Me Too

The movement that Burke founded is about healing for sexual violence survivors through catharsis, breaking the silence and isolation of victims. The hashtag was launched to give a sense of the magnitude of the problem. None of that is about hatred of men.

As far as I am concerned, a bunch of millennials whining hysterically about men on social media can't change that. Granted that most people can't see the difference, which is sad.

Today’s Masculinity Is Stifling

As boys grow up, the process of becoming men encourages them to shed the sort of intimate connections and emotional intelligence that add meaning to life.

SARAH RICHJUN 11, 2018

In hindsight, our son was gearing up to wear a dress to school for quite some time. For months, he wore dresses—or his purple-and-green mermaid costume—on weekends and after school. Then he began wearing them to sleep in lieu of pajamas, changing out of them after breakfast. Finally, one morning, I brought him his clean pants and shirt, and he looked at me and said, “I’m already dressed.”

He was seated on the couch in a gray cotton sundress covered in doe-eyed unicorns with rainbow manes. [...]

After Ford came out publicly, someone Politico identified as “a lawyer close to the White House” said that “if somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.” As far as this administration is concerned, to allow Brett Kavanaugh to face consequences for one woman’s story — no matter what documents she has or how many people she told no matter how many years ago — would simply set a bad precedent. Not only because this is about more than Brett Kavanaugh, who after all is just a cog in the machine of decades-long conservative dreams of bending the court to the movement’s will. Because it’s about all men. (And it’s feminists who are supposed to be anti-men by tarring them all as would-be rapists?)


That anonymous lawyer’s worry is not actually about all men, to be really precise; it’s about the ones who can be “brought down” because they are already on high — elite men whose careers and good reputation are assumed to be theirs by birthright. Men who Ford’s therapist described as “highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington.” Men for whom, even now, all is forgiven as long as they serve the causes that keep the system going, until perhaps there are too many women to publicly dismiss them all as liars (see Moonves, Les).

Consequences are for women like Ford — women who speak up even when there is nothing to be gained, and know what is coming to them no matter what their standing in the community is, but who have been unable to forget.

Consequences are for women like Monica Lewinsky, who was 22, not that much older than Ford was, when Kavanaugh worked on the legal team that cornered her in a hotel room and threatened to charge her with crimes if she didn’t cooperate. Kavanaugh himself demanded that prosecutors question Clinton in gynecological detail, details which later surfaced in the official report. It was Kavanaugh who demanded that Clinton apologize — not to Lewinsky, but to his own boss Kenneth Starr. In her memoir, Lewinsky describes her treatment at the hand of the Starr team as follows: “I had been emotionally raped,” and “I felt very violated. I really felt raped and physically ill.” She has been paying for what she did at 22 ever since, and Kavanaugh has not apologized.

When the Women’s March held its 2017 convention in Detroit, the session called “Confronting White Womanhood” — intended “to unpack the ways white women uphold and benefit from white supremacy” — had a line out the door. It was so oversubscribed that it had to be held twice, and on the second day, it was moved to a space that could hold 500. In the summer of 2018, when 600 women took over the central lobby of the Senate’s Hart office building to protest immigration policy, the majority of them looked to be white. Sitting on the floor, they wrapped themselves in foil blankets, arms locked, and most were arrested. Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza has noticed these racial demographics, of course, but she says she has no interest in turning away people who share her movement’s goals. That doesn’t mean, however, that her anger at white women for excluding women of color for generations isn’t still “palpable.” “That hasn’t changed,” she says. “What has changed is that I understand that the coalition that is going to save us has to be much bigger than what it is. I want people to get free. I’m mad as hell about a whole bunch of things, every single day. But I want to be free more than I want to be mad.”

