Why "That Guy" Got Defensive Over Your Me Too Hashtag, and Why he Really Shouldn't Have
I'm writing this as if my reader was any woman who's used the #MeToo hashtag in the days since the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandal broke out of Hollywood. I doubt that I have many such readers, but if you are, thank you for taking the time to consider things from another point of view, as it were. That seems to be a challenge for people in all segments of the political and cultural spectrum these days.
My understanding is that the me too hashtag has been posted and/or commented on
several million times on numerous social media sites, worldwide. That is indeed a substantial outpouring of emotion over a serious issue. However, not all responses have been positive, or at least what many women using it have hoped for. Some men have also posted their me too confessions of harassment at the hands of women, and some have responded with a not-all-men kind of response that feminists on social media find so infuriating. To be fair, many women, including many feminists, have expressed support for men using the hashtag to articulate their own negative experiences.
I do not doubt that many of these me too posts from women are valid. I am sorry such things happen to so many of you. Were it in my power to prevent it, I would. As someone who's survived some kind of sexual assault, perhaps you feel invalidated when men post similar stories about their own experience, or post some "not all men" type of response. Doubtlessly, some men out there are truly indifferent to your suffering, and a few most definitely have contributed to it in some way.
While I do see where you're coming from, dear female survivor of male maleficence, I also see where the guys who post their own me too stories or not all men kinds of hashtags are coming from. I think there is more to be gained from mutual understanding, and I probably do have at least a rough idea why it is that guy in your Twitter or Facebook feed posted his own me too story, or a not all men kind of hashtag, or referenced false rape accusations or the like.
The most crucial thing to understand is this: just as your me too hashtag was not directed at that guy specifically and deliberately, so too was his response not directed at you specifically and deliberately. Just as you know that not all men are harassers, he knows that not all women make up false allegations of harassment. If there is no need for him to therefore get defensive, there is likewise no need for you to do likewise. He's not trying to silence you.
Social theories prevalent on college campuses and in the media today speak of social demographics: males, women, whites, blacks and so on as if they were incorporated bodies whose actions are guided by the collective will of the majority of its members. This corporate metaphor will not be directly stated. It is implicit in the manner in which demographic groups are spoken of, especially when the privilege of one is stacked against the marginalization of the other.
This will sound patronizing, but it needs to be said. There is no annual general meeting of the male gender, whereat they collectively elect their directors and decide what their collective future policy will be. There was no motion that was passed deciding that women should be paid less than men or that men are entitled to women's bodies at their whim. Men are not acting as agents or representatives of the corporate body of the entire male gender when they grope or cat call.
At the most, he's been exposed to a subculture wherein a disdainful attitude towards women was expressed. I've seen many over the years. I would hope that he would not allow this subculture to rub off on him, but he's less capable of challenging and changing it than you might think. So what that guy is trying to tell you is that ultimately, he's nearly as powerless as you are. Perhaps moreso. You'd be very surprised at how little control he, or any guy, has over the collective conduct of the male gender as a whole, or even of the conduct of any guy other than himself.
There's a good chance even that boorish and shitty behavior is as a result of powerlessness, not
power. This is not, and should not be a consolation to you nor a defense of his actions, but in the moment when he's a boor or even a rapist, he has power that he otherwise does not have. There's also the possibility that he's mentally ill or else has a personality disorder of some kind or another. Neither of which are at all related to his gender or his societal attitudes towards women. Of course, it's quite possible that he is a male chauvinist or even a misogynist. There's no sense denying that they exist, and there's more of them than we'd like. But human motivation is, if anything, complex. There is very rarely a single cause of why people behave the way they do.
I do get the appeal that concepts of male power and privilege have, especially for women who've been hurt by men. If only the male of the species could exert their collective will and remedy the ills that befall womankind at their hands. As a woman who's been hurt by the conduct of a male, you have neither the power nor the responsibility to make that change. That men are not collectively doing this must mean that they are unwilling to give up on their power and privilege. And from there, they have the gall to demand your sympathy for their Mickey-Mouse feelings of injustice at being targeted by a social media hashtag campaign!
If only it were so easy. That guy in your social media feed is giving you really bad news, and I understand why you don't like it. What he's telling you is not that he won't stop the ills that travail women. It's that beyond the reach of his own actions, he can't. That is the limit of his, or any of our power. And that means that the problems of rape and sexual harassment will not be so easily solved. That's not what you wanted to hear. I get that. That's not what I wanted to say either. But that's the cold, hard truth.
It's worth considering that if he really didn't care, or he regarded you as the object your feminist theories tell you he does, he wouldn't be trying to communicate his own sense of powerlessness to you. I do not suggest in saying this that you should prioritize that guy's emotional struggles over your own. He needs to own his insecurities, just as we all do. Unless he too has been a victim, his insecurities do not match the pain you've suffered if you've been sexually assaulted. I do not suggest otherwise. But it might lessen your own angst somewhat to understand that he is not so ill intended as you might think.
Of course, that guy may well be guilty, and we can only hope that he'll reflect upon his conduct and change his ways. But if that guy is not guilty, than lumping him in with the men who are simply because they have "male privilege" will not only be ineffective, it may well be quite counter productive.
When that guy hears feminists attacking and denouncing him, he quite understandably begins to question the validity of the entire feminist enterprise. After all, acknowledging that things might not be so great for him does not in any way nullify your own very real and legitimate pain. If anything, it's a greater recognition of how serious a problem sexual assault and harassment really are. Yet time and again he hits walls of ideologically driven self righteousness and denialism when he attempts to articulate his own viewpoint on the matter, which again is not done with the intent of silencing your viewpoint. It is not a zero sum game. He wonders why it is being treated as such. Isn't this about equality, after all?
