Slutsky & Bitchin' | #MeToo celebrity feuds have to be judged case-by-case to avoid gender war casualties
Slutsky: As Charles Dickens once said: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair."
Bitchin': Wow! What brought that on today?
Slutsky: It seemed appropriate in the context of the #MeToo movement which many feel is an attack on men. But is it? When #MeToo took off, it was about victims of sexual and physical assaults claiming the space to call out people in power who had abused this power to harass those weaker than them. People remember female victims and think the movement is an excuse for women to accuse men in power. But they forget that it was only after #MeToo started that male victims also stepped forward like Brendan Fraser, who spoke about being groped by a former president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), the organization responsible for putting on the Golden Globes.
Bitchin': But in any revolutionary moment, when established patterns of power are challenged, those who have internalized those structures of power feel threatened. The American revolution started as a peasant uprising when people in the American colonies were tired of being heavily taxed by the English Crown. They took it on themselves to redress the imbalance of power. With the French revolution, the aristocracy saw the peasant uprising as hooliganism. The revolutionaries also had blood on their hands by the end when they started killing off any aristocrat they could lay their hands on, which wasn't just either. But it was a class war that brought the ideas of egalitarianism and a non-feudal system of government -- the roots of democracy itself -- to the world.
Slutsky: And #MeToo has turned into a gender war. So there will be unjust casualties -- as history shows -- but it is not to say that the movement itself is not needed or justified to rebalance the power between men and women.
Bitchin': Some women will misuse this moment for their own ends and falsely accuse men. No revolution is clean. So how can one expect the #MeToo wars to be neat and cozy with everyone agreeing on what is just? And even though #MeToo has been sucked into the maelstrom of the gender wars because most victims of sexual battery or assault are women -- we forget that the issue originally was never about women against men.
Slutsky: When there are so many media representations of #MeToo and the avalanche of YouTube celebrities talking about the movement from very particular and personal biases, it becomes extremely important to reiterate what #MeToo is really about. It is about victims of assault asking for justice that had been denied to them for years because predators had been protected by corrupt systems of power.
Bitchin': So it becomes equally important to also view each case, especially celebrity cases, with care. Are you becoming part of a mob, like those French peasants killing aristocrats regardless of whether they were guilty or not? Or are you standing for justice and the rebalance of unjust power equations and standing by the victims of such power imbalance?
Slutsky: It is what every person calling themselves a feminist has to introspect on.
Slutsky & Bitchin’ is a weekly column that will examine the highs and lows of pop culture and media from a feminist POV. The column is published every Saturday.