I wish MeToo had become a labor movement.
Editor’s note: This is a bit of a stretch as a topic for Substance. But, at the height of MeToo, we all talked about reliable witnesses and due process, so it actually fits.
As far as recent political movements go, no revolt has taken more of a beating than Black Lives Matter. The movement, and the media’s idiotic coverage of it (“That fire isn’t actually a fire!” followed by “Everything is anarchy and crime!”) triggered a backlash. Republicans painted Democrats as soft on crime, Democrats tried to outflank Republicans on crime, etc.
But BLM is still here. The teenagers in my neighborhood still scrawl ACAB on the mailboxes. Perhaps more consequentially, there’s the reform district attorney movement, the election of politicians who don’t fear monger about crime (see: Today’s results of the Chicago Mayoral race), and a better public understanding of abusive, racist policing and criminal justice. The criminal justice system is so unjust that I can’t think of any issue better suited to enrage the sensibilities of passionate young people. BLM is clearly here to stay, in spite of the backlash.
But doesn’t it feel like MeToo just kind of went away? Like society breathed a collective sigh that the banshees had settled down and things could go back to normal? A quick Google search of MeToo generates the following results:
Years after #MeToo, Daniels and McDougal strike at Trump's power
And…
“Earlier, the idea of sexuality meant seducing the girl, but now you’d be caught in MeToo movement”
Wow. Great. We really changed things.
I think there are a few reasons for the movement’s failure.
One is the patriarchy, duh.
Also, the demand to “believe all women” is sexist: if women are, in fact, people, and sometimes people lie, it follows that sometimes women lie. Yes, false rape claims are rare. But when you pretend they virtually never happen, and then you get the Duke Lacrosse team story or the Rolling Stone campus rape fiasco, it feeds the ghouls who secretly believe all women lie about rape all of the time. And the idea that if you were truly a part of the movement you called out, publicly, men in your life? No thanks. My best male friends aren’t perfect, but they’re good people, and I’d never turn against them.
I think there’s a much bigger structural problem though: MeToo failed to communicate that everyone suffers when one asshole at the top has way too much power. MeToo should have morphed into an all-inclusive labor movement, not an ephemeral blip that wiped a few gross individuals from the top.
In 2017, I helped MeToo a boss who’d been sexually harassing employees for years. Contrary to the cliche that women witches were salivating to burn powerful men alive, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done—you don’t work with someone for a decade without developing some fondness for them.
All of the women struggled with what it would mean to talk to a reporter on the record. We made sure that everything we told reporters could be fact-checked in some way so that we weren’t relying on our own flawed memories. The story turned into an episode of This American Life called “5 Women” that was universally beloved—Bari Weiss gushed about it.
I think there are a few reasons for why it didn’t cause hair-rending about MeToo. It wasn’t about rape, which is too upsetting for most people to really want to think about. My boss was the executive editor of a lefty web magazine, not Al Franken. And, you didn’t have to worry about whether it was OK to like his music (Michael Jackson) or movies (Weinstein, Woody Allen). Also, my boss was such a reckless fucking idiot that men could absorb the story and go “Phew, now that I would never do.”
I liked the episode a lot. But there’s something about it that bugged me from the beginning. It was exclusively about sexual impropriety. The gross, suggestive, and relentless comments, the inappropriate touching, his affair with an employee (none of my or anyone’s business, but our donors surely weren’t ecstatic to find their money had gone to flying her back and forth across the country) There was the fact that everyone in the professional and social vicinity of the publication were astounded when he hired a man and not yet another questionably qualified young woman, etc. Therefor, the story was strictly about the objects of his sexual attention: the young, stereotypically attractive women he hired, almost exclusively.
If you can’t see yourself in a movement—even worse, if you’re an inherently suspect ally—your attention will wane, no matter how many daughters you have.
BLM, too, requires empathy for people who aren’t you. But BLM is literally life and death, while #MeToo asked the world to feel sorry for attractive young women—rich, famous actresses even—as unlucky victims.
But absolutely everyone that worked for my boss suffered because he was a mercurial asshole who was your best friend one minute and an enraged crazy person the next and you never knew who’d you get. A mercurial asshole who could fire you for any or no reason. When I was hired in 2008, I heard dark tales of how he came in to the office once and raged-fired every person in the room.
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