Iman Hariri-Kia at Elite Daily is outraged in College Men Are Finally Asking For Consent — But Only Because They’re Afraid Of Being “MeToo’d”
But the majority of women and femmes also believe men are actively seeking consent for the wrong reasons. Thirty-nine percent of those surveyed feel men are asking for consent because they’re afraid of being publicly accused of sexual assault.
Yet striking fear in men was the goal from the beginning, as Ezra Klein at Vox.com explained back in 2014 in “Yes Means Yes” is a terrible law, and I completely support it (emphasis mine):
”No Means No” has created a world where women are afraid. To work, “Yes Means Yes” needs to create a world where men are afraid.
From the article it is clear that what really bothers feminists is not that men fear being victimized by the #MeToo witch hunt, but that #MeToo is recognized as victimizing men:
“#MeToo’d” is a phrase that keeps coming up in my conversations with college women and femmes. They claim to have heard college men use it in excess and in a defensive manner when describing the “threat of being accused of sexual assault.” (“You wouldn’t want to get #MeToo’d, make sure you don’t get #MeToo’d.”) It even has its own Urban Dictionary entry, which defines the slang term as “when a woman ruins your life by accusing you of sexual assault or sexual harassment, without any evidence or [past] the time that any evidence could be collected.” This phrase is hugely problematic, as it steers the conversation away from women and their bodies and onto men and their feelings.
This social response to #MeToo is the wholly natural reaction to a process founded on not distinguishing between real and false accusations. The callousness with which feminists like Hariri-Kia dismiss men’s fears of false accusations is breathtaking, and is what animates the larger #MeToo movement. They really can’t conceive that men are living, breathing, human beings, or understand why they wouldn’t want to be falsely accused. The reality is that the vast majority of men don’t rape, so the only logical behavioral change on their part isn’t to stop doing something they already didn’t do, but take necessary measures to prevent being falsely accused.
Still, we are very early on in the response to Yes Means Yes and #MeToo, so the full reaction hasn’t yet occurred. Over the long term the SJW pogroms will eventually birth a generation of men who eschew both feminism and feminism’s foundation, chivalry. #MeToo is founded on men’s goodwill towards women, and driven by a very open disdain of men. Long term something will have to give, but in the meantime the reservoir of men’s goodwill is so deep as to be seemingly inexhaustible.
Note: If like me you were confused by the term “women and femmes”, here is an explanation.
Leave a Reply