“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.
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.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.
- Ijeoma Oluo
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Post your comments here: