Next LP live: July 22
What was #MeToo? Is it still with us?
Mark your calendars, ladies and gents.
Something interesting started happening around 2016, just before the NYT broke the Harvey Weinstein story. That something started losing force around the time a woman - under a social media tsunami - was fired, chased out of the country and forced to change her name for calling the cops on a man in Central Park who threatened her. The incident happened on the same day of the George Floyd murder in Minnesota. Two events that, some argue, signalled the beginning of the race-primacy era of grievance. Next to race, MeToo looked much too Karen-y. In a not-so-faint an echo of the OJ Simpson trials, Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs lawyers recently argued that the feds use a ‘racist law’ to target their client, and punish his ‘Black male sexuality’. (The rapper was acquitted in federal trial on the most serious charges, but still faces 50 ongoing civil lawsuits.)
What was MeToo? I would argue that the MeToo at its ripest primarily operates/d extra-judicially and post-facto. If it reaches the courts, I think it turns into a different thing, an event with fact-finding procedures which are stricter and more protocolled. Whereas MeToo is in its core an honoring of a feeling. What was that feeling? Victimhood, helplessness? Rage? An inarticulate cri against injustice, let the chips fall where they may? Did the feeling, as the movement swelled and the media noticed that it brought traffic like very little else, mix with some other feelings, a desire for revenge, sadism, spite? The ‘Shitty Media Men List’ was probably the MeToo at its most exacerbated. It combined digital tools, anonymity, grievances of incomparable nature and weight (from an inconsiderate date to sexual blackmail in a professional setting), retroactivity, and a lot of young people in an industry in freefall. Where men tended to be the gatekeepers and women formed the vast majority of incoming cohorts, students at training schools, etc.
Few of you will remember the case of Jeramy Dodd. He was accused by an anonymous collective of using “his position and stature at Coach House and the CanLit community at large in order to pursue inappropriate relationships with emerging women writers." Reader, Dodd was a poetry board member in a small publishing house. It was early 2018: he was removed, the poetry program suspended, and I don’t believe he has published a single thing since.
And who even remembers Jon Paul Fiorentino. A creative writing prof at Concordia was singled out by a former girlfriend Emma Healey who accused him of dating while power-imbalanced (no other way to put it). Their romantic relationship, she had said, “began as consensual, but was eventually marred by an imbalance of power”. Healey has written extensively about the trauma of dating a writing prof and has since done very well for herself, y compris a book deal with Random House. JPF hasn’t published since.
And neither has Steven Galloway, who after the insane ordeal he went through is now edging his way through the courts trying to clear his name; his defamation lawsuit against a bunch of writers who publicly refused to accept that an independent investigation by a retired judge found him innocent is proceeding, after a 5-year delay. As in the Concordia case, teachers dating students led to some dark outcomes.
Is this going to be one of the real legacies of MeToo: the end of dating in any and all work settings? Or is it the white collar jobs only? Some of these cases (the absurd ones and the less absurd ones, cf. some that I mention below) point out at the weakness at the heart of some of these institutions. Should students go drinking with professors, for example, and wouldn’t the informality of those relationships undermine the formal part of work? (Former Trinity College Provost Andy Orchard’s case is a good illustration.) Also, equally, is the ‘power imbalance’ always already a sin? Why are women entering these relationships in the first place?
More of you will remember the case of Albert Schultz, and on this one I have conflicting thoughts. Four actresses, former collaborators (alongside a campaign from the Globe and the CBC) took him to civil court for inappropriate behaviour during rehearsal and in social setting: groping, exposing himself for a prank, sexually spicy comments - the stupid Benny Hill stuff, but as far as I can tell from what was made public, no sexual blackmail of casting couches. “Belittling and bullying” was also highlighted. The matter was ‘settled’ (rumours of low thousands paid in damages were never confirmed) and Schultz and his wife, the until then, unwisely, ED of the theatre that he ran as the AD, left the company he co-founded, left Toronto - and left theatre. He now runs a restaurant in his home town. Again, an institutional snafu and hubris: if you had a problem with the AD, seemingly by all accounts a charismatic media darling with a talent of separating donors from their money - you couldn’t really go to the ED. There was nowhere to go. So… helpless people resort to breaking things.
I came across this list of Canadian men who have been MeToo’d circa 2017-18 (cases seem to peter out by 2020) and some foray into the huh? territory. Steve Paikin is probably the only one accused who got out of it with his reputation and career unscathed. Several others sound absurd on first reading. Erin Weir’s story is among the more unusual; apparently he stood too close to some women at parties and talked too much? I just don’t know.
Meanwhile, over in the US, Al Franken, who might have been the Dems’ one chance against Trump in 2016 - populist, good on TV, funny - was taken out by a small chorus of MeToos which seem to have been about being touched in a crowd of people and there was a mention of an uninvited kiss?
I could be - you can voice that complaint - particularly cool-headed about the MeToo’d men because, as a gay woman, I am not affected the usual way: I’ve never blurred the sexual and the professional with men (just don’t ask me about women) and never found (placed?) myself as far as I know in a situation where that can happen. I like men and tend to get along well with them and maybe it’s because I don’t date them, and did not spend decades supporting one among them and raising his children? My sources of resentment towards men (yes they piss me off too sometimes qua men) will never come from that kind of source.
Phoebe’s insights will be interesting for this reason too. She has written eloquently against the notion that heterosexual women - most women, by far - are not into men as much as men are into women and that they are shrinking violets under the constant and oppressive gaze of male sexuality. (We chatted about this once on Twitter: it’s actually fairly easy to select yourself out of male sexual attention.) I’d also like to hear her thoughts on that Larissa Philips piece and if it changed the conversation about assault while Paglia and Virginie Despentes and many other writers who attempted similar couldn’t. Lots to talk about.
PS: I didn’t even mention Jian Ghomeshi… Another one for the column institutional rot, sub-section: CBC managers. Plus he was acquitted. Anyone read Marie Henein’s memoir and how candid on the topic is it? I’ll never understand why so many women went gaga over him, even when those stories preceded him.