The following is an imaginary article/blog post depicting a possible future that could very easily happen. Me Too/Time’s Up is very important and needs to be here, but it has to go through important changes to survive and actually render change: change not just in the norms of sexual contact, as the Aziz Ansari incident showed, but change in how we approach allegations of violation of differing kind, a need to pump the brakes, actually wait to examine the evidence before rendering judgment, and stop the internecine conflicts threatening to tear the movement, and the Resistance, apart. We can stop this future from happening, but only if we switch our path for the better. Names of interview subjects and personal anecdotes are fictitious and any resemblance to any real individuals is purely coincidental. This piece also is not predicting for a fact the events to follow, but merely sends a warning.
THE NEEDLING AND THE DAMAGE DONE
How #MeToo destroyed its credibility and stunted the advancement of sexual politics
Two years ago, when Harvey Weinstein was exposed as a serial predator, and scores of actresses followed Rose McGowan’s lead in telling their stories of the cruel mistreatment they had suffered, it seemed like a new awakening in sexual norms was upon us. The scummy men were going to be outed and face the consequences of their actions, women were finally going to carve a way to not live in fear of not being heard or believed, and the men who remained were going to set a new standard for interacting with women, standards that were clearer than ever and easier to live up to. It seemed like a dream that had been fostered for decades was going to come true.
But it was more of an enticing illusion than reality. The movement known as Me Too as well as Time’s Up lies in utter ruins, its credibility shattered. Too many rushes to judgment had led to countless reputations destroyed, as boys and men, famous and ordinary, were forever branded with a scarlet P for predator, regardless of the later exculpatory evidence and the defense mustered by them and their loved ones. Even with the vast majority of reports of harassment and rape the movement focused on still turning out true, the media blitz on egregious mistakes simply became a deafening roar that couldn’t be ignored. A violent schism opened up between men and women, and even between each other, leading to far more fragmentation and infighting than ever before.
“I never thought it could end up like this,” Phoebe Cantwell, a Time’s Up organizer, says. “It was supposed to be a turning point for the better, something to bring us all together, and to be a renewal for progressives. Now, thanks to a lack of due diligence regarding allegations and the inflexibility of the firebrands, it looks like the progress that had been made in the last few years has been completely derailed. It’ll take years for things to start running again. And who knows if we’ll be able to get people onboard again after so much egg on our faces.”
When did the movement lose its way and become hijacked by extremism, an unyielding belief in every single account of misconduct? Individual opinions vary, but many trace the beginning of the end to when, in late 2017, former Minnesota Senator Al Franken was accused of groping eight different women, starting when Leann Tweeden, who performed with Franken on the same USO tour in 2006, alleged that Franken had forced himself on her during rehearsals for a sexually provocative skit and posted a photo of him placing his hands to hover close to her chest in a way indicating fondling her breasts when she appeared to be asleep. Franken stated he did not remember the even the same way, and invited an ethics committee investigation. Afterwards, seven other women came forward with stories of Franken groping them, such as when taking photos with them. As it came with the parallel reports about Congressman John Conyers’ misconduct and his many settlements, which led to calls from the Democratic Party to resign, which he reluctantly did, many of Franken’s colleagues in the Senate called on Franken to follow. Social media and various gathering sites of progressive activists also screeched for his removal, and this led to massive, nasty flame wars between users who didn’t completely agree.
Franken caved, and announced his intention to resign in November, which he followed through on in January. Many hailed this as a victory, especially in light of Doug Jones’ win in the Alabama special election. It was felt that a zero tolerance stance had encouraged the voters to rebuke Roy Moore, and the ascension of Tina Smith to Franken’s seat was a major step forward for women, would help lead the inevitable “blue wave” in retaking Congress, and had firmly put Franken out of their minds. But fate was cruel. Smith was unable to hold on her seat in the special election the following November, a seat that would’ve been safely Franken’s until 2020. The blue wave was reduced significantly below expectations due to various Republican strategies and the hamfisted, reductionist moralizing the Democrats now had regarding sexual harassment and assault, portraying the matter in black and white terms. And then came the cruelest twist of the knife.
During the investigation into President Trump’s collusion with Russia in the 2016 presidential election, it came out that one of his key associates, Roger Stone, who had stated on a rogue Twitter account just prior to Tweeden publishing her story that soon it would be Franken’s “turn in the barrel”, had arranged the entire event with Tweeden beforehand, thus her very convenient forgiveness for Franken. In fact, during meetings with Stone, she laughed about apparent conquests and moves she’d made on performers on other USO tours, including a guitarist, Robin Williams, and Evil Dead star Bruce Campbell. She even said that she fondly remembered the tour with Franken and said that she was very much a willing participant in the juvenile tomfoolery Franken seemed to be showing. Various people, male and female, from the tour also came out and stated quite clearly that there were no signs, not even unspoken or subtle or open to misinterpretation, from Tweeden indicating any sort of victimization. With one allegation completely debunked, naturally doubt began to creep into the other accounts, which could not be looked into without any ethics committee investigation, with subpoena power having occurred. And thus, with a disappointing midterm race, and Franken’s seat gone red, anger and resentment over the treatment of the Franken affair boiled over.
