What Happens When It’s #HimToo?

As many Twitter users noted, this was a starkly different message from the one McGowan promoted when men were accused:

But it’s not moral cowardice that’s the problem; it’s moral relativism, and it’s something that will continue to bedevil the MeToo movement unless it’s confronted. Yes, women are far less likely to be perpetrators of sexual assault and harassment than men, but it’s not unheard of, and as more women make gains in politics and the workplace, more cases of female harassers are likely to occur. When women abuse their power, what’s a feminist activist to do?

Consider the case of New York University professor of German literature Avital Ronell, who was recently found guilty of harassing a male graduate student and suspended from teaching for the next academic year. After a nearly yearlong Title IX investigation, NYU determined that the student, Nimrod Reitman, had suffered physical and emotional harassment “sufficiently pervasive to alter the terms and conditions” of his learning environment. Despite being asked by Reitman to stop, Ronell sent inappropriate emails calling Reitman her “Sweet cuddly Baby” and her “cock-er spaniel,” as well as initiating repeated unwanted physical contact. (The Ronell case is a telling snapshot of our peculiar moment in gender history: the accused professor identifies as a lesbian and the male graduate student is gay and married to a man.) Ronell denies harassing Reitman, claiming theirs was merely the harmless banter of “two adults, a gay man and a queer woman, who share an Israeli heritage, as well as a penchant for florid and campy communications arising from our common academic backgrounds and sensibilities.”

Judith Butler, the well-known feminist scholar and president-elect of the Modern Language Association, rallied to Ronell’s defense, drafting a letter to NYU (eventually signed by many prominent progressive scholars from institutions such as Harvard, Berkeley, Yale, Columbia, and 11 faculty members from NYU) that is as myopic in its approach to harassment claims as it is chilling to anyone considering becoming a graduate student in literature. As a draft of the letter stated clearly, the only facts that matter are those that redound to Ronell’s career, not the experience of her victim, whom they attempt to discredit despite not knowing the full extent of his allegations:

Some of Ronell’s colleagues went further, arguing that Reitman shouldn’t have used Title IX to attack a woman. Professor Diane Davis of the University of Texas-Austin told the Times, “I am of course very supportive of what Title IX and the #MeToo movement are trying to do, of their efforts to confront and to prevent abuses, for which they also seek some sort of justice … But it’s for that very reason that it’s so disappointing when this incredible energy for justice is twisted and turned against itself, which is what many of us believe is happening in this case.”

Where might a tenured professor get the idea that Title IX (which forbids discrimination based on sex in federally funded education programs) was for women only? Feminist legal theory offers some hints. In Are Women Human? Catharine MacKinnon argued that since laws are made mostly by men, those laws can never fully protect women. “Most rapists are men and most legislators are men and most judges are men and the law of rape was created when women weren’t even allowed to vote. So that means not that all the people who wrote it were rapists, but that they are a member of the group who do [rape],” she explained in a 2006 interview with the Guardian.

By this logic, laws enacted to combat sex discrimination (such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX), although still inadequate for granting women their full freedoms, should be viewed as a form of reparations for centuries of patriarchy and applied accordingly. For these theorists, for whom everything is gendered, stories such as Argento’s and Ronell’s don’t just create cognitive dissonance; they are literally unbelievable because they think women can never truly wield power over men.

Such views have clearly been embraced by many mainstream activists, which is why calling out Argento’s and Ronell’s behavior isn’t merely hypocrisy-hunting for sport. It presents MeToo leaders with a stark choice: Make your movement about protecting individuals from harassment and abuse, in which case you will support due process and justice regardless of a victim’s sex; or make your movement the practical expression of a misguided and radical feminist theory, in which case it will have a hard time explaining itself or maintaining its integrity when the female prey becomes the female predator.

Update: Argento released a statement late Tuesday morning: