It’s gone far enough. What started as a necessary mass-rejection of sexual harassment and assault is sliding into absurdity and irrelevance. A backlash is looming against the very people the spontaneous battle against sexual villainy was meant to help: powerless women and men.
The fight is being waged not with force, but with the rather bland Internet movement, #MeToo. The battle by hashtag conflates genuine sex crimes with mere childish behavior — blending the Harvey Weinsteins and Kevin Spaceys with the Al Frankens and George H.W. Bushes.
How long before we stop taking victims seriously?
Franken, the former “Saturday Night Live” writer and performer and now staunchly liberal senator from Minnesota, has been tossed into the guillotine without a trial. And while I reject his leftist politics — even more so his inability to be funny — I don’t think confusing silly, even lewd, behavior with clear, intimate violations helps anyone. Rather, it threatens to make accusers, many of them women, appear unserious. Or “hysterical,’’ to use a term commonly wielded against humans bearing XX chromosomes.
On Thursday, former Playboy model-turned-radio host Leeann Tweeden claimed Franken stuck his tongue in her mouth. He claimed he doesn’t remember the tongue-lashing that evidently occurred as they were “rehearsing” a scene for a skit on a USO tour to the Middle East in 2006, before Franken was elected to office. But there exists photographic evidence that he took things a few notches further. Franken was snapped, with a doofusy grin on his face, groping Tweeden’s flak jacket-covered breasts as she slept.
Lewd and crude? For sure. Grounds for public censure? Perhaps. But potentially career-ending? I don’t think so.Franken initially issued a statement of apology to Tweeden, saying, “As to the photo, it was clearly intended to be funny but wasn’t. I shouldn’t have done it.” Hours later, he added an “I’m sorry’’ to “everyone else who was part of that tour, to everyone who has worked for me, to everyone I represent, and to everyone who counts on me to be an ally and supporter and champion of women.’’
Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is calling on the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate Gropegate. And a chorus of critics is urging Franken to resign from his seat. But in a preachy New York Times op-ed urging him to step aside, Michelle Goldberg revealed her underlying bias in the third paragraph: “Sure, Franken made plenty of sexist jokes when he was with ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ‘’ she wrote, “ but I thought he was one of the good guys. (I thought there were good guys.)’’
No good guys? Come on! And so, the war on sexual offenses has been revealed to be part of a wider feminist War on Men.
My fear is that the pendulum will swing so wildly out of control, the fight against genuine sexually based offenses will be delegitimized as much ado about nothing. It makes me wince that comic Louis C.K., who admitted pleasuring himself in front of grossed-out females, is mentioned in the same breath as nonagenarian ex-President George H.W. Bush, accused of grabbing women’s backsides and telling a dirty joke.
Wheelchair-bound at age 93 “his arm falls on the lower waist of people with whom he takes pictures,” said his spokesman, Jim McGrath. “To try to put people at ease, the president routinely tells the same joke — and on occasion, he has patted women’s rears in what he intended to be a good-natured manner.’’ He apologized.Is Bush’s boorishness really equivalent to Louis C.K. masturbating in front of women? Are Franken’s jokes really on the same level as Weinstein’s sexual assaults?
In Philadelphia, an old painting was removed from a restaurant because it showed Italian men whistling at women on the street. The trivial now threatens the legitimate.
If this becomes the woman who cries wolf whistle, the real wolves are going to get away with it.