The Kind of Feminist I Am Not / A Musing on #Metoo
There's lots of kinds of feminists, even ones I am similar to. Let's talk about what I am not, with a focus mainly on #Metoo.
What kind of gender-critical feminist am I not?
Meghan Murphy. Kathleen Stock. Kat Rosenfield, Amy Hamm. More, that I can’t remember.
Women who were cancelled, and then built a career, for saying men cannot be women. That men cannot be allowed into women’s spaces, or into our sports, or to identify as us, not simply because they are not but because women are at great risk of male violence, especially whenever we are vulnerable. They provide great analysis of this phenomenon, showing evidence and the stories of women who were hurt. They acknowledge and fight against the fact that men commit sexual violence against women, frequently, so women must be protected as much as possible.
And yet.
When a man is publicly accused of sexual assault or inappropriate behaviour, they seemingly forget this. They focus on “free speech” and “due process”. They insinuate or often outright call the man’s accusers liars, or motivated by malice, or any number of things to invalidate her (often more than one her’s) experience. They pontificate on the usefulness of #MeToo, and sigh, as they do any time a woman makes an accusation, that it’s gone too far and men are under attack. They sigh this every time. There is almost no accusation that is credible enough for them. It doesn’t matter if the accusations are anonymous, or if the women come forward and name themselves. If they are anonymous, it’s fake. If the woman comes forward, she’s doing it for attention or because she hates him / he jilted her / she’s just making it up for some vague reason that we never say but it, no matter what, cannot be true.
Sometimes, if the abuse is captured on video, that’s enough for them. If they can see with their own eyes how a man abused a woman, they’ll believe it. Never just a woman’s word. Often texts aren’t good enough, or letters. If a woman comes out, with an incredibly detailed description of what a man did to her, but he says he didn’t do it, well then they conclude that he didn’t do it and she’s making it up.
A relevant Lundy Bancroft quote that often comes to mind when reading these denials is,
“I frequently encounter [people] who say: “Well, she accuses him of abusing her, but he denies it.” They then drop the matter, as if the man’s denial closes the case….If the man is abusive, of course he is going to deny it, partly to protect himself and partly because his perceptions are distorted. If he were ready to accept responsibility for his actions in relationships, he wouldn’t be abusive.”
How do they lose this understanding of sexual violence towards women so quickly? What about these real-life cases makes them forget all their knowledge of how the patriarchy works and readily swallow whatever excuses that the misogynists make? I think it’s probably two things.
First, they themselves were cancelled. They remember what it is like to have exaggerated claims made about them that they did not do. Any time any accusations are made about anyone for anything bad, they identify with that person. Since you cannot 100% determine if they are true, they assume they are not. Instead of taking a step back and applying their knowledge of how the patriarchy works and how horribly common sexual violence against women is, they jump in to defend, no matter who it is.
Second, the community they found after being cancelled is generally “free speech” and “due process” oriented. Most people in that group were cancelled for political opinions and did not get due process. So they instantly jump on the side of anyone else who has been cancelled, for any reason. Then, when these feminists spend enough time around them, they start to agree. They want to be on the side of their friends. They do not want to anger or god forbid lose this new community who has accepted them by disagreeing, by saying no, this kind of accusation is different than the kind we experienced, this is about something bigger. They even convince themselves that it isn’t different, that it is the same. Maybe they have gone too far with the whole #MeToo thing, and women who come forward are mostly liars. I can’t say how they reconcile this cognitive dissonance with the rest of their feminist beliefs.
Oh, sometimes they don’t say it outright, that the women are liars. Sometimes they say “let’s wait for the courts to decide!” as if that happens, as if all rapists and men who sexually assault women are taken to court and the real rapists get convicted and all the innocent men who were accused by the evil women are let off free, at which point we can stop (sometimes pretending) to believe the woman because the courts are never wrong and it’s not hard to prove REAL sexual assault, surely.
Or they’ll agree, to some extent. Maybe he made some crude jokes and verbally abused her, but certainly he didn’t actually touch her, so (inferred ending) it doesn’t matter and it’s not a big deal anyway. Yeah, maybe I can believe he was a creep to the women, but for some reason it’s too far to assume he would have routinely sexually harassed them and threatened their careers if they didn’t sexually please him. It’s unclear to me why they can believe these women but only to a specific extent. Why they never believe a woman is telling the full truth, and she must be lying somehow.
