An year or so ago, I was at a bar with a (male) friend, and we somehow ended up having an extended argument over metoo that basically boiled down to “was this a good thing?” He was on the “no” side and made some of the same arguments as Matt. It was an eye opening experience for me because I basically took the “goodness” of metoo for granted, and trying to figure out a way to argue for it, especially quantitatively, was not straightforward. Your conversation touched on similar topics.
I think: 1) you can plausibly argue that, of all the plausible ways a society-wide reckoning over sexual harassment and inequality could go, what happened in the US in the mid-2010s was below the median in terms of whatever outcome you prioritize. But arguing that no reckoning is better than reckoning is a bigger and more challenging claim. 2) I think Demsas touches on this but if you could somehow freeze the definition of sexual assault and sexual harassment to what the average person considered it to be in 2014, and then measure that, and that only, through 2026..I hypothesize that it would have declined materially, and been driven by metoo. And that would be the clearest benefit of metoo. But this is a hard analysis to execute. 3) The loose and hard-to-quantify benefits of metoo are difficult for me to grapple with as an otherwise fairly quantitative lib who likes to follow the evidence. I think conservatives or people who are anti metoo could understandably accuse me of hypocrisy and say that when an issue touches on my personal prejudices and I don’t have the evidence to support my claims, I default to arguments like the above, and show that my commitment to evidence and data and reason is BS. To this, all I can do is shrug. It’s a reasonable objection.
It's understandable why this conversation focused mostly on the workplace, but (as someone roughly Jerusalem's age) I felt like #MeToo and 2010s feminism more generally went much further than that, and there really were a lot of attempts to shame and stigmatize what I would consider benign or, at worst, mildly inconsiderate dating and romantic behavior. Especially in feminist blogs, Tumblr, and Twitter at the time.
Behaviors like hitting on women in purely social contexts were attacked and shamed, as were like, misreading the vibe and going in for a kiss on date when she didn't want it. I admit I'm on the more terminally online side of things, but this discourse really messed with my head in my teens and early-20s, and many of my male friends had similar experiences.
The Aziz Ansari article is one example.
There was also a big cultural shift away from the idea that you should hit on or date women in hobby groups.
I do think this conversation might have benefited from being separated out. It's true that a lot of women don't feel safe in situations where they're being hit on, because *many* women have experienced entirely out-of-pocket reactions by men they're rejecting. But that tends to verge into "women should be scared of all men" territory, which I think is a really bad place for society to be.
The real reason men should very carefully consider whether to hit on a stranger in a social situation is because it's irritating as hell to be hit on everywhere you go, which a lot of men don't understand, because men tend to experience more rejection (esp if they're constantly shooting their shot with strangers). It's dehumanizing, and that feeling combined with the very real possibility of a bad reaction makes rejecting men feel dangerous. But women shouldn't just be blanket scared of men, and there's a couple brands of feminism that seem to lean in that direction (both conservative and liberal).
I agree we don't want a world where women are constantly hit on whenever they are in public spaces. But to Matt's point in the episode, a lot of men *and* women are unhappy with cultural shift where so much of dating happens online now, and yet pretty much all other avenues for meeting dates outside of online dating have a lot of people yelling about how men shouldn't hit on women in those contexts, whether it's work, hobby groups, or even with friends.
If we want alternatives to online dating, we need to come to a social consensus about what the alternatives are.
Most of the time, the point isn't "you can never develop a romantic relationship with someone from your hobby group", it's that you shouldn't join a group just to hit on women. The best way to develop a relationship is to develop it, over time, which causes people to feel safer and gives more room to build a vibe / read signals. It's not that woman never want men to talk to them, it's that we like to be regarded as people first, rather than sexual objects first. Asking out someone from the bowling team is a dramatically different prospect when you just met vs when you've gotten to know each other over several games.
This is so circular though. Let's say you are a median man of normal to below average attractiveness. You want to meet and hopefully sleep with women, respectfully. You go on a dating app, but you swipe 1000 times and get no dates (median man gets vanishingly few interactions). So you talk to friends and acquaintances, and they say to meet women through hobby groups or normal social interactions. So you join a run club, but you didn't join a run club because you wanted to run, what you actually want to do is meet women. So what you actually have to do is pretend your goal is not your goal. And you end up in a situation where the charismatic, the attractive, and the good liars are perceived as doing things the right way. They are allowed to date. And the socially awkward, less charismatic, less socially aware men are the creepy ones because they aren't picking up on the social cues and lying well enough. Which in some ways is the same as it ever was, charismatic liars always got laid the most. But I don't think we have a good answer to how a mediocre man is supposed to date in 2026.
I would say the solution is to be less concerned with getting laid. No one likes desperation, and if people spent more of their time and effort trying to appreciate women as people first, I suspect they'll also have more dating success over time.
No one is saying "do hobbies you have no interest in to play a long game on women." The better solution is to actually *have interests* outside of women, and to treat women as people you're NOT interested in sleeping with for awhile. Build actual human friendships and relationships (not "pretend to build relationships with people you secretly want to sleep with"). I'm not saying its a slam dunk to getting laid, I'm saying its a path to human happiness where you're also much less likely to send women running from bad vibes. And it will be AT LEAST as successful as swiping a thousand times, it's just harder and more humanizing work.
In short: I think "guys who have trouble getting laid" have a goals problem. If you want to get laid, hire a sex worker. If you want to build a real human relationship, don't start with "I want to get laid" because women can smell that a mile away. Be a human person with interests, go out into the world seeking interesting experiences and human friendships, and you'll have more success.
If no relevant polling data is available, then I will default to the observed reactions to the Aziz Ansari case, the closest that we got to this sort of discourse reaching the general public, and I will observe that an awful lot of public reactions to that case amounted to "this is ridiculous." Which would seem to indicate that in fact large numbers of women do not feel the way that you describe.
In the absence of any data to the contrary, given that it is effectively impossible to determine how a given person will react without asking them, I reject the idea that "men should very carefully consider whether to hit on a stranger in a social situation". Just follow basic social norms and be polite and go ahead and talk to people in public. If you're unfamiliar with what the basic social norms are, ask someone IRL. That seems totally workable to me.
I personally have issues that make me uncomfortable with a decent amount of "normal" social interactions, and I simply don't think that it's reasonable for people with unusual social preferences to expect the world to accommodate them without them making those preferences known, which is kind of true by definition in this case.
An important note is that "feeling unsafe" is not the same as feeling like the other person has done something massively wrong. Yes, many people, including women, including myself, thought the cancellation of Ansari was out of proportion to the situation. More to the point, it's not clear to me why "be considerate and carefully consider whether your actions are welcome or not" is such a burden that men feel the need to fight it?