So he harbours doubts. And as time goes on, those doubts will only grow as his inquiries are met with increased self righteousness and sanctimony. Those are harsh words, I know. But I really do think we're at a moment now where real motives must be questioned. He will, as I have, come to the conclusion that most feminism today is not about equality at all, but about the maintenance of a cultural myth of feminine purity and moral superiority. He might not know this intellectually, but he senses it instinctively. And he knows it's wrong.
This means using privilege theory as a legitimizing way of erasing or rationalizing away instances of female misconduct towards men, or of silencing dissent and criticism of feminist ideology, since they jeopardize the narrative of monolithic male power and female victimhood that the myth of innate feminine morality depends upon as an axiomatic foundation.
If women are so powerless, he wonders, then why is feminist theory virtually hegemonic in colleges and universities? Why does it enjoy such favorable media bias? Why is it rarely subject to any kind of real fact checking or scrutiny, except from rival ideologies with their own sets of problems? Why do they have the willing ear of legislators on a whole bevy of issues?
Feminists claim that males are so rarely told that they are not entitled to women's bodies or emotional labor. He, like I, don't know whether to laugh or cry when we hear such claims. Most of what he and I are exposed to day in and day out on social media is feminist sloganeering from people who think their self declared marginalized status exempts them from all the moral strictures they expect us to live by.
It seems to that guy, as it does to me, that feminist claims of universal male privilege and female marginalization are more a kind of "
big lie" - an ideological rationalization that escapes scrutiny because it underwrites too many cherished assumptions of too many people with the clout to insure that it remains uncriticized, and repeated often enough by enough credible enough sources that to even think of questioning it will strike many as beyond the pale.
When that guy tries to speak his peace, he is told that he is derailing conversations, and buzzwords and slogans are unloaded accusing him of "making everything about men." Again, tell a big enough lie and hope the ensuing confusion ends the discussion. Truth is, the discussion is already about men. It's been about men, about all men and collective male responsibility at least as far back as Susan Brownmiller's 1975 polemic
Against our Will: Men, Women and Rape. Wherein it was made very explicit that rape is "a conscious process of intimidation by which
all men keep
all women in a state of fear."
The disingenuous voices in this discussion, then, would be those calling men out for making a discussion "all about men" when men is what the discussion already is all about. What feminists object to is men daring to assert themselves and to have their own points of view in relationships with women, private and public, at all levels of society. That guy, like myself, fails to see how this is conducive to positive relationships and an atmosphere of mutual respect, though if he's anything like me, he's long since given up believing that feminist ideologues, at least as they represent themselves in all their maternal sanctimoniousness on social media, care a whiff about positive relationships or mutual respect.
I would hope that they do in real life, leastwise given how many of them do seem to be in intimate relationships of some kind or another with men. At times I wonder how sincere the whole thing really is.
Remember, my thoughts here are not about you, female readers. Nor do I think it wise or accurate to simply reverse the feminist narrative and declare all women privileged and men the marginalized caste in society. And I certainly don't doubt your very real negative experiences at male hands. Instead, I think we need to go beyond these ideologies of collective identity and responsibility.
That will be a long time in coming. In the meantime, I will agree with you on one thing, however. That he should not interject his own issues into feminist discussions. He should simply bow out of them entirely. Not because he, or I, do not care about the very real problems women face. It's because we lack the power feminists attribute to us, and we really oughtn't subject ourselves to the moral judgement of those who seem to us to be more interested in exploiting issues like harassment and rape so as to feel superior to us than they are in solving the actual issues.
Many feminists do not seem willing to listen to anyone who does not confirm their faith in the moral and intellectual infallibility of feminist theory, and use "power plus prejudice" kinds of formulations to rationalize their ideological hubris. Real social justice involves huge amounts of listening and dialogue rather than ceaseless one way sermonizing. Other people, male and female, are to be valued as ends in and of themselves with every right to their own dignity, not merely as instruments for the pleasure of others (as the sexual abuser sees them) or merely as heathens to be converted to the one true faith or sinners to spend their days in ceaseless repentance for sins they did not commit, as many (though not all) feminist theorists see them.
It's regrettable that things have to be this way, but I've long since concluded that my time and effort are not well spent on this kind of egocentrism and emotional parasitism. What's passing for feminism these days has more in common with a cult than it does with any meaningful movement for positive social change.
I would suggest to this guy that he should not have relationships of any kind with women or men who exploit feminist theory in these kinds of self righteous and self serving ways. He sure shouldn't waste his time arguing with them on the internet. I've seen far too many battle of the sexes kinds of discussions online, and they've all generated far more heat than light. Fragile egos are what matters in these situations. My observation is that repetitious talking points, buzzwords, slogans and copy pasta continually get trotted out and presented with all the reverence of holy incantations. As if they were the word of God, or perhaps more appropriately Goddess rather than the tentative theories of fallible human beings. Discussion with this kind of irrationality is futile. I prefer reasoning to liturgy and problem solving to self indulgent ritual. The only way to win is not to fight.
I would instead suggest to him that he take his concerns to alternative media spaces where gender issues are discussed more openly and freely and with less emphasis on dogmatism and ego. There is no sense in trying to reason with the kinds of ideologues we now see so prevalent on social media and in partisan media outlets.
Men like he and I and the women who likewise reject gender theory dogmas need instead to organize and strategize on how we can one day claim the commanding heights of our culture: academia, media, government and civil society more broadly, for those who reject the ideas of male chauvinism and female moral superiority alike.
If you are not
that feminist, you have nothing to worry about. And even if you are, you'll find mutual respect and partnership far more satisfying in the long run than the temporary ego boost granted by institutionalized feminist theory. And it will probably eventually result in less rape and harassment of women (and men) in the long run.
