Lopamudra, Week 8

What Happens to #MeToo When a Feminist Is the Accused?

The Me Too (or #MeToo) movement, with variations of related local or international names, is a movement against sexual assault and harassment of women. Similar to other social justice and empowerment movements based upon breaking silence, the purpose of "Me Too", is to empower women through empathy and solidarity through strength in numbers, especially young and vulnerable women, by visibly demonstrating how many women have survived sexual assault and harassment, especially in their own houses and workplace. However, In this case, the accused is feminist scholar Avital Ronell, and the person reporting harassment is a male former graduate student, Nimrod Reitman. The accused says that when he did complain to Ronell about her harassment, she retaliated by sabotaging his job prospects.  Graduate students can be especially vulnerable to harassment by their advisers, who often wield enormous control over the direction of their careers. Survivors’ testimony as part of #MeToo has exposed the ways that harassers abuse their power, taking advantage of situations in which their victims can’t report for fear of damage to their careers. When such cases are amplified by social media forums that reach a wide audience of diverse faculty members, potentially vulnerable students, and attendant administrative stake holders, then the faculty have an ethical responsibility, not just a perfunctory legal one, to expose and report such offenders in order to eradicate systemic inequity. And while the #MeToo movement needs to take on gender inequality, it also needs to acknowledge that in the world’s precarious and hierarchical work culture, employees often have few options if their superiors mistreat them - and this can make anyone who needs a pay check vulnerable to harassment, regardless of gender.