In the two years since #MeToo reshaped the public conversation around sexual assault, my friends and I have begun to whisper among ourselves – what if the exposure of predatory behavior by
Harvey Weinstein had not raised our standards for men’s behavior, but actually lowered them? After all, Weinstein was routinely held up as an example of what kind of sexual abuse was unacceptable, but not in such a way that acknowledged the prevalence of his sort of exploitation and abuse of power, but in a way that seemed to suggest that anything short of his level of high-profile, organized, serial rape and assault wasn’t really so bad.
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I thought, in other words, that the forces of misogyny were willing to make Harvey Weinstein something a sacrificial lamb, a man they were willing to concede was an abuser, so long as they could also maintain that none of the innumerable less brazen or egregious offenses other men commit are worthy of censure. I thought that they were willing to concede, at least, that a man of incredible power who allegedly used that power to coerce and force sex from dozens of unconsenting women was unacceptable, that he should not be welcome in the community. I was wrong.
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Critics of the #MeToo movement have described being accused of sexual assault as akin to summary execution for a man, and have loudly bemoaned men’s ruined careers and social deaths. But these men are not dead. They are very much still alive, and in many cases they are still working. They will not go away, and they seem unwilling, even, to stop demanding our attention, stop showing up uninvited in our newsfeeds, on our television screens, and in the comedy bars where we go to have a laugh and relax. We’re told they’re dead, but they keep appearing everywhere, still here and still very much capable of inflicting further harm. In the set that got her booed at the Downtime Bar, Bachman compared Weinstein to the horror villain Freddy Krueger, and in his zombielike ability to reemerge and torment women where they expect to be at ease, this comparison seems particularly apt.