I can only comment on what is in front of the paywall, but:
First study: "we investigated gender differences in the experience of generic public incivilities such as tailgating, pushing in crowded spaces, and yelling or cursing"
So, totally different behaviors than merely asking a stranger out in public, and behaviors that are near-universally recognized as at least rude. Totally irrelevant to the question.
The stuff available in front of the paywall on the second thing is mostly a discussion about terminology, and it isn't immediately clear to me that it has any relevant statistics at all.
I apologize if the stuff behind the paywall in both articles is in fact relevant to our conversation, but I can only go based on what I can see, so I can't comment any further on your sources from where I am now.
"More to the point, it's not clear to me why 'be considerate and carefully consider whether your actions are welcome or not' is such a burden that men feel the need to fight it?"
There isn't any reliable way to determine whether initiating a conversation with someone will be "welcome" without doing it, so asking someone to "carefully consider"/"very carefully consider" in this context is potentially likely to lead to false positives for "would my interactions be unwelcome" and thus missing out on potentially enjoyable/fruitful social interactions, just for starters.
This is precisely why relevant statistics, if they are available, are important to the question. If, hypothetically, it turns out that a large majority of women are fine with being asked out in public, or whatever, then under a lot of frameworks that would raise some serious questions about the potential tradeoffs of shifting social norms towards making people more cautious in doing those things, even before we get into the conversation about whether a given method of attempting to shift social norms in that direction would actually be effective or not.
Nitpicking a bit, the video is specifically about MeToo, not 2010s feminism more generally. But yeah, a lot of the backlash to meToo has to be understood in that context.
Hell, even here there is an implicit equivocation between a professor steering a conversation with a student towards a romantic relationship (the example listed in the transcript) and the professor exploiting the uneven power dynamic between him and his student (withholding tutoring? Assigning a worse grade?). The latter is, I think, what people are mainly concerned about when they critique that sort of relationship, but the example listed is the professor guiding the conversation towards his preferred outcome. Which seems like…a normal thing to do, at least in a general context.
Personally I think of #MeToo as mostly just 2010s millennial feminism going mainstream beyond the internet and college campuses, and so they're both part of the same broader social movement.
Having read the transcript, a couple scattered thoughts
1) pre-MeToo, my university made it clear in no uncertain terms at freshman orientation (in 2012) that having sex with a girl who had been drinking was rape, even if you did not realize she had been drinking. It frankly scared me away from sex in ways that my abstinence-only sex ed teachers could have only dreamed. It took me years to learn that wasn’t the legal standard (at least AIUI, will defer to any lawyers here). Obviously the timeline means that can’t be pinned on meToo, but it did affect how I viewed the movement at the time
2) I’m not sure we should take the increase in reported sexual harassment to the EEOC over time at face value. The slippery definition of sexual harassment (and for that matter non-sexual harassment) makes that a moving target.
Excited to see what you make of Bowling Alone! I taught a course around it last year (twice) and thought the book was just so moving and masterful. It’s written like a whodunit. So much care taken with the evidence.
That said, I’m also a little skeptical of the concept of social capital, and part of me thinks that the political ideal of the book really doesn’t make that much sense—a resurgence of social capital, but without its “dark side” of out-group hostility? Isn’t that like a donut without the hole?
Will read the transcript later, but my immediate thought is that there is frankly only so much society can do. The reality is that most men are physically stronger and larger than most women. Society can punish men who hurt women after the fact, but it cannot realistically deprive them of their physical ability to do so. At most it can 1) ideally have men restrain themselves or 2) failing that, have men restrain each other. But in either case, that ultimately leaves women’s safety in the hands of men, which I suspect still leaves women uneasy (though as a man I cannot realistically comment on that).
Actually, the "men protecting women" aspect was a very important result of #metoo. Sexual harassment trainings in colleges and workplaces made it much clearer that if you see someone being mistreated, doing something to divert the perpetrator or take the victim away from the situation is a worthwhile thing to do as a bystander. Examples in the trainings I've had:
-If you see a guy taking a girl who's super wasted away at a frat party or bar, you should get friends and say something (possibly something like, "oh, sketchy guy, someone was looking for you out front!" If you don't want to be confrontational)
-If a man talks over a woman in a meeting, it's helpful to say, "Actually, I don't think Sarah finished her point. Sarah, could you continue?"
-If you hear someone say something sexual in the workplace, you can say something like, "ugh, not at work man"
One of the signal facts about this issue is that for sexual violence, we have a vastly higher standard of proof, and allow defenses, that we don't for other kinds of interpersonal violence. To take an example that was in the news recently, if you say "my Uber driver beat me up", and provide the level of evidence that many women have, that is considered proof. Testimony that you didn't want to be beaten is sufficient.
No, that isn't what I said. We don't assume that people giving other people money is theft, but if I say "I didn't want to give him money and he made me" we treat that as sufficient evidence for theft.
I’ll stop with the rhetorical questions. The point I’m trying to make is that sex just *is* different, and not always in the clear realm of convictable offense, as JD says. What would the equivalent of the Aziz Anzari scenario be in terms of getting beat up, or being forced to give someone money? “I thought about giving him $100, he was really pushy, so I gave him $5 and took a cab home”?
I just don't think it's different -- if someone says that they didn't consent to some interaction that they had, I think we should treat that similarly across interactions.
(I realize that this implies significant revision of heterosexual interactions.)
At the same time, I’d like to think it’s changed some, I admit. My biggest concern is thinking it’s easy to invoke the carceral state when it comes to sex.
I the the key idea behind the special treatment of sex is that while people generally lie about all kinds of stuff, women specifically lie about whether they consent to sex, both beforehand so you can go off various signals other than consent, and afterwards to preserve her "virtue" so you can't believe her testimony. Lots of #MeToo didn't involve the state at all, but I think eliminating this noxious idea would help both with formal legal proceedings and with more informal judgement of human interactions.
And if someone walked into the airport stating they were just raped by their Uber driver, gave a statement to the police, and agreed to a forensic examination, that would be enough proof to arrest the Uber driver. A lot of sexual assault claims, ranging from sexual battery to rape, don't have that level of proof.
I can't read the full article without a paid subscription, but the opening deals with a civil suit against Uber regarding a rape where the offender was arrested, pled guilty, and was sentenced to 10 years. So the proof was already there.
My overall opinion on the results of #metoo is that the men who should be scared aren't and the men who shouldn't be scared are.
For example, I hear that story about Ruben Gallego and think people are *insane* for thinking that's a problem. You should be able to date people you meet at work, just as you should be able to make friends with people you meet at work! I would not exist if it weren't for people dating people they met at work, since that's where my parents met. That said, I do think hitting on people at work and at work events should be highly discouraged. If people are going to get together romantically through work after becoming friends through work first, that makes sense.
