Weinstein, #MeToo and the Fragility of Masculinity: the Everyday Pervasiveness of Sexism

Facebook and Twitter timelines have recently become flooded with women (and a few men) posting the hashtag #MeToo onto their pages as a way of demonstrating that they too have been the unfortunate victims of sexual assault and harassment. Seemingly simple in its conception, the use of #MeToo as tool has been fundamental to showing those around us how widespread and pervasive the global culture of sexual harassment is, and how often it has happened to the women around and among you. More than just a hashtag, a social media fad, a trend that will be forgotten as quickly as it appears, #MeToo is creating a global platform in which women can express their frustration, feel connected to other women who’ve experienced the same (which appears to be all of us at this point), and most importantly, is a way of engaging men with a conversation and reality they too often chose to ignore.

The appearance of #MeToo as a tool for women’s empowerment and expression online at this specific time is not random. The past weeks has witnessed every newspaper front cover present a new case of sexual assault committed by US film mogul Harvey Weinstein, with a larger conversation around sexism and assault in Hollywood brewing in the background. Yet for many of us women fighting for our equal rights, the issue is unfortunately not one limited to the glamorous lives of film stars and movie producers. Rather, sexual assault is a reality that women engage with daily – regardless of their age, country, nationality, class, etc… #MeToo, those two simple words repeated over and over again as we scroll down our timelines, is about showing that patriarchy is global, all encompassing, and affects everyone – not only starlettes trying to make it to the top of the Hollywood hierarchy. It affects your sister when she is on the bus and has to repeatedly ask a stranger to stop touching her. It affects your co-worker when she gets fired by her boss for denying him a date or sexual favour. It affects your best friend when she has to explain to you that her bodycon dress was not an invitation for a stranger to touch her. #MeToo is about making the experiences that women have taken for too long for granted an undeniable reality in the eyes of all, and especially men.

Yet why is it still so difficult to engage men with these conversations? Why is it that a flood of hashtags and suffering and experiences need to be made public (and beyond public, viral) for them to be acknowledged and for things to really change? Why is it that even when faced with the reality that they (maybe not them personally but the world of men of which they are members of) are the ones who are at fault here, so many men chose to ignore or belittle the issue and their responsibility towards it ? As much as women would love to be stopping our own rapes, assaults, and the constant sexism we experience, the solution lies not in the victim but in the attacker. As #MeToo demonstrates, it is not women who need to be educated on the subject and who need to alter their behaviour – our existence as women has given us a free lifetime course entitled Sexism Everyday 101 – it is the men who are either committing these crimes or those who in their silence are supporting such behaviour. It is time for men too to start acknowledging, confronting, and altering the way they understand and treat the women around them.

But engaging men — and more specifically the men who wilfully ignore the role that they may play in a larger systemic sexist society — can be extremely difficult when they are those who chose to block out any sense of responsibility in the issue. Even at times, the men who wear the ‘Feminist Ally’ shield as an excuse to deny their own inherent sexism (because when an issue is systemic, it involves ALL of us’ way of thinking), end up using their powerful position to silence and not uplift the opinions and experiences of other women. These are the men who will quickly state clearly that they, unlike the Brock Turners and Harvey Weinsteins of this world, would never commit such treacherous acts or hurt women. These are the men who will immediately become defensive about the issues they claim they are supporting, distinguishing themselves as the ‘good ones’ in a world filled with ‘bad ones’. These are the men who will use the platforms created by women to express their frustrations as a way of reminding us that ‘Not All Men’ are involved in this issue I personally consider this as having the same inherent ideological fragility as claims like ‘All Lives Matter’ when discussing Race Issues and the oppression of blacks in the world). These are the men who claim they are helping women while simultaneously denying them the voices and platforms they deserve and so desperately need. These are the men who believe that their opinions matter more than the opinions of women that they might disagree with. These are the men who are holding us ALL, men and women, back.

I was unfortunately made too aware of these types of men — the ones we desperately need to engage with yet make it quasi-impossible — in the comment section of a friend’s own MeToo post on Facebook. Renowned for being trolls on her page who repeatedly join forces to mock the more serious posts and comments this friend was making through her social media platform, they decided to join forces again to make their very important opinions heard in a space created for women to finally have their voices shine bright. I must also remind you all that while the ‘Me Too’ movement has become so widespread that the majority of my female friends have shared the seemingly simple status, admitting on the global platform which is Facebook that you too have been sexually harassed or assaulted can still be a daunting task for women who’ve become accustomed since childhood to downplay or ignore sexism because “thats just the way men are”. By posting those two words on their Facebook page, they are making their long-term suffering visible to all of those in their networks: from their grandmothers to their old high school teachers to all the acquaintances they’ve accumulated in their Friends list. So when these two boys began to use my friend’s post as an opportunity not only to post “MeToo” (and while I do believe men’s harassment is a serious issue, we cannot lose sight of the inherently gendered elements of this conversation, nor can we forget that this is a time for women’s voices to be heard), but to also mock through “lols” and laughing emojis the seriousness of her perspective and her issue, I couldn’t help but respond. When I expressed how, regardless of intent, laughing emojis could appear disrespectful and inconsiderate of the seriousness of my friend’s pain, these men decided that I deserved the full troll-like breadth of their wrath.

