Does sexual harassment truly merit professional decapitation? That’s what NYTimes columnist Bret Stephens wants to know. As does Matt Damon. And apparently, according to New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, it’s besieging her own medial specialist’s conscience. I wonder what skeletons he’s got in his closet.
From the moment the Harvey Weinstein effect took its full force, the #MeToo movement has become subject to scrutiny that feels almost as significant as the campaign against sexual misconduct itself.
Critics of the movement have targeted the perceived inability to discern between varying degrees of assault as the crux of aspects that are wrong with the fewer than five-month-old crusade to resolve the dismal state of sexual attitudes. A force for change that is barely in its infancy has already managed to draw detractors, especially as assailants, mostly men, continue to face this reckoning.
Why are people, specifically but not solely men, unable to thoughtfully participate in the conversation? When women leave a sexual experience feeling violated, assaulted or just simply in tears — even if the sex itself may seem to have been within a grey area of consent — isn’t the conversation important to have?
When Babe.net published the piece “I went on a date with Aziz Ansari. It was the worst night of my life,” a back and forth erupted over the sexual encounter and whether it exhibited aspects of assault or if Ansari was just the target of angry women (because weaponizing a woman’s anger is significantly easier than actually engaging it).
Reading the Babe article alongside the articles that inevitably came with it felt like taking a masterclass on how to misconstrue a movement. It was an immediate attempt to disengage with the concerns of millennial women without properly shedding light on such embedded dynamics.
The strongest criticism of “Grace,” the victim of Ansari’s sexual misconduct, was that she was unable to assume agency within the situation. Why didn’t she just get up and leave?
The lesson of #MeToo, from the perspective of a cisgendered man, is a commitment to listening to each story of sexual misconduct. Grey areas that have been emerging shouldn’t be bleached out by men who claim to understand them just as well as the women who experience them.
Men such as Damon are being horrible listeners at a time when listening is crucial. It would do critics well not to dismiss claims of harassment by asking “Has #MeToo gone too far?” especially when the movement itself still has not exhibited whether the ramifications of harassment (especially those acts in the grey area) will actually last.
In recent months, the conversation has grown along with the chorus of critics. In December, the New Yorker published Kristen Roupenian’s short fiction piece “Cat Person,” a story that drew on the worst date imaginable — and, more disconcertingly, a date that many women go on over and over again.
One of the most cited scenes is the one in which the two characters, at the end of their dismally awkward date, have a sexual encounter that lacks affirmative consent and, in some capacity, fringes on assault. Many women have described this scene as harrowingly familiar, while men (though not all men) have decried it an innocuous, consensual encounter.
I would describe the experience of reading such a skin-crawling, unrelentingly horrific story, but doing so would detract from the voices of women who know such gruesomeness on a personal level.
How do men feel, then, that they can provide salient feedback on an experience that is completely out of their realm? This is not to say that Roupenian’s story shouldn’t yield criticism from a literary standpoint, but most of the male objection doesn’t come from such an earnest place.
With the laudatory reception from women came a swift and blunt backlash from men who defended the actions of the man in the story, Robert, and indicted those of the woman, Margot.
Of course, the warped conventions of sexual encounters have become so normalized that any conversation saying otherwise is a target for resentment by those who perpetuate such lopsided dynamics.
Thus, the criticism veers into a territory that begins eliminating the conversation of sexual politics. This infringes on one’s right to express discontent with this wholly unbalanced dynamic.
Dismissing a movement still somewhat in its inception by weaponizing the voices of its heralders does nothing to add to the conversation.
Women likely understand the difference between sexual harassment and assault, especially considering how many have withstood both. Discourse that actually promotes enriching discussion rather than positing women as “agentless” could yield a culture that balances the skewed nature of sexual politics.
Joel Danilewitz can be reached at joeldan@umich.edu.