The negative impact here is what you see in Cartoons Hate Her's articles about how literally everyone wants to be approached more often in public. Back when I was a young single person, I got hit on a lot, and about half those interactions were with nice guys who'd back off once I said I wasn't interested while the other half were unpleasant because either the guy was way too persistent, really rude upon being rejected ("well you're not that hot anyway" was on the milder end), or downright scary. Nowadays, it seems like all the nice guys are too scared to hit on girls in public so 100% of cold approaches are negative. I really don't think that's a better world.
It's a totally normal thing to do! I think unfortunately, people have defaulted to looking for an extremely simple rule here, but the ideal situation is a bit nuanced. Though it's not that different from any normal social group with people who see each other a lot over time.
1. It is normal for people to socialize as coworkers and to get to know who people are outside of work.
2. It is also normal for friendly coworkers to become actual friends. Generally that means that they hang out even on weekends outside of work and activities immediately following the work day.
3. It is normal to have crushes on friends and ask them out.
What we really want to discourage is the feeling that work is a meat market where people are hitting on each other. That would be really annoying and unprofessional! That type of atmosphere is really only appropriate in bars and clubs.
I'm not quite sure exactly where you draw the line between them
I had a waste shot. The bigger thing was, people just need to be able to be professional and accept rejection or breaking up as an adult in not making big deal about it.
If you ask somebody out and they say, no, you say thank you and you walk away
You break up with somebody, you still have to act polite and work with them.
I can tell you, I did ask my now Wife out within a couple months of her starting to work at the restaurant we were at.
Although she did give me a signal that I thought meant She MAYBE might like me. She started running her hand through the back of my hair at the bar.
I'd say one of the main distinctions I'd make is that someone you just met isn't someone to hit on. A couple months is long enough to have had a lot of shifts together, a lot of chatting during downtime, and a good amount of really getting to know each other. When you hear about a man hitting on a woman as soon as he met her at a conference, that sounds more like what Jerusalem was complaining about: that the man isn't seeing her as a person, only as a romantic object. If you can credibly say that you know a coworker well enough to like her personality, that's fine. But you can't ask a coworker out just for their looks; that's too disrespectful to what you're all there for.
Thank you, in each of your comments, for saying all the things I think. "Don't immediately hit on a woman you just met at work" and "Never hit on any woman you work with ever" are very different statements, and the difference is time and effort getting to know them as a person. It really doesn't seem that complicated to me, but you have men out here like it's SO baffling and they have NO IDEA how to operate at work, as though every woman is scheming to make a false accusation against them. Like maybe they need to work on how they perceive women before we get into #MeToo or workplace harassment.
Haha, "the friend zone". I think what men need to understand about the friend zone is that if they get put there, they never actually had a shot. Not once have I ever met a guy who I thought was attractive and great and decided after becoming friends with him that I wanted to stay friends rather than date him. Men who are in the friend zone are there because they have some quality that disqualifies them from the woman's mind as a romantic partner. In theory, I suppose some men seem much better than they turn out to be on further acquaintance, and those men might manage to date more women if they ask them out immediately upon meeting, but they are generally headed for quick break ups as soon as the woman discovers the disqualifying characteristic. Most guys improve their romantic prospects when women get to know them better, but not necessarily enough to persuade the woman to actually date them.
OK, listened to up to Peer Review, and I just found the conversation to be so depressingly removed from the reality of how relationships form. The frustration Jerusalem expresses about being looked at by guys as “an object” is real, but then she assumes that women don’t look at men that way sometimes, and the Srivansen argument does the same thing. A little bit of Phoebe Maltz Bovy’s perspective would have helped here, I think.
Also, in all the Sexual Harassment trainings I have received in the workplace, it had always been defined as “unwanted attention”. You know that meme where the Chad flirts with a woman in the workplace while a schlubby guy gets Human Resources sicced on them? Thems the rules, and it’s probably correct!
It’s also a little odd that you failed to mention Katherine MacKinnon’s other claim to fame: Banding with the Religious Right to try and ban porn. Her militancy shot through both projects, as well as #MeToo.
The other thing that didn’t get mentioned was the Shitty Media Men list, which is surprising since a good part of the conversation was how #MeToo was a function of media reporting on itself. I see, from Brownmiller, to MacKinnon, to “Dear Colleague”, a consistent effort to wear down the cultural norm of a presumption of innocence, or a right to cross-examine the accuser. At the same time, gossip between women is a survival mechanism; the SMM list could be looked at as a high-tech bathroom wall. The problem is when that wall becomes grounds for firing its subjects.
To me, #MeToo came out of a real frustration that what women believed would be equality hadn’t come fast enough, and Trump’s election over Hillary Clinton was the final straw. The ground had already been laid by many feminists who felt the normal ideas of equality within our system (Innocent until proven guilty; free speech) were barriers to women feeling “free” in the “walk my dog at night” sense that Jerusalem opened her post with, so by 2017 those niceties were no longer considered, and anyone who brought them up was pilloried (Conor Friedersdorf, to name but one). That loss of the rights of the accused comes up with a lot of these movements, and I think it’s fair to say it’s part of the package of traits that define “wokeness”, which is why that sensibility, and its increasing popularity (don’t be fooled by any temporary ebb; this episode demonstrates how its precepts are barely even questioned now) worry me greatly.
This is an instance where bloggers aren’t really equipped to comment. Women’s protections against harassment and assault in the workplace are much stronger than they were fifteen years ago, before #metoo. You may not see that if you spend your days slinging takes from your home office. But if you work in a big institution, it’s a daily reality, and one that, despite some overreach, is a net positive.
One win, maybe not specifically #metoo but over a similar time period - when I was a teenager, there was a culture of sexualizing underaged girls, "jailbait" etc. That is just not viewed the same way anymore.
I agree that our legal procedures are not up to adjudicating the harms of sexual assault, and metoo has had some positive outcomes, but the overall effect has been destructive and likely net-negative. In particular, the presumption of guilt that now prevails is a repudiation of core liberal values.
The ragebait title is concerning. I'm hesitant to even listen to this one, but hold on to hope that I'm surprised.
From the title, I expected to be pissed off by the discussion, but I actually found it quite interesting, albeit a bit unsatisfying in its lack of any particular conclusions.
Jerusalem & Matt's mutual trust is great for this sort of conversation.
Given that they're using it to talk about very different (related) phenomena, it's easy to imagine this discussion spending the whole runtime litigating what "metoo" means.
“True equality for women cannot exist in a world where girls are afraid to walk home from school alone and women have to remain on high alert while going about their normal lives. The unfortunate fact is that you can’t legislate freedom.”
