In October 2017, the #MeToo movement took off. During the months that followed, it appeared to consume our culture, devastating careers, spreading paranoia and mistrust across industries.
Activists and the media claimed #MeToo would change the world. 5 years later, it’s forgotten.
Assorted powerful men, mostly in the entertainment industry, lost their careers and a few their freedom. The trials of Harvey Weinstein drag on with the unwatchable tedium of the many movies that he produced. Charlie Rose recently celebrated Women’s History Month by retweeting his interviews with Hillary Clinton and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. CBS News recently conducted a cheerful chat with Garrison Keilor on relaunching his career.
The fall of Governor Andrew Cuomo, in the most recent and likely last #MeToo case, showcased just how much the wheel had turned with key #TimesUp figures, the organization set up by Hollywood to fight sexual harassment, caught covertly supporting Cuomo. Lisa Bloom went from advising Harvey Weinstein to representing Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. #MeToo had become a grift whose crusaders could cash in by playing for the other team.
There’s little reason to think that the #MeToo movement helped anyone except those players.
Like most moral panics, #MeToo reaped its share of the guilty and the innocent, but nothing has actually changed. A new film industry survey reports that 69% of respondents claimed that they had “personally experienced abuse or misconduct in the last five years.”
A poll from this summer showed only 49% of Americans still support the #MeToo movement. 21% oppose it and another 30% just don’t care or don’t even remember what it is.
The fifth anniversary of the #MeToo movement has been muted because Democrats and their media are relying heavily on abortion, not sexual harassment, to radicalize and recruit women.
And, awkwardly, the most powerful man in the country, Joe Biden, is a serial predator who can’t seem to let an opportunity go to grope or inappropriately banter with women and young girls.
Not only was Biden credibly accused of sexual assault, but one of his closest friends and advisers, who screened Kamala for her present position, former Senator Chris Dodd, was the other half of Senator Ted Kennedy’s infamous “waitress sandwich” during which, “The six-foot-two, 225-plus-pound Kennedy grabs the five-foot-three, 103-pound waitress and throws her on the table… Kennedy then picks her up from the table and throws her on Dodd, who is sprawled in a chair… Kennedy jumps on top and begins rubbing his genital area against hers.”
Biden appointed Dodd as one of his special advisers and personally dedicated the Dodd Center for Human Rights. The Center has a statement of solidarity with Ukraine, not with waitresses.
Even while the #MeToo movement was fading, the erasure of women from public life was picking up steam. Five years after #MeToo, women live in a world in which men can enter their bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms, prison cells and shelters. Complaining means not just being fired, but being canceled for speaking out against these invasions and assaults.
A culture war has inflicted chest binders, hormones and mastectomies and hysterectomies on women and girls in an attempt to erase their sex. The scale of these medical atrocities dwarf not only Harvey Weinstein, but the worst serial killers in history. The occasional predatory celebrity, no matter how monstrous, proved far easier to topple than the nightmarish femicide.
The world five years after #MeToo is a place of “pregnant people”, “bleeders” and “uterus-havers” where women have been far more thoroughly erased than the apocalyptic feminist fantasies of The Handmaid’s Tale now in its unwatched penultimate season.
Feminism is both omnipresent and helpless. Like all the other curated causes in the media, it’s obsessed with trivialities and distractions, manufactured campaigns that reveal the powerlessness of its ideals. The one thing feminism isn’t allowed to do is defend women.
The real purpose of the #MeToo movement was not to change anything, but to distract us from the change that was already taking place. Like other hashtag moral panics, including #BlackLivesMatter, it was an organizational, recruitment and radicalization engine. It used the movement as leverage for embedding a new layer of woke consultants and activists within corporations to indoctrinate employees and promote the varied causes of the Left.
And cash in.
#MeToo told women that their interests lay in woke alliances. And those woke alliances are using intersectionality to destroy women who, once recruited, are told that they don’t exist.
