No, Not #MeToo

The #MeToo hashtag began because the truth
about Harvey Weinstein flooded out.

A few weeks ago, when the #MeToo hashtag drew attention to the widespread sexual violence women suffer regularly in Western culture, I did something appallingly crude: I posted #MeToo myself. Because, yes, it has happened to me. Though I’ve never suffered out-and-out violence, nor had it happen consistently over my lifetime, I have known the degradation of having a stranger’s hands on my body while lewd and humiliating language flew.

I call my action “appallingly crude” not to pretend what happened to me isn’t serious; nobody should endure such treatment, even if it’s just one-off. Rather, I feel shame at hijacking this message because I engaged in bandwagon behavior and tried to make it all about me. Yes, I’ve had strangers make me feel ashamed of having a body… twice. I can count the number of times it’s happened without removing a mitten. And that’s the point. For me, it’s exceptional.

As I’ve spoken to women in recent weeks, I’ve come to understand that, for most of one entire half of the human species, it happens so often, so persistently, that they can’t keep count. I’ve recently spoken to waitresses whose customers think the fact they’re paying for food gives them permission to paw the hired help. Wives who meet strangers that consider wedding vows optional. Daughters whose fathers think there’s any way whatsoever they can comment on their girls’ growing bodies that doesn’t cause shame.

The #MeToo tag surged into public consciousness following Harvey Weinstein’s public meltdown in early October. It burned hot and fast… and, like most social media trends, it burned out quickly behind some celebrity stunt or presidential cock-up. Though it still attracts some comment from high-minded publishers like The Atlantic or The Washington Post, it mostly burned out after about a week.

But during its heated run, it got remarkably wide coverage. Yes, the usual bastions of po-faced liberalism, like The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post, shared their stern disapproval of how men handle being dudes. I was most shocked when right-wing columnist Cal Thomas, who formerly served as Jerry Falwell’s press flack, wrote movingly about his own family members’ experiences being subject to constant, unrelenting sexual pressures.

Sadly, the brevity required by tweets and Facebook status updates means stories get stripped of detail. In 140 characters, sexual harassment and assault, even rape, happen largely in the passive voice. These things happen to women; they aren’t performed by men. In this construction, I (or someone who looks like me) didn’t pressure a woman for sex, make degrading comments, or coerce sex. It just happened, like the weather.

Many women have written about the #MeToo
experience recently; Jennifer Lawrence is
probably the most famous to do so.

The worst part, I’ve come to realize, is the fatuousness of men like me, men who claim to be progressive and fair-minded, joining the bandwagon. Desperate to prove the pervasiveness of sexually motivated bigotry, we commandeer women’s experiences and tell our uniquely male stories. Because hey, a stranger groped me in a public restroom when I was seventeen, so clearly, I understand the feeling of getting leered at daily from birth to the grave.

I fear this arrogance, a heavily (but not exclusively) male phenomenon, may partly doom this hashtag campaign to early obsolescence. Like “All Lives Matter,” the male #MeToo shows a fundamental inability to recognize that society’s fundamental fault lines aren’t distributed randomly. Some people literally get treated so badly in the casual violence sweepstakes that their abuse tilts the tables. My mistreatment was degrading, but it was individual, not systemic.

Because hey, I’ve engaged in the kind of barroom banter where a table-full of men, trying to out-dude one another, get increasingly crude and demanding with waitresses and bartenders. I’ve reached through a woman’s personal space bubble and put my hands on her body, thinking I was being flirty, when I was just ignoring her boundaries. I’ve perused the kind of online porn that profits from degrading women for male gratification.

Rather than taking the opportunity to see women holding a mirror to my violently inappropriate behavior, I wanted to claim victim status too. I wanted to be martyred for the cause. Maybe this doesn’t make me evil, since in embracing the hashtag, I at least recognized the awfulness of that behavior in general. Rather, my behavior makes me selfish, since I ignored my complicity with the system I condemned.

It’s impossible to know how common sexual violence really is. But I’m with memoirist Mary Karr, who estimates that if you include harassment, the number reaches nearly 100%. And I’m not the victim here. The sooner I realize this, the better we’ll all be.