Until we achieve that, we have not fully civilized ourselves. The suffering is women’s but the toleration of this iniquity is all of ours, especially men’s.
I totally agree with you, Jerusalem. My one caveat is not your statement, but the MeToo founder, who says people are more comfortable about calling out "rape culture." Yes, people are more comfortable about naming rape culture. But saying the U.S. has a rape culture seems to flatten the difference between the Democratic Republic of Congo and India vs. The US.
I basically fully agree w/ Jerusalem’s take that #MeToo led to a pretty obvious shift in culture which was for the most part good.
I do think there is an interesting tension in the latter half of the episode, where the discussion turns to the question of permitting certain kinds of relationship to exist without the looming possibility of sexualization, rather than addressing power differentials. I get what is being said there. But OTOH, the request in that case is emphatically not for men to treat women like they do anyone else—see any group of gay men—and we’re not really privileging woman’s autonomy either, because plenty of women have actually affirmatively wanted to sleep with a professor or a congressman or whatever, for both savory and unsavory, wise and unwise reasons.
The San Francisco Symphony just hired a female music director to replace Esa-Pekka Salonen. I don't think you understand what a reversal this is. Less than 10 years ago, I read a quote by one of the players in that orchestra advising her that the orchestra was not going to want to hire a female principal oboe player. They did in fact have no women principal players. They also frequently invited the conductor Vasily Petrenko, who is on record saying women aren't as effective conductors. The players in that orchestra told me he outright complained to the orchestra that it had too many women, despite having no female principals and a minority of women overall.
The number of stories that women came forth with have made the business model of upholding the aesthetic of male genius untenable. Orchestras all over the country are programming more works by women and going out of their way to hire women subs for the orchestra, which is a significant pipeline for women to later join the orchestra. (You can be invited to the final, not blind round of an audition, which is how this happens more often than not in even in orchestras that use blind auditions.)
The reason people used to ask women to sub less is the same reason we support fewer women in politics. Players were afraid that their femaleness would caused them to be judges with more scrutiny. And those same players viewed them with more scrutiny. Plus, if you invite a woman to sub for you, people might think you're trying to sleep with your former student, and that's bad, so it's better just to not risk it.
The #metoo movement has also made orchestras safer. The New York Philharmonic was not a safe working environment five years ago when they still employed Liang Wang and Matthew Muckey, who had long been accused of drugging raping one of their colleagues, after which she was denied tenure. But activists got that story out there, and the Phil finally did an investigation showing that 15 total women, I believe, had complaints of harassment and assault from the same players.
A teachers in Rice, De Paul, Eastman, the San Francisco Conservatory, the Cleveland Institute and IU have been removed because women came forward with abuse claims and the schools investigated and found credible evidence.
Interlochen, the music arts school, just commissioned and released their own report on sexual abuse instances. (Jeffrey Epstein owned a cabin there and was a frequent donor. He was gone by the time I went to summer camp there, though.) Over on Facebook I learned that the investigation was triggered by an anonymous posting on the activist Katherine Needleman's FB page.
The Cleveland Orchestra and the Curtis Institute have conducted abuse investigations recently, too, as a result of activism.
I saw a player his schmoozed with my own teachers in SF get arrested for admitting to child rape 2 years ago. The audio of the confession was in the news. That was batshit.
Fun fact: Katherine Needleman's grandfather is the same Needleman who campaigned to get the word out that led in paint is bad for you. Apparently people whose business objectives didn't align with that truth did everything to discredit him. So you can thank him for that.
The biggest win from all this has been that people now have a real, felt sense that there have been barriers to women in this industry. Before, there was no suspicion that maybe the absence of women at the top was due to gatekeeping or bias. Now people are in the habit of questioning their perceptions.
It's difficult to play with authority when people doubt you have it in the first place. Authority has to be received, not just executed. So having people merely be open to having misperceived the capabilities to women is literally everything.
There was a discussion about how the social media has seen an era of leaderless activism. There's no leader to define the goals of the movement. There's no one to plan out next steps. There's no one to say "That approach is probably unproductive, so maybe don't do that." Well, some people will say not to do that, but it's all part of the same activist maw, and so no one is positioned to actually enforce any "don't do that" directive. I think it's been such a bad condition that I now have a tendency to see most activist activity as at least unproductive and more often than not directly harmful to the cause they are trying to support. Even leader-ful activism seems to take cues the leaderless activism style (thus there was no one with any perspective stopping kids from throwing soup at expensive art works for ... the environment?). I hadn't heard of the term "leaderless activism", but it helps to explain a lot of why I now have such a low opinion of activism, even though I tend to agree on the direction (if not the amplitude) of the vector of their cause.
Then at the end, Matt was talking about how there's no clear measurement of what has changed as a result of #MeToo . No one is actually measuring society to see whether and how the campaign has resulted in a better world.
The lack of measurement goes hand in hand with the leaderlessness. Well run organizations have a mission, they plan out actions to achieve that mission, and importantly, they have mechanisms for figuring out if their mission was achieved. That last part requires gathering some kind of data, so that the leaders can assess what worked and what didn't. If a campaign doesn't change anything, they pick up and move on to something else, but in a well run organization they will use data to do that. And as an organization, they allocate resources to gather that data, knowing that will help them be more effective. In a leaderless structure, there's no one making decisions for the group, so there's no one able to say "Let's put some of our resources into measuring effectiveness", so there's no data collected. We should actually expect a leaderless activist movement to have a paucity of data, just like we should expect it to have lack of clarity of aims, and lack of enforcement mechanisms to keep one's own unproductively-unruly allies in check.
An year or so ago, I was at a bar with a (male) friend, and we somehow ended up having an extended argument over metoo that basically boiled down to “was this a good thing?” He was on the “no” side and made some of the same arguments as Matt. It was an eye opening experience for me because I basically took the “goodness” of metoo for granted, and trying to figure out a way to argue for it, especially quantitatively, was not straightforward. Your conversation touched on similar topics.
I think: 1) you can plausibly argue that, of all the plausible ways a society-wide reckoning over sexual harassment and inequality could go, what happened in the US in the mid-2010s was below the median in terms of whatever outcome you prioritize. But arguing that no reckoning is better than reckoning is a bigger and more challenging claim. 2) I think Demsas touches on this but if you could somehow freeze the definition of sexual assault and sexual harassment to what the average person considered it to be in 2014, and then measure that, and that only, through 2026..I hypothesize that it would have declined materially, and been driven by metoo. And that would be the clearest benefit of metoo. But this is a hard analysis to execute. 3) The loose and hard-to-quantify benefits of metoo are difficult for me to grapple with as an otherwise fairly quantitative lib who likes to follow the evidence. I think conservatives or people who are anti metoo could understandably accuse me of hypocrisy and say that when an issue touches on my personal prejudices and I don’t have the evidence to support my claims, I default to arguments like the above, and show that my commitment to evidence and data and reason is BS. To this, all I can do is shrug. It’s a reasonable objection.
good comment imo
It's understandable why this conversation focused mostly on the workplace, but (as someone roughly Jerusalem's age) I felt like #MeToo and 2010s feminism more generally went much further than that, and there really were a lot of attempts to shame and stigmatize what I would consider benign or, at worst, mildly inconsiderate dating and romantic behavior. Especially in feminist blogs, Tumblr, and Twitter at the time.
