I see two diverging narratives emerging from our current cultural reckoning with sexual harassment and violence. One focuses on sexual harassment as a problem of individuals — the good ones, the bad ones, the victimized ones, the manipulative ones — while the other looks more broadly at the workings of a larger system or culture. I argue that in order to see real change emerge from this movement, we need to understand the problems with the more popular “individual” narrative and move towards addressing wider cultural issues, including those that exist at the college.
“I feel sorry for someone like Matt Damon, who is a decent human being. … He came out and said all men are not rapists, and he got beaten to death. Come on, this is crazy!”
- Terry Gilliam
“There is a bit of a witch hunt happening. … There are some people – famous people – being suddenly accused of touching some girl’s knee or something, and suddenly they are being dropped from their programmes.”
- Liam Neeson
#MeToo, from a narrative of individuals to a narrative of the system
The individual-focused narrative of #MeToo, the one I see most frequently in mainstream media discussions, celebrates the takedown of what we’ll call the individual “monsters” — Harvey Weinstein and Larry Nassar, for example. But when pressed to look at larger systemic problems, this narrative slides into hand-wringing and breast-beating over the hypothetical innocent men who may lose employment, social standing, freedom (or their lives, if we believe Terry Gilliam) because of some hypothetical mistake.
There’s no room in this narrative to address people who are problems but not obviously “monsters” — those guilty of less violent forms of harassment or of speaking poorly about their accused friends, for example — or larger systems and networks that are problematic even if not participating in open harassment. For example, this narrative demands that we see Al Franken as innocent — even a victim himself — because his groping and unwanted kissing is not on par with the extreme forms of rape and sexual violence committed by Weinstein, Nassar, Cosby, Moore, and other "monsters." We lose the ability to talk about the way that he harmed women whom he was meant to represent.
When we focus on individuals, all men either fall into the category of monsters deserving of punishment or else of innocent well-meaning people who would never purposefully do wrong. Positioned against these men, the survivors become either good victims — usually one of many, usually white,
cisgender women — or bad ones who are overly-fragile creatures at best (delicate women taking insult where none was intended), and malicious beasts at worst (evil women out to ruin good men’s lives). These evil women are quite obviously the ones Liam Neeson and Terry Gilliam claim to see.
This narrative is reductive and serves to erase real harm and close off space needed for important conversations.
Today’s headlines seem to be either dominated by the men who’ve been flaunting their abuse of women for years, even decades, with explicit details of all of the horrors they were allowed to inflict upon women — or about the men who might be at risk for being “unfairly” accused. The men who are now “scared to even talk to women” lest they be accused of sexual harassment. And the women…the women are forgotten completely.
- Ijeoma Oluo
But there’s a second narrative, one that I believe in but which seems less mainstream, that sees the possibility that we’re at a crossroads not paved with the ruination of powerful men, but with the deep, careful reflection of people of all genders on our place within systemic violence.
The phrasing of “MeToo,” like the solidarity it represents, is
more than a decade old, and at its best it represents not a place to call out individual monsters, but a way to see the scope of systemic violence. Its mainstream focus in the last few months should be recognized as the culmination of a generation of activism by feminists who have pressed us to reflect on the nature of power in our society and on how that unequal balance of power — based on gender and sexuality, yes, but also on race, social class, disability, body size, language, documentation status, and placement in a corporate structure — makes some people more vulnerable to abuse.
This narrative of #MeToo looks at recent revelations of sexual harassment and violence and sees not the threat of innocent men losing their jobs over a joke, but a long history of women
“voluntarily” leaving jobs they were good at because of a culture that accepts sexist jokes as normal. We see years of
survivors denied due process for their complaints of harassment (and worse) now facing deep public concern about
“due process” for accused men. We see trans and gender non-conforming
folx having to choose between employment and feeling safe using the bathroom, fighting against
cultural stereotyping of their identities as predatory despite being harassed, assaulted, and murdered at obscenely high rates. We see people of color held back from advancement because a supervisor saw their reactions as
“too aggressive.” We see
farm workers who can’t speak up about the conditions of their labor for fear of deportation.
To address these kinds of violence is an uncomfortable conversation, not least because we must begin with this understanding: this narrative of the #MeToo movement, the one I will posit is the real movement, asks us to look beyond the familiar, almost comfortable, narrative that tells us that bad acts are done by individual monstrous men who can be found and easily cast out. Yes, there are bad people who have done bad things, and even those of us who want to see a
radical revisioning of the prison system have a hard time feeling a lot of pity for the likes of Larry Nassar.
But the narrative of individual monsters committing monstrous acts — the narrative that overlooks the wider cultural problems — allow us to too easily ignore the more banal, everyday kinds of violence that do harm by simply looking the other way, by doing what seems normal, by following the path of least resistance, by upholding the status quo. As we look for a real end to these kinds of violence, we are asking all people to look beyond the faces of the monsters — of the Harvey Weinsteins and Larry Nassars and Roy Moores — and to the systems that have enabled them. We’re not looking for individuals who must be cast out. We’re not necessarily talking about people who need to be fired or people who need to have legal action taken against them.
Instead, I envision a call for careful reflection on the culture and the systemic power that abets this violence, and on the ways that we are all complicit in supporting it.