And now, much like women, #MeToo is forgotten. There’s not much room for it in the Biden era. Or that of Ezra Miller, the D.C. movie star whose personal pronoun is “they”, who claimed to have been victimized during the #MeToo era, but who was accused of choking women.
What does sexual harassment mean in a world where men claim to be women before assaulting women? How does #MeToo work in a society where girls are canceled as oppressors for wanting some privacy? Wokeness never actually ends abuses, it redefines them as virtues.
#MeToo is forgotten because, at least for now, it served its purpose. It didn’t stop sexual harassment, but it was never meant to. It was another implementation of cancel culture that allowed a handful of activists and lawyers to denounce anyone they pleased. And it helped get us used to the idea that companies should fire people and society should revile them before the evidence is actually in. We all live in the world that #MeToo helped to make. It’s a world in which women, and just about everyone else is, are worse off and more vulnerable than ever.
The same world of “my truth” that made accusations without evidence sacrosanct also allowed men to claim that they were women because that was also the “my truth” that they believed.
By claiming to be the bigger victims, the predators once again turned the tables on their prey.
The world of “my truth” erased justice and women. What began as a feminist effort ended with the elimination of women. It will not end there until we believe that objective truth matters.
Without objective truths, there’s no justice nor safety for anyone, only pain, fear and rage. The real lesson of #MeToo’s failures is that unless we believe that the truth matters, we are all lost.
It also gave licence for psychotic drama queens to spread lies and rumors about innocent men.
It sure did, and the statistics showing that 79% of women are still subject to abuse is probably due to anything at all is considered abuse these days. My daughter tells me that she is not allowed to say “your hair looks nice” to a woman just in case the woman doesn’t think it looks nice!!
Logic?
Thanks Mo! Excellent example. I once had a session with my doctor ruined because I said “Nice to see you.”
What the hell? You need to switch doctors. Or your doctor needs psycho therapy.
I feel bad because I finally found a good doctor who never argues with me and always helps. He even prescribed medicine which is healing my old stomach ulcer, and I didn’t have to swallow a camera to get it.
By the way, #MeToo is deafeningly silent on the situation in Iran.
It’s as if MeToo is a Marxist pressure group first, and the “justice for victims” components are window dressing.
And the entire islamic world. And worldwide sex slavery. And trannies giving girls concussions in volleyball and then parading around the girl’s locker room naked.
The saner elements of feminism believed in innocent until proven guilty.
The saner elements of feminism stood up for both male and female victims of domestic and sexual abuse.
The saner elements of feminism stood up for the falsely accused.
The saner elements of feminism defended actual feminine beauty.
We need the saner elements of feminism.
Shame nobody seems to be able to locate one these days.
Maybe the smoke from all those burned bras back in the hippy days caused brain damage that the feminists passed on congenitally to later generations.
Ah yes,I remember it well…the early stages of the lunacy we are witnessing today…
“Come on ma…burn your bra!”
Funny, I had completely forgotten about that bit of history 🙂
But that train left the station years ago. I retired in 2016 but long before that it had become de rigeur for women in the workforce to make complaints against their male colleagues. They got attention and support from the institution and suffered no adverse consequences if the complaint was dismissed as untrue or too trivial for any reasonable person to consider it actionable. (Which is not to say that there were no adverse consequences for the person complained against even if the complaint was deismissed. There often were.) Feminism started this culture and it made the work environment a paranoid hellscape for men.
Yeah, the man is presumed guilty until proven innocent. And even if proven innocent is still viewed with suspicion.
Yep. Not for the first, and not for the last time.
Personally I’m waiting up for the WTF movement to kick in.
While I admire the ingenious deviousness at the core of this article, the idea that #MeToo is responsible for trans women undergoing medical procedures is just preposterous. Whatever you think about transsexualism or “wokeness,” the causal connections asserted here are non-existent.
Also, whatever you think of Ezra Miller, and whatever Miller may or may not done, they never claimed to be a woman, as you imply. Can you make one argument without lying?