Behaviors like hitting on women in purely social contexts were attacked and shamed, as were like, misreading the vibe and going in for a kiss on date when she didn't want it. I admit I'm on the more terminally online side of things, but this discourse really messed with my head in my teens and early-20s, and many of my male friends had similar experiences.
The Aziz Ansari article is one example.
There was also a big cultural shift away from the idea that you should hit on or date women in hobby groups.
Another example is this article that went viral in 2013 (though worth noting the author has since apologized for it) where a man asking for advice on how to overcome approach anxiety at a social event is told he *should* feel anxious: https://web.archive.org/web/20170206164140/https://captainawkward.com/2013/04/20/476-i-have-anxiety-that-women-will-have-anxiety-about-me-approaching-them/
This SlateStarCodex article covers this genre of feminist writing well (see section III for a bunch of examples) where unhappily single men are mercilessly mocked and shamed: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/
I do think this conversation might have benefited from being separated out. It's true that a lot of women don't feel safe in situations where they're being hit on, because *many* women have experienced entirely out-of-pocket reactions by men they're rejecting. But that tends to verge into "women should be scared of all men" territory, which I think is a really bad place for society to be.
The real reason men should very carefully consider whether to hit on a stranger in a social situation is because it's irritating as hell to be hit on everywhere you go, which a lot of men don't understand, because men tend to experience more rejection (esp if they're constantly shooting their shot with strangers). It's dehumanizing, and that feeling combined with the very real possibility of a bad reaction makes rejecting men feel dangerous. But women shouldn't just be blanket scared of men, and there's a couple brands of feminism that seem to lean in that direction (both conservative and liberal).
I agree we don't want a world where women are constantly hit on whenever they are in public spaces. But to Matt's point in the episode, a lot of men *and* women are unhappy with cultural shift where so much of dating happens online now, and yet pretty much all other avenues for meeting dates outside of online dating have a lot of people yelling about how men shouldn't hit on women in those contexts, whether it's work, hobby groups, or even with friends.
If we want alternatives to online dating, we need to come to a social consensus about what the alternatives are.
Most of the time, the point isn't "you can never develop a romantic relationship with someone from your hobby group", it's that you shouldn't join a group just to hit on women. The best way to develop a relationship is to develop it, over time, which causes people to feel safer and gives more room to build a vibe / read signals. It's not that woman never want men to talk to them, it's that we like to be regarded as people first, rather than sexual objects first. Asking out someone from the bowling team is a dramatically different prospect when you just met vs when you've gotten to know each other over several games.
This is so circular though. Let's say you are a median man of normal to below average attractiveness. You want to meet and hopefully sleep with women, respectfully. You go on a dating app, but you swipe 1000 times and get no dates (median man gets vanishingly few interactions). So you talk to friends and acquaintances, and they say to meet women through hobby groups or normal social interactions. So you join a run club, but you didn't join a run club because you wanted to run, what you actually want to do is meet women. So what you actually have to do is pretend your goal is not your goal. And you end up in a situation where the charismatic, the attractive, and the good liars are perceived as doing things the right way. They are allowed to date. And the socially awkward, less charismatic, less socially aware men are the creepy ones because they aren't picking up on the social cues and lying well enough. Which in some ways is the same as it ever was, charismatic liars always got laid the most. But I don't think we have a good answer to how a mediocre man is supposed to date in 2026.
> Let's say you are a median man of normal to below average attractiveness.
You first have to accept then that you won't easily get casual sex.
> So you join a run club, but you didn't join a run club because you wanted to run, what you actually want to do is meet women.
Presumably you have *some* hobbies and can join communities focused on them.
I agree with Kim: desperation is obvious and a turnoff.
I would say the solution is to be less concerned with getting laid. No one likes desperation, and if people spent more of their time and effort trying to appreciate women as people first, I suspect they'll also have more dating success over time.
No one is saying "do hobbies you have no interest in to play a long game on women." The better solution is to actually *have interests* outside of women, and to treat women as people you're NOT interested in sleeping with for awhile. Build actual human friendships and relationships (not "pretend to build relationships with people you secretly want to sleep with"). I'm not saying its a slam dunk to getting laid, I'm saying its a path to human happiness where you're also much less likely to send women running from bad vibes. And it will be AT LEAST as successful as swiping a thousand times, it's just harder and more humanizing work.
In short: I think "guys who have trouble getting laid" have a goals problem. If you want to get laid, hire a sex worker. If you want to build a real human relationship, don't start with "I want to get laid" because women can smell that a mile away. Be a human person with interests, go out into the world seeking interesting experiences and human friendships, and you'll have more success.
If no relevant polling data is available, then I will default to the observed reactions to the Aziz Ansari case, the closest that we got to this sort of discourse reaching the general public, and I will observe that an awful lot of public reactions to that case amounted to "this is ridiculous." Which would seem to indicate that in fact large numbers of women do not feel the way that you describe.
In the absence of any data to the contrary, given that it is effectively impossible to determine how a given person will react without asking them, I reject the idea that "men should very carefully consider whether to hit on a stranger in a social situation". Just follow basic social norms and be polite and go ahead and talk to people in public. If you're unfamiliar with what the basic social norms are, ask someone IRL. That seems totally workable to me.
I personally have issues that make me uncomfortable with a decent amount of "normal" social interactions, and I simply don't think that it's reasonable for people with unusual social preferences to expect the world to accommodate them without them making those preferences known, which is kind of true by definition in this case.
I'm pretty sure i've read survey Data from cartoons hate her
That reports, on average, most women would prefer to get hit on more
But of course, they only want to be hit on by the people they want to be hit on
And that's the conundrum.
I notice phrases like "a lot", and "many." Do you have any data or statistics on how many women feel this way?
This is a very well-studied area and sources are very easy to find if you look. Here are a couple : https://isps.yale.edu/resource/gender-fear-and-public-places-how-negative-encounters-with-strangers-harm-women
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277539515302077
An important note is that "feeling unsafe" is not the same as feeling like the other person has done something massively wrong. Yes, many people, including women, including myself, thought the cancellation of Ansari was out of proportion to the situation. More to the point, it's not clear to me why "be considerate and carefully consider whether your actions are welcome or not" is such a burden that men feel the need to fight it?