Multiple elements of our Facebook ‘exchange’ were incredibly problematic and inherently sexist (regardless of how much these men were expressing that they were all ‘down with the cause’). First, there was the argument that sexual violence was a genderless issue and that he had been harassed by “men that wanted to bum him” (the discrete homophobia was not lost on me) hence had AS MUCH of a right to give his opinion on women’s issues as women (what an ally huh). I was then told after my response that, “I’m no longer going to be reading anything you write because you’re childish and I disagree” which demonstrates first off how much these men value women’s perspectives but also shows how they chose to engage with perspectives they might not agree with. Their refusal to engage respectfully and directly with a contrasting opinion is one of the key characteristics of our divided, polarised social-media era of social justice. Once the first boy (I would call them men but I believe masculinity to mean maturity and respect of which neither demonstrated) had made clear that my voice should be silenced for not being in line with his, the second decided to take on a much more confrontational approach. “Yo, fuck you man. I wasn’t being rude. You’re rude and you’ve always been rude. Look at yourself in a mirror” was the key quote out of his multiple messages and there is SO much that is inherently wrong with this. Beyond the unnecessary aggression and vulgarity of his response lies a much deeper form of sexism that all of us women have experienced well to often; the personal attack. Made uncomfortable by my ability to express my opinions respectfully and diplomatically and with his masculine fragility offended that a woman might not agree with him, the easiest way for this type of man to respond is by attacking a woman not for her opinions but for her personality. By calling me rude, angry, crazy, or bitchy (directly or not), this man was discrediting my ability to have rational, well-formed opinions by pointing towards my person and not my thoughts. Whether he was able to understand it or not, this man was silencing me and the irony of being silenced on a platform about giving women a loud voice is not lost upon me. Even my friend, the one who’d posted the original ‘Me Too’, took the time to write how such behaviour and attitude was disrespectful, rude, and aggressive to both of us. Finally, the first man — who had ‘exited’ the conversation only to return and reiterate that he’d chosen to read NONE of my previous comments as he disagreed with them and only wanted to ‘keep growing’ (because one definitely grows when they stop hearing others perspectives) — chose to reclaim that our opinions (which he had not read) were inherently wrong and he could never be disrespectful to the cause because “he had friends who had lived through domestic violence too”. Yes, these men not only ‘All Lives Mattered’ sexual violence but they also pulled the ‘I have black friends so I can’t be racist’ card on women’s rights. The whole exchange was nothing but the exemplification of male fragility and the way fragile boys will attack women and their opinions when they feel threatened.

Unfortunately, it is these men who we need to find ways to engage with, no matter how frustrating, offensive, and impossible it may appear. These men, with their pride and their poorly-formed definition of masculinity, are the ones who indirectly allow a system of women being silenced and attacked to continue. By claiming they are allies, by claiming they have friends who’ve experienced this too (quick hello ALL women have experienced this too), by arguing that their opinion on gendered violence is as important as a woman, these men are the ones who are tactfully silencing us in the name of their fragility. It is these men, who claim they love strong-willed opinionated women until those women don’t agree with their opinion and then they’re “rude” or “bitchy”, are as much part of the problem as those who are staying silent. What the Weinstein scandal or the MeToo hashtag movement has come to demonstrate, sexism is a systemic issue in a society in which all of us — men and women — are part of. To be able to really solve the rampant inequality between men and women, we all need to be engaging with the ways in which our own actions and behaviour contribute to a world where an opinionated man is impressive and an opinionated woman is aggressive. We all need to be able to recognise how our small and big actions play in a role in a wider issue and we all need to be able to put our pride down to recognise the humanity of others and allow them their voice to be heard. Being attacked on a platform about women being attacked reminded me of how important introspection can be as a tool for social equality but equally how difficult it is for many to remove their own pride to listen to others. It reminded me that, as women, we should never allow anyone to make our voices silenced by attacking not our opinions but our own person. It reminded to be proud, to be strong, and to be as loud as necessary no matter the imbecility of the response. It reminded me that Me Too, I am a strong, powerful, opinionated woman who won’t stop fighting for what she believes.

#feminism #femininity #masculinity #sexism #discursivesexism #everydaysexism #metoo #metoo #weinstein #fragility #aggressive #socialjustice #feminist #feministtheory #sexualviolence #sexualharassment #sexualassault