The MeToo movement no longer holds the authority which it did in 2017. Why is this? Surely rape and sexual assault are perennially horrifying to most people in the civilized West. I believe that there have been too many accusations of “fuzzy rape,” both in the media and on the ground, for the movement to retain its grip on the zeitgeist.
By “fuzzy rape” I mean sex that wasn’t coercive, but which made the female party feel violated. Fuzzy rape describes a clash of perspectives: that of the woman who feels wronged, often only after the fact, and that of the man who may have been pushy, but had no intention of raping a woman. That is, fuzzy rape does not describe actual rape.
The demand that all sex satisfy “affirmative consent” – which holds that only a clear “yes,” which does not arise from pressure, legitimizes sex – is not the answer. “Yeses” can be insincere or regretted; this regret is the very basis of many MeToo complaints. But, as Louise Perry has articulated so well, consent is the only concept by which people can regulate and punish bad sex in a post-sexual revolution world. Accusations of fuzzy rape are far more likely to happen when consent is the only word which women wield to complain about bad sex: with “chivalry” and “dignity” gone, the only complaint that ensures punishment, given post-sexual revolution norms, is that of rape. There can be criminals and there can be impeccable men, but nothing in between. What we used to call “cads” are now brandished “rapists” to the detriment of everyone, not just wrongly accused men: it’s no wonder relations between the sexes seem more fraught than ever.
The incentive structure of MeToo has led to several high-profile cases of false accusation of rape or sexual assault, motivated by vengeance or clout-chasing; this appears to be true of the case of LA Dodgers star Trevor Bauer, against whom prosecutors declined to bring a case. We can only imagine how many false accusations have not made the headlines. This phenomenon only makes the predicament of actual victims worse; their accounts now risk being lumped in with fuzzy rape.
But I don’t believe that malicious false accusations comprise the bulk of the problem. Many allegations of fuzzy rape are perfectly honest accounts from the woman’s perspective. An accusation may describe the event as it took place in the eyes of a woman who had no access to the perspective of the man involved. As a result, it doesn’t matter if the accused did not intend to coerce his accuser. Regardless of the man’s intent, if the woman feels wronged – perhaps due to discomfort, regret, or shame – then, by MeToo’s logic, her case is salient enough to justify causing permanent reputational damage by making a public accusation.
“Guilty until proven innocent” is the new normal, justified by the fact that relatively few rapists are ever prosecuted – a valid observation, but one which cannot excuse the abandonment of due process. This alerts us to a peculiar biological burden which falls on women, which we must help women to shoulder: since rape can be difficult to prove, women must do their utmost to avoid situations which either endanger them or risk causing them sexual discomfort and regret. The stakes are high. We must encourage women to exercise caution, not feed them the idealistic lie that all the responsibility falls on men. Real rapists will not change because feminist theory tells them to. Even more relevant to the MeToo movement is that normal, well-meaning men in the West will not necessarily have the sensitivity or wherewithal to honor a woman’s dignity or desires if sex – especially casual sex – is on the cards. So women must take back their power: the power to resist the illusory empowerment of sexual liberation. The power to turn men down.
I haven’t discussed less serious transgressions like leery behaviour or groping. MeToo has caused another conflation besides real and fuzzy rape: the conflation of minor and major sexual wrongdoing. It has done so by seeking to exact the same punishment across the board: permanent reputational damage and ostracism, especially by getting men fired. The public campaign against Aziz Ansari, who made a woman he took on a date uncomfortable by making sexual advances after she accompanied him home, was swiftly dubbed unreasonable. The fallout demonstrates how MeToo’s muddled priorities – spotlighting accounts of fuzzy rape – have diminished the movement’s credibility.
A glaring but unspoken paradox in the MeToo movement is that most of the attention is given to fuzzy rape cases while less glamorous stories, like those of women in Muslim communities (both here and abroad) who are coerced into marriage, groomed from a young age to be with much older men, or forced to work in brothels, are ignored. These sexual violations take place behind closed doors, and the violated women have no power to speak out; but there is too much evidence of women’s sexual exploitation at the hands of Islamic culture for feminists to justifiably turn away. I have written about the feminist aversion to discussing how Islam violates women’s dignity and rights. This is made doubly ironic in the light of the outrage prompted by accounts of fuzzy rape. If the alleged crime of Aziz Ansari was enough to whip up a MeToo frenzy, surely cases of utterly unequivocal rape, which accompany the suppression of female agency in much of the Muslim world, should cause world-ending outrage. But they don’t. They don’t fit the narrative that sexism is bound up in white male privilege.
Even more taboo are cases of Muslim and other migrants sexually exploiting or abusing native women in host countries; these cases, which are growing in Europe, reverse the narrative entirely. I catalogued in Prey the by now routine sexual offenses and horrors committed on European soil – often with impunity or trivial punishments – by these men against local women.
Finally, in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks it became apparent that horrific sexual violence was used as a tool against Israeli girls and women. Women were not only gang raped but had sharp objects shoved in to them, or shot between the legs. None of this seems to have merited any attention from the MeToo crowd.
This tells me that, at its heart, MeToo is not about liberating women from the confines of sexual patriarchy. There are real patriarchies existing right alongside us, which few if any on the Left are willing to criticize for fear of being called racist. MeToo is about punishing men who, in the libertine chaos since the sexual revolution, have left women feeling spurned or used. Rejecting that revolution – a grave burden which befalls both sexes – is the only way to avoid escalating this war of the sexes and to move on from MeToo.
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