The #MeToo Backlash Is Already Here
Beyoncé stunned audiences when she closed her 2014 VMA performance backed by the blazing 20 foot declaration - FEMINIST.
A year later, as part of the Ms. Foundation’s “My Feminism Is” campaign, I stood alongside dozens of other public figures to define feminism as “the social, economic, and political equality of all genders.”
Two years later, we’re still pondering the definition of feminism. It’s 2017’s word of the year. In Merriam Webster’s online dictionary the word generated 70 percent more searches this year than last, which is surprising given that last year the first woman in American history was a candidate for president from one of the major political parties.
My own definition of feminism is a bit unconventional. Rather than support specific policies or ideologies, I believe feminism is the discipline of intellectual humility. The feminist thinker and organizer should always be asking this question: What are we missing? Who are we excluding?
My feminism requires me to seek missing truths even in the rising tide of women’s empowerment buoyed by the courageous efforts of the #MeToo movement and the historic electoral victories of 2017.
Truth One: Backlash is the companion of victory
Each day it seems another high profile man loses the luster of his public reputation and the profits of his public platform because his appalling acts of sexual harassment, coercion, or assault have finally become public. In the wake of these stunning developments it is easy to imagine this moment as a reckoning. The powerful and predatory can no longer be assured that victims will hold the ugly secrets in darkness for decades.
It is true that to speak against the powerful is courageous. This month Time magazine named The Silence Breakers as their person of the year in recognition of the power of these collectively raised voices.
But there is another truth. This space has not been silent. Anita Hill shattered it 25 years ago at the Senate Confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas. Title IX advocates have been disrupting the silence of campus sexual assault throughout this decade. Rape survivors serving in our armed forces have bravely stepped forward to challenge the chain of command and demand accountability with their careers and lives at stake. Groundbreaking scholars like Monique Morris have mapped the sexual assault to prison pipeline, pushing the most vulnerable black girls out of classrooms and into confinement. The abused, the raped, the harassed, the trafficked have not been silent. Our nation has been deaf.
The abused, the raped, the harassed, the trafficked have not been silent. Our nation has been deaf.
This distinction matters because it suggests we may not be in a reckoning but on the precipice of a backlash which is already building momentum. We should not forget that even as Vice President Joe Biden ramps up for a 2020 presidential run, he was implicated in the discursive violence enacted against Professor Anita Hill as Clarence Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court. We should notice that even as “silence breaks” about sexual harassment in Hollywood and in newsrooms, the Department of Education is eliminating the hard-won Title IX protections on campuses. And we cannot forget that little has changed in recent weeks for American girls, women, soldiers, and workers whose abusers are not famous enough to make the news.
Truth 2: Individual retribution is not institutional justice
Having survived sexual assault I understand with enduring and agonizing empathy that the harm of sexual violence is personal. The personal accountability of our perpetrators is important. It is also insufficient. Though the wounds of harassment and assault are typically experienced one individual at time, the causes and consequences are collective. Our perpetrators are nurtured, empowered, harbored, and rewarded in institutions and systems that value mens’ ideas, humor, experiences, opinions, tastes, preferences, expertise, and interests over women’s. These systems communicate the higher market value of men in everything from paychecks to cultural capital and communicate it with such clarity that girls are fully aware of it by middle school. There may be a measure of satisfaction from these isolated cases of individual retribution, but punishing the “bad guys” is not equivalent to justice.
The swift removal of high profile figures is more about covering corporate asses than changing corporate cultures.
Let us not miss the truth that the swift removal of high profile figures is more about covering corporate asses than changing corporate cultures. Women must continue to speak and to support one another in courageously coming forward, but let’s do so in a way that demands restorative justice. Restorative justice demands accountability and institutional restitution from the companies, corporations, and organizations that paid, promoted and harbored harassers. These are the states who gave safe haven to men who terrorized women and they must make amends through meaningful accountability.
Harassment training is not justice because it pours more resources into men. Justice is redirecting resources to women.
Truth 3: We Need Rooms of Our Own
In her foundational feminist text, A Room of One’s Own, author Virginia Woolf engages in a thought experiment imagining what might have happened if William Shakespeare had a sister, Judith. Woolf wonders if Judith Shakespeare, endowed with all of the same gifts of insight, artistry and intellect, would have left behind a similar body of work as her brother, The Bard. She determines it would have been impossible for Judith to write as her brother William wrote because unlike her brother, Judith’s talent would not have been nurtured. Indeed, indeed she would not even have been left alone.
Woolf reasons of Judith’s life -
“[S]he was snubbed, slapped, lectured and exhorted. Her mind must have been strained and her vitality lowered by the need of opposing this, of disproving that. For here again we come within range of that very interesting and obscure masculine complex which has had so much influence upon the woman’s movement; that deep seated desire, not so much that she shall be inferior as that he shall be superior, which plants him wherever one looks, not only in front of the arts, but barring the way to politics too, even when the risk to himself seems infinitesimal and the suppliant humble and devoted.
For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.”
It is this need for domination that fuels the harassment, assault, and abuse women are speaking out against. Far too many contemporary Judith Shakespeare’s are crushed beneath these dynamics daily, their lives and minds and creativity are stunted by patriarchy and the sexual violence which is used to ensure men stay firmly in control of resources. Men talk over women in class, steal their ideas in the workplace, pay them less for their labors, pay them nothing for their contributions at home, call them hysterical for speaking up for themselves. It is exhausting.
Justice requires that resources be redirected, funneled, and poured, immediately to supporting women’s capacity to be in rooms of their own.
A Proposal
Building on these missing truths I offer a modest proposal: Each time a high profile man is discovered to have a pattern of harassment and abuse within a company, that company will need to engage in restorative justice because they harbored this abuser. For five years the company will pay 77 cents (because you know, the pay gap!) on the dollar of that man’s annual salary (plus bonus and benefits) into a Room of Her Own Foundation. If your lead anchor, star chef, CEO, founding engineer, etc., is a sexual harasser or abuser then you are now a contributor. Congratulations.
For example, Weinstein corporation is worth $150 million. Let’s call that 115 million into the foundation. Matt Lauer made $20 million a year so Comcast/NBC gives $15.4 million to the foundation. You get the idea. Done fairly, the “Room of Her Own Foundation" will have billion dollar endowment within the year.
Now it is time to name a board. I nominate Rebecca Traister, Salamishah Tillet, Janet Mock, and Anita Hill. I’d like to see Peggy Noonan, Nikki Haley and Condi Rice on the board as well. Each year the board will choose a panel of judges. Those judges will grant 50 women a $1 million grant paid out over four years.
The sole purpose of the grant is supporting women’s ideas and their ability to create a world based on those ideas. Think, write, create. Repeat. The next year 50 new grantees are chosen. Within the decade the dollars paid by harasser-harboring corporations would have supported work that floods the world with ideas and words by women. Women who are not stressing each about how to make ends meet. Some of the women will be traditional writers. Some won’t even be literate and will have to dictate their thought. Some will be old, some young, some liberal, some conservative. Some will write in English and others in the many languages of the world. Each woman will have an untapped brilliance currently being lost to mediocre predatory men.
Feminism is the word. The backlash is coming. Let's build a feminist room. Four walls and a door and a key where we can think and write. #PayWomenToThink. #PayWomenToWrite.
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