I can only comment on what is in front of the paywall, but:
First study: "we investigated gender differences in the experience of generic public incivilities such as tailgating, pushing in crowded spaces, and yelling or cursing"
So, totally different behaviors than merely asking a stranger out in public, and behaviors that are near-universally recognized as at least rude. Totally irrelevant to the question.
The stuff available in front of the paywall on the second thing is mostly a discussion about terminology, and it isn't immediately clear to me that it has any relevant statistics at all.
I apologize if the stuff behind the paywall in both articles is in fact relevant to our conversation, but I can only go based on what I can see, so I can't comment any further on your sources from where I am now.
"More to the point, it's not clear to me why 'be considerate and carefully consider whether your actions are welcome or not' is such a burden that men feel the need to fight it?"
There isn't any reliable way to determine whether initiating a conversation with someone will be "welcome" without doing it, so asking someone to "carefully consider"/"very carefully consider" in this context is potentially likely to lead to false positives for "would my interactions be unwelcome" and thus missing out on potentially enjoyable/fruitful social interactions, just for starters.
This is precisely why relevant statistics, if they are available, are important to the question. If, hypothetically, it turns out that a large majority of women are fine with being asked out in public, or whatever, then under a lot of frameworks that would raise some serious questions about the potential tradeoffs of shifting social norms towards making people more cautious in doing those things, even before we get into the conversation about whether a given method of attempting to shift social norms in that direction would actually be effective or not.
Nitpicking a bit, the video is specifically about MeToo, not 2010s feminism more generally. But yeah, a lot of the backlash to meToo has to be understood in that context.
Hell, even here there is an implicit equivocation between a professor steering a conversation with a student towards a romantic relationship (the example listed in the transcript) and the professor exploiting the uneven power dynamic between him and his student (withholding tutoring? Assigning a worse grade?). The latter is, I think, what people are mainly concerned about when they critique that sort of relationship, but the example listed is the professor guiding the conversation towards his preferred outcome. Which seems like…a normal thing to do, at least in a general context.
Personally I think of #MeToo as mostly just 2010s millennial feminism going mainstream beyond the internet and college campuses, and so they're both part of the same broader social movement.
Having read the transcript, a couple scattered thoughts
1) pre-MeToo, my university made it clear in no uncertain terms at freshman orientation (in 2012) that having sex with a girl who had been drinking was rape, even if you did not realize she had been drinking. It frankly scared me away from sex in ways that my abstinence-only sex ed teachers could have only dreamed. It took me years to learn that wasn’t the legal standard (at least AIUI, will defer to any lawyers here). Obviously the timeline means that can’t be pinned on meToo, but it did affect how I viewed the movement at the time
2) I’m not sure we should take the increase in reported sexual harassment to the EEOC over time at face value. The slippery definition of sexual harassment (and for that matter non-sexual harassment) makes that a moving target.
Excited to see what you make of Bowling Alone! I taught a course around it last year (twice) and thought the book was just so moving and masterful. It’s written like a whodunit. So much care taken with the evidence.
That said, I’m also a little skeptical of the concept of social capital, and part of me thinks that the political ideal of the book really doesn’t make that much sense—a resurgence of social capital, but without its “dark side” of out-group hostility? Isn’t that like a donut without the hole?
Will read the transcript later, but my immediate thought is that there is frankly only so much society can do. The reality is that most men are physically stronger and larger than most women. Society can punish men who hurt women after the fact, but it cannot realistically deprive them of their physical ability to do so. At most it can 1) ideally have men restrain themselves or 2) failing that, have men restrain each other. But in either case, that ultimately leaves women’s safety in the hands of men, which I suspect still leaves women uneasy (though as a man I cannot realistically comment on that).
Actually, the "men protecting women" aspect was a very important result of #metoo. Sexual harassment trainings in colleges and workplaces made it much clearer that if you see someone being mistreated, doing something to divert the perpetrator or take the victim away from the situation is a worthwhile thing to do as a bystander. Examples in the trainings I've had:
-If you see a guy taking a girl who's super wasted away at a frat party or bar, you should get friends and say something (possibly something like, "oh, sketchy guy, someone was looking for you out front!" If you don't want to be confrontational)
-If a man talks over a woman in a meeting, it's helpful to say, "Actually, I don't think Sarah finished her point. Sarah, could you continue?"
-If you hear someone say something sexual in the workplace, you can say something like, "ugh, not at work man"
One of the signal facts about this issue is that for sexual violence, we have a vastly higher standard of proof, and allow defenses, that we don't for other kinds of interpersonal violence. To take an example that was in the news recently, if you say "my Uber driver beat me up", and provide the level of evidence that many women have, that is considered proof. Testimony that you didn't want to be beaten is sufficient.
Are you saying all sexual relations should be presumed to be assault?
No, that isn't what I said. We don't assume that people giving other people money is theft, but if I say "I didn't want to give him money and he made me" we treat that as sufficient evidence for theft.
So you think having sex is like donating money?
I’ll stop with the rhetorical questions. The point I’m trying to make is that sex just *is* different, and not always in the clear realm of convictable offense, as JD says. What would the equivalent of the Aziz Anzari scenario be in terms of getting beat up, or being forced to give someone money? “I thought about giving him $100, he was really pushy, so I gave him $5 and took a cab home”?
I just don't think it's different -- if someone says that they didn't consent to some interaction that they had, I think we should treat that similarly across interactions.
(I realize that this implies significant revision of heterosexual interactions.)
That is quite an understatement!
At the same time, I’d like to think it’s changed some, I admit. My biggest concern is thinking it’s easy to invoke the carceral state when it comes to sex.
I the the key idea behind the special treatment of sex is that while people generally lie about all kinds of stuff, women specifically lie about whether they consent to sex, both beforehand so you can go off various signals other than consent, and afterwards to preserve her "virtue" so you can't believe her testimony. Lots of #MeToo didn't involve the state at all, but I think eliminating this noxious idea would help both with formal legal proceedings and with more informal judgement of human interactions.
I assume you're referencing either this or something like it.
https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/uber-driver-assault-logan-airport/
And if someone walked into the airport stating they were just raped by their Uber driver, gave a statement to the police, and agreed to a forensic examination, that would be enough proof to arrest the Uber driver. A lot of sexual assault claims, ranging from sexual battery to rape, don't have that level of proof.
I was thinking of this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/business/uber-sexual-assault-lawsuits.html
I can't read the full article without a paid subscription, but the opening deals with a civil suit against Uber regarding a rape where the offender was arrested, pled guilty, and was sentenced to 10 years. So the proof was already there.
