Five years after #MeToo, it was to be expected. The dust settled, the lawsuits took their course, the business community adapted its public relations strategies and had many opportunities to execute the choreography of Responsibility™ in a crisis. The State has also done its homework: consultations, reforms, establishment of specialized courts.
Progress, they say. Except that we wonder today if, while we were shining the spotlight on institutional responses to sexual violence, we were able to see that social discourse was slowly but surely taking a hundred steps backwards.
Patriarchal violence never works better than when it is implicit. No sooner had we begun to develop strategies for naming their many forms aloud than the status quo was already reclaiming its rights.
Last spring, there was a revealing episode – a bit far from us, but the signs were not wrong. During the highly publicized defamation trial between actress Amber Heard and her ex-husband Johnny Depp, the tenor of the reactions to the story of the abuse repeated word for word the scenario of the absolution of domestic violence.
As if #MeToo had never been there. As if we had never discussed the complexity of intimate violence, or the fact that the perfect pattern of the “battered woman” almost never exists – that there are gestures of self-defense, of defiance, of confrontation, which do not erase the relationship of domination. Too far, too sensationalist, nothing to do with us, they said. However, the ambient mood (particularly hostile) announced the continuation.
These days, in a very local business, we are discovering a new lever to bury violence: regret. Women inhabited by contradictory feelings, discovering that they empathize with a person who has made them suffer, are no longer certain that they should have spoken. This is nothing new, the workers who accompany the victims of intimate violence describe this ambivalence as an extremely frequent thing.
We can also propose a political reading of what draws women to the side of repentance. The test of complexity that we are talking about these days is part of a particular context. In the last five years, in Quebec, the post-#MeToo discussion has been gradually locked into a binary opposition between rape culture and cancellation culture, then reduced to the examination of the modalities of punishment: deserved or not? Exaggerated or not?
It is true that the worm may have been in the apple from the start. From the earliest moments of #MeToo, the movement, in its most consensual form, had a particularly strong attachment to the idea of justice as punishment. We wanted to seeing Harvey Weinstein in prison, to sum it up roughly.
If everyone agreed on the need to bring to justice the presumed aggressors who had committed acts clearly assimilated to the crime, it was difficult to mask the poverty of our analytical grids on the questions of reparation and rehabilitation.
How many times will it be necessary to repeat that monsters do not exist? That we construct them to explain violence, but that violence does not disappear when we humanize its author, like the frightening shadows when we turn on the light?
Now that whistleblowing movements have ventured beyond the scope of “judiciable” facts, looking into the intricacies of violence, now that the waters are muddier, the patterns are blurring, the monsters are disappearing. So we turn the mirror back to the victims. We individualize the stakes and we set a verdict on an entire social movement; a verdict that takes the form of a warning, a recall the order.
All the ingredients are in place: the rise of reactionary complaints about free speech, the relentless attacks on voices that analyze the world from a marginalized point of view, a general climate of hostility to regard to social movements. As for #MeToo, all that was missing was a pretext for us to allow ourselves, finally, to raise loud and clear a question that many people were mulling over in silence: are feminists Again gone too far? Who, in such circumstances, would not suddenly be inclined to regret an overly subversive gesture of affirmation?
We can undoubtedly say that the encounter between a dynamic of mass training and unreserved adherence to punitive logics is not ideal for promoting the achievement of social justice objectives. But we must also say that the ambivalences described by the women who have denounced intimate violence are imbued with an ethic of sacrifice to which, in the name of “reparation”, people who have suffered abuse or who are subject to relations of domination. To speak of the “slippage” of #MeToo without speaking above all of the completely patriarchal figure of the tidy, affable woman who always supports male violence, is to do the very anatomy of the backlash.