How many more? Actors, tech executives, politicians, TV stars: the names, allegations and apologies mount. The exposure of the predatory behaviour of the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, and the #MeToo campaign it triggered, has had an impact even his accusers surely never anticipated. It has forced at least some powerful individuals to at last face consequences for their behaviour. But it has proved even more important and instructive in two other regards.
First, the sheer volume of testimony that has emerged refutes the idea that the odd “bad apple” needs to be removed but everything is otherwise fine. It has demonstrated that this is a widespread and structural issue. Second, the torrent has emboldened women to challenge behaviour that they silently endured.
Women are, at last, being heard. But which women? The questions that #MeToo has forced people to confront – who is heard, who is believed, who wins redress – are skewed by race and class as much as by gender. The very phrase “me too” bears examination: many ascribed it to the actor Alyssa Milano, who started the social media avalanche. But it was a black woman, Tarana Burke, who first used the words to raise awareness of the pervasiveness of abuse – just as the battles of black workers, mostly forgotten, shaped US sexual harassment law.
The nature of celebrity and the news cycle, the role of social media, and the privileges of race, have cast the spotlight in one direction, and left many of those who bear the heaviest burden in the shadows. A report published by the TUC last year found that more than half of women experienced sexual harassment at work; four-fifths did not report it. (Very few of those who did saw a positive outcome.) But the public discussion has encompassed relatively few of these experiences.
What does #MeToo mean for women who face additional discrimination and abuse as people of colour? For women on factory floors, in care homes, or delivering parcels? For women on short-term contracts and without union representation, or in the gig economy, where bosses can easily deny them work and where abusers may be clients of the business paying them? No woman should suffer socially, economically or professionally for challenging her abuser. But how much harder it is to speak out when the cost may be not only your career, but the ability to pay the rent or feed your children. And how much more likely you are to be targeted when predatory men know that. The EU Agency for Fundamental Rights notes: “Women with irregular or precarious employment contracts ... are also more susceptible to sexual harassment.”
The neglect of these issues is not a problem peculiar to feminism, as some imply. It reflects the fact that feminism is not immune from broader social forces. But feminism can be part of the solution. Women become more powerful when they support one another – as Ms Burke and Ms Milano have stood together in demanding better for women everywhere, urging that #MeToo becomes #HerToo. It is what Latina farmworkers demonstrated in writing a joint letter to the Hollywood figures who have come forward, describing their “common experience of being preyed upon by individuals who have the power to ... threaten our economic, physical and emotional security”.
This solidarity is especially critical as the backlash begins. Plenty of people want to move on; some because they don’t understand the movement’s importance, and others precisely because they understand its implications. Even now, women are paying a price for speaking out. Much discussion has skipped past the primary question – how women should be treated in the workplace – to fixate on how perpetrators should be treated, without pausing to acknowledge the penalties that victims have already paid.
The #MeToo campaign has proved powerful. But it cannot solve all the problems it raises; it will solve even fewer for some women; and some aspects of it bring problems of their own. It was only ever a beginning. The work of effecting real, widespread and lasting change will be long, slow, unglamorous and exhausting. It will be not just about raising awareness but about improving law and policy, and bolstering women’s economic status. It will depend on measures such as a new international standard on violence and harassment in the world of work, currently under discussion by the UN’s International Labour Organization. Its best hope of success rests on its ability to address the needs of all women.
