The disorientation of men around MeToo

The MeToo moment a few years back spun a lot of stand-up guys into a vertigo which is hard to talk about.

Predatory men find narratives which twist and exaggerate ordinary men’s experiences to try to make themselves seem sympathetic to those men.

“Incels” take the common experience of loneliness, rejection, and sexual frustration that can drive an ordinary bloke a little batty … and twist and exaggerate it to try to make other men sympathetic to their fantasies of coercing women.

Rapists and harassers take the common experience of men being perplexed by mixed signals from women … and twist and exaggerate it to try to make it sound plausible to other men that women commonly exaggerate and misrepresent simple misunderstandings.

“Men’s rights activists” take men’s common, unpleasant experiences of cultural norms of toxic masculinity … and twist and exaggerate them to try to make it sound reasonable that women enjoy rights and liberties beyond those of men.

Abusers take ordinary experiences of feeling misrepresented by one’s opponents in conflicts … and twist and exaggerate them to try to re-cast their victims as the real abusers. This is known as DARVO: “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender”.

We need to approach this in a sophisticated way. If we deny the narratives of predatory men in a way which denies the grain of truth on which they try to build their deceptions, it strengthens them rather than weakens them. Dismissiveness about men’s legitimate frustrations paradoxically makes predators’ lies sound more plausible. (This includes plausibility in predators rationalizing to themselves; I am hopeful that forthrightness about how how toxic masculinity harms men will produce less men who harm women.)

Without hanging a halo on ordinary men, who have our own complicities in sexism and unexamined forms of misogyny, we must recognize how different we are from predatory men. Ordinary men have a hard time conceiving of doing the things predatory men do. It make ordinary men suckers for their lies. And predatory men work hard at those lies, disguising themselves by pretending that they are ordinary men suffering unlucky misfortune.

This includes a lot of ordinary men having good reasons to badly misunderstand the world as policing men far more vigorously than it really does. This makes predators’ lies feel more plausible than they really are. We see this in two different reactions to MeToo:

• “I thought I knew how bad harassment was out there but good gods I had no idea.”
• “This has gone too far! It is no longer possible for a man to be careful enough to be safe!”

Register the horrors inherent in what that second group means by “careful”.

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On impunity

I have taken the liberty of transcribing a chilling, instructive thread from Dr. Nicole Bedera which I referenced in the course of my own original Twitter thread which turned into this post, about how wrong it is to imagine that predatory men face consequences:

In light of Harvey Weinstein’s life being “ruined,” I have more to say on this rhetoric around rape allegations “ruining lives.” And to do that, I want to use the example of one rapist in my research—we’ll call him Justin.

I interviewed Justin as part of my dissertation. He was formally accused of sexual assault at his university. He, too, claimed that his life was “ruined” by the allegations. But when I asked him to describe exactly what was different for him, he didn’t have much to say.

He had gotten poor grades that semester, but they weren’t any worse than usual. A lot of people knew about the allegations, but he had told most of them himself and nearly everyone took his side. Even two of his victim’s roommates offered to testify on his behalf.

Occasionally, the friends of his victim would warn other women in their immediate circle about Justin when he tried to date them. But they usually dated him anyway. He actually used the “false allegation” as a pickup strategy on first dates.

It went like this:

1. bring up the allegation as proof of how “honest” and “vulnerable” you are
2. show a misleading set of texts as evidence that the allegation was false
3. tell the new date that you totally understand if she is uncomfortable
4. set second date

Justin talked about how the allegations had “ruined” his life as part of this dating strategy. He bragged that the method worked every time and that he had “a lot of sex” now.

If anything, Justin (and most perpetrators) got a lot of advantages from the administrators from using the “ruined lives” rhetoric. (I interviewed them, too.) For example, Justin’s bad grades? He got them wiped from his record and his tuition reimbursed.

And not just for the semester of the investigation—he got all of his low grades from his entire college career wiped off his transcript. He intended to continue erasing bad grades from his transcript through the rest of his college career.

Justin also had close relationships with high level administrators after the investigation. That worked out to his advantage.

In one case, another victim of Justin’s tried to report a sexual assault. The administrator who heard the report never filed the proper paperwork or notified the right people for the report to move forward. She didn’t want to make Justin’s life any harder.

The same thing happened when a professor tried to report that three other women had disclosed to him that they had been sexually assaulted by Justin.

In general, administrators were more concerned with “ruining lives” than letting a perpetrator re-offend on campus. Stories like Justin’s were common in my field site.

If anything, most administrators thought that the system was rigged against perpetrators. (Even though they rarely held any of them accountable.) They openly admitted to giving perpetrators legal advice and actively helping them build their cases.

They refused to help victims in the same way, saying it would be inappropriate for a “neutral” party to benefit one side. This often meant that victims filed the wrong type of complaint for the abuse they experienced, making it even easier to dismiss cases.

Meanwhile, it was the victims (and I interviewed them, too) who were suffering. I completed the last interview for my dissertation two days ago. The victim I interviewed attempted to take her own life in the middle of the investigation process.

Her assailant was found in violation of the university’s code of sexual misconduct. (In plain speak, everyone agreed he had committed a sexual assault.) But the university had taken so long with the investigation that he had already graduated, so he wasn’t punished.

Actually, he was invited to apply to the university for graduate school once his victim had graduated. That invitation came in the same letter that said he had been found responsible for committing an act of sexual assault.

After our interview ended, I gave the survivor advice about how to drop out. She felt so traumatized by her university that the university’s logo had become a trigger for her. She was set to graduate in the spring, but she couldn’t imagine seeing that emblem for another day.

As part of my dissertation, I set out to gather evidence of whether or not men accused of rape really had their “lives ruined.” I never found any evidence of a ruined life. But I heard a lot of stories from survivors about overwhelming trauma, including a lot of suicide attempts.

Stop perpetuating the myth that rape allegations “ruin lives.” They don’t. But spreading that myth around has real implications for survivors who will be traumatized over and over again by the people who believe that a perpetrator’s “ruined life” is all there is at stake.