On #MeToo, my mind is full of caveats
The #metoo hashtag has both impressed me and made me feel twitchy. I've been impressed by those who were willing to open up about uncomfortable experiences in order to start a conversation. It's not that I was surprised about those experiences. I'm a woman; I've been alive for nearly forty years. Undergoing sustained sexual harassment at the workplace and violence in a relationship are the two experiences that come most quickly to mind if I were to #metoo too, as it were, but something about the process made me uneasy, as more and more people posted about such experiences and others responded by commiserating, apologising on behalf of men, or simply using the weepy emoji Facebook so conveniently now offers.
My mind became filled with a range of caveats. Some people have pointed out that #metoo conflates harassment, which is unfair, with abuse or rape, which are criminal; others have complained about the implicit pressure to "share" as social media creepily terms it, their own experiences, when they may not wish to; privately, quite a lot of men of my acquaintance have recalled experiences of harassment, abuse, and rape too, and not all of them were the victims only of other men. Who, then, should be in the dock? Is the issue more about people in positions of power behaving badly, whether those people are men or women (and, numerically, far more have been men)? Is it about warped ideas of masculinity? I'm not rejecting either of those thoughts, yet neither quite seemed to fit when I considered things. Instead, and I thought about it while travelling for a couple of days to Norwich, where I used to live, taking trains and underground trains via London, what I began to notice in myself was the times when I was sensitive to other beings, and the times when I wasn't. Sometimes I gave money to a homeless person; another time I said no to an addict on the street who asked for money. After years of being vegetarian because the idea of eating meat made me uncomfortable, but without any reason other than that my body seems to welcome it, I've resumed eating meat. In the Underground, I got up to let an older woman sit, but also silently accepted the (silent) politeness of two men during another journey who simply remained standing when a seat became available and let me sit in it even though they were nearer it than I was. We all have moments of kindness and empathy and moments of being unaware; we all also allow ourselves moments of unawareness, sometimes of callousness or insensitivity.
I am not saying that rape or sexual harassment or abuse are the same as eating meat or politely refusing to give someone money on the street. I have no sympathy with the actions of a powerful man in the film industry who forces himself on people who, in different ways, need his sanction. What I am saying is that I notice the moments in myself when I am less self-aware than I might be - the moments when I treat other people (or animals) as purely instrumental, not as beings who are ends in themselves. And I wonder about it. Some of the most damaging things that happen to us are not officially criminal, or certainly not things that could be proven in court. And sometimes, probably, we damage others without really intending to, through inattention as well as through failing to make the effort to be human.
It's good that the conversation is happening, but it also makes me queasy. Perhaps I haven't fully identified why, but one point of discomfort is that #metoo invites me to consider myself (in this case) on the right side of the line of cruelty and insensitivity, and I don't think I always am. Like probably every other woman, I've been vulnerable to and the subject of sexual harassment and violence, and I don't think either is even slightly okay. But in other areas, as one of the privileged - educationally, economically, in many other ways too - I've been on the side of those who dispense callousness. Many of the people I know or work with are, like me, also privileged in those ways; but we remain largely silent about those balances of power, perhaps because they are in our favour. I'm glad of the conversation that's been started by #metoo - I just don't think it should end there.