The Problem With #MeToo
Sexual predation is about more than just patriarchy: it's about the deeply human compulsion to shut one’s eyes to inconvenient things, and it's in all of us.
I don’t know how to begin, only that I have to. I don’t know what I want to say, only that I want to try and catch something and see the shape, and this is the only way I know how.
I don’t know why now, far too late, long past when it might have made a difference. Some things are just felt. Leaves blush red and start to crumble without instruction come autumn. Swallows and shearwater know the moment to take flight without language to explain why. A turn in the air. The angle of the light. Today’s the day, begin.
Nobody is drawn to psychotherapeutic work by accident. All of us are strange creatures, and most of us have had at least a peek into the cracks of madness. Normal people, beings to whom life has been kind, do not usually wish to spend their days becoming ever-more intimately familiar with just how badly we can damage one another, or how randomly and cruelly psychic breakdown can descend and obliterate.
I can’t name all the things that nudged me along the path. I know the reasons I tell myself, and I also know that humans are very good at lying to ourselves as well as each other. But I believe that part of it is because of #MeToo. Or, more specifically, my experience as a particular kind of #MeToo cannon fodder.
By unfathomably good fortune, I was once lucky enough to have writer as a job title. Despite being greener than Kermit’s cuticles and floridly mentally ill, at the tender age of 22 I had an actual, paying job in the media and entertainment business. Not the big leagues by any means, but notable enough to serve as a microcosm for ‘the industry’ at large.
It was a place built on personalities: think the podcast circuit before the podcast circuit was a thing. This is important.
There’s no way to say this that isn’t ugly and I’m sick of trying to soften it: sexual predation by two of the personalities was an open secret known to everyone in the building. I lived it, I survived it, and eventually I tried to sue the company over it.
I want to tell that story, because I think the thread of it runs through all the reasons #MeToo was always doomed to fail.
In short, what happened in that place and in many others like it — to me and many others like me — was only possible because of the deeply human compulsion to shut one’s eyes to inconvenient things. To perform a sort of spell of not-knowing, not-seeing, not-comprehending. To bend towards calculated utilitarianism and away from doing the right thing when the cost demanded runs too high. We are all at risk of this kind of complicity, I think.
It’s also what happens absolutely inevitably when we build empires of wealth on the mythos of individuals.
Now. This isn’t particularly relevant and I wish it wasn’t necessary to clarify, but to be clear: I am speaking here about unwanted bodily violation performed openly in the workplace. I will not be sharing the details of what was done to me. I owe that to nobody and I will sacrifice nothing more of myself on the altar of this sorry affair, especially not for something as cheap as clicks. But to try and prevent some degree of inevitable cruelty in the comments, I am not referring to being called “sweetie” by my boss or told I look pretty. I am not twisted up over a workplace tryst that turned ugly. I am also not saying those things are inconsequential: I can speak no truth that’s worth a damn about anyone else’s experiences save my own. But it’s important to say at least that what occurred would meet the threshold for criminal proceedings had I chosen to attempt this route. Had I been braver, perhaps, or more selfless. Less self-protective.
If you know anything about how Jimmy Savile operated, picking off girls in plain sight while the BBC encouraged everyone not to believe their own lying eyes, you have the gist of it.
I figure I’m about the same age now as the female brand manager who knew exactly what was happening to the young women in the room next door and who was doing it. I noticed very early in my tenure that the times she shut her office door correlated almost seamlessly with the arrival of the vultures in the writer’s room.
Are you going to be a problem, I remember her asking me in those early days.
I’d like to think I would never do what she did, that I’m not capable of that kind of callousness. I used to be so certain. Now, older, I imagine myself in her position and ask myself honestly: what would I do? What course of action would I choose, were I responsible for an entire floor of people: their livelihoods and by extension their mortgages, hospital bills, children, elderly parents? If I knew the personalities that paid our wages were rotten and dangerous, albeit strategic in their malevolence by choosing unsympathetic victims of little consequence … would I try to make it right? Knowing full well I probably wouldn’t prevail, and understanding full well that if I did we’d all be jobless within the year?
Without Jimmy Savile, after all, there would have been no Top of the Pops.
#MeToo was about “holding powerful men accountable”. Noble goal, underpants-gnome level understanding of the systemic and personal factors that push back against change and what’s actually required to achieve it. Despite grasping this on some level, I clung to the #MeToo movement like a wet rat on a floating corpse.
