In 2012, after
Jyoti Singh Pandey was savagely raped and murdered on a Delhi bus, thousands of
middle-class men and women took to the streets to protest the so-called ‘rape
culture’ of the Indian capital, the failure of the government to provide
adequate security to the city’s women, and the reluctance of the state to
sentence rapists to death. Quite a few observers, mostly
leftists, pointed out that the citizens braving the
batons and water cannons of the Delhi Police had not cared enough even to write
an angry letter when poor women were raped by employers, tribal women were
raped by the police, or Dalits were raped by upper-caste landlords. They had
been less than outraged when Muslims in Gujarat were raped by Hindu
nationalists, and they generally refused to believe that Kashmiri and Manipuri
women could have been raped by the Army and the
CRPF. The protesters, it was pointed out, were not only insisting that they
were the primary victims of sexual violence in India, they were appropriating
the unspeakable horror that the woman on the bus had experienced. It was a reasonable observation.
Ironically, the same critics of middle-class self-absorption have jumped on
board the ‘Me Too’ bandwagon, which is a similar exercise in
self-absorption and conspicuous outrage, this time by the denizens of the global First
World, which includes the aspirational First Worlds within the Third.
‘Me Too,’ which
began with actresses accusing a movie producer of harassment and assault, has become
a wider phenomenon. It remains, however, limited to middle and upper class
women who have come forward to speak of their trauma. As with any declaration
of victimhood by the privileged and the determination of the comfortable to
weep for their moments of discomfort, this is both aesthetically and
ideologically suspect. The ‘Me Too’ class of Americans, for instance, has shown
no comparable outrage when it comes to refugees and migrants raped beyond the
borders of America, or even those raped by American troops. Few who are
flooding social media with their ‘confessions’ have given such eager support to
Black Lives Matter, concerned themselves with the bombing of civilians in
Afghanistan or Syria, or mobilized against the general violence of inequality. Yet
the thought of white actresses being accosted by famous men in expensive hotel
rooms was apparently enough to remind them of their own suffering, producing a
rush of solidarity. This is not just a matter of selective empathy. Like the
refusal of Indian protesters to ‘see’ rape in Kashmir and their conviction that
sexual violence was their problem, the selectivity of ‘Me Too’ is a protection of one’s own complicity in the
violence that is not protested.
Within the circle
of elite protest, the need to declare ‘me too’ has produced strange conflations
and contrivances. On the one hand, it has cobbled together – under a hashtag – revelations
of child molestation and rape with narratives of ‘inappropriate’ conduct and innuendo, justifying the eclecticism with vague references
to ‘the patriarchy’ and an absurdly simplistic notion of ‘power’ that eviscerates adulthood and consent. On the other,
it has borrowed the vocabulary of law enforcement, criminal justice ('repeat sexual offender,' 'zero tolerance,' etc.) and tabloid media (a world of 'predators') and merged it with the language of campus bureaucracy (the domain of the 'inappropriate'), effectively stretching the boundaries of rape to the point where it is defined entirely
by how the victim claims to ‘feel,’ and covers everything from extreme force to bad jokes and
bad sex. Elie Wiesel is accused of an 'assault' (an unwanted ass-grab lasting a second) at a public function: his victim claims the incident
(which she describes in lurid terms, using words like 'inserted,' 'molested' and 'shoved') left her with eighteen years of suicidal depression and panic attacks. She is not otherwise bothered by Wiesel's politics; her trauma stems partly from her belief that he is a great humanitarian. An actress has stepped forward to accuse the octogenarian George
H.W. Bush of ‘sexual assault’ because he supposedly reached out of his
wheelchair to pat her posterior and tell her a dirty joke. An article in the
New York Times described Donald Trump’s dismissal of Megyn Kelly during the
2016 election campaign (she was, he had said, menstruating when she
asked him difficult questions) as a ‘horrific sexual violation.’ Trump’s remark
was certainly horrific in its coarseness and its sexism, but can it really be called sexual violation? And is Kelly's experience with Trump's oafishness automatically horrific? This
is not just a debasement of language that inflates the significance of some
violations and deflates that of others. It is the deployment of language to appropriate
the pain of others to amplify one’s own discomfort.
‘Me Too’
exemplifies, also, the confessional culture that is the hallmark of the
Internet age, and that has been embraced as feminist ‘self-expression.’ Women,
it is assumed, not only may but should ‘confess’ their experiences - particularly sexual experiences, good and bad - publicly and
heroically, as part of the recovery of the female voice that would otherwise be
silenced by ‘power.’ Parts of the formulation are quite misleading. ‘Confession’
is a morally meaningful idea only if the confessing individual is going to
admit a crime or sin, which is clearly not the case here. What is being
invested with the heroic value of confession is actually exhibition: the narcissistic
glow of revealing yourself to admirers and sympathizers in relative
safety, like conspicuously carrying a mattress around campus as protest and as an ‘art project,’ expecting a
grade at the end of the semester. Such exhibition reflects the cult of psychiatric selfhood that has become a middle-class entitlement. It is deeply reactionary, fed by
decades of corporate incitement to self-love as self-expression, and now by the culture of the selfie shared on social media. The choice of 'me too' as the hashtag of this herd behavior is entirely apt.
In the process
of that ‘heroic’ self-expression, accusation itself is enveloped in a
halo of saintly suffering and ‘courage’ that apparently eliminates the need for skepticism, due
process (including the presumption of innocence) and evidence. To accuse is to warrant protection, love
and solidarity; to be accused is to be damned. This has generated a
proliferation of irresponsible, damaging and malicious finger-pointing: mischief
masquerading as justice, the confusion of empathy and ‘belief’ to the degree that the need to believe accusers has taken precedence over the concept of reasonable doubt, the substitution of ‘feelings’ for legality, and demands for 'zero tolerance,' the one-size-fits-all reaction to public anxiety beloved of administrators and politicians seeking to show their toughness. On campuses, it has generated the oddly sentimental kangaroo
courts of Title IX, which are a travesty of due process and ludicrous enough that Laura Kipnis was subjected
to Title IX proceedings for having criticized Title IX proceedings. Some ‘Me
Too’ supporters have opined that since due process has ‘not worked’ as a
deterrent to sexual violations, it is dispensable. By that logic, the failure
of the criminal courts to prevent murder and theft should give us the license to
lynch. Revisiting due process is entirely counterproductive if it means the enhancement of "victims' rights," a pedigreed right-wing ideology.
Those who are less
comfortable with lynching have hedged by pointing to the urgency of
systemic change. There is no doubt that systemic change is a good idea, just as there is no doubt that unsolicited pussy-grabbing is an especially repulsive masculine entitlement. But to
jump from that to jettisoning all sense of proportion, wallowing in one's conviction of victimhood, and celebrating or defending the circulation of lists of ‘sexual
harassers’ – alternately described as 'sex offenders' or 'sexual assailants,' named by anonymous accusers, compiled without question or corroboration – is to
accept the doctrine of collateral damage, which makes (other) individuals expendable if one’s (own) cause appears worthy. It may be argued that scholars who have spent their careers celebrating hools, jacqueries and ‘political society’ should expect nothing more liberal than a well-intentioned mob trial. But it is a dangerous road for
a movement to take, no matter what its bona fides. Few allies will remain when the fingers of accusation are so random and reckless.
October 27, 2017
