Harvey Weinstein sentenced for 23 years in rape trial. (“Harvey Weinstein”, 2020, para. 1)
The writing of this last concluding chapter coincided with the prison sentencing of Weinstein for committing rape and a criminal sex act against two women in his professional network. While the trial was based on two charges, a further four women testified that they too had been sexually assaulted in order “to demonstrate a pattern of predatory behavior by Mr. Weinstein” (Nashrulla, 2020, para. 8). The sentencing of Weinstein is one significant outcome following #MeToo challenges against sexual harassment and violence. While Weinstein’s criminal trial focused specifically on rape and sexual assault, it was resistance to sexual harassment that played a key role in the public calling out of celebrity perpetrators, including Weinstein, in 2017 (Chapters 1 and 2). Sexual harassment as a political tool for challenging unequal and subordinating gendered dynamics has been the central focus of this book. These gendered dynamics are dominantly characterised by a binary in which women are positioned as victims of male sexual violence. The victimisation of women by men has been connected to persistent and pervasive patterns of heterosexuality in which women are positioned as passive or least agentically constrained in relation to men (Chapter 1). These patterns co-exist and have become complexly intertwined with newer contemporary patterns in which feminism has become increasingly mainstream and women’s empowerment and sexual agency valorised. The taken-for-grantedness of women’s agency and assumed equality in relation to men in recent decades has dovetailed with periods in which sexism and sexual harassment virtually disappeared from public discussion (Chapter 3). The minimal public profile of these issues, particularly during the early 2000s, would seem to support the postfeminist rhetoric that gender equality has been achieved and feminism is no longer needed. What #MeToo has demonstrated is that the contemporary emphases on women’s agency and newfound sexual and professional freedoms have not paralleled a decline in sexual harassment and violence. This book has shown that discourses around women’s agency have worked flexibly and fluidly to erase or minimise people’s, particularly women’s, experiences of sexual harassment (Chapters 3 and 4). These patterns of erasure and minimisation have undoubtedly been supported by the persistence of heterosexualised gender relations, in which men remain positioned as sexually agentic and women as passive or constrained in relation to them.
#MeToo has certainly problematised the minimisation of sexual victimisation and gender inequality and created space for a veritable flood of victims to break silences and voice their experiences across different social media platforms. A key theme running across the chapters in this book centres on speaking rights of those who have experienced sexual harassment. As I have argued in this book, much scholarship on #MeToo has been concerned with who has been able to speak and who has been heard. A key concern with #MeToo is how celebrity women, who are privileged across a range of fault lines (e.g. class and wealth), became the most visible in the public speak-out. This has rightly raised questions about the potentially exclusionary character of #MeToo. The speaking out of celebrity women has been contextualised in this book within a cultural backdrop marked by neoliberalism and its confluence with particular variants of popular feminism. Neoliberal feminist discourse around women’s empowerment and success at work, I have argued, has been a pertinent frame within which to make sense of celebrity speak-outs during the galvanisation of #MeToo. Specifically, #MeToo drew attention to how the abilities of celebrity women to work and succeed have been limited by the Hollywood casting couch. Within this context, one way in which sexual harassment can and has been problematised in popular discourse is as a constraint to neoliberal human capital enhancement, in which people are not only encouraged to do paid work, but also to achieve professionally through maximising their capital value. I explored the ways in which neoliberal human capital enhancement addresses primarily those in privileged locations. Indeed, the inclusivity of #MeToo has at times been marked with assimilationist modes of incorporation which can work to erase race and class politics in sexual harassment dynamics. The association of #MeToo with paid work has also raised questions about its relevance for those outside formal economies of work (Chapter 2).
Chapter 3 moved on to examine intersecting power inequalities at play in victim politics. Victim ideals centre on the passivity and vulnerability of those who experience a wrong, however, at the same time, victimhood has been maligned because of its association with passivity. Postfeminism, for example, has suggested that the feminist call for women to claim a victim identity, particularly when they experience less extreme instances of sexual harassment, reinforces their position as passive and vulnerable within the heterosexual gender binary. Postfeminist rhetoric posits highly individualised solutions to sexual harassment which involve women putting men in their place “with strength and confidence” (Roiphe, 1993, p. 100). In contrast, some feminist discourses constitute women’s claim to victim identity as an act of agentic resistance and non-labelling as passive complicity with the normalisation sexual harassment. Women’s labelling or non-labelling of their experiences of problematic gendered behaviour have both been subject to the trouble of navigating maligned passive feminine identities, particularly before the more recent public problematisation of sexual harassment and violence.
Research on victim politics suggests that victim ideals become increasingly complex for women who do not, or cannot easily align with, ideals of feminine victimhood which have been marked by, for example, white middle-class privilege. The more recent challenges made in and around #MeToo have seen some push back to the well-entrenched associations between femininity, victimhood and passivity. I have argued that #MeToo has contributed to a greater visibility of victim narratives which are not always or straightforwardly reducible to traditional discourses of feminine passivity or individualising discourses of female agency. This, I suggest is important, for legitimising the speaking rights of some people who have struggled to be heard and may provide opportunities “to recognize commensurabilities that exist in practice and to work with these”, in order to move towards a more inclusive feminist project (Capdevila et al., 2006). I will return to the possibilities for inclusion later in this chapter.