These women will post, sometimes daily, about instances of sexual violence against women, in specific scenarios. When trans women assault girls in locker rooms, or bathrooms. When men who have been convicted of sexual assault suddenly become trans women and get transferred to a women’s prison. Then they have no trouble believing the girls and women in this scenario, because it aligns with their politics and they feel no sense of kinship to the men accused.
I have other theories. Some of these women have sons. I wonder if there is something about creating and loving and raising a boy that makes you more worried about this possibility, of girls accusing your precious boy of things he absolutely cannot have done, which you know he cannot have done by virtue of being your precious boy. Suddenly, men's rights activism looks more appealing to you, because what if this happens to your boy? What if he is accused of this and his life is ruined? Logically, their sons are way, way more likely to be raped than to be falsely accused of rape. Logically, the second part of that is often unsaid, their sons are way, way more likely to be actual rapists than falsely accused.
I wonder which way it is with their sons. If their sons are the sweet, polite and respectful men their mothers think they are, and they suddenly become worried about this remote chance a woman will destroy them. Or if their sons are actually aggressive and feel entitled to women, and their mothers deep down know this, and want to get ahead of any sexual assault claims that might legitimately arise by priming themselves to think of all of them as fake. What if their ordinary sexual impulses are misinterpreted by the silly, stupid, vindictive women as sexual harassment and their lives are ruined? My, they don’t want to do anything sexual with women without a contract beforehand, something that is definitely true and backed up with evidence and not just something her sons tell her to convince her that’s why they don’t have girlfriends. I’m just too respectful and scared of women, Mom! What if they accuse me of rape for being sexually attracted to them?
I think one of the cruelties of female socialization is being taught to over-empathize with men and under-empathize with other women. So when men they know are accused, they drop the feminism and sisterhood and jump to the defense of the man. They’ll believe a man they know and love over women they don’t, just because they know and love him and not because they actually know anything about the situation. It’s awful to learn that someone you trusted is actually a misogynist, and it is preferable to believe it is not true. Easier to think that no, this is one of the times that a woman is making it up.
It’s also possible that these are women who have never been the victim of male violence. Through luck or just not dating men, they’ve never been sexually assaulted or truly harassed. The most they have encountered is men catcalling them on the street, or being creepy at a bar. And they don’t have the emotional intelligence or empathy to truly believe that any woman who comes out has really experienced worse, just because she said so. Maybe if he’s convicted, or if there’s a video, they will believe it. But just because a woman said a man treated her worse than they themselves have been treated, doesn’t mean she actually has been, and she’s probably lying because that doesn’t happen to women they know.
It just makes me frustrated. How these women can know that male sexual violence is so common, and such a threat to women constantly that we need our own spaces, and that it is vital to defend them against men who want to be us. And that they simultaneously doubt that any given man accused of sexual impropriety towards women is actually guilty of it. They contribute right back to the culture that means that women need protection from men, and where men are mostly allowed to treat women however they want with impunity.
It’s so EMBARRASSING. Like you’re a feminist but you bend over trying to prove to the boys that you’re not one of THOSE feminists, the kind who actually call all men out for bad behaviour and think there should be consequences, or (gasp) maybe even believe women who come forward about being sexually assaulted by famous and powerful men.
You can condemn the men that other men don’t like. The transgender ones, the immigrant ones, the illegal alien ones, the drag queens, the brown or black ones (depending on the man you are trying to please), sometimes the religious ones. But men that other men do like, especially famous and powerful ones? Those are off-limits.
Maybe they feel good about this. That they aren’t too feminist, that they still are on men’s side sometimes. Look how rational they are!
On the rare occasions they do deign to believe the women who come forward, they rarely blame the men. I risk dating this, but a podcast was recently released featuring two women who accused Neil Gaiman of raping them. Quickly, a tweet from him was found, where he expressed support for survivors of male violence, displaying his hypocrisy for all to see. And what is the response of these women? Telling other women that if they believe men who do this, men who purport to be on their sides, they are naive and need to realize that men who do this are actually predators.
I would bet that if I tweeted, “No man is actually a feminist and the ones that publicly proclaim to be feminists are actually rapists,”, they would have an issue with it. They don’t actually believe this. It’s just more comfortable to blame the women who believed these men than blame the man for assaulting them.
But some of these women don’t identify as feminists. Feminist, to them, is remniscient of the liberal feminists who hate them so much. They don’t attach labels like that to their activism. It is with no small sense of irony that I would remind them that just because you don’t like a label doesn’t mean that it doesn’t apply to you, especially given you fit the literal definition. Maybe this is one of their ways they subconsciously dispute that, because this kind of behaviour isn’t feminist in the least.