Is #MeToo Good for Women?

Editor’s note: The following article contains explicit language about sexual assault and sexual violence.

Back when Anita Hill was testifying at Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearing we had a hall fight just outside of my office, a battle of the sexes cutting across our customary workplace alliances. Women were angry; men were convinced that Hill was acting out of spite or in the interests of financial gain—or just trying to get attention.

A colleague opined that Hill, a law school professor, was looking for publicity that would launch her career in modeling or acting. Then, he predicted, she would get exposure in the supermarket checkout tabloids and a lucrative book contract.

Other men did not speculate about Hill’s plans but were convinced that women, including Hill, used sex to manipulate men. They assumed that we ensnared men by teasing and withholding sex in order to get free meals, expensive gifts and, ultimately lifelong financial support. And that, if scorned, we accused them of sexual misconduct.

The dirty little secret is that until well into the past century women did use sex to manipulate men because sex was the only card we had to play. Ever heard of Lysistrata? Men worked for money; we worked for men to earn our keep. And to get men our only effective drawing card was sex. Most of us then had no other viable options. What else was there? Being a salesgirl or a secretary for life? Or an old maid schoolteacher, living on a pittance with parents and taking care of them in old age?

Things are different now. But, in the public sphere, we’re still playing the sex card because nothing else works. When a class action sex discrimination suit against Walmart ground through the courts, no one noticed. Occupational sex segregation remained the norm, at a level unchanged since the 1990s but was regarded as unobjectionable: the result of women’s tastes and choices, natural abilities and human capital investments—not discrimination. The tacit assumption was that women were naturally suited to the narrow range of occupations most occupied and, in any case, were not invested in work in the way that men were. Complaints about discrimination in employment only got a hearing when repackaged as accusations of sexual harassment.

The sex card took tricks because it was assumed that women were most heavily invested in sexuality broadly construed: bed and babies, bodies and relationships. Playing it exploited the popular view of women as essentially and fundamentally sexual—as ‘The Sex’—as well as Victorian notions about women’s fragility and psychological instability. Sexual harassment had to be taken seriously: it hit women where it hurt, at the core of their being which was essentially sexual; it traumatized women and caused lasting psychological damage because women were psychologically fragile easily damaged.

#MeToo was a movement whose time had come. By the late 20^th century feminist activism, earlier directed to achieving equity in public life and the workplace, had come to focus on sexuality issues. Abortion was the signature feminist issue, always in the news, along with campaigns for parental leave (de facto maternity leave) and the establishment of suitable facilities for breastfeeding in public places. Sex sold. The persisting male-female wage-gap rarely made the news and few worried about occupational sex segregation, but when women complained about sexual misconduct the public took notice.

So, when Melissa Thompson accused Harvey Weinstein of rape, #MeToo burst out of Facebook to become the movement of the late twenty-teens. Thompson, shortly after her encounter with Harvey Weinstein, wrote in an email to a friend: ‘I fucked something disgusting and I did not want to…It was beyond disgusting.’ Weinstein, Thomson alleged, overpowered her inside his Tribeca hotel room. ‘If I would try to fight myself away from him’, she wrote, ‘he would then move around to a place where he could block me in…He cornered me, over and over again’. That was rape and, apart from Weinstein’s defense attorneys, everyone (as they should) took it seriously.

#MeToo objected strenuously to the assumption that women accused men of rape in order to manipulate or undermine them or to get attention. #MeToo made the forceful and compelling case too that quid pro quo arrangements for professional benefits should not be tolerated—a case that had to be made.

But once #MeToo was up and running, legions of women and a few men piled on to talk openly about a range of sexual offenses from bad dates to episodes of ‘inappropriate touching’ that made them ‘uncomfortable’. Predictably, men who dismissed women who complained about sexual harassment as vindictive, manipulative, or unhinged took this as a reductio and launched a counter-victimization offensive. Any off-hand remark or casual touch, they whined, could destroy their careers and ruin their lives. The men were the victims: women, as always, were using sex to manipulate and undermine them.

It’s still too early to predict how #MeToo will play out—in particular, whether it can be leveraged to promote fairer treatment for women in the job market, to address pervasive sex discrimination in employment, shrink the male-female wage gap, and end occupational sex segregation. That, arguably, is what really matters. We are essentially thinking beings, if not metaphysically, practically. Doing mind-killing, pink-collar drudge work, trapped behind a check-stand scanning groceries or in a carrel inputting data, being sidelined in business or the professions, talked over and dismissed, having our proposals appropriated by and credited to male colleagues, being shunted onto the mommy track, cuts to the core of what we essentially are. Catcalling, inappropriate touching, ‘locker room talk’, and the whole range of sub-criminal piggish male behavior does not. We are not essentially sexual beings.

But unless we make a fuss about sex no one listens. We’re back once more to ending the Peloponnesian War in Lysistrata. So #MeToo exploits and perpetuates the traditional view of women as ‘The Sex’ to draw attention to the unjust treatment of women and recruit allies, because the sex card is still the most powerful card we have to play.

H.E. Barber

H.E. Baber is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego. An exdurantist, her primary philosophical interest is in puzzles concerning the identities of persons and other ordinary objects—and the identity of extraordinary objects. The Trinity: A Philosophical Investigation, her most recent book, will be in print at the end of May.