Believe Evidence, and Proceed Pragmatically
The culture of #MeToo reflected a small shift in power toward women. It didn’t go as far as I thought it might. I remember this time when I adopted a stance of basically keeping my mouth closed and legs together for fear of being called out for mansplaining or manspreading. A physical and emotional smallness I adopted as a response to the request by women everywhere that men like me (loud, white) make our voices and our bodies a little smaller. There was a moment when I felt a bit like wherever I was, I was not welcome, and my presence was an intrusion. Like I’d accidentally stumbled into a ladies restroom and couldn’t find my way out. There was a feeling that not just abusive men, but men in general, kind of sucked.
This coincided with a time when I was feeling vulnerable to a woman who had falsely accused me of domestic violence and sexual abuse of our children, and who had gained enormously by doing so, so perhaps I was more hypersensitive to being castigated and thrown out than the average man. I knew that in the one place I could see where one could argue that #BelieveHer is already in practice—the family court system—it was vulnerable to exploitation, so the entire movement made me nervous. I genuinely believed I might never be able to be my annoying, loud self again.
On the other hand, I believe no oppressed group has ever made much progress without some form of violence. Physical, economic, whatever — you have to press the buttons, cause discomfort, harm, and, at the edge of that movement there will be truly innocent bystanders who get burned by the flames. And there will be psychopaths in the movement who exploit the permission-to-violence-for-the-cause to do their own violences for their own purposes separate from the cause. Understanding a movement by an oppressed group in terms of these issues at the boundaries is poor analysis. Movements are best understood in terms of their mainstream values, with the boundary issues evaluated as a part of the whole. In this specific case, my own personal experience with a woman who has falsely accused me and benefited from it is not the most accurate frame for the #MeToo movement.
Much sooner than I expected in 2018, women in the real world invited masculine energy back to the table. I felt this large re-invitation very viscerally at a personal level, as much as I’d felt the prior sensation of being unwanted in their physical and social space. I told people at the time, “well, that was quick.” And I realized that women really like men, generally speaking. More than I knew.
The #MeToo rocket has launched — there was a blast zone, that boundary place where the fire scorched some people a little far and wide in order to get the movement off the ground. You cannot launch the rocket without the blast zone. It’s inevitable, and that inevitability—the inevitable truth that there will be innocents caught up in the big net of history and dealt with unjustly in a movement to support the oppressed—is not an argument against these movements. The world is messy.
Now that it has launched, the blast zone doesn’t feel as excusable anymore. People start realizing that maybe they do want to vet claims by women, rather than simply believing them. When it comes to the claims right now against Joe Biden, there is a reckoning among women who earlier took a hard #BelieveHer lines to reevaluate the merits of that philosophy and possibly redefine it a bit. Alyssa Milano’s essay about this in Deadline isn't a philosophical masterpiece, but I think it's sincere and worth reading, if not as thought leadership on the issue, at least with sympathy for the challenge facing women who want to find a way toward a world with less violence against women, where abusers are brought to justice: https://deadline.com/2020/04/alyssa-milano-joe-biden-tara-reade-allegations-guest-column-1202921826/
If anyone wants my advice, my advice would be that nobody ever #BelieveHer, or #BelieveHim. Never. Actually, generally, don't ever do anything that comes in a HashTag. Believe evidence, of which personal accusations make up a part. And proceed pragmatically, understanding that its inevitable that the system is cautious with evidence, as any lurch toward automatically believing and acting on accusations provides an avenue for power acquisition that is attractive enough to be abused and thus will be abused. For every 50 sincere people in any movement, there's a cynical opportunist of varying degrees of psychopathy, and that one can do outsized damage given the protection afforded by movement dogmas.
There is therefore no better way forward than a pragmatic and measured approach to evaluating claims. There is unlikely to be a better standard than presuming people are innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. This remains true even as the approach is unsatisfying in every case where the baddie walks free.
Because the truth is the system cannot possibly be set up in a way to make sure the bad guys are stopped, or the victims are served justice. The system is far too messy for that, to be frank. The best the system can do is lurch imperfectly toward an average and toward some kind of ethical sustainability. That's it. That's where these judicial precedents live. That's why Kavanaugh is a supreme court justice whether he DID or DID NOT assault the woman who accused him, that's why Bill Cosby eventually went to Jail, but not for decades, even though he was known by so many to be an abuser. That's even why liberal women of high visibility are being slower to dive into the accusations against Biden. They want to beat Trump this year. Big nodes in the system are more important than little ones, and the system lurches onward, with any pragmatic justice seeker on the left preferring a Biden presidency to a Trump repeat.