#MeToo Part 2

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I’ve been reading and thinking about the #MeToo movement since I posted my #MeToo blog on November 4. While the intent of the movement is to encourage women to speak up about sexual harassment and abuse in all facets of our lives as an attack on systemic misogyny, it has quickly become complicated by—surprise—political co-option, which like everything else, brings us both good and bad fallout.

The political pivoting point appears to be Senator Al Franken. In a December 7 article in The New Yorker journalist Masha Gessen laid out what she sees as the moral divide between the party Franken belongs to and the party of Roy Moore, candidate for senator from Alabama accused of pedophilia. She points out that Moore is just an example of that’s party’s depravity, exhibited in full force by the tax cut bill, the racist travel ban, the pending Medicare and Medicaid cuts, and the support of an admitted harasser in the Oval Office.

Forced to resign by the Dems, Franken became their sacrificial lamb, or as conservative leaning Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker put it, “it became clear that Franken’s job was to fall on his sword so Democrats could seize the high ground surrendered by Republicans.” Franken, who wanted to appear before the Senate ethics committee to explain his actions (he denies some of the accusations, has apologized for others, and says he “remembers things differently” on others), was forced out and denied due process.  

But Gessen takes the discussion beyond the argument over the moral divide: “The case of Franken makes it all that much more clear that this conversation is, in fact, about sex, not about power, violence, or illegal acts. The accusations against him, which involve groping and forcible kissing, arguably fall into the emergent, undefined, and most likely undefinable category of ‘sexual misconduct.’ Put more simply, Franken stands accused of acting repeatedly like a jerk, and he denies that he acted this way. The entire sequence of events, from the initial accusations to Franken’s resignation, is based on the premise that Americans, as a society, or at least half of a society, should be policing non-criminal behavior related to sex.”

The far right provocateurs are jumping into the sex policing business as well. As Rebecca Solnit writes in a December 10 Guardian article,  Mike Cernovitch, the alt-right conspiracy theorist, tried to get an MSNBC (left leaning) contributor fired over an anti-rape joke about Roman Polanski that Cernovitch didn’t get—or pretended not to get. Solnit points out, “if we’re going to fire everyone who has made a non-feminist remark we’re pretty much going to clear all the offices everywhere of almost every man and quite a few women,” and “when it comes to men in the legislative branch, they’re nearly all guilty of some form of sexual harassment, inappropriate behavior, insensitive remarks, and so forth. I suspect a high percentage of powerful heterosexual men in general are guilty of at least Franken’s degree of denigration of individual women, and if such things are grounds for dismissal, fairness would demand we dismiss them all.” (Former Lieutenant Governor Diane Denish just posted an opinion piece about legislator Michael Padilla, saying the allegations against him 12 years ago were heard and settled and now he’s being pushed out of his run for Lt. Gov. after no further accusations have been made.) 

So we become bogged down in who is guiltier than whom, who is going to decide that degree of guilt, and what is the punishment?  As misogyny exists in every aspect of our society, so should due process. That men like Franken are mostly seen as allies to the liberal cause and supportive of their female staff and fellow workers, so, too, should they abandon their support of positions that result in reinforcing systemic misogyny: Zionism, the American war machine, nuclear proliferation, etc.

Longtime feminist Robin Morgan addresses this disconnect in her blog post from December 4,  but from a slightly different perspective: “To prioritize a record of action on progressive issues—whether for racial equality, economic justice, environmental imperatives, peace activism, or any other aspect of forward-thinking politics, even including being supportive of feminism in the abstract—while abusing real women in the specific, sends what message? It sends the message that the female half of humanity somehow isn’t affected by racial inequality, economic injustice, environmental imperatives, war, and the rest—or else is affected only by those issues, which are important because they also affect men.”

As I wrote in #MeToo Part 1 I know the difference between rape and misconduct. It all has to go. As we wade through this difficult terrain, though, let’s prevent its hijacking by making sure we keep focused on never letting anyone treat us as less than a fully realized human being just as we treat them the same way.