The #MeToo Movement Will Produce Victims of Its Own
Paul Craig Roberts
From the standpoint of the #MeToo movement, the wrong country was banned from the Olympics. It should have been the US, not Russia. According to MeToo women, the US Olympic Committee and USA Gymnastics covered up Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse of US athletes for years. https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/02/14/ban-united-states-from-olympics.html
In contrast, the Russian doping scandal appears to be an orchestration by Washington as part of its ongoing policy to isolate Russia.
The entire story of systematic government-sponsored doping of Russian athletes rests essentially on the unconfirmed story of one person—the person running the alleged doping program. Curiously, this person fled Russia to the US and “confessed.” He is hidden somewhere under US protection. Why would the person running a doping program do this? Perhaps because it wasn’t a state-sponsored program, and authorities were hot on his heels. Did he confess to Americans so as not to be handed over to the Russians for prosecution?
Some of the Russian-bashers claim that more evidence comes from non-doping Russian athletes who claimed they were disadvantaged by the state doping program. This means that they were not included in the program. How then could it have been an all-inclusive state-sponsored program?
The Court of Arbitration for Sport has cleared many of the banned Russian athletes of the false charge. Nevertheless the International Olympic Committee refused to admit the cleared athletes to the games. Faced with the intrusion of US foreign policy into the Olympic games, the court’s spokesperson backed off. He said that the absence of any evidence of the athletes guilt does not mean that the athletes are innocent. In other words, guilty by accusation until proven innocent.
Is there any Western institution that is not corrupt?
The #MeToo movement will claim that it is not—and clearly there are cases of sexual abuse—but what happens to the movement once it becomes institutionalized, as it is in the process of becoming. Every US state attorney general has asked for federal legislation ending the practice of arbitration in cases of alleged workplace sexual harassment. The argument is that private settlement of charges “silences women’s voices” and thereby perpetuates harassment, whereas public settlement in court roots out serial abusers.
Yes, it does. But it also creates a power that it is naive to think no woman would abuse. Just as ambitious women can use sex to achieve career advancement, they can also use the implicit threat of bringing a harssment charge. What the reform will do is to alter the power balance and create a new abuse in the place of the targeted abuse. Men instead of women will be the victims.
This is certain to happen considering the attitude of MeToo women. For example, Sophie Gilbert makes a blanket charge against all men when she writes in The Atlantic that she would be surprised if she could find one woman who had not been sexually coerced or intimidated. Rooted as the MeToo movement is in Identity Politics, the assumption is that women in general confront “a climate of serial sexual predation.” https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/10/the-movement-of-metoo/542979/
The old left blamed capitalism for instilling exploitative attitudes in wielders of power. Identity politics blames racist, sexist, heterosexual males. Just as no one could have convinced a jury of the old left that capitalism wasn’t guilty, no one will be able to convince a jury conditioned by Identity Politics that heterosexual males are not guillty.
Whatever point of view that prevails will produce its own victims.
When I think about the charge that male sexual predation is the norm, I wonder what happened to the old fashioned slap. I can recall a time before women were infantilized by MeToo when women could stick up for themselves. It was also a time when men had women on a pedestal and showed respect to women in ways now banned by feminists. Could there be a relationship between women being pulled off the pedestal by feminists and the increase in harassment?
There are other forms of harassment than sexual, and we should not approve of any of them. But the focus on sexual harassment is dangerous, because the term is so broad and undefined. It comes down to anything that a woman says it is or is indoctrinated to see it as. For example, a woman is dressed to attract attention and the looks she provokes become harassment. She considers herself harassed if showing off her charms results in “harassment stares.” Or she doesn’t get her way and misinterprets the fact as sexual intimidation. In France, of all places, there is legislation pending that defines sexual harassment as a male asking a female her name or for her telephone number. In other words, if a male makes an effort to meet a female, he is guilty of harassment. Until recently for a guy to ask a gal’s name was not considered harassment, but apparently enough women in France have been trained to regard any male interest in them as sexual harassment.
This is a good way to destroy relations between the genders, which is the goal of Identity Politics, based as it is in cultural Marxism.
Whether by intention or by an idea running its course, men have been set up. They have been forced by civil rights laws to bring women into their midst, and the women are now being empowered with a tool to push aside the men with the Identity Politics charge that heterosexual men are sexual predators.
Just as rebellious children who equate parental control with abuse have learned that relief from parental control is just a phone call away to Child Protective Services, feminists have gained the power to bring down men on sexual harassment charges. I have no doubt that those of both genders, or should I say all genders, have grown more abusive with time. Formerly, people were held together by family ties and marriage, and their behavior was regulated by religion and by having “to look oneself in the mirror.” Today these ties only weakly exist. People are individuals a la Ayn Rand, into it for themselves and preoccupied with their own personal interests and looking out for themselves alone. In his book, The Old Regime and the Revolution, Alexis De Tocqueville wrote that being out for oneself is the very definition of modernity. Commitment is so diminished that the divorce rate in the US is 50% of marriages.
There are a number of reasons that heterosexual males do not regard their approaches to women as sexual harassment. To remind those who confuse an explanation with an excuse, this is an explanation. One reason is that the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, formerly celebrated by feminists, along with birth control and access to birth control, made women as promiscuous as men. The age of sexual maturity for females has dropped, and today there are many young women not of legal age who are very sexually experienced. Sex lost its stigma, and Cosmopolitian Magazine continues to celebrate the sexually liberated woman.
What the MeToo movement is doing, based as it is in the exploitative ethos of cultural Marxism, is turning women’s sexual liberation into the sexual harassment of women by men.
When you think about America, what do you see? A society falling apart at the seams. A government unable to represent anyone but the rich and powerful. A government in thrall to powerful interests such as the military/security complex, which requires endless wars of aggression and a police state domestically to suppress dissent from the wars; a government whose economic policy is in thrall to Wall Street and which has created enormous amounts of money pumped into stock prices in the guise of “helping the economy.” Only equity owners have been helped. The distribution of income and wealth in the US is now worse than in many gangster states, according to the CIA itself.
With the collapse of civil liberty and the opportunity society, MeToo is busy at work destroying the relationship between man and woman. It is difficult to imagine a worst crime. Will liberation come from the movement or only a change in who is harassed and a breakdown in the basic social relationship?
Note: I did not follow the Larry Nassar case beyond reading some media reports. http://www.cnn.com/2018/02/01/us/msu-amanda-thomashow-complaint-larry-nassar/index.html The invasive procedure used by Nassar, treating the pelvic floor, was a known and approved one. It was turned into sexual abuse because Nassar did not expain the procedure and obtain consent and did not have a third party present during the treatment. When Nassar was arrested on child pornography charges, it threw a different light on his pelvic treatment, which involved the insertion of fingers into the vagina. The media reports I have seen do not say whether the procedure was an effective treatment. However, overall Nassar appears to have been successful in treating women for sports injuries, which is why USA Gymnastics relied on him.
MeToo women are not content with Nassar’s life sentence. They regard the problem to be much larger than Nassar. They see the problem as pervasive coverup of sexual abuse by the US Olympic Committee, USA Gymnastics, and Michigan State University. The target is “a climate of serial sexual predation” in which all males (and females in denial) are guilty.
If there was a coverup, for example, by Michigan State University, was it because of “a climate of serial sexual predation,” or was it because the university’s attorneys were doing their job of protecting the university from civil lawsuits?
Are we witnessing the launching of a sexual abuse witch hunt that will have many innocent victims as did the child abuse witch hunt?
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