Me Too

an app which will allow people to give legal consent to sex via their mobile

French 'MeToo' creator Sandra Muller 'sued for defamation'

18 January 2018

Sandra Muller, the creator of the French equivalent of the "MeToo" movement, says she is being sued for defamation by a man she accused of sexual harassment.

Ms Muller accused former television boss Eric Brion of making a sexually inappropriate advance toward her.

She created #balancetonporc, or "rat on your pig", which has been used to share stories thousands of times.

Mr Brion admitted making a comment, but said he only did so once.

In a piece for French newspaper Le Monde in December, he apologised for making the crude remark, but said there was a need for "truth and nuance" amid the wave of accusations.

He said his actions had little in common with accusations levelled at figures such as Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who is facing dozens of allegations of sexual harassment and assault.

Mr Brion described the "machine" Ms Muller launched with her tweets as "unstoppable", and alleged that he had been subject to serious professional and personal repercussions because of it.

Between 1.6 and 2.5 million people participated in women's marches around the world this weekend. But blink, and you'll miss all the attention paid to them on Sunday's top five political talk shows. It amounted to about seven seconds.

As Media Matters reported, the shows, which include ABC’s This Week, CBS’ Face the Nation, CNN’s State of the Union, Fox’s Fox News Sunday, and NBC’s Meet the Press, "were nearly silent on the topic." In the midst of a government shutdown, which lasted under 72 hours, the bookers roped in over a dozen lawmakers and government officials to speak to that crisis instead.

Insult! Meet injury. None were women.

If Trump fans, who represent a sliver of the electorate so small that Trump remains the most unpopular president since Harry Truman, are given the full run of the New York Times editorial section because we need to better understand them, then surely the greatest mass mobilization of women nationwide (ever?) deserves at least an equivalent measure of attention.

Or at least, I think so.

But alas, the news doesn't seem to. Instead, it looks like someone decided that stories about the movement and who powers it are "niche," not the stuff of "general interest" publications. And while we've gotten stories about women who've decided to run for office since the first Women's March in the mainstream media, and many are excellent, better still would be stories of the black women who elected Sen. Doug Jones in Alabama and Gov. Ralph Northam in Virginia. How politically active were they until now? When did they realize they needed to band together? How'd they do it? Why?

Dana Fisher, a social scientist at the University of Maryland who will soon finish a book on the resistance under Trump, adds that while the lack of press has disappointed her, her research suggests it will just further galvanize women to protest, speak out, and organize. "The more underestimated people are, first, the more pissed off they get, but second, the more determined they are to show what they can do."

So with or without the outlets, advocates intend keep up their efforts and their focus on what matters: the ballot. "Women are marching in the streets by the millions because we reject pervasive misogyny, attacks on reproductive rights—including abortion access—and a culture where #MeToo moments feel far too familiar to all of us," wrote NARAL National Communications Director Kaylie Hanson Long in an emailed statement. "It's time to recognize us not as just a sea of pink hats, but as a driving force for political change."

As things turned out, cultural understandings about the electoral process in relation to gender were more powerful than understandings about it in relation to race. Much to the chagrin—rage, actually—of many white female abolitionists and women’s rights activists, the Fifteenth Amendment gave newly freed black men the right to vote in 1870. Although cultural understandings that promoted white supremacy interfered with the law for decades (and continue today in the form of voter suppression), black men voted and held office during Reconstruction—Mississippi had two black senators, Louisiana for a short time had a black governor, and “an estimated 2,000 black men served in some kind of elective office during that era.”3

It was not until 1916 that the first woman, Jeannette Rankin, was elected to national office. Rankin was elected to Congress from Montana. Women in Wyoming were given the right to vote in 1869. But women of all races had to wait until the twentieth century, with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, for the constitutional right to vote. The question of who would go first in the march of national electoral progress—black men or white women—was asked again during the 2008 presidential primary contest between Obama and Clinton. The answer was the same as it had been in the 1860s.

political scientist Farida Jalalzai, whom the Atlantic Monthly commentator Uri Friedman quoted when he wrote, in a postmortem of Clinton’s campaign, that women “are more likely to serve as prime ministers than as presidents, perhaps because in parliamentary systems women can ‘bypass a potentially biased general public and be chosen by the party.’” Friedman goes on to suggest that “to win a national vote in a presidential system, women must contend more directly, and on a larger scale, with sexism and stereotypes.”4 It should not surprise us that requiring candidates to run as potential symbols of the nation would place women at a disadvantage.

The person at the head of the ticket undoubtedly matters in both parliamentary and presidential systems. But the person matters more in a system that encourages voters to fixate on their instinctive responses to a candidate’s personality, rather than on support for a party and its overall policies.

A woman operating in the US’s political system, as Jalalzai suggests, will necessarily encounter age-old understandings about femininity and masculinity that have remained in place to a greater extent than many care to acknowledge, and that remain undisturbed by firsthand experiences with the candidate. On the other hand, Clinton says, in parliamentary systems

prime ministers are chosen by their colleagues—people they’ve worked with day in and day out, who’ve seen firsthand their talents and competence. It’s a system designed to reward women’s skill at building relationships, which requires emotional labor.

A senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign who was accused of repeatedly sexually harassing a young subordinate was kept on the campaign at Mrs. Clinton’s request, according to four people familiar with what took place.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager at the time recommended that she fire the adviser, Burns Strider. But Mrs. Clinton did not. Instead, Mr. Strider was docked several weeks of pay and ordered to undergo counseling, and the young woman was moved to a new job.

Oxford Islamic academic in custody in France on rape accusations

Reuters Staff

PARIS (Reuters) - Prominent Swiss academic Tariq Ramadan, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Oxford, has been taken into custody by French police following accusations of rape, a judicial source said on Wednesday.

The source said a preliminary investigation was opened after two complaints were filed against Ramadan, a well-known figure in the Middle East. He is the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Egypt, Hassan al-Banna.

Ramadan took a leave of absence from Oxford last November after two women filed complaints in France alleging rape. He has denied the allegations and filed a complaint for slander against author Henda Ayari, one of his accusers.

Silence is capitulation.