, I think, reveals the limits of #metoo as a historical phenomenon. Of course it is not fair to expect a movement subject to backlash almost as soon as it named itself to do everything, to right every sexist wrong. But it is, I think, telling that although #metoo began as (at least ambivalently) about work, the stories in which reporters invested time and media owners invested word count and page placement and the commentariat invested their own attention capital were about sex to the exclusion of work.
Emphasizing sexual violence, in the absence of other power relations, as the paradigmatic case of gender oppression (as, I think, the #metoo movement was sometimes guilty of implicitly doing), cannot give rise to the kinds of claims for gender equality the #metoo advocates wanted to make. #Metoo narratives, almost by definition, figured their heroines and narrators as sexual objects. I have absolutely no doubt that while the subjects of such articles were deeply conflicted about the decision to undertake a brutal recounting and open themselves to public scrutiny via various longform articles, others read them (and some were perhaps written) as perverse Letters to Penthouse. The recent cataloging of Neil Gaiman’s abuses may be read as an individual’s unburdening or a careful documentation intended to forestall accusations of falsehood against the accuser, but I invite the reader to ask whether it would have merited quite so many words in today’s media economy if it didn’t involve weird sex stuff.
Call this the Mad Men effect. My pet theory about the show is that it was popular in large part because it allowed viewers to simultaneously indulge in revanchist gender dynamics and feel moral superiority at the distance between those social norms and one’s own. How irresistible is it to be given the opportunity to both root for Don Draper’s conquests and condemn his conduct hopeless retrograde! Or to vicariously bask in the unambiguous male attention showered on Joan while bemoaning her limited opportunities for advancement. Titillation without shame (indeed, the opposite!) is an intoxicating mix.
It is also a mix these narratives of male celebrity sexual misconduct provide a non-trivial subset of their audience. U.S. media consumers are perhaps too comfortable listening to these stories. As a former classmate and Title IX activist once wrote, she and her fellow advocates demanded epistemic authority on the basis of their experiences, but then journalists just wanted them to be “sad rape girls.”
However, the Title IX claims were not that sexual assault by one’s peers is per se a violation of federal law; they were claims that the institution’s failure to address these assaults impeded women’s and girls’ academic achievement. Physical invasion or unwanted sexualization are but two of the many means by which men maintain their status and deny women opportunities to challenge their authority in various contexts. Sexual harassment is one way women can be driven out of jobs or denied opportunities by forcing an impossible choice - subject oneself to unwanted touching and comments or avoid those with the ability to dispense money and power and status. But it is only one.5
And here is where I put my cards on the table. As I observed to a friend a couple months ago (who shared that she felt the same way), I have experienced patriarchy and sexism in my life overwhelmingly not through sexual vulnerability or impingement on my physical autonomy, but as a discounting of my ideas, an underestimation of my abilities, and (most infuriatingly), a theft of my time. I have not been exempt from mundane experiences of unwanted touching, boundary-pushing, or “unheard” no’s. But the most devastating incidents of sexism, those that have made doubt it was even possible to achieve the professional stature or opportunities I saw male peers awarded or that I wanted most for myself, or the petty insults and extra tasks that, through accretion and distraction, have eaten at my willingness to fight for those things, have had nothing to do with sexuality at all.
The director of undergraduate math education at my college never made a pass at me, never commented on my appearance, never touched me. But his unofficial policy of hiring only women math majors for work-study jobs in the department coded me, and my fellow female math majors, as secretaries, in the eyes of our peers and the other male professors. (At the time I attended there was not a single tenured woman in the University of Chicago math department.) My (male) colleague accidentally ran a natural experiment that revealed only the preschoolers whose mothers received a birthday party invitation RSVPed or attended; not one of the father recipients attended or even acknowledged receipt. My husband has never once been the first parent called by any of my children’s caregivers. And the other examples that I will not share because yes, I fear professional consequences if the former bosses and professors identify themselves in this essay and take offense. Sexism has left my body largely unmolested but has eaten incalculable amounts of my time and cost me opportunities I may never know about. And I am lucky, working in a coastal city in a subfield full of men who would call themselves feminist, in a marriage that is egalitarian at least in aspiration.
I do not think I am alone in experiencing sexism as not primarily sexual; or at least, many of my friends feel the same way (and younger women may find themselves feeling this way when they reach their 40s). Which prompts me to ask: Why did #metoo at its moment of greatest cultural impact veer into sex and not into work? Why not move from sexual harassment to these other, seemingly trivial but accumulative humiliations? Why Aziz Ansari and not the shitty boss who didn’t grab your ass but did steal your idea?