But usually, if you get beaten up, there's physical evidence
Depending on the type of sexual assault, there might not be. And if it's sexual harassment, there's probably none at all
My overall opinion on the results of #metoo is that the men who should be scared aren't and the men who shouldn't be scared are.
For example, I hear that story about Ruben Gallego and think people are *insane* for thinking that's a problem. You should be able to date people you meet at work, just as you should be able to make friends with people you meet at work! I would not exist if it weren't for people dating people they met at work, since that's where my parents met. That said, I do think hitting on people at work and at work events should be highly discouraged. If people are going to get together romantically through work after becoming friends through work first, that makes sense.
The negative impact here is what you see in Cartoons Hate Her's articles about how literally everyone wants to be approached more often in public. Back when I was a young single person, I got hit on a lot, and about half those interactions were with nice guys who'd back off once I said I wasn't interested while the other half were unpleasant because either the guy was way too persistent, really rude upon being rejected ("well you're not that hot anyway" was on the milder end), or downright scary. Nowadays, it seems like all the nice guys are too scared to hit on girls in public so 100% of cold approaches are negative. I really don't think that's a better world.
I also met my wife at work.
It's a totally normal thing to do! I think unfortunately, people have defaulted to looking for an extremely simple rule here, but the ideal situation is a bit nuanced. Though it's not that different from any normal social group with people who see each other a lot over time.
1. It is normal for people to socialize as coworkers and to get to know who people are outside of work.
2. It is also normal for friendly coworkers to become actual friends. Generally that means that they hang out even on weekends outside of work and activities immediately following the work day.
3. It is normal to have crushes on friends and ask them out.
What we really want to discourage is the feeling that work is a meat market where people are hitting on each other. That would be really annoying and unprofessional! That type of atmosphere is really only appropriate in bars and clubs.
I'm not quite sure exactly where you draw the line between them
I had a waste shot. The bigger thing was, people just need to be able to be professional and accept rejection or breaking up as an adult in not making big deal about it.
If you ask somebody out and they say, no, you say thank you and you walk away
You break up with somebody, you still have to act polite and work with them.
I can tell you, I did ask my now Wife out within a couple months of her starting to work at the restaurant we were at.
Although she did give me a signal that I thought meant She MAYBE might like me. She started running her hand through the back of my hair at the bar.
I'd say one of the main distinctions I'd make is that someone you just met isn't someone to hit on. A couple months is long enough to have had a lot of shifts together, a lot of chatting during downtime, and a good amount of really getting to know each other. When you hear about a man hitting on a woman as soon as he met her at a conference, that sounds more like what Jerusalem was complaining about: that the man isn't seeing her as a person, only as a romantic object. If you can credibly say that you know a coworker well enough to like her personality, that's fine. But you can't ask a coworker out just for their looks; that's too disrespectful to what you're all there for.
Thank you, in each of your comments, for saying all the things I think. "Don't immediately hit on a woman you just met at work" and "Never hit on any woman you work with ever" are very different statements, and the difference is time and effort getting to know them as a person. It really doesn't seem that complicated to me, but you have men out here like it's SO baffling and they have NO IDEA how to operate at work, as though every woman is scheming to make a false accusation against them. Like maybe they need to work on how they perceive women before we get into #MeToo or workplace harassment.
Most of that sounds pretty reasonable
Although, for a lot of guys, I know we worry about getting put into the dreaded friend zone
Also, at a conference might be a bit different, because there might not be an opportunity to really get to know that person
You meet you, either, shoot your shot or not
Haha, "the friend zone". I think what men need to understand about the friend zone is that if they get put there, they never actually had a shot. Not once have I ever met a guy who I thought was attractive and great and decided after becoming friends with him that I wanted to stay friends rather than date him. Men who are in the friend zone are there because they have some quality that disqualifies them from the woman's mind as a romantic partner. In theory, I suppose some men seem much better than they turn out to be on further acquaintance, and those men might manage to date more women if they ask them out immediately upon meeting, but they are generally headed for quick break ups as soon as the woman discovers the disqualifying characteristic. Most guys improve their romantic prospects when women get to know them better, but not necessarily enough to persuade the woman to actually date them.
OK, listened to up to Peer Review, and I just found the conversation to be so depressingly removed from the reality of how relationships form. The frustration Jerusalem expresses about being looked at by guys as “an object” is real, but then she assumes that women don’t look at men that way sometimes, and the Srivansen argument does the same thing. A little bit of Phoebe Maltz Bovy’s perspective would have helped here, I think.
Also, in all the Sexual Harassment trainings I have received in the workplace, it had always been defined as “unwanted attention”. You know that meme where the Chad flirts with a woman in the workplace while a schlubby guy gets Human Resources sicced on them? Thems the rules, and it’s probably correct!
It’s also a little odd that you failed to mention Katherine MacKinnon’s other claim to fame: Banding with the Religious Right to try and ban porn. Her militancy shot through both projects, as well as #MeToo.
The other thing that didn’t get mentioned was the Shitty Media Men list, which is surprising since a good part of the conversation was how #MeToo was a function of media reporting on itself. I see, from Brownmiller, to MacKinnon, to “Dear Colleague”, a consistent effort to wear down the cultural norm of a presumption of innocence, or a right to cross-examine the accuser. At the same time, gossip between women is a survival mechanism; the SMM list could be looked at as a high-tech bathroom wall. The problem is when that wall becomes grounds for firing its subjects.
To me, #MeToo came out of a real frustration that what women believed would be equality hadn’t come fast enough, and Trump’s election over Hillary Clinton was the final straw. The ground had already been laid by many feminists who felt the normal ideas of equality within our system (Innocent until proven guilty; free speech) were barriers to women feeling “free” in the “walk my dog at night” sense that Jerusalem opened her post with, so by 2017 those niceties were no longer considered, and anyone who brought them up was pilloried (Conor Friedersdorf, to name but one). That loss of the rights of the accused comes up with a lot of these movements, and I think it’s fair to say it’s part of the package of traits that define “wokeness”, which is why that sensibility, and its increasing popularity (don’t be fooled by any temporary ebb; this episode demonstrates how its precepts are barely even questioned now) worry me greatly.
This is an instance where bloggers aren’t really equipped to comment. Women’s protections against harassment and assault in the workplace are much stronger than they were fifteen years ago, before #metoo. You may not see that if you spend your days slinging takes from your home office. But if you work in a big institution, it’s a daily reality, and one that, despite some overreach, is a net positive.
One win, maybe not specifically #metoo but over a similar time period - when I was a teenager, there was a culture of sexualizing underaged girls, "jailbait" etc. That is just not viewed the same way anymore.