A Problem of Culture
One of the most frustrating part of the use of the #MeToo hashtag and the resulting conversations about sexual harassment is that they focus too much on sex, turning what should be understood as stories of workplace harassment into situations steeped in layers of discussion about consent and sexual mores. And while there’s no denying that there are some interlinked issues in play and a necessary conversation about consent in our culture, when it comes to the workplace we need to keep the focus on harassment.
The problem that we face isn’t one of dating in the office, or of men misunderstanding cues related to sexual interest. Frankly, hand-wringing over the potential future of office relationships is dismissive and offensive because the problem is environments where people with more power — whether that power comes from job title, gender, race, or any other axis of
privilege — make people with less power unable to effectively do their jobs. The problem is in the harassment, and more specifically, the harassment of those with less power.
And the painful truth is that, yes, there has long been an acceptance of the kind of behaviors that do prevent people from doing their jobs. Sometimes this is extreme forms of assault, but mostly it’s just an
“old boys club” environment, which can be damaging to people of all genders.
If we want to envision a workplace that is safe for all, then yes, we
must address these harmful environments, and sometimes that will look like criticizing behaviors and institutions that have seemingly “always” been fine. What’s key to remember, though, is that what we see at this cultural moment — as with the heavily publicized “
Shitty Media Men” list and the “
Shitty Men in Academia” list) — is not the sudden turning against things that have always been fine. Rather, it’s the sudden public knowledge of what has always been. Faced with wider cultures who would not hear them, women and other folx have been using gossip and “
whisper networks,” flawed as they are, to try to protect each other.
Things haven’t been fine. Those without power have just been quiet.
Even though we work in very different environments, we share a common experience of being preyed upon by individuals who have the power to hire, fire, blacklist and otherwise threaten our economic, physical and emotional security. Like you, there are few positions available to us and reporting any kind of harm or injustice committed against us doesn’t seem like a viable option.
-Alianza Nacional de Campesinas
Larry Nassar did official University HR Training (and so did everyone at Michigan State who looked the other way)
As we approach a discussion of harassment as a cultural issue, it becomes necessary to look at the the culture of our workplace at all levels. The most obvious place is, of course, Human Resources and the way that harassment is discussed at that system level.
I want to be fair to the difficult situation of HR: it exists to facilitate employee relationships, but at the same time serves the institution/management and therefore the preexisting cultural condition of the institution. It’s not hard to imagine how that can be a hell of a double-bind. Still, we’ve seen plenty of evidence recently that on a national scale,
women have reported men to HR only to see no results, or taking action through HR has been disincentivized.
The efficacy of the ubiquitous HR Sexual Harassment Training has similarly been called into question, with most experts agreeing that it is a very ineffective way to address workplace cultural problems of sexual harassment. Some researchers point to a common reliance on sexual and gender stereotypes in such trainings that makes people uncomfortable. But I tend to gravitate primarily to the explanation that such
trainings exist to address the institution’s legal liability, so it’s hard to look at them as a good faith attempt at changing a problem in the institutional culture. And how employees view such trainings matters, as research suggests that the value of HR Training rests primarily in the
value individual employees place on the training and on the way employees view the work culture.
(I can only suggest here that an email threatening to fire those who fail to complete a training does not create an environment in which employees will take HR Training as a serious and important discussion of culture. Rather, it serves to reinforce the idea that the “real” purpose of those trainings is to protect management from legal liability, and the existence of that liability is the soul reason for such threats.)
My takeaway from this: HR (and HR Training) can only be as good as the culture it works within, and therefore, bigger changes to work culture have to look more collective than a training at the beginning of each semester.
Of course, I don’t say this to take away from the fact that we should be advocating for better training and better policies — we should absolutely be doing that. But if HR can only be as good as the culture it works for, we should
simultaneously be engaged in changing that culture.
If we want to change the culture around us, we
must look more deeply at the whole system — not the monstrous men, not the individuals deserving scorn, or blame, or pity, but at the places where we see power operating in ways that may be harmful or silencing.
This strikes me as an important goal for anyone who is labor-minded: to remember
all the workers, all the power differentials, and to actively position ourselves to listen, learn, and support those who are ready to speak.
In that spirit, I offer these suggestions for a beginning place for action:
- Read through the links provided throughout the essay above, particularly to feminist writing about sexual harassment, labor, and the #MeToo movement. Frequently, the positions of feminists, especially those who were steering this conversation long before Rose McGowan’s problematic leadership, are seen only in abridged or mocked contexts, and the already existing nuance in this conversation gets lost in generalized, highly individualized fears about due process and proportionality.
- Be ready to actually listen, while also acknowledging that plenty of people who have felt victimized by parts of what has been the institution’s normal workings aren’t ready to speak.
- Understand the ways in which you might experience privilege based on certain axes of your identity — not just gender, but race, class, job security, citizenship and abledness — that may prevent you from seeing/noticing situations that are harmful to people with more marginalized identities.
- Read through this link, also cited above, for some concrete suggestions for more effective ways to begin addressing workplace culture, and begin a conversation about a better way to handle HR Trainings on Sexual Harassment. Look for more discussion of how we might take action in an upcoming issue of The Advocate.
- Educate yourself on the current war on Title IX by Betsy DeVos and the way that these choices may harm our students, as an important, very linked conversation to this one.
