Today in Los Angeles, a march in support of the #MeToo movement is scheduled to take place. Thousands of people are expected to attend.
#MeToo is, of course, the anti-sexual-harassment meme that’s currently all the rage. It’s taken down Harvey Weinstein, NPR editor Michael Oreskes, Kevin Spacey, would-be senator Roy Moore, Louis C.K., and so on.
Alyssa Milano kick-started this Twitter craze when she said “[i]f you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.” Legions of digital peacocks have since retweeted the hashtag, hoping that they too might shine through in a fifteen-minute-long burst of celebrity.
And so, every would-be victim is worked up into an indignant froth.
“[E]verybody should be believed at first until they are disbelieved based on evidence,” Hillary Clinton offered during her doomed campaign.
But no, this “guilty until proven innocent” standard on harassment and assault is exactly wrong. Assuming guilt before proof isn’t a way to support victims — rather, it’s a well-known and once often practiced way to promote lynchings with pitchfork-pitching hysteria. Incentivizing the mindless reposting of accusations isn’t going to end sexual assault. But it will arouse a mob’s groupthink and narcissism.
Until now, no protest movement has grown up around allegations unproved, around shadowy rumors, around hyperbolic conjecture. And that’s very important. Odd is the movement that objects to what’s intangible — the muddled middle ground that even police and prosecutors with decades of experience often stumble through, with imperfect results.
District Attorneys and veteran detectives can’t guarantee to find the truth, but somehow second- and third-tier celebrities can peer into the subconscious mind of every victim and perpetrator? Give me a break.
This isn’t the civil rights movement. What American in the 60’s didn’t know blacks were being treated as subhuman? Instead, this is the ether, the dead zone, unknown quantities, the Stranger Things of modish causes. This might explain why #MeToo is led by a Milano and not an MLK.
In a 1994 study on the motives for false rape reports, Purdue sociologist Eugene Kanin found a false-report rate for sexual assault of 40 percent in the community he was studying. #MeToo Marchers will be parading through the streets to rally against a probability, not an injustice.
And consider the #MeToo medium, social media. A study by Louis Leung suggests that social media serves very narcissistic ends, “satisfying five socio-psychological needs: showing affection, venting negative feelings, gaining recognition, getting entertainment, and fulfilling cognitive needs.”
There is, then, an insatiable draw for ordinary people, otherwise unknown, to boost their profile by adding to the chorus call of victims. Fallible fame-seekers — the Tawana Bradleys and Crystal Mangums of the world — adrenalized by social media’s neurological rewards, have every incentive to claim victimhood. And unlike the Bradley and Mangum hoaxes, there is no fail-safe counter-investigation to prove the social-media peacocks wrong, or to penalize perjurers. All reward and no punishment.
False memories of sexual abuse tear apart families, friends, and community. Rape hysteria is a well-documented phenomenon, one expertly dissected by Dorothy Rabinowitz. Her masterful work No Crueler Tyrannies assailed “the child sexual abuse trials of the 1980s and 1990s where child care providers were convicted not only for crimes they didn’t commit, but crimes which Rabinowitz argues never happened.” Our current example is similar.
Is there no claim that warrants skepticism? Now, even George H.W. Bush has been accused of “groping.” Anything is possible, but what’s likely? More importantly, what can be proved?
John Adams wrote the following in the notes for his defense of the British soldiers accused of murder in the 1770 Boston Massacre: “In some Cases presumptive Evidences go far to prove a Person guilty, tho there be no express Proof of the Fact to be committed by him.”
Presumptive evidences. The monster that feeds the mob.
Alex Grass is the Religion and Law Correspondent for The Media Project.
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