I very strongly suspect that "To Catch A Predator" had a lot more to do with that particular shift in social norms than #MeToo.
I agree that our legal procedures are not up to adjudicating the harms of sexual assault, and metoo has had some positive outcomes, but the overall effect has been destructive and likely net-negative. In particular, the presumption of guilt that now prevails is a repudiation of core liberal values.
The ragebait title is concerning. I'm hesitant to even listen to this one, but hold on to hope that I'm surprised.
From the title, I expected to be pissed off by the discussion, but I actually found it quite interesting, albeit a bit unsatisfying in its lack of any particular conclusions.
Agreed, now that I'm through it.
Jerusalem & Matt's mutual trust is great for this sort of conversation.
Given that they're using it to talk about very different (related) phenomena, it's easy to imagine this discussion spending the whole runtime litigating what "metoo" means.
“True equality for women cannot exist in a world where girls are afraid to walk home from school alone and women have to remain on high alert while going about their normal lives. The unfortunate fact is that you can’t legislate freedom.”
Until we achieve that, we have not fully civilized ourselves. The suffering is women’s but the toleration of this iniquity is all of ours, especially men’s.
I totally agree with you, Jerusalem. My one caveat is not your statement, but the MeToo founder, who says people are more comfortable about calling out "rape culture." Yes, people are more comfortable about naming rape culture. But saying the U.S. has a rape culture seems to flatten the difference between the Democratic Republic of Congo and India vs. The US.
I basically fully agree w/ Jerusalem’s take that #MeToo led to a pretty obvious shift in culture which was for the most part good.
I do think there is an interesting tension in the latter half of the episode, where the discussion turns to the question of permitting certain kinds of relationship to exist without the looming possibility of sexualization, rather than addressing power differentials. I get what is being said there. But OTOH, the request in that case is emphatically not for men to treat women like they do anyone else—see any group of gay men—and we’re not really privileging woman’s autonomy either, because plenty of women have actually affirmatively wanted to sleep with a professor or a congressman or whatever, for both savory and unsavory, wise and unwise reasons.
In classical music #metoo has WORKED.
The San Francisco Symphony just hired a female music director to replace Esa-Pekka Salonen. I don't think you understand what a reversal this is. Less than 10 years ago, I read a quote by one of the players in that orchestra advising her that the orchestra was not going to want to hire a female principal oboe player. They did in fact have no women principal players. They also frequently invited the conductor Vasily Petrenko, who is on record saying women aren't as effective conductors. The players in that orchestra told me he outright complained to the orchestra that it had too many women, despite having no female principals and a minority of women overall.
The number of stories that women came forth with have made the business model of upholding the aesthetic of male genius untenable. Orchestras all over the country are programming more works by women and going out of their way to hire women subs for the orchestra, which is a significant pipeline for women to later join the orchestra. (You can be invited to the final, not blind round of an audition, which is how this happens more often than not in even in orchestras that use blind auditions.)
The reason people used to ask women to sub less is the same reason we support fewer women in politics. Players were afraid that their femaleness would caused them to be judges with more scrutiny. And those same players viewed them with more scrutiny. Plus, if you invite a woman to sub for you, people might think you're trying to sleep with your former student, and that's bad, so it's better just to not risk it.
The #metoo movement has also made orchestras safer. The New York Philharmonic was not a safe working environment five years ago when they still employed Liang Wang and Matthew Muckey, who had long been accused of drugging raping one of their colleagues, after which she was denied tenure. But activists got that story out there, and the Phil finally did an investigation showing that 15 total women, I believe, had complaints of harassment and assault from the same players.
A teachers in Rice, De Paul, Eastman, the San Francisco Conservatory, the Cleveland Institute and IU have been removed because women came forward with abuse claims and the schools investigated and found credible evidence.
Interlochen, the music arts school, just commissioned and released their own report on sexual abuse instances. (Jeffrey Epstein owned a cabin there and was a frequent donor. He was gone by the time I went to summer camp there, though.) Over on Facebook I learned that the investigation was triggered by an anonymous posting on the activist Katherine Needleman's FB page.
The Cleveland Orchestra and the Curtis Institute have conducted abuse investigations recently, too, as a result of activism.
I saw a player his schmoozed with my own teachers in SF get arrested for admitting to child rape 2 years ago. The audio of the confession was in the news. That was batshit.
Fun fact: Katherine Needleman's grandfather is the same Needleman who campaigned to get the word out that led in paint is bad for you. Apparently people whose business objectives didn't align with that truth did everything to discredit him. So you can thank him for that.
The biggest win from all this has been that people now have a real, felt sense that there have been barriers to women in this industry. Before, there was no suspicion that maybe the absence of women at the top was due to gatekeeping or bias. Now people are in the habit of questioning their perceptions.
It's difficult to play with authority when people doubt you have it in the first place. Authority has to be received, not just executed. So having people merely be open to having misperceived the capabilities to women is literally everything.
Let's connect two threads in this discussion:
There was a discussion about how the social media has seen an era of leaderless activism. There's no leader to define the goals of the movement. There's no one to plan out next steps. There's no one to say "That approach is probably unproductive, so maybe don't do that." Well, some people will say not to do that, but it's all part of the same activist maw, and so no one is positioned to actually enforce any "don't do that" directive. I think it's been such a bad condition that I now have a tendency to see most activist activity as at least unproductive and more often than not directly harmful to the cause they are trying to support. Even leader-ful activism seems to take cues the leaderless activism style (thus there was no one with any perspective stopping kids from throwing soup at expensive art works for ... the environment?). I hadn't heard of the term "leaderless activism", but it helps to explain a lot of why I now have such a low opinion of activism, even though I tend to agree on the direction (if not the amplitude) of the vector of their cause.
Then at the end, Matt was talking about how there's no clear measurement of what has changed as a result of #MeToo . No one is actually measuring society to see whether and how the campaign has resulted in a better world.
The lack of measurement goes hand in hand with the leaderlessness. Well run organizations have a mission, they plan out actions to achieve that mission, and importantly, they have mechanisms for figuring out if their mission was achieved. That last part requires gathering some kind of data, so that the leaders can assess what worked and what didn't. If a campaign doesn't change anything, they pick up and move on to something else, but in a well run organization they will use data to do that. And as an organization, they allocate resources to gather that data, knowing that will help them be more effective. In a leaderless structure, there's no one making decisions for the group, so there's no one able to say "Let's put some of our resources into measuring effectiveness", so there's no data collected. We should actually expect a leaderless activist movement to have a paucity of data, just like we should expect it to have lack of clarity of aims, and lack of enforcement mechanisms to keep one's own unproductively-unruly allies in check.