The #MeToo movement came and went with an incredible intensity across American politics, media, and culture, and for years now I’ve wanted to have a serious conversation with someone about its legacy.
Not so much about the question of whether it “went too far” in some cases — an overblown narrative, in my view — as much as the question of what actually happened here at all. My Co-Host Jerusalem is willing to go hard and say it didn’t go far enough, but I’m more wondering if it went anywhere at all. Or how the pieces fit together. She argues that the movement was more about shifting norms than about aiming for formal legislative change, citing pioneering legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon’s claim that “#MeToo has done what the law could not.” I think one of the paradoxes of the era is that the Harvey Weinstein exposés that in many ways set the whole thing in motion revealed behavior that everyone had already agreed wasn’t acceptable.
In many ways, it seems to me that MacKinnon’s reflections on this sell her own work short. Creating the legal infrastructure for sexual harassment litigation induced corporate America to create its own infrastructure for propagating new norms around workplace behavior and that created the situation in which it required a conspiracy of silence to protect Weinstein. Still, the level of labor-intensive investigation that went into exposing him simply can’t be done in every workplace. The scattershot, journalism-heavy nature of #MeToo meant that focus often seemed more a function of how famous the perpetrator was than of the scale of his misdeeds.
Jerusalem argues that the nature of these cases is that they normally won’t feature the kind of incontrovertible proof that can be the basis for formal law enforcement. She also observes that while women do want perpetrators to be punished, lots of victims, for good reason, do not want to put themselves at the center of a legal proceeding. She cites broad evidence that progressive views about gender roles are becoming more entrenched to offer an optimistic take on shifting norms and values.
I am hung up on the fact that #MeToo had a lot of the characteristic flaws of postmodern leaderless social movements in the internet era. Without authoritative spokespeople, there were few clear definitions or policy objectives. Attention crested and then waned for reasons that seem to have more to do with media dynamics than with clear policy shifts. And the question of which men have and have not been forgiven and by whom and in what sense remains fraught and unclear.
We get into all this and more on this week’s episode. Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Our next Book Club episode will discuss Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone,” so grab a copy now if you want to read along.
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