Sexual Coercion, Gender Construction, and Responsibility for Freedom: A Beauvoirian Account of Me Too (original) (raw)
Sexual Coercion, Gender Construction, and Responsibility for Freedom: A Beauvoirian Account of Me Too
Claire McKinney
To cite this article: Claire McKinney (2019) Sexual Coercion, Gender Construction, and Responsibility for Freedom: A Beauvoirian Account of Me Too, Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, 40:1, 75-96, DOI: 10.1080/1554477X.2019.1563415
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1554477X.2019.1563415
Published online: 22 Mar 2019.
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Sexual Coercion, Gender Construction, and Responsibility for Freedom: A Beauvoirian Account of Me Too
Claire McKinney
Government and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, USA
Abstract
The Me Too movement has focused mainstream attention on the pervasiveness of sexual coercion in public and private life. The fact that sexual coercion is so widespread suggests that gender hierarchy is at least partially maintained by the most intimate of human interactions. This article argues that the work of Simone de Beauvoir illuminates the operation of sexual coercion as a mainstay of gender hierarchy and the Me Too movement as an exercise of the responsibility for political freedom. To be responsible for freedom is to undertake new projects as expressions of one’s values but always with the duty to enhance the freedom of others. These projects can never be complete because humans act in a world not entirely of their own making and so must grapple with the facticity of existence. Reading Me Too through Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics reveals the potential for expansive political solidarity while acknowledging the movement’s incompleteness and potential failure. Through an appraisal of the nascent movement’s activity and broader social responses, the article concludes that a continued responsibility to work against sexual coercion is part of a collective political freedom in pursuit of gender equality.
KEYWORDS
Freedom; sexual coercion; Simone de Beauvoir; Me Too movement
The body is not a thing, it is a situation.
-Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Many of us have learned to live with workplaces and a society in general in which we are denied equal respect. Many of us have learned to survive in degrading circumstances. What we will never know is how much psychic energy has been drained away from our creativity in the course of our efforts to find self-worth in spite of our degradation. In that sense, there is no measure for the loss to our selves because we can only dream of what it might mean to live in a society in which that kind of psychic energy was not drained off.
—Drucilla Cornell, The Imaginary Domain
The work against sexual assault and harassment has been a continuous effort in the 21st century. From grassroots efforts to nonprofit organizations
- CONTACT Claire McKinney © cmckinney@wm.edu (1) Government Department, College of William & Mary, William & Mary, P.O. Box 8795, Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795, USA.
© 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ↩︎
to legislative efforts, the ongoing contention that people should be free from sexual violence, intimidation, and hostility remains a bedrock of feminist activism and policymaking. But since 2016, the tenor of such organizing has reached a new pitch. When a 2005 Access Hollywood tape leaked where listeners could hear then-candidate Donald Trump proclaim his own practices of sexual assault in the most vulgar terms, author Kelly Oxford encouraged women to use the hashtag #notokay to share the stories of their first sexual assaults. Over 1 million people tweeted their assault stories (Moscatello 2016). Then, a year later, both the New York Times and The New Yorker published stories that documented decades of sexual harassment, assault, and rape by entertainment executive, Harvey Weinstein. Actress Alyssa Milano, wanting to further the conversation sparked by the Weinstein allegations tweeted, “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet” (Milano 2017). Unwittingly, a slogan created by activist Tarana Burke in 2006 to help survivors of sexual assault transformed into a viral hashtag that became the basis of what is popularly characterized as a movement. 1{ }^{1} The Me Too movement is in its infancy, but as a sign of popular feminist protest, it is fomenting conversations about how to better report on sexual assault and harassment, how to confront the problems with sexual harassment and assault from entertainment to housekeeping and from agriculture to academia, and the need for new legal tools to contest nondisclosure agreements, forced arbitration, and assault and harassment themselves.
The genesis and continued growth of Me Too provide a background consideration for how the new movement against sexual coercion 2{ }^{2} might be thought in relation to feminist theory more broadly. This article suggests a feminist framework for understanding the deep transformative political nature of Me Too; namely, I suggest that Me Too should be read as a paradigmatic example of the exercise of political freedom theorized by existentialist feminist thinker, Simone de Beauvoir.
