“Me Too” Should Not Become a Zero Sum Game
Some thoughts on the “me too” movement and preventing it from being hijacked by the partriarchy and bourgeois pseudo-feminism. I’d love to know what my friends (male and female) think.
Before getting started, let me clarify that I have never fully believed that “you can’t tear down The Man’s house with The Man’s tools.” Sometimes you just have to play defense with what Joanna Macy calls “holding actions” that leverage existing institutions against the abusers, polluters and fraudsters or people who are just so damaged and dangerous that we can’t deal with them as we would ideally like to. But I do believe that, in the long run, we can’t build the world we want with the power-over tools of patriarchy, capitalism, racism and imperialism.
Feminism, to me has never meant just giving women equal rights and opportunities to participate at all levels of a hierarchical, patriarchal system — equal numbers of women in the halls of a regressive, out of touch Congress, equal numbers of corporate CEOs and hedge fund managers…and equal numbers of women starving in the streets while holding down three grueling, underpaid, no-benefits jobs or homeless refugees fleeing war and climate chaos. And feminism certainly is not about women doing to men what men have traditionally done to women.
…which brings me to how the “me too” movement, meant to empower women, is in danger of being weaponized by the patriarchy in the classic game they have always played, encouraging women to run to authority figures inside the patriarchal system instead of organizing for mutual support and radical change — in other words, running to one man or group of men (or a male-defined institution) to protect us from another man or group of men — the classic protection racket.
Here are some examples:
Most of the advice that I have seen for women being harassed in the workplace is to handle it within the existing system, for example, documenting the abuse, reporting it to HR (good luck with that when the boss controls HR) and a whole assortment of tactics for deflecting and avoiding dangerous situations. We see this from “The Code” for women in Congress to the policies of businesses small and large. The problem with this is that it leaves each woman to deal with it as an individual. But what about building women’s solidarity? Women should be having meetings in every workplace in the country where we pledge to believe and support each other if any one of us is abused, and to ACT in concert. (Women in Congress and other women in positions of power, time to lead the way!) An insult to one is an insult to all, as the Teamsters say. Men get that and they act on it, rallying to defend each other, but women are expected to confront a culture of sexism alone.
Another way this manifests is for women to be urged to go to the most violent and repressive institutions of our society — the police and courts — for protection. In cases where we are dealing with violent offenders or serial predators who present a real and ongoing threat, yes, that is when we use The Man’s tools. I get that. But are force and violence ultimately the tools we want to rely upon for the world we hope to build?
Ditto for one-size-fits-all, “zero tolerance” policies where a perpetrator who denies and gaslights is treated the same as someone who admits what he has done and makes a real effort at repair. This is how we end up prosecuting teenagers who “sext” each other as child pornographers. This is how we put a young man who steps over the line with a date in a truly ambiguous situation in the position of not being able to apologize and learn because he has to fight for his life, and at the same time put the young woman, who may feel abused but ambivalent, in the position of either covering it up or entering into the same zero-sum game in a system that doesn’t see either of them as fully human. This is how we get scammed into treating an Al Franken the same as a Roy Moore and forgetting about the Bill Clintons and Clarence Thomases of the world and all the enablers, both male and female, who defended them, including their privileged, entitled, sex-traitor wives. Yeah, the deck has been traditionally stacked against women and I get the temptation to restack the deck and try again, but didn’t we used to want to throw out the whole rotten deck? What happened to that?
As a dyed in the wool, second wave radical feminist, I respectfully disagree with the “zero tolerance” approach to pretty much anything. Zero tolerance, punitive, winner-take-all revenge based systems and policies are inconsistent with (at least radical) feminism and are IMHO, just another manifestation of the patriarchal, hierarchical, power-over model that is at the root of the problem in the first place. A community-based, restorative model is more reflective of the world we want to create and should be our goal if we truly want to create a society where violence against women will not be baked in as it is now. The means create the end.
One further thought — as usual, it is the most marginalized, overlooked and oppressed women and girls who are showing us the way, for example by uniting and organizing to fight back against child marriage, forced marriage, bride abduction and “honor” crimes. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-13681053. Sisterhood is powerful.
