Christine Blasey Ford’s memoir was published this week to polite reviews, tepid fanfare and an inevitable cluster of think pieces which sniffed at the fragrant corpse of MeToo then pronounced it officially dead.
The key change or “vibe-shift,” as one writer called it, was summed up by the writer Kat Rosenfeld who recently mused in Unherd that, in retrospect, the collective MeToo fever dream, “stemmed not from our sympathetic feelings toward victims of sexual assault, but from a sense that allegations could be used to political advantage, that even the most powerful man might be toppled if credibly accused.”
In hindsight, it’s obvious the virtuous fervour of MeToo concealed a darker impulse, one that was both avaricious and chaotic and which, in addition to putting some really bad guys behind bars, also destroyed many not-so-bad and blameless people’s reputations and lives. Is there any recourse? Sadly not. Timing’s a bitch, but like all familiar stories the tale of MeToo has a lesson to teach us. The collective desire to seize back something, anything, in order to justify the pain-spasm of our collective sense of victimhood felt thrilling at the time, but the effect was negligible at best. Few were helped by MeToo and many more were hurt, some for no logical reason except that inflicting pain somehow felt logical at the time. It’s not surprising. Movements fuelled by self-righteous moral outrage often result in over-corrections that, in the end, reinforce the same problems they initially purported to solve. If you don’t believe me, google ‘History.’
With the recent vibe-shift comes a kind of tacit acknowledgement that many women in the public sphere (in addition to Blasey Ford) found ourselves being eviscerated on Twitter and elsewhere during this time. Many of us lost income we desperately needed to feed our families. In addition to these shenanigans,
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