In 2017 a lot of my friends contributed to the MeToo hashtag. Friends who were still having panic attacks and avoided places where their rapist might be. Vulnerable friends who were still hurting put their pain out there in public in the hopes of creating a better future. While I greatly admire their courage, I’m afraid they gave their love to a movement that doesn’t love them back.
From the start, MeToo has been all about rich women. It sickens me to my stomach to see MeToo labelled a ‘success’ because rich men had their career ruined. I look at my friends and nothing has changed for them. Nothing. Their rapists hold the same jobs and social positions that they did before. Without 50.000 twitter followers, MeToo doesn’t bring any of the justice it claims to bring. Outside Hollowood, MeToo just exposes the victim to further public scrutiny while doing absolutely nothing against the perpetrators. More and more it feels like a spectacle for rich women which exploits the suffering of poor women for its viral success.
So it is 0% surprising to me that a big part of MeToo is so comfortable being the vehicle of the neoliberal feminism of the Democratic Party.
???? It brought awareness to a huge problem! And yeah it lead to rapists in Hollywood being outted, and you’re making out like that’s a bad thing? You’re implying rich women who participated in the “Me too” movement did it for attention and to prey off the poor?
As far as I was aware, the Me Too movement was simply to show everyone how widespread sexual violence was. Not to out every rapist (although that would have been good, it’s simply not feasible for scared victims, etc). I’m not sure what you expected from the movement, but clearly it’s not what you got
Well, this ties into a bigger problem in how we do activism. The problem with ‘awareness’ is that it doesn’t actually do anything on its own and if people are more ‘aware’ of a problem but do not have the tools to create systematic change or do not bother to, nothing actually changes.
Not one of the people who protected one of my friends’ rapists before stopped doing so after MeToo. Not one community that I can think of actively communicated better rules about consent. The legal system is just as broken as it was before. Everyone claims to be more ‘aware’ but changes nothing. Then what’s the fucking point of awareness? Where is this illusive ‘succes’ that is being claimed?
And that’s not just MeToo. Everywhere around me I see ‘awareness campaigns’ that aren’t acually going anywhere and that seem more about the concept of ‘going viral’ than about making anything better. This error in what is seen as effective activism isn’t new, it has its roots in foundations and NGOs that measure succes in terms of the visibility of their own brand name. Their ‘activism’ is performative, requires the oppressed to put their oppression on display but doesn’t measure succes as a real physical improvement in the lives of the oppressed.
This is creating a measure for succes that is removed from the question of actual change and that’s a problem.
QueerAnarchism 