#MeToo, #ItWasMe, and the Post-Weinstein Megaphone of Social Media
“Genuinely curious if there are women who have never been sexually harassed,” a friend of mine wrote on her Facebook page earlier this week. She was responding to the #MeToo posts that have been flooding social media since Sunday, when the actor Alyssa Milano suggested, on Twitter, that anyone who has been sexually harassed or assaulted use the hashtag, so that the enormity of the problem might be conveyed. That mission has been accomplished; I’d be overjoyed, and shocked, if the answer to my friend’s question turned out to be anything but an unequivocal no.
The phrase has been posted millions of times, often accompanied by stories of encounters that range from the gross to the humiliating to the horrific. Its power lies in its simplicity: the whole poisonous spectrum of misogyny covered in two mundane words. This isn’t the first time that they’ve been used to this purpose; a decade ago, Tarana Burke, an activist and social worker, began a “Me Too” campaign to help young women of color who had been subjected to abuse. “ ‘Me Too’ is about using the power of empathy to stomp out shame,” Burke told Amy Goodman on “Democracy Now!” The sheer number of women rallying behind the hashtag represents a gutting universal truth, but there is power in numbers, too.
That the exposure and disgrace of Harvey Weinstein has proved to be such an extraordinary moment of shared catharsis is the silver lining to the awful revelations about his decades of predation. Lord knows we didn’t get resolution with Donald Trump. Bill Cosby’s trial ended in a hung jury. R. Kelly—who, as Brittany Packnett wrote a few months ago on the Cut, has avoided much of the wrath rained down on other high-profile predators by targeting young black women—has just collaborated on a track with, who else, Chris Brown. Roger Ailes did lose his network, and Bill O’Reilly lost his show, but not his career; neither expressed anything that could be construed as an acknowledgment of the harm he had caused, let alone remorse for it.
These high-profile men, skilled in the abusive leveraging of their outsized power, are, of course, in the minority. The people behind most #MeToos are of a more familiar scale: friends, lovers, acquaintances, teachers, colleagues, bosses, the countless anonymous strangers who have forced their way forever into their targets’ memories with indelible words and deeds that they, no doubt, have long forgotten. It is not lost on those women (and some men, too) who have posted their stories that the burden for calling this whole rotten system to account—the emotional labor expended on offering proof, once again, of how truly universal this problem is—falls now, as ever, on the people who have suffered, rather than on the perpetrators. Another friend of mine wrote on her Facebook page that she found that “me too” sounded too much like a confession, a petition to be forgiven for a wrong that she didn’t commit. “So, instead, I offer: he too, he too, he too, #hetoo,” she wrote.
In an attempt to right the balance, other hashtags have been coined over the last few days, to be used by men who have been complicit or guilty in sexual harassment or assault. The intention is good, but, on balance, the effect is far more disturbing than salutary. Search hashtags like #IHave or #ItWasMe and you are confronted by story after story of misbehavior and transgressions recounted in a penitent, performative first person. It’s like getting trapped in a haunted house; horrifying confessions pop out of every door. “I coerced her into having sex with me. I had sex with her when she didn’t want me to,” one stranger wrote, to my astonishment. It’s one thing to acknowledge that you have benefitted from sexism or participated in misogyny in ways that you are ashamed of and disavow. But it’s hard to see how using social media to ask the world to bear witness to your generalized confession to coercion, or even, in some cases, to the crime of rape, does anything but trivialize and compound the damage done. (On the other hand, maybe such a post will allow the “her” involved to at last press charges.)
There is no public remedy for a grievous harm committed in private; the megaphone of social media can’t be used to ask the many for the forgiveness that only one person can give. One terrible irony of using social media to speak out about harassment and assault is that so often the perpetrator remains in a shared network. You come across smiling pictures, on Facebook, of the guy who raped a friend; you see creeps who should be retreating into the digital bushes instead writing sober, thoughtful messages of support on Twitter—easy acts of moral laundering. So it goes, on the Internet, where the person is so often indistinguishable from the persona; the same is true of the people who stalk, harass, insult, bully, and threaten women online, and then, when caught, insist that none of that has any implication for their “normal,” everyday selves.
Another hashtag has started to gain traction: #IWill, which encourages men to go on the record pledging future awareness and action in support of women and gender equality. If, as Rebecca Solnit wrote last week in the Guardian, the way toward a society that is less egregiously hostile to women will be paved by “a plethora of small acts that accrete into a different world view and different values,” you could do worse than express your commitment to it now. In the meantime, we’re left in the broken present wondering, as ever, how to make sense of the broken past.
Over the weekend, I watched Noah Baumbach’s terrific new movie, “The Meyerowitz Stories,” and was struck by a scene in which Jean, played by Elizabeth Marvel, tells her brothers, Danny and Matthew, played by Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller, about an incident that took place decades before, when she was in high school. She had gone to visit their narcissistic father at his summer house on Martha’s Vineyard; while taking an outdoor shower, she had caught a friend of his watching her, masturbating. Their father asked her if she had been touched. Since the answer was no, he did nothing. (One of the most discomfiting parts of the episode is the difficulty in defining what it even was—Jean doesn’t want to call it molestation, but it has marked her for life.) Now the siblings are visiting their father in the hospital, and the friend is there—eighty years old, frail to crumbling, hobbled by dementia. The brothers are horrified. What can they do? Beat an old man up? Spit on him? Instead, they take out their rage on his car, smashing it up with stones and branches. They feel victorious, righteous; you can practically see their testosterone levels rising. Jean looks at them in disbelief: a couple of grown men who have quelled their own feelings of powerlessness and guilt in an act of meaningless revenge. “I’m glad you guys feel better,” she says. “Unfortunately, I’m still fucked up.”
