When You Struggle To Find The Me In #MeToo
The abuses are real—no doubt about that. But my own experiences with men incline me against the kind of generalizations some are making.
I have been thinking of writing this piece for some time now. Yet a concern of mine is it will come across in a way I don’t intend. Specifically, my worry is that given the nature of this topic it will be difficult for me to express my point of view without appearing unsympathetic or self-satisfied. But I have decided to move forward with it because I keep coming back to a sense that this is a point which ought to be made. So here goes.
My experience of men, from my dad to my husband to all the less significant relationships along the way, has been overwhelmingly positive. As a general rule I have felt respected, treated as an equal, and judged by the content of my character—not by my sex.
You can see how this might come across as unsympathetic. Someone might read this as an attempt on my part to pour cold water on the #MeToo momentum. Hear me out, though: I understand my experience is not everyone else’s experience, and I absolutely affirm that uncountably many women have had polar opposite experiences with men. I recognize that — as with life circumstances more generally — there is an element of luck in the hand I’ve been dealt. It seems clear from the #MeToo stories that a great many men have been acting with impunity over a great many years. The #MeToo movement is in that sense a reiteration of the principle that the king is not above the law. The budding Harvey Weinsteins of the world are now on notice of that.
However, there are times when the commentary on the negative treatment of women seems to assume that such mistreatment is a universal experience. By implication, that would mean society is, without exception, a hostile and abusive place for women. This is how Jessica Valenti put it in a recent article on Medium.
In my last book, Sex Object, I asked how it was possible that we still have no word to describe what happens to women living in a country that hates them. Terms like “trauma” or “triggered” don’t quite capture the cumulative impact of how living under sexism slowly whittles away your sense of safety and self.
The idea that an entire country hates women was echoed by Arwa Mahdawi writing an article in The Guardian entitled “The Kavanaugh Hearing Proves Yet Again The U.S. Hates Women.” That was old news, though, because it was announced back in 2016 in Slate with an article entitled “Donald Trump’s Victory Proves that America Hates Women.” That in turn was very old news because Andrea Dworkin was saying as much decades ago. Writing last year in The Outline, Leah Finnegan neatly summed it up and confirmed the validity of the position.
For the uninitiated, Dworkin holds a very low opinion of men, which is correct, and thinks they subjugate women simply by existing and also pushing us into various gender constructs, which is also correct.
Earlier in the year, writing in The Washington Post, Suzanna Danuta Walters asked: “Why Can’t We Hate Men?” She had the following advice for men:
So men, if you really are #WithUs and would like us to not hate you for all the millennia of woe you have produced and benefited from, start with this: Lean out so we can actually just stand up without being beaten down. Pledge to vote for feminist women only. Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power. We got this.
The idea that an entire country hates women, or that the actions of the Donald Trumps, Harvey Weinsteins, or Brett Kavanaughs of the world are representative of the behavior of men as a class are propositions which I find hard to square with my own life experience. I haven’t felt hated in the 10 plus years I’ve lived in the United States, and I didn’t feel hated before that when I lived in the United Kingdom. (Admittedly, I have never lived in a society like Saudi Arabia.)
Unless I am unique in feeling this way, perhaps there is a counter-narrative to the idea that our society is hopelessly sexist. It might be that, for all the bad ones, there are an awful lot of good men out there who recognize the patriarchal tradition from whence we came and are more than willing to do their part in affirming the equality, dignity, and capability of women.
Recognizing a multiplicity of women’s experiences is particularly important when it comes to what we teach our daughters. Of course, it would be wrong to make them naive about the potential detriment they might face. But it would be equally wrong to paint a picture which exaggerates the risk—that is, to send them out into the world simply expecting to be abused or discriminated against.
Earlier this year, historian Dan Snow let it be known that he lied to his six-year-old daughter at an aviation museum by telling her that women flew Spitfires in combat during the Second World War. He wanted her to be able to follow her dreams without seeing gender as a possible limiting factor, and so he planned on explaining the patriarchy at a later date. Guardian columnist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett commented:
What struck me was how challenging it must be to bring up daughters in a world where the odds are stacked against them, without completely terrifying them by lifting up the filthy, unequal carpet in one brutal flourish to reveal the Hieronymus Bosch clutter beneath.
Now that just seems a little extreme to me. It’s not that I would consider the playing field to be completely equal in 2018. We have, however, come a long way, and so—to mix metaphors—it is a glass-half-full kind of playing field rather than glass-half-empty. For our daughters, as for anyone in life, a glass-half-full approach is generally the more productive tactic because it emphasizes agency rather than oppression.
There are reasons for the young Miss Snow to be optimistic rather than pessimistic about her life chances—patriarchal history notwithstanding. She is growing up in a country which currently has its second female prime minister, in a continent whose politics have been dominated by a female leader for over a decade. It is a country in which few people can remember a time before the reign of a Queen who is renowned for her competence, wisdom, and conscientiousness. In that, Elizabeth II fits the model of female monarchs in British history who have tended to be paragons of competence.
Beyond those general facts, Miss Snow has more personal ones going for her. Her well-known father and grandfather both went to Oxford. Her other grandfather is the Duke of Westminster. Her great-aunt is a professor at Oxford. Her great-great-great-grandfather, David Lloyd George, was prime minister. I mention all that not as some “prolier-than-thou” rant but because having that kind of background really matters in how one’s life goes.
In 2014, the economist Gregory Clark published his book on social mobility entitled The Son Also Rises. In it, he tracks surnames as they turn up across the centuries on university records, lists of members of parliament, and other such registers. In a number of different countries, including the U.K., he finds a much higher persistence of social status passed down through generations than had previously been assumed. For Britain this means that surnames of Norman origin—that is, of the conquerors and thus the social elite of some 1,000 years ago—still dominate the registers at Oxford and Cambridge in the 21st century. As one of the research team put it:
Surnames such as Baskerville, Darcy, Mandeville, and Montgomery are still over-represented at Oxbridge and also among elite occupations such as medicine, law, and politics.
These findings reiterate what, I think, most people intuitively grasp—namely, that life chances within society are not equal. The challenge that presents —which animates much of the debate between left and right—is what can and should be done about it. In addressing that challenge, it seems to me that identity politics, as a methodology, paints in strokes which are far too broad to account for the manifold variables which affect any given individual’s experience and life chances. It segregates people out into broad categories of oppressed and oppressor which are beset with both false negatives and false positives.
As important as it is to recognize ways in which people — many people — have been mistreated in the past, it is wrong to extrapolate from that and assume that mistreatment applies to everyone. In fact, if we are to define a fairer society as one in which power and wealth are less concentrated, then the emphasis should be on recognizing and taking advantage of the ways in which opportunities do exist. My advice to my six-year-old daughter: “You have, in many ways, already won the lottery of life. Now go forth upon your journey, my girl.”