Beauvoir’s oeuvre has recently been reconsidered as serious feminist philosophy after decades of being understood as both anachronistic and derivative (Kruks 2012). The resurgence of interest in Beauvoir as a serious political thinker felicitously coincides with the greatest amount of media attention to feminist grassroots action in a generation. Beauvoir’s attention to the ambiguity and contradictions of embodied freedom is a crucial theoretical aid to appraise both the promise and limits of Me Too. This article will proceed as follows. First, I will reconstruct the feminist-embodied politics of Beauvoir where she diagnoses the context of gender-based oppression and outlines a way to understand embodied responsibility for freedom as an ethics of ambiguity. Second, I turn my attention to Me Too as a manifestation of the dilemmas of responsibility for freedom, attendant to the inevitability of failure and partiality. Finally, I turn to current criticisms of the Me Too
movement to develop a Beauvoirian response to our expectations for feminist politics.
Responsibility for freedom
Simone de Beauvoir’s most famous work is The Second Sex, a 1949 treatise examining the experience of being a woman (2009). She examines biology, myth, history, psychoanalysis, literature, and philosophy in her portrait of the oppressed state women experience by virtue of their sex. 3{ }^{3} Here, I want to join consideration of this text that was central to the feminist movements of the mid20th century with another of Beauvoir’s philosophical works, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948). Inspired by a lecture she gave in 1945 and published as installments in the leftist newspaper she helped run in postwar France, Les Temps Moderne, The Ethics of Ambiguity is Beauvoir’s attempt at formulating an existentialist ethics, a task Jean Paul Sartre delayed at the end of Being and Nothingness and a task understood as impossible by György Lukács (Deutscher 2008). Reading any two texts of Beauvoir’s together can be a dangerous prospect, given how her own thought evolved during the tumultuous 20th century. But reading The Ethics of Ambiguity alongside The Second Sex is a productive and less fraught exercise. First, the two texts were produced nearly simultaneously; according to Kruks (2012, 15), when The Ethics of Ambiguity was published, Beauvoir had already completed a large portion of The Second Sex. Second, Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics appears as a part of her explanation of current gender oppression and the potential for gender equality. Beauvoir posits that all humans share an ontological condition that requires individuals to grapple with their capacity for transcendence and their fundamental immanence simultaneously. That is, we are embodied creatures who have the capacity to strive toward a future not yet determined. The play between immanence (or the facticity of existence) and transcendence (the possibility of moving beyond what is given) also undergirds Beauvoir’s characterization of gender oppression: men seek to foist all immanence on women so men can achieve absolute transcendence. Thus, men treat women as confined to and useful only because of their bodies. But this oppressive system is a denial of the fact that men, too, are constrained by being embodied creatures who enter into a world not of their own creation. A more honest relation to the body would require an appreciation that human value is created through striving for a future that does not merely replicate the past (a responsibility for freedom) but that recognizes the impossibility of leaving the past and our bodies behind.
In this section I outline four main aspects of Beauvoir’s thinking on gender and freedom that aid thinking about Me Too: the place of intimacy in gender oppression, the meaning of responsibility for freedom as part of an existentialist ethics, envisioning gender equality and freedom, and the inevitability of failure as a part of ethics.
The intimacy of oppression
Beauvoir’s task in The Second Sex is, in part, to give lie to the claim that men and women had achieved equality given the extension of the right to vote to women in France in 1945. 4{ }^{4} Beauvoir argues that actual living women experience their lives as a realization of the restrictions of their freedom: the blissful childhood open with possibility is progressively and periodically narrowed. Social pressure and experiences force the realization that women’s lives are meant to work primarily in service of the maintenance of life (reproduce and raise children) so that men can produce new possibilities for human existence.