“The Senators and many of the pundits called an audible,” Veronica Natley, a Minnesota Democratic Party official, says sadly. “The Senators should have stood with Franken and pressed harder for the investigation he himself called for. Or at least, he should have made the decision to ignore the calls to resign, redouble his calls for an investigation, pledged to live by the results, and not run again in 2020. All of that would’ve been sufficient. Instead, by resigning, it set a new template for Republicans to follow, another way to rig elections in their favor.” Indeed, since Franken’s resignation, thirty Congresspeople and six Senators, including five women, have resigned at the merest whiff of sexual impropriety before any analysis of the allegations, and several of the Democratic candidates’ midterm election campaigns were terminated early by the same, leading to chaos in the various races, chaos the Republicans were able to exploit handily.
If the political results were disheartening, the social results fared no better. The supporters of Me Too/Time’s Up began to grow more rigid in their beliefs, shutting down the valid concerns raised by people over the possibility of conflating different types of behavior to be as deserving harsh punishment as actual rape. As one blog comment that went viral during the time the movement began to crumble states, “It’s getting to point that any man who lightly and briefly touches a woman’s butt for two seconds, possibly even by accident, is now going to be targeted, no matter how contrite the male in question is.” Pop star Taylor Swift and her fans, in particular, received a torrent of hate, as many considered her civil suit over a DJ’s alleged groping of her being the precedent for this new standard of misconduct, particularly in Franken’s case.
Karen Handen, a writer at Jezebel, states quite plainly, “There was still a lot of good that happened. But the shades of gray in situations began to be reduced to simple black and white starting after the 2018 Golden Globes. Don’t get me wrong, when the article about Aziz Ansari came out, it did shine a light on the fact that men need to be raised by new standards, especially when it comes to wanting and expecting sex. But the writer at Babe clearly had an axe to grind, and raised the woman’s account in a way that trivialized sexual misconduct. She had a right to change her mind about that date, and she did so. But she did clearly send mixed signals that even the most sensitive, fair-minded man could find hard to interpret, especially if she was willing to cross other boundaries before saying no to certain ones. And for men on the autistic spectrum, who largely are the ones subject to many of the proven cases of false accusations, it’s beyond hellish.”
Oliver Handley, a Florida college student, was such an individual. At an open-air student party on the campus of the University of Florida, he tripped over electrical cables and, as he fell, lightly brushed the breast of a female student, who did not wish to be identified for this article. The woman stated that the encounter counted as groping and harassment, particularly when several students claimed that Handley had literally leapt at her. Handley promptly apologized, but swayed by the crowd, she refused and stated that she was going to file a complaint. Over and over again, Handley apologized, but no one was swayed. He tried to set up a private meeting with the woman to settle the affair, but when someone reported that they’d seen him touching another female’s back, she refused to meet him.
The investigation held by the dean of student affairs talked to as many people from the gathering as possible. A combination of genuine confabulation and limelight seeking led to all the students claiming that Handley had aggressively moved on the woman, and it ended in his suspension. In the aftermath, Handley became a pariah in his Gainesville neighborhood. “His mailbox, smartphone, email and social media accounts were flooded with hateful comments, condemning him for the alleged misconduct, referring to him as a pervert, threatening to castrate or kill him,” Sheila Handley, his mother, states quite tearfully.
Fearful for his life, Handley and his family filed a police report, but they moved quite slowly on the information. One day, when walking through a nearby park, a group of people ganged up on Handley and roughed him up considerably. He filed another report and the individuals in question were brought in. However, Handley’s various detractors gave their undivided support to his assailants, either calling them heroes who stopped a sex criminal from hurting another victim, or framed for an event that didn’t happen. Some went so far as to claim that Handley did it to himself. Already fragile from the events, Oliver Handley ran a hose from his exhaust pipe into his car and ran the engine. He was twenty-two years old.
The Alachua County Sheriff’s Office decided to investigate the events starting from the campus party up to the suicide. After continual interviews, especially from family, friends and his psychiatrist, they determined that Oliver Handley had done no intentional harm, and that the woman in question was swayed by peer pressure to believing the worst. After informing her of what they knew, she apologized to them and to Handley’s family, admitting her mistake. But when she filed such a message through social media, many called her “bought off” and “having sold out her integrity.”
Stories like Oliver Handley’s became quite common. Alt-right sites especially used them to their benefit. So-called “brogressives” also jumped on it. YouTube figures like TJ Kirk, aka “TheAmazingAtheist”, referred to it as part of a nefarious “feminazi SJW conspiracy.” Followers began to desert Me Too and Time’s Up in droves, utterly disillusioned. Many of them created so-called “sexually neutral sites” saying that “we don’t support radical feminism or MRAs, just normality.” Groups began to show innocence support for certain figures tarred by allegations, including Russell Simmons, James Toback, TJ Miller, and even Kevin Spacey. Matt Damon decided to retract his apology for comments he made about a “spectrum of behavior”, for which Minnie Driver and many other actresses had chastised him for, saying, “I definitely could’ve worded it better, especially in terms of commenting on Louis C.K.’s possible redemption, but in fact I think that the gist of what I said was in fact true. I think physical contact is now being pigeonholed into being one way or the other, and creating a very restrictive sense of what is appropriate sexual behavior. Maybe this effectively rolling back what the sexual revolution accomplished, but in a way that conservatives never wanted it to.” His comments effectively led to more fracturing, especially in the movement that had seemed to move to silence him earlier.
Me Too/Time’s Up was, in many ways, a victim of its early success. An inability to examine critically what was popping up and accepting it face value, accusing any and all people with concerns as “trolls”, “bots” and “saboteurs”, and an unchecked sense of hubris and arrogance doomed it. At this moment, the aftereffects are still being catalogued, and it will take years to make sense of it all. But how much simpler it seemed, when Rose McGowan asked people to tell their stories and be counted.