Look too, to the ways in which the legacy of Anita Hill’s willingness to speak up is playing out now. Hill’s alleged harasser was confirmed to the Court in spite of her harrowing testimony. In his capacity as a Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas has helped to decide cases — for example, Citizens United and the Voting Rights Act decision — that paved the way for Donald Trump’s election, and in turn for the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. But it is simultaneously true that the rage women felt at the way Anita Hill was treated by the all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Committee inspired record numbers of them to run for office, and a record number of them to come to Washington in 1992, the same year that Bill and Hillary Clinton arrived in the White House. President Clinton’s own abuse of sexual power would derail the feminist conversation around harassment, and complicate his wife’s later campaigns for the presidency. But the rage over her 2016 loss to Trump would help set off the contemporary #MeToo campaign, reigniting an awareness of sexual harassment that returns us now to the spectacular injustice done to Hill, nearly three decades ago.

This work of perfecting our union is often circular, always daunting; these efforts take time; they require our resilience and determination. Rage helps drive them forward, through the bleakest periods.

“It is probably going to be years,” the young activist Emma González told reporters in 2018 about her battle against the gun lobby. “And at this point, I don’t know that I mind. Nothing that’s worth it is easy … We could very well die trying to do this. But we could very well die not trying to do this, too. So why not die for something rather than nothing?”

González seems to know in her youth what it took some activists ages to figure out: what’s ahead of her. Vivian Gornick has written of her delight, in the 1970s, at discovering the writing of the First Wave feminists, who’d preceded her by a century: “I remember reading Elizabeth Cady Stanton and feeling amazed that a hundred years ago she had said exactly what I was now saying. Amazed, and gratified. Not sobered. That would come later.”

What should have been sobering — what was sobering to me, in the summer of 2018, and to Gornick as time went on — was that women had been here before, yet we had to get here again. The process of change was going to be slow, hard, and often circular.

Nonetheless, so many women are prepared to dig in — even as it costs them their comforts and profoundly unsettles their lives, their very sense of self.

Summer of Rage White men are the minority in the United States — no wonder they get uncomfortable when their power is challenged.

Democrats have won the popular vote in four of five of the elections held since 2000, yet have only occupied the White House for two terms. Meanwhile, Republicans, as Jonathan Chait wrote Wednesday, are “increasingly comfortable with, and reliant on, countermajoritarian power.” Of course, as Chait outlines in his column, the Electoral College was intentionally designed to empower a minority: those in less populous areas of the country who wanted to protect the institution of slavery. The documents that encoded the participatory democracy of which Americans tend to be so proud expressly barred the electoral, civic, and economic participation of the nonwhite and the non-male.


White men are at the center, our normative citizen, despite being only around a third of the nation’s population. Their outsize power is measurable by the fact that they still — nearly 140 years after the passage of the 15th Amendment, not quite 100 years after the passage of the 19th Amendment, and more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts — hold roughly two-thirds of elected offices in federal, state, and local legislatures. We have had 92 presidents and vice-presidents. One-hundred percent of them have been men, and more than 99 percent white men.

But it’s not just in the numbers; it’s also in the quotidian realities of living in this country. The suffocating power of our minority rule is evidenced by the fact that we’re always busy worrying about the humanity — the comfort and the dignity — of white men, at the same time discouraging disruptive challenge to their authority.

Consider the #MeToo movement, in which so much public sympathy has redounded to powerful men who lost their jobs (though not their millions) after being accused of harassment, a phenomenon that philosophy professor Kate Manne has smartly dubbed “himpathy.” Sometimes this himpathy has stretched the bounds of credulity, as when the former television journalist Charlie Rose, accused of harassment and assault by more than 35 women, many of them his former employees, was described in a recent profile as “brilliant,” “broken,” and “lonely.” These days, we learned, when Rose goes to the swank Manhattan media eatery where he used to be a star, he finishes his dinner alone, in less than an hour.

The problem is, Rose’s superficial social banishment can be presented as a grave sentence without any acknowledgment of how his behavior was the kind that keeps many women from ever becoming denizens of media hotspots in the first place, that blocks their chances for professional success, not to mention impinges on their bodily integrity. This same blindness is on display every day in the political press.

That anonymous lawyer’s worry is not actually about all men, to be really precise; it’s about the ones who can be “brought down” because they are already on high — elite men whose careers and good reputation are assumed to be theirs by birthright. Men who Ford’s therapist described as “highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington.”