There are various anxieties swirling around right now. Masha Gessen has written a piece for The New Yorker in which she says that those on the left are starting to police sex as a surrogate for the aggression that can’t be policed – unjust tax plans, travel bans, etc. This is the second article that she’s written about the #MeToo developments of the past couple of months. And others have drawn similar parallels and articulated similar fears. But as much as I am in awe of her insight into the mechanics of political authoritarianism, Gessen is misunderstanding the sources of moral panics and sex panics. As a result, she and others are misreading the dangers of this moment.
Consensual, healthy, sexual exchanges between men and women are not at risk. Trust me. Men who already engage in the negotiation of sexual opportunity and mutual desire from a position of respect and humility are going to be just fine.
To fear otherwise is problematic on a bunch of levels. First, it assumes that women don’t want to have sex. They do. A healthy, heterosexual, otherwise unencumbered woman isn’t looking for a reason to say no. She’s looking for the assurances she needs to say yes.
Second, it mischaracterizes past causes of moral panics or sex panics. They aren’t whipped up by the targets of oppression; they’re whipped up by those who are used to unchallenged power, and they do it in order to police the oppressed. So to fear that women are suddenly going to see phallic dangers where there aren’t any because their weak little minds have been worked up into a prudish frenzy is, to put it plainly, bullshit.
This brings us to the third and truly dangerous problem. It’s the real moral panic that is being deployed by the powerful as a weapon in this moment: the fear that there’s a ‘lack of due process’. It’s ingenious, really. And it happens every time. Whenever a group of people critiques the existing structures that have kept them powerless, their lack of access to the mechanisms of law and order are thrown back at them as evidence of their lawlessness. Never mind that fairness and reasonableness get defined by others and that faith in institutions is the quintessential privilege of the powerful. Those who’ve never enjoyed due process are suddenly scolded for not valuing it sufficiently.
And this is what brings us, finally, to Franken.
He has been forced to resign from the Senate because six women have accused him of various forms of assault or attempted assault. And make no mistake, forcibly kissing a woman is an assault, grabbing a woman’s ass is an assault. If it was when Trump described himself doing it, then it is when Franken does it. The fact that worse things are too, and that women put up with much worse all the time, doesn’t make it any less so. And the fact that Franken remembers it differently isn’t an indication that it didn’t happen. It’s an indication of why and how something like that can be done by a man who also sees himself as a feminist.
But, and this is what gets us back to due process, he isn’t being arrested. He isn’t being charged with a crime. He’s losing his job. That’s all. And the same goes for Conyers, and Hockenberry, and all the men who, outside the media scrutiny, have resigned from state houses around the country over the past few weeks.
Crying out about the lack of due process in these cases really needs to be examined closely. We need to go to the logical end point of arguing that the legal standard for conviction of a crime in a court of law is what must be met in order for a man to lose his job. Really? For predatory men to no longer thrive in their workplaces we must be able to convict?
Finally, and in a similar vein, I’m also reading from various precincts that the Democratic Party and the left-leaning media are inflicting mortal blows to their own body politic at its weakest moment. Apparently, according to this narrative, #MeToo is doing the enemy’s work for them by sowing chaos, fear, and self-doubt in the halls of liberal power. In other words, unreasonable women (dare I say shrill? vindictive? hysterical?) are now to blame for the state of the Democratic Party. Just as Clinton was a weak candidate and white women elected Trump, we find, once again, that the double X chromosome is the source of the problem.
I wonder if Democrats who find no difficulty recognizing that the GOP and Trump are preemptively vilifying Mueller, his team, and the FBI, can see that #MeToo and its fallout are being set up for the blame if the Democrats continue to be ineffective at resisting the further rise of the strong man.
Martini Wisdom 