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”.

Related commentaries

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.

Prompted by the strong allegations of abuse committed by Neil Gaiman, the Tumblr poser shadesofmauve observes:

Source: I worked with a guy who turned out to be heavily involved in an international, multi-state sex-slavery/trafficking ring.

He was really nice.

Yeah.

It hits like a dumptruck of shit. You don’t feel stable in your world anymore. How could someone you interacted with, liked, also be a truly horrible person? How could your judgement be that bad? How can real people, not stylized cartoon bogeymen, be actually doing this shit?

You have to sit with the fact that you couldn’t, or probably couldn’t, have known. You should have no guilt as part of this horror — but guilt is almost certainly part of that mess you’re feeling, because our brains do this associative thing, and somehow “I liked [the version of] the guy [that I knew]”, or his creations, becomes “I made a horrible mistake and should feel guilty.”

You didn’t, loves, you didn’t.

We’re human, and we can only go by the information we have. And the information we have is only the smallest glimpse into someone else’s life.

I didn’t work closely with the guy I knew at work, but we chatted. He wasn’t just nice; he was one of the only people outside my tiny department who seemed genuinely nice in a workplace that was rapidly becoming incredibly toxic. He loaned me a bike trainer. Occasionally he’d see me at the bus stop and give me a lift home.

Yup. I was a young woman in my twenties and rode in this guy’s car. More than once.

When I tell this story that part usually makes people gasp. “You must feel so scared about what could have happened to you!” “You’re so lucky nothing happened!”

No, that’s not how it worked. I was never in danger. This guy targeted Korean women with little-to-no English who were coerced and powerless. A white, fluent, US citizen coworker wasn’t a potential victim. I got to be a person, not prey.

Y’know that little warning bell that goes off, when you’re around someone who might be a danger to you? That animal sense that says “Something is off here, watch out”?

Yeah, that doesn’t ping if the preferred prey isn’t around.

That’s what rattled me the most about this. I liked to think of myself as willing to stand up for people with less power than me. I worked with Japanese exchange students in college and put myself bodily between them and creeps, and I sure as hell got that little alarm when some asian-schoolgirl fetishist schmoozed on them. But we were all there.

I had to learn that the alarm won’t go off when the hunter isn’t hunting. That it’s not the solid indicator I might’ve thought it was. That sometimes this is what the privilege of not being prey does; it completely masks your ability to detect the horrors that are going on.

A lot of people point out that ‘people like that’ have amazing charisma and ability to lie and manipulate, and that’s true. Anyone who’s gotten away with this shit for decades is going to be way smoother than the pathetic little hangers-on I dealt with in university. But it’s not just that. I seriously, deeply believe that he saw me as a person, and he did not extend personhood to his victims. We didn’t have a fake coworker relationship. We had a real one. And just like I don’t know the ins-and-outs of most of my coworkers lives, I had no idea that what he did on his down time was perpetrate horrors.

I know this is getting off the topic, but it’s so very important. Especially as a message to cis guys: please understand that you won’t recognize a creep the way you might think you will. If you’re not the preferred prey, the hind-brain alarm won’t go off. You have to listen to victims, not your gut feeling that the person seems perfectly nice and normal. It doesn’t mean there’s never a false accusation, but face the fact that it’s usually real, and you don’t have enough information to say otherwise.

So, yeah. It fucking sucks. Writing about this twists my insides into tense knots, and it was almost a decade ago. I was never in danger. No one I knew was hurt!

Just countless, powerless women, horrifically abused by someone who was nice to me.

You don’t trust your own judgement quite the same way, after. And as utterly shitty as it is, as twisted up and unstead-in-the-world as I felt the day I found out — I don’t actually think that’s a bad thing.

I think we all need to question our own judgement. It makes us better people.

I don’t see villains around every corner just because I knew one, once. But I do own the fact that I can’t know, really know, about anyone except those closest to me. They have their own full lives. They’ll go from the pinnacles of kindness to the depths of depravity — and I won’t know.

It’s not a failing. It’s just being human. Something to remember before you slap labels on people, before you condemn them or idolize them. Think about how much you can’t know, and how flawed our judgement always is.

Grieve for victims, and the feeling of betrayal. But maybe let yourself off the hook, and be a bit slower to skewer others on it.