When I was in the thick of it, drinking bile in caustically misandrist circles (and spitting my own poison in before passing the cup), these powerful men were a convenient and perhaps necessary target for all my hate and rage. Being abused openly by someone who gets off on your humiliation and powerlessness is the psychic equivalent of having your nose rubbed in your own shit, watching your pride and potency snap like the neck of a baby bird. You do what you have to in order to survive, and it is healthy — at least initially — to rage against the injustice. You warm yourself in that fire, even as you burn.
But there’s an unacknowledged Gordian knot at the heart of the #MeToo movement that troubled me even back then: the reality that psychopaths and sadists will always exist in the places that shape culture, and flaws in both our systems and our basic human conditioning enable them in ways we haven’t even begun to seriously grapple with.
Predators are attracted to power, and in addition to naked avarice they tend to possess traits that make them extremely proficient at acquiring it. Charm, manipulation, lack of conscience, an uncanny knack for understanding who they need to be in order to get what they want. Once someone rises to the top of an organisation built on personalities, the cost of ousting them cannot be paid. They are too big to fail.
This creates the perfect breeding ground for complicity at all levels. For example: how would I get the police to take me seriously about the two perps (let’s call them Weinstein and Savile) when there were multiple witnesses in the room but not a single one of them was prepared to back me up?
“OK ma’am, sure … and where are you claiming this incident occurred?”
“In the promotions office.”
“Was anyone else there?”
“Yes, Paige and Madison and Andy and Indigo.”
“And will they confirm your story?”
Like hell they would, and I can’t really blame them: I would have been asking them to nuke their careers and futures for the certainty of nothing except doing the right thing. I’d like to think I would have bitten the bullet for them were the roles reversed. I really hope I’m that person. But I also enjoy having a place to live, being able to afford food, and not getting blacklisted from gainful employment.
I should have filed a complaint despite all this, even though the lack of witnesses would be an immovable obstacle right from the start. For all I know, it might have saved someone else. There’s some measure of complicity smeared across my own hands, that’s the entire point of this piece. #MeToo should never have been so concerned with individual predators. They do what they do and they’ll always be with us, they alone bear responsibility for their acts. But we each need to examine what’s in us that allows them to do what they do uninhibited and brazen. The bit where we collectively, semi-consciously choose to look away, soothing ourselves with the lie that it can’t be that bad or someone else would be doing something.
Can one single person truly, honestly, in the secret places of their heart, claim to be shocked that Russell Brand was exactly who he told us he was?
To lightly defend the white feather I carry, I don’t think I would have survived the court process back then: the picking-apart of my life, the inevitable not-guilty. My-word-against-a-God-of-the-people. I have seen what happens when chaotic, angry, mentally unwell women make accusations. If you’re lucky, a kind female detective holds your hand and explains that because you take an antipsychotic, or have scars on your arms, or have been hospitalised for a suicide attempt, you will be painted an unreliable witness so easily it’s not worth going to court. If you’re unlucky, they’ll let you take the stand.
Why didn’t I just quit? It’s a reasonable question, even if you’re asking with the gauche implication that I valued being a “content creator” more than my own self-respect or safety. Well for starters, I’d signed a two-year contract and had no money for a lawyer if the company chose to make an example of me. Despite my frankly inadvisable level of responsibility, I was earning about the same as I had been pulling pints between lectures two years previously. It was the thick of the global financial crisis: there was no way I was going to find another job, and quitting this one would very probably mean living in my car within a few months. I was getting most of my meals from the merch cupboard as it was.
I thought about quitting almost every day, but I didn’t have any good options or I wouldn’t have been targeted in the first place. Predators can pick out a suitable victim based on the way they walk in a crowd, they’re perfectly capable of sizing up who they can most readily mess with at their place of employment. I was poor, I was deep in grief, I’d been previously victimised, and I had no viable family support. I hid it well but I was not all there mentally, and I was not well-liked around the office (for reasons it pains me to admit were valid).
On a related note, I recently read Freddie deBoer’s piece linking the hate Lena Dunham receives with her painfully enviable levels of creative privilege and ease. I agree almost entirely with Freddie’s thinking, having spent time in similar spaces (albeit not at such dizzying heights). I would add only that I think part of the vitriol, at least for others who have spent time in commercial writing and entertainment spaces, relates to the level of protection anyone born into that golden bubble of nepotism enjoys. There were low-level Lenas scattered throughout the place I worked, and they were strictly off-limits. If your father owns half a radio station or your mother runs PR for a production company, you inherit immunity from predation with your blood. You can go to work like a normal person and write, and chase success, and sleep peacefully. You don’t have to be careful: to make sure you wear pants or stockings, to never turn your back to the door, to read the shifts in the air that mean you’d best get gone.
