If fundamentalists are hijacking #MeToo to promote a socially conservative sexual agenda, is that a completely bad thing ?

Even Bari Weiss, Opinion editor for the New York Times, says that with the Aziz Ansari case, the #MeToo movement has gone too far: ‘The insidious attempt by some women to criminalize awkward, gross and entitled sex takes women back to the days of smelling salts and fainting couches.’ We from a far-left background might call this the movement’s ‘Kronstadt moment’.

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The tendency to treat women as delicate flowers lacking either sin or agency, and men as having a monopoly on responsibility, is indeed extremely sexist. Conflating bad sex or unwanted advances with sexual assault does a huge disservice to the real victims. If a man’s career can be destroyed by unproven, unsubstantiated allegations from anonymous women, that too is injustice. These points are not new; similar ones were already being made a quarter of a century ago by ‘power feminist’ Katie Roiphe.

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But if fundamentalists have hijacked #MeToo and are ironically pushing a socially conservative sexual agenda, is that a completely bad thing ? A post-sexual-revolution culture that abandons more respectful courtship in favour of young men going out to ‘get laid’ with women they neither know nor care about, and young women increasingly emulating their boorish, drunken promiscuity is far from representing genuine liberation, and is likely to encourage sexual harassment and assault. Hence the case of the Stanford University student Brock Turner, who sexually assaulted an unconscious woman behind a skip after they had attended a student party together; an assault his father notoriously labelled ’20 minutes of action.’

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Sexually promiscuous women appeal to male fantasy; Modesty Blaise and Lisbeth Salander were created by male writers. But as someone wrote in relation to Sex and the City, ‘Samantha’s inner life stops at her labia but I’ve never met a real-life woman who would envy her.’ However misguided the excesses of the #MeToo movement, perhaps in their own way, they reflect a feeling among many women, and even men, that the blessings of social progress have not been unmixed. Aziz Ansari’s accuser may not be a victim, and her public humiliation of him may have been deeply unfair, but her hurt was undoubtedly real, even if it was due to her own choices. As the highly doctrinaire and aggressive Jessica Valenti tweeted in relation to the Ansari case, ‘part of what women are saying right now is that what the culture considers “normal” sexual encounters are not working for us, and oftentimes harmful.’

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Provided we don’t abandon the principle of sexual equality, maybe it wouldn’t hurt for us to be a bit more prudish and old-fashioned ?