The inclusive feel of #MeToo has undoubtedly been facilitated by the contributions of male victims to #MeToo after the Weinstein exposé was published. In Chapter 4, I suggested that speaking rights for men have been facilitated by celebrity men’s visible participation in popular feminism over the last decade. Alongside such participations, there has also been the increased social legitimisation of inclusive masculinities. Inclusive masculinities have been tied to a decline in anti-gay sentiment and associated anxieties around being marked as gay (Anderson, 2009). Male victims have often been subject to anti-gay rhetoric, and so an increased emphasis on inclusive masculinities would seem to lay the ground for men speaking out. The joining of Hollywood’s male victims in the #MeToo speak-out appeared, on the surface, to unsettle and destabilise the heterosexualised binary of male perpetrators and female victims. However, my analysis has shown how the reporting of celebrity male victims during #MeToo preserve notions of traditional heterosexual masculine ideals, which centre on heterosexual adult men as resistant to victimisation. In doing so, perpetration/victimisation became reframed within the heterosexualised binary of male perpetrators and female victims.
The well-entrenched notion of men as perpetrators was explored further in Chapter 5, where I discuss the new predominance of the sexual predator discourse. The popularisation of the term sexual predator has dovetailed with neoliberal carceral politics. The vilification of the sexual predator has been argued to have served as a central justification in moves towards mass incarceration (Wacquant, 2009). Within the sexual predator discourse, sex offending is treated as symptomatic of an individual’s abnormal psychology which, I have argued, has profound implications for the speaking rights of men who perpetrate sexual harassment. This was explored through the examination of media coverage of celebrity perpetrator apologies during the galvanisation of #MeToo. The reporting treated offender accounts and apologies as evidence of individual pathology. This pathologisation provided the basis to infer the criminogenic intentions of perpetrators, and dismiss their accounts. I have argued that the prominence of the sexual predator discourse may constrain or even undo some of the impacts of #MeToo, which include men’s critical reflection and discussion of doing sex and doing relationships within gendered and heterosexualised frames.
The sexual predator discourse has co-occurred with the interchangeable use of sexual harassment with terms including assault to describe instances of problematic and subordinating gendered dynamics. I have argued that the interchangeability of such terms seems related to challenges against the normalisation and trivialisation of sexual harassment and violence, as well as locating a greater range of problematic behaviours within criminal justice frames (Chapter 5). However, I am tentative about treating punitive criminal justice solutions as unqualified feminist successes. As Loney-Howes (2019) cautions, re-energised commitments to increased state governance may well reflect neoliberal reformulations of the impacts of #MeToo to enact the punitive punishment of individuals. This move, Loney-Howes (2019) argues, can effectively conceal the structural conditions underpinning contemporary sexual harassment by directing attention to a few bad apples. The sexual predator discourse is resonant with the kind of redirection that Loney-Howes (2019) warns against. Indeed, the sexual predator discourse could well risk losing a sense of connection between sexual violence, harassment and normative patterns of heterosexuality. Such a loss may mean that the possibilities for rewriting normative heterosexualised relationalities become limited.
At this point, I would like to return to my earlier suggestion about how the new visibility of representations of victimhood, that cut across polarisations of agency and passivity, might lend themselves to a more inclusive feminist project. Such a project, as I have argued throughout this book, will necessarily involve attention to intersecting social and structural power inequalities which underpin unequal rights to speak and be heard (Chapter 3). Central to such a project, I would argue, is the need to interrogate dominant understandings that assume a homogenous and universal womanhood and manhood. Such understandings can obscure how sexual harassment and violence is marked by a host of intersections of power and difference (Chapters 3 and 4). As critiques of the limits of inclusion within #MeToo have alluded to, it is important to take seriously the idea that heterosexualised gender relations are not the only thing that matters in sexual victimisation dynamics (e.g. Ison, 2019; Mack & McCann, 2018). Attention to these issues may open up new possibilities for rethinking and rewriting normative and heterosexualised binaries of agency/passivity and perpetration/victimisation. At the same time, it is vital that consideration is given to what justice for wrongs experienced might look like. A focus on dealing with “sexual predators” within the criminal justice system may obscure the possibilities for other forms of justice1 which may better serve feminist rather than neoliberal agendas (e.g. Taylor, 2019).
As I end this book, it would be remiss of me not to mention the new and unprecedented context that we are currently living in. The “end” of Harvey Weinstein’s story in the media, which saw him sentenced to 23 years in prison, also occurred in the same month that saw the US and UK government implement lockdown measures during the global Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic context has produced an extraordinary and bleak economic climate characterised by high levels of unemployment, rising domestic violence rates and the intensification of inequalities around access to resources and medical treatment (Ingala Smith, 2020). Amidst the pandemic, #BlackLivesMatter has gained renewed focus following global protests against racism and police brutality. These protests were spurred by the death of George Floyd, an African-American man, during a police arrest in May 2020. In these landscapes, “#MeToo may find itself in the annals of history, another chapter in a long trajectory of activism” (Loney-Howes & Fileborn, 2019, p. 336). However, in the context of deepening inequalities, and the opportunities that this brings for exploitation, it is critical to keep resistance against sexual harassment and violence on the public agenda in ways which attend to intersections of power and difference.
- 1.
An example of this could include transformative justice which are victim centred and not allied with state criminal punishment. Transformative justice often aims to hold perpetrators to account without pathologising them. See Taylor (2019) for further discussion.