In a story last week on the Uvalde shooter, the Washington Post interviewed several teen girls who'd interacted with him on social media. Collectively, they painted a disturbing portrait of a violent and misogynistic young man, one prone to making threats towards them. In some cases, the girls say, they reported the threats to Yubo, a social media app deemed a "tinder for teenagers." But, the company ignored their reports. In other cases, the girls found his behavior disturbing, but they said it was so typical of what they encounter generally, that they didn't think anyone would really care.
For decades now, surveys of sexual violence have found consistently that somewhere between one in three and one in six women will experience sexual assault or an attempted sexual assault in their lifetimes (this is separate from other forms of harassment, including verbal harassment). In a very substantial minority of those cases, the first such attempt happened when they were girls in the 12-17 range.
In 2017, the #MeToo movement seized hold of the nation's attention. One immediate impetus for that was the reporting of the New York Times and the New Yorker on the decades-long crimes of Harvey Weinstein. That reporting prompted a cascade of women, especially in the entertainment field, to come forward to share their own stories of assault and abuse. And for a period of time, some very high profile men, including Louis C.K., Aziz Ansari and Senator Al Franken were compelled to cede their positions in the wake of accusations against them (not all of the same degree or kind and none in the ballpark of what Weinstein has now been convicted of).
But, to make a long story short, there has been a backlash in recent years against #MeToo itself. I mentioned yesterday that I find problematic the language around "cancel culture" or "canceling." In part, that's because the word itself implies a finality that in most cases misrepresents what has actually happened, since many so-called “canceled” people have eventually resumed their perches atop the cultural/celebrity pyramid (Franken is an example of someone who actually permanently lost his chosen career. That's not typical).
Anyhoo, if 2017 seemed to represent the beginning of a looonnnggg overdue course correction, the fact remains that violence against girls and women is epidemic, in the United States and globally. In Latin America over the past few years, a determined movement led by women has emerged to highlight the pervasive violence that marks the lives of girls and women. This includes highlighting "femicide," a category meant to draw attention to how pervasive misogyny results in the regular killing of girls and women because they are female.
Meanwhile, #MeToo surged and foundered in the US on the backs of its framing as a celebrity phenomenon. I think of this as the Hollywoodification of the issue. High profile abusers and high profile victims light up the news cycle. They allow news organizations to turn a pervasive social reality into compelling story-telling. There's nothing necessarily wrong with this. Or to put it another way, it might be unavoidable, at least to some significant degree. The revelations of 2017-18 brought focused attention to a fundamental problem. They also helped inspire lots of people to become more active in trying to force their societies to take the problem more seriously.
But, live by the high profile stories, die by the high profile stories. Smarter people than me are now writing about the Johnny Depp defamation case against Amber Heard as the death knell of #MeToo. One could argue that the beginning of the end of #MeToo, at least in the sense of a movement that felt too powerful, too consistent with the prevailing tide of history to be on the wrong side of, was the Kavanaugh confirmation process in 2018. Regardless, whatever consciousness was raised, at least for some, by the graphic documentation of the fact that wealthy and powerful men had spent decades getting away with abusing (mostly) women, the reality of the day-to-day fear and violence that so many women experience has not changed. At all.
There are many, many pixels worth of unpacking to do here. But what prompted me to begin writing this out is a feeling akin to what I wrote in my last post. That our political system - that is, the means by which society attempts to redress basic problems to ensure that ordinary people can live better lives - is making little or no progress redressing those fundamental problems.
I don't mean that everything is exactly as crappy now as it's always been. I don't believe that. But concerning the things I care most about, including redressing social and material inequalities and the ways those undermine the well being of the most vulnerable among us, we've more or less stalled out. That very much includes the predations that confront so many girls and women in their day to day lives. We lurch from one sensational example to the next of a society's failure to protect its most vulnerable. Meanwhile, the more mundane realities, including those experienced by the girls WaPo talked to after the Uvalde massacre, persist.
And while it's easy to get caught up in and exercised by those sensations, to see clearly those more mundane realities under our noses requires, as they say, a constant struggle.