Another member of the Church posted an article from the National Review which fretted about how the Brett Kavanaugh circus is damaging the MeToo movement, and we should all be worried about that. There was some lively discussion, but here's my take on it. I thought it worth documenting in a venue somewhat less ephemeral than comments on a Facebook post.
The MeToo movement never had very much credibility to begin with; it has absolutely zero now. It also has no momentum, and no energy; the last time I saw a story in the news—ANY news—that bore the tag MeToo was over a month ago, and it was about a few minor celebrities distancing themselves from and disavowing the movement. I don't know who the National Review is fooling by dragging around the corpse of a disgraced and long-dead movement and pretending like it still has some currency or social cachet, but at least when Jonathan Silverman and Andrew McCarthy did it in Weekend at Bernies, they had the sense to do it while the corpse was still fresh. Facebook isn't a very good medium to explain in depth why the movement is less serious than the brief hysterical moral panic in the 80s about Satanic cults taking over day care centers, but I'll do my best to be both brief and as complete as possible.
1) Everybody already knew what Hollywood and NYC careers were like. It's been well-known since the 1920s. Even if it wasn't, Shirley Temple's autobiography and Judy Garland's biography were published decades ago and were best-sellers. Nobody can profess ignorance with a straight face anymore. It's hard to take seriously the claims of alleged victims of sexual impropriety when they willingly and even ambitiously courted people who were well-known for it to advance their careers. Also; if they WERE sexually assaulted or molested, why are they coming out years after the fact, in most cases? Why did many of them take payments, and then CONTINUE WORKING WITH THEIR ALLEGED MOLESTORS for years, and even decades in some cases? Normal Americans saw MeToo start, and rolled their eyes, saying, "Yeah, even Grandma knew better decades ago than to get involved in a career like that if chastity were something she valued." It's a little bit like suggesting that soldiers made an honest mistake if they thought joining the Army were just about getting snazzy uniforms and were shocked to actually be asked to go to war.
2) The most visual voices of MeToo, which propelled it into brief, faddish moral hysteria status, were all so incredibly flawed that they substantially and materially damaged the movement. Rose McGowan had older pictures of her standing basically naked on the red carpet back when she was younger and a more in demand commodity, and then she was arrested for possession of large amounts of cocaine, plus her hysterical behavior on social media made the whole thing seem absurd. Ashley Judd was revealed to have worked with Weinstein on several projects AFTER she was allegedly harassed, which calls into serious question her sincerity. She clearly is nothing more than a huckster and fraud attempting to get in front of the parade and pretend to be leading it. Asia Argento was one of its most vocal proponents, and she was revealed to be a sexual predator herself, engaging in under-age illicit liaisons while married to Anthony Bourdain. The MeToo movement was largely a victim of its own incompetent and dishonest so-called leaders. Normal Americans saw this movement as a freak show coming out of a clown car and paid little attention, other than to note with some satisfaction that at least a few absolutely terrible people were publicly scalped and driven from the public eye in disgrace.
3) The timing could not have been worse; it was only;what, a year ago that the Rolling Stone frat house rape hoax was revealed to be a fraud, that the mattress girl rape hoax was revealed to be a fraud and not that long before that the Duke lacrosse team rape hoax was revealed to be a fraud. Anyone paying attention has noted two things: a) the oft-cited numbers of 1 in 4 women sexually assaulted in college is obviously a fraudulent number, based on flawed and even simply made up statistics. If it were anything at all of the sort, nobody would ever send their daughters to college. In reality, the number is closer to 1 in 500. b) several studies, two of which that I'm familiar with because I've read them myself by the DoD and the CDC, have independently confirmed that somewhere between 45-60% of all rape allegations are outright false and never happened.
Now, granted, in the case of some of the public MeToo scalps, they never even contested the allegations, so they were obviously true. But again; normal Americans saw all of this and realized that there was a strong element of mass hysteria associated with the whole thing.
4) The targets started to get really uncomfortable. It was one thing when it was a bunch of Hollywood moguls, but when it spread into the news media industry, reports and stories started to dry up. After all, it's not a very good career move to go on the air saying, "Tonight's top story; is my boss a sexual predator?" Also, some people started tallying the accused and realized that over 75% of them were Jewish. It got so bad that both the Jewish Times and Haaretz felt like they had to address it by questioning whether or not there was something specific to the Jewish male character that made them susceptible to this particular problem, and Larry David even commented on it during an SNL monolog. All of them were pretty much fluff pieces that amounted to little more than some smoke, some mirrors and loads of gratuitous Holocaust references and dark implications, but nobody ever really addressed the issue in a way that was substantive, and the media rather quickly moved to other topics.
5) In spite of the hysteria, it was clear that the root of the problem wasn't touched, and only a few disposable targets that Big Hollywood and Big Media didn't have any use for anymore were offered up to be lynched by the mob. And even some of the accused skated through. Did anything actually ever happen to Al Franken? Nope. What about Corey Booker? Nope. Story buried. What about the ubiquitous chatter about pedophilia and child abuse in Hollywood? Discussion about it spiked briefly several months ago, but absolutely nothing happened, nothing changed, nobody was arrested or even investigated, and the media mostly tried to distract everyone from thinking about it too much. A handful of new stories from Corey Feldman and a few others saw the light, only to be forgotten as quickly as they surfaced.
Again, normal Americans saw the movement as hypocritical and useless. It was all a bunch of virtue signaling and mob hysteria, but the real problems that it was dancing around remain as strong and untouched as ever.
And Angie's comment way up above is also outright false. It absolutely IS a partisan issue, because there is a strong correlation between political affiliation and sexual assault, to the tune of liberals are over 50% more likely to be guilty of it. (That number would be statistically even MORE stark if liberal Republican politicians were properly classed as leftists and not rightists.) The partisan nature of sexual assault is scientifically unassailable, and what's more, it's hardly surprising anyway because its common sense. When one ideology preaches hedonism and lauds sexual libertines, is anyone surprised that that's the ideology where sexual assault is much more common? Of course not. Also, the entire thing is predicted by r/K-selection theory applied to politics anyway, which is one of the most useful models of describing the political landscape that I've ever seen, because it never fails to not only describe but even correctly predict what other models simply cannot.
UPDATE: Also; surprise, surprise! https://www.theblaze.com/news/2018/10/09/human-resources-study-shows-a-stunning-unintended-backlash-to-the-me-too-movement/ Granted; that's maybe not actually bad news. Getting women back home and recreating the nuclear family that we've largely had culturally stolen from us is a good thing in general. But it can be a disaster specifically to some individuals, of course, to have their livelihood cut out from under them.
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