What Gets Lost: What Does it Mean for Women Post-#MeToo
By Michelle Molitor, with Nicole Young
When we initially sat down to write this piece, we were contemplating how to explore just what has been lost in the post-#MeToo years. We discussed the force and fury of the male backlash to the #MeToo movement, the actions that powerful men took to insulate themselves against accusation and professional harm. We talked about the ways that the legislature has been used as the arm of those powerful men to double down on control and compliance from women’s bodies. And then, we started talking about a law that made its way through the North Carolina state legislature.
It all began with a tweet on July 18th, that read, “Republicans in North Carolina just introduced a bill that’d make abortion punishable with death. So very pro-life of them.” The bill in question was actually introduced a year before, in 2021, and had very little support in the North Carolina state house. It had and continues to have little chance of passage, at least with this particular assembly of North Carolina legislators. But even with all of those caveats, the content of the bill is deeply disturbing and abjectly terrifying.
The bill, not surprisingly, determines that life begins at the moment of fertilization. This has been a common and scientifically unsupported idea that the anti-abortion movement has used since its inception. But using that definition of life as its basis, the proposed legislation continues,
“Any person who willfully seeks to destroy the life of another person, by any means, at any stage of life, or succeeds in doing so, shall be held accountable for attempted murder or for first degree murder, respectively. Any person has the right to defend his or her own life or the life of another person, even by the use of deadly force if necessary, from willful destruction by another person.”
Even the outraged tweet doesn’t capture the full horror of this proposed legislation. “Any person,” it says, may use deadly force in response to an abortion or a miscarriage. This means that these North Carolina legislators, Representatives Mark Brody and Larry G. Pittman, who are both white men over the age of 65, would give domestic partners, law enforcement officers, and even community members cover to kill women and child-bearing people.
It’s impossible to view this legislation, the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June, and the targeting of gender-affirming surgery, and not see how they are intimately connected both to the expansion of women’s rights over the last 25 years and the brief cultural potency of the #MeToo movement.
The many movements to end sexual and gender-based violence, of which #MeToo is just one, [are] about elevating the voices of survivors so that eradicating rape culture becomes essential to our lives and to the well-being of our society.
As the #MeToo movement was gaining momentum in 2017 and 2018, in addition to well-known abusers like Harvey Weinstein and R. Kelly being outed for their harm, some of America’s favorite men, popular darlings also came under fire. Louis C.K., Al Franken, Bill Cosby, Dr. Dre, and a handful of others were also exposed for either their sexual abuse or physical assault. Almost immediately, a straw man conversation about the dangers of accountability culture, or as Roxanne Gay calls it, “consequence culture,” began. The media—both conservative and liberal—stoked the fires of worry and hand-wringing. Were we being too harsh? Were we ruining good men’s lives? Were we beginning down a slippery slope?
Very rarely interrogated or even investigated was the scope of damage even short interactions with harmful men had caused in the lives of women and men who were the victims of their abuse. Little was said about the ways that these men leveraged their public platforms as shields against accusation or how much damage women risked in even admitting to the abuse, let alone sharing it with major media outlets. Instead, “cancel culture” became a rhetorical hole that felt too dangerous to fall into. In order to be “rational,” to be “objective,” or even to be “professional,” one must consider both sides fully and carefully eschew the allure of cancel culture's siren call.
Very little was said in those same major media streams about accountability or healthy consequences for harmful actions. While many women activists, writers, and scholars—particularly Black and queer women and femmes—described accountability models that were not centered in carcerality, but community care, the national conversation about cancel culture, ambled on, picking up speed as it rolled down the slope of popular opinion.
Since 2017, conservative voices have co-opted the language of a movement led by survivors of sexual assault, in order to erase the message, in order to erase the truths the movement leaders revealed about rape culture. The red herrings and false equivalencies touted by #MeToo’s detractors, have lain a foundation for the dizzying pace of anti-queer, anti-woman, anti-trans, and anti-choice legislation that we are seeing introduced in state houses across the country and being handed down from conservative activist justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. Judicial victories for harmful men like Johnny Depp and others have been reported as the end of the #MeToo moment.
However, #MeToo founder, Tarana Burke, recently reminded us of who has gotten lost in our current understanding of both the movement and the hetero-patriarchal backlash that has attempted to quell it. The movement, she said in a statement on Twitter, isn’t dead—quite the opposite; it is alive and well no matter what happened in the courts. She wrote, “[M]illions of people who have never been able to utter the words 'it happened to me' have released the shame that wasn't theirs to carry in the first place, we have built the country's first political agenda created solely by Survivors, and for the first time since Anita Hill took the stand three decades ago we've had a sustained national dialogue about, not just sexual harassment, but the spectrum of sexual violence in this country."
Understanding anti-abortion, anti-queer, and anti-trans bills as woven together allows us to understand how the beneficiaries of patriarchy would like to curtail not only women’s right to an abortion, but to name their own identities, to defy rape culture, to reject heteronormativity and the prescribed social roles it demands.
Because the many movements to end sexual and gender-based violence, of which #MeToo is just one, have never completely been about correcting the systems that criminalize victims and protect abusers. While those measures are important, the harder, more important work is the work of shifting our culture so that women, girls, and femmes no longer have to accept the spectrum of sexual violence—as Burke describes it—as a normal part of their lives. The movement is about elevating the voices of survivors so that eradicating rape culture becomes essential to our lives and to the well-being of our society.
The work of this particular movement is ensuring that we reveal the interconnectedness of systems of harm, particularly as they affect the lives of those in our society with women presenting bodies. What gets lost when we dismiss legislation like North Carolina House Bill 158 as fringe are the linkages between systems that seek to penalize women for their choices. Because understanding anti-abortion, anti-queer, and anti-trans bills as woven together allows us to understand how the beneficiaries of patriarchy would like to curtail not only women’s right to an abortion, but to name their own identities, to defy rape culture, to reject heteronormativity and the prescribed social roles it demands—and to pursue the most radical understanding of their own liberation as human beings.
When we prioritize that culture shift, we can find solid ground to stand on in the rising tide of legislative and judicial attacks. And as Tarana Burke encourages us to do, leave the idea of a post-#MeToo era behind, and instead remember that this conversation, the real conversation—about building a just and free world for women, girls, and femmes—is very much alive.