Over the weekend, as women continued to process the possible long-term implications of the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse and harassment exposés and revelations, the hashtag #MeToo went viral, after actor Alyssa Milano shared the idea based on the Me Too movement, started by Tarana Burke. Women are sharing stories, or simply the affirmation, of the sexual harassment or abuse inflicted on them by men. The idea, in Facebook “share if you agree” terms, is this:
If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote "Me too" as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.
On Facebook, you see this message followed by a “Me, too,” and sometimes an anecdote or 10, sometimes simply the affirmation. On Twitter, where brevity rules, even in the new 280-character universe, the hashtag suffices. It is a surprise to exactly zero women how many women are signing on; we know that many more, even those who may be keeping quiet on purpose, have also been victimized by men.
It is sobering to remember that not everyone has done a shift on the Shitty Things Men Do in the World desk and might not already have “a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” But if my Facebook feed is any indication, the blissfully unaware have been given quite the education.
So now what? The media and entertainment industries' response to Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sex crimes and professional abuses has been swift and damning. But look closer and you’ll see there’s a deep-rooted denial of responsibility that will continue to allow men like him to abuse vulnerable people. (We can’t ignore that the same kinds of men prey on men and boys, too.) That will keep on happening until a sea change occurs and other men embrace their responsibility to stop harassment and abuse instead of enabling the abusers through complicit silence, or supporting the abused and harassed from the sidelines but never putting their own reputations on the line to defend them.
Exhibit A: Matt Damon, who rushed to clear his name when Sharon Waxman said he was among the industry heavyweights who tried to squash a story about Weinstein more than a decade ago. In Damon’s self-exonerating interview, he said all the right things. If he had known, he would have stopped it. He has daughters. The very thought keeps him up at night. But it was this line that stopped me: “We vouch for each other, all the time.”
Here's what Damon said had happened: Weinstein called Damon and told him Waxman was writing a negative article about Fabrizio Lombardo, then the head of Miramax in Italy. If Matt could just call Sharon and tell her about his very good experiences with Fabrizio, that would help. Apparently there was no point, in Damon's recollection, that he felt he should ask why — of Waxman or Weinstein or Lombardo — he was being called upon to vouch for this guy. It was an unthinking reflex for him, it seems, like kicking his leg when knocked lightly on the knee. “We vouch for each other, all the time,” because why on earth would a man need to be skeptical of his friend’s motives for asking him to do so? I bet a woman would know the answer to that question. Hey, me too.
Exhibit B: Goddamnit, Woody Allen. I’ve written everything I feel the world needs to hear from me on Woody Allen already. But his own unsurprising comments on Weinstein (“sick,” “sad,” blah blah blah) also revealed two very common attitudes about women who report sexual abuse and harassment. The boring one is, “You don’t want it to lead to a witch-hunt atmosphere.” As if he’s the first genius to try to turn the scenario of working to expose a widespread pattern of abuse against women in the workplace into an off-brand ironic “Twilight Zone” episode, suggesting it could turn against us into that which we hate, right, “a Salem atmosphere, where every guy in an office who winks at a woman is suddenly having to call a lawyer to defend himself.” Where the hell would we be without Woody Allen’s formidable intellect and moral compass to guide us? Allen also claimed he had never heard any of the allegations against Weinstein, despite working with him on several projects.
'No one ever came to me or told me horror stories with any real seriousness,' Allen said. 'And they wouldn’t, because you are not interested in it. You are interested in making your movie. But you do hear a million fanciful rumors all the time. And some turn out to be true and some — many — are just stories about this actress, or that actor.'
“You are not interested in it.” How many have decided to ignore any “fanciful rumors” going around their workplace, their peer group, their community, without directly confronting anyone about them and maintained this pose as a defensible, even noble, perch above the gossip? Notice how Allen shifts into the second person in this statement. Employing the second person as a stand-in for the first can be a killer rhetorical device; it shifts the speaker’s perspective to the reader or listener. In film, it’s a point-of-view shot — the audience sees only what the character sees, and nothing he doesn’t. It’s an empathy jump-start. What it suggests is we are in this together. I don’t have to wonder why Allen shifted perspective for this statement. I do wonder if he even noticed that he did.
So what to do with the tidal wave of #MeToo? Women have reported; they have given men a sense of the magnitude of the problem. What needs to happen next is for the Matt Damons of the world to stop mindlessly vouching for their bros without even asking why it is necessary to do so. What needs to happen next is that those who give off the “not interested” vibe need to recognize that such an attitude toward the well-being of fellow human beings, especially those who work with and for them, will naturally result in no women sharing “horror stories” out of fear of being dismissed as spreading “fanciful rumors.” In other words, they need to correct their complicity in the silencing and shaming of women.
Progress on justice for women is slow, but it’s happening. Women have gone on the record about Harvey Weinstein, and it would seem as though they are believed. Yet believing women won’t necessarily stop a serial predator from preying again. Making noise in public can. So now the next wave of viral #MeToo posts need to come from men in response to this “share if you agree” prompt: “If all men who have spoken up in a personal or professional setting to ensure safety and/or justice for women wrote ‘Me, too’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the attainability of a solution.” Let it be a motivator for those who have nothing to report, yet.
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