Where #metoo met its backlash was not in calling attention to the pervasiveness of the problem of sexual violence (the point of women is sex, after all) or even in enforcing behavioral norms. The radical move of #metoo and thus the thing that prompted its undoing was the insistence that women’s careers mattered as much as men’s. In preparation for writing this essay I reread the Katie Roiphe piece on #metoo “whisper networks.” Roiphe is, shall we say, skeptical of #metoo. She quotes the Rebecca Traister piece I cited at the top of this piece, suggesting the animus from women is of thwarted professional ambitions. And she decries the possibility that a woman’s conclusion that an editor was creepy toward her at the bar might culminate in professional consequences.
To which I thought: “You say that as if it were a bad thing.”
The world is full of whisper networks. Jobs are awarded or lost based on them, shifts scheduled, books published or rejected, movies cast, Supreme Court clerks hired. It is laughable to think that Roiphe’s real problem is with the loss of opportunities or status on the basis of rumors or subjective assessments. The real offense is that young women, collectively, could build a whisper network capable of dethroning those in power. She’s right in her empirical assessment, but gets it normatively backward. The exhilarating aspect of #metoo for those like me for whom sexual violence or harassment had not been a formative experience of our professional or personal lives, was the possibility that our judgments of men might matter as much as their judgments of us. After spending the first decade of my adult life coming to realize I would succeed or fail as a lawyer or an academic based on the opinions of older men of my intelligence and that I would never fucking know if I would have done differently or better if I had been a man who produced the same writing or the same arguments, the thought that my possibility of achievement in a field might be worth unseating an abuser understood to already be great felt like maybe, an opening for equality. The greatness of a Keillor or Lauer or Franken was not worth the loss of younger women who couldn’t stay in the field after what those men did.
Whether it was a failure of its most prominent advocates or overdetermined by a patriarchal media that only wanted tawdry tales, the movement fell short of this radical possibility. Freedom from sexual violence is a bare minimum, a rights guarantee consistent with all sorts of inequality. The possibility that a woman's (or even women's, plural!) bad opinion might be career-ending for men in the same way a man's bad opinion could end a woman's, is a demand for equal power. And this was the possibility briefly offered by #metoo and the precise point that it became intolerable. #Metoo was only ever allowed to be about women’s sexual subjugation. Part of its legacy has therefore been, ironically, to obscure all the ways in which women are professionally discounted or economically penalized that have nothing to do with their sexual availability or lack thereof. Another aspect has been a kind of bargaining-against-oneself by feminism: Yale law students protested Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment in the name of feminism; but only after he was credibly accused of attempted sexual assault – not before, when he was only guilty of publicly announcing he would have denied an abortion to a teenager in immigration detention.6 Do I think a #metoo movement that unabashedly embraced women’s power to dethrone men “without due process” as the point of the movement would have fared better against the almost cartoonish levels of backlash? Almost certainly not. But if you’re going to be accused of unjustly seizing power no matter what, you might as well try to claim it.
Until it was forced to wind down by the revelation that its founders had sold out their sistren for their own political careers by defending Andrew Cuomo. That TIME’S UP wound down operations in 2023 and Cuomo is running a plausible campaign for New York City mayor should put to bed any suggestion that #metoo somehow “went too far.”
It is an unfortunate irony of #metoo that the earliest target was guilty of such evil that unambiguously horrific conduct could still pale in comparison. The very undeniability of Weinstein’s wrongdoing, so crucial for the movement to not be dismissed as predicated on a lie, was a double-edged sword.
I want it on the record that I thought and think the project is brilliant and will probably (hopefully?) be remembered as a generational piece of performance art.
Interestingly, the Ninth Circuit has found that where the school could revoke a student’s ability to live off-campus and remain on the school football team, that was sufficient “disciplinary authority” to bring that student’s horrific conduct in the off-campus housing under the ambit of Title IX. Such a decision prompts difficult questions about which students are dependent on such permission from the school or dependent on school funding for their living situation.
For those who have read it, I think My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name illustrates how sexual transgression (even at its worst) can be secondary to other forms of gender oppression. Although Lila is brutally raped on her honeymoon, that abuse is portrayed as secondary (in the narrative structure, at least) to her earlier discovery at the wedding party itself that her husband has sold a pair of shoes Lila designed (and, symbolically, her talents and hard-fought independence) to her arch-enemy. Even more provocatively, the text can be read to imply that it is because her new husband betrayed her in this way that Lila refuses to have sex with him. Her rape is not a separate violation but a continuation of this professional betrayal, an expression of her husband’s persistence in claiming a marital relation that he has poisoned and/or is revealed to be a lie to the point of physical violence.
Oooh boy is there lots to be said here about class identification with Christine Blasey Ford and whose injuries are cognizable for putting candidates for positions of enormous power outside the scope of moral consideration.