Me Too Is Just a Liberal Phenomenon

One of the great ironies of Trumpism is that the revelations that led to a nationalized Me Too movement flowered after Trump infected our politics. You’d think the nation that elected a man saddled with sexual assault and harassment allegations wouldn’t be ready to contend with yet another cultural reckoning, but by the first two weeks of October 2017—slightly less than a year after the 2016 election—it had no choice. The New York Times’s and The New Yorker’s reports about Harvey Weinstein, published five days apart and two years ago, opened the floodgates. Next was the “Shitty Media Men” list and numerous seismic shifts in the industrial foundations of press, publishing, film, television and music. From Vox Media’s editorial director Lockhart Steele to NBC News’s Mark Halperin to The New Republic’s Hamilton Fish, hundreds of men realized, for the first time, the consequences of their toxic actions. To make matters even more delicious, a lot of those guys were replaced by women, which felt gratifying. Hoda Kotb replaced Matt Lauer, Christiane Amanpour replaced Charlie Rose and Tina Smith replaced Al Franken (though Franken’s cancellation has become contentious as of late).

There’s a case to be made that Trumpism heightened the Me Too reckoning; that women were so infuriated by the 2016 election, they spun what might have otherwise eclipsed as a mild disturbance into an ongoing wave of rage. No doubt, our current understanding of the relationship between sex and power is a Trump-catalyzed effect. What’s more, not all of the women who’ve come forward in the past two years have become heroes or lionized in the annals of—using Hillary Clinton’s language—“gutsy women.” Quite the opposite, actually, as Rebecca Traister recently wrote in New York Magazine: “There has been very little acknowledgment that the risks of speaking up in many ways replicate the risks of harassment itself: the pressures, the humiliations, the possibility of having one’s professional record obscured by smears. Of course, the scale of the harm done to the storytellers differs, as does so much else, depending on their class and race, the stability of their points of entry into a public and perilous conversation. Those who have spoken up about harassment are often referred to by critics and the men they accused as being part of a mob and even by their admirers as members of a kind of thrilling sisterhood.”

There have been no immediate winners since the movement, originally founded by Tarana Burke to give a voice to marginalized and disenfranchised women, erupted into a national milestone. While society at large, and women in the future, may still benefit, the majority of women who’ve been directly involved, according to Traister’s New York Magazine investigation, seem to have also suffered, from lost jobs to social ostracism. The aftermath is a continuance of the unspoken threat to women under the power of abusive men: Snitches get, if not stitches, exiled and cast out.

There once was a predicted danger of the right wanting to coopt the Me Too movement as another chapter in its weird anti-sex crusade. That hasn’t happened because the right is staunchly in denial about the existence of sexual harassment in business, in politics and in the broader culture—unless, that is, it’s in service to their narrative of the caricatures of hypocritical Hollywood elitism. We live in such a bifurcated time that the right and the left are so profoundly separated, we practically breathe different oxygen.

I often think of the white woman who donned a homemade T-shirt with the words “Trump can grab my…arrow pointing down.” She wasn’t bothered by the sexual assault allegations against the president; she was emboldened by how her exoneration of Trump owned the libs. Something similar occurred during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh. Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony enraged some women. Melania Trump, the Patty Hearst of modern women suffering from Stockholm syndrome, reportedly told her husband that Ford was lying. The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway went on Laura Ingraham’s show and said, “Also, these are people who like her but they remembered her …a heavy drinker who was much more aggressive with boys than we were led to believe.” The implication, of course, is Ford was asking for it. It was the “a nut or a slut” defense, rebooted for the Twitter age.

Such women on the right are not victims of oppression. These women do not view themselves as oppressed because their preferred flavor of “culture wars” puts political victory above justice for all. They are participants in their own oppression and authors of protections for men whose predations transcend party and politics. So while the leftist voting blocs are focused on changing workplace culture via positions against pay discrimination, the right has convinced itself that Me Too is a myth. It’s a creation from the left or otherwise the exclusive province of Hollywood’s liberal elites. This is why so many people on the right are furious with women who speak out. In their collective mind, systemic sexual harassment isn’t real.

Changing culture is good and right and important. People like Halperin and Rose were accused of committing textbook sexual harassment, and seeing them ejected is a win for all. On the right, however, we see people like conservative TV personality Eric Bolling and Fox & Friends cohost Steve Doocy quickly rehabilitate. Let’s not forget allegations against conservative fixtures Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich. Roy Moore lost the Alabama Senate seat by only 1.7 percent. The President of the United States faces more than a dozen sexual assault allegations.

Me Too has changed the landscape of men’s behavior, which was needed and is absolutely a good thing. After all, sexual harassment is not the same as sex. Manipulation of women in the workplace is not a sexual behavior or corollary of sexuality. But in our fractured country, what does it mean that sexual assault allegations are largely viewed by the right as exaggerated? Eventually, won’t the right have to be held accountable? For something?

It’s almost as if Me Too has only affected the worlds of the left. That’s why Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court. An ironic exception to this is endless malfeasance at Fox News, where the predatory actions of Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly were pernicious and impossible to ignore. But this is absolutely an exception. Our country may indeed continue, in such a profoundly lopsided way, to be one in which the left is culled and the right claims immunity. In which case, the next phenomenon will be the proliferation of an underground culture wherein women on the right fall victim to sexual harassment, sexual violence and abuse that defies categorization. They’ll have no one to blame but themselves.