Anyway: I left the day my contract ended and everyone thought I’d gone insane. I was insane, but I was doing the most lucid thing I’d managed in years by quitting. Not that I could explain that particularly easily to the people in my life, especially those I’d studied with (most of whom were still working unpaid internships):
But won’t you miss it? Don’t you love it? You have an audience. You’re getting paid to write. You work with famous people. What’s wrong with you?
I can’t remember what I said in response, probably lies. I was too tired to bear anyone else’s disappointment on top of my own, too jaded, too run-through. Oh, you know, I just want to see the world while I’m young. I can chain myself to a desk anytime. I’m sure I’ll be back. Spoiler alert: I was insane, not stupid. I never went back.
It would be more than ten years before I could bring myself to write again.
Once I got out, I went back to the only other thing I’ve ever been any good at: I worked on boats. I ignored the inevitable whispers about my wasted potential. I found a good therapist and I met good people. I started — slowly, tentatively — to trust them. I adopted a cat. Then another. Slowly, over years, I got better. I stopped self-medicating so much. I learned to tolerate stability, reconnected with my family, accepted the grief I’d been running from, and eventually decided I’d like to help other people the way my therapist had helped me. I took a few more years to further stabilise and integrate, instinctively aware of the dangers of healing-while-wounded.
When I was ready, I applied to train as a psychotherapist with a specialisation in sexual trauma and PTSD.
Not long after I graduated, I got some very interesting news: my old workplace was at the epicentre of a #MeToo media firestorm.
Two things had happened to facilitate this unlikely turn of events:
Firstly, the lesser of the two evils (Weinstein, if you like) finally picked the wrong person to lay hands on. Allegedly, he raped a teenage girl who won the equivalent of a backstage pass to hang out with him at an event, and her father just happened to be a powerful lawyer. There was nothing for her to lose and everything to gain if he went down and took the whole place with him.
Secondly, from what I can gather, at about the same time this particularly vile crime came to light Weinstein managed to really piss off someone high up in the business. She was angry enough to go full scorched-earth and spill all manner of secrets on the way out.
The company issued a statement, as they do when such unpleasantries are unavoidable:
We here at MediaCorp are devastated by the disturbing allegations made this week in relation to our flagship brand PersonalityFM. We remain dedicated to maintaining a culture of diversity, equity and inclusion, and above all we value the safety and wellbeing of our people. We take sexual misconduct extremely seriously, and this issue is of the utmost importance to us. An independent investigation into our culture, hiring practices, and complaints procedures will be commencing immediately. We do not tolerate unprofessional, unsafe, or criminal behaviour here at MediaCorp. We never have, and we never will.
It was at this point that I decided, as per my old boss’s pointed question: yes, I am going to be a problem.
Here ends Part One.
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UPDATE: I’m writing a book on therapy culture! If you’re a publishing-type person and interested in getting in on the action please email me skyesclera@gmail.com and I’ll tell you all about it.
This post was written and edited without the use of AI.
There is so much to love about this piece, including that it grabbed me from beginning to end. Like drop everything and read it now.
It’s incredibly honest, human, and doesn’t fall for the feminist trap of female superiority, moral innocence, or purity narratives. Complicity and self-preservation in systems that will devour you is a normal reaction to threat. You understand that systems are filled with people who sense, suspect, minimise, rationalise, and look away because the incentives for disrupting the social order are unbearably high, which is why predators can keep doing what they want.
I love that you refuse innocence. You implicate yourself in the same human tendencies toward denial, self-preservation, and looking away that allow predatory systems to survive instead of positioning yourself outside them as morally pure. Excellent all the way through.
Ugh, I’m so sorry.
You could write an entire piece on how having a documented history of mental illness makes legal justice inaccessible, especially if you are a woman. It is scary and infuriating and humiliating to know that if someone abuses me, I don’t have the same legal options available to me because of my history: even if the facts are entirely on my side and my mental illness is irrelevant, a good lawyer will use it to tear me to pieces. I have been advised in the past not to report people who have abused me—I have been advised to appease them even—because I “will never win a court case”. It makes you feel like less of a person to be told you will never win a court case, no matter how innocent or victimized you are. And then, later on, the same men will say, “If it was so bad, why didn’t you sue?” I don’t feel like a full citizen, tbh; I know that sounds dramatic, but I feel like the justice system is there to serve other people, not me.