It is the relationship between woman and man that sets up the meaning of being a woman as restriction: “The relation of the two sexes is not that of two electrical poles: the man represents both the positive and the neuter…woman is the negative to such a point that any determination is imputed to her as a limitation” (2009, 5). Beauvoir elaborates further: “Humanity is male, and man defines woman, not in herself but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being…she is nothing other than what man decides; she is thus called ‘the sex,’ meaning that the male sees her essentially as a sexed being; for him she is sex, so she is it in the absolute” (5). The reduction of any person to their body or their sex places their status as an object above any subjective desire they may have. In the context of Me Too, the notion that a person’s body is appropriable because a more powerful person desires that body is crucial for the operation of sexual coercion. 5{ }^{5}
The relationality between men and women that establishes the meaning of gender is part of the larger phenomenon of alterity, or otherness, found in all group identity. Alterity is “the fundamental category of human thought” (de Beauvoir, Borde, and Malovany-Chevallier 2009, 6); all groups identify themselves through setting up others who are not them. As such, each group sets itself as “the essential and sets up the other as inessential, as the object” (de Beauvoir, Borde, and Malovany-Chevallier 2009, 7). If such a category of thought is fundamental, it seems that Beauvoir is positing that the oppression of women by men is almost inevitable, for women cannot help but be the objects to men’s subjects. But she suggests the oppressive relations are the result of nonreciprocal alterity. In conditions of reciprocal alterity, just as you can define the Other as inessential, the Other has a reciprocal capacity to claim that you are inessential. This reciprocal alterity demonstrates the relativity of our claims to being essential: just as when one travels to a foreign country, one feels one’s otherness, such an experience of the self as both essential and inessential sets up the capacity to recognize “difference in equality” (de Beauvoir, Borde, and Malovany-Chevallier 2009, 765) or the desirability of sexual difference that can coexist with claims to equality.
Given the possibility of reciprocal alterity, Beauvoir asks, "How is it, then, that between the sexes this reciprocity has not been put forward, that one of
the terms has been asserted as the only essential one, denying any relativity in regard to its correlative, defining the latter as pure alterity" (2009,7)(2009,7) ? Beauvoir answers her question by arguing that submission by the Other to the terms of the One (in this case, submission of women to men’s status as Absolute) is crucial. “Where does this submission in woman come from” (2009,7)(2009,7) ? Or, in the context of Me Too, we could ask, why have so many men and women who have experienced sexual coercion remained silent?
While Beauvoir provides a host of historical and sociological reasons for the general failure to end gender oppression, she also locates these realities in interpersonal relations. Once women and men are tied together in contemporary oppressive relations, women become trapped in their oppression for three reasons: “she lacks the concrete means, she senses the necessary link connecting her to man without positing its reciprocity, and she often derives satisfaction from her role as Other” (de Beauvoir, Borde, and MalovanyChevallier 2009, 10). The first reason for women’s continued oppression is clear; when men have more access to power, money, and other resources, to break from men would be to descend into privation. This reason has been central in many of the accounts of Me Too. From actors and comedians who know they will be blacklisted if they expose powerful men to the agricultural workers who fear that reporting on supervisors will cost them a job necessary to support their families or make them targets of immigration officials, the lack of access to money and institutions of power make silence a rational, if fear-based, response.
The second and third reasons are less relevant to an analysis of why sexual coercion is so pervasive, but they can help us understand why solidarity among targets of sexual coercion as well as those who have not experienced sexual coercion is so difficult. The second reason concerns the internalized sense of dependence. Even if men desire women sexually, women fail to convert such desire into power. Given that a patriarchal order has organized the habits of emotions, relation, occupation, and more, positing that men need women in the same way that women need men is an extraordinary proposition. The final reason ties women’s intimate oppression to existential ethics: the satisfaction of being an other or being a thing is supported by the temptation to flee freedom. The “metaphysics of freedom” must “invent its goals without help” (de Beauvoir, Borde, and Malovany-Chevallier 2009, 10). To challenge sexual coercion would risk one’s comforts in how things operate now; not every life lived in gender oppression is intolerable. Not only is it scary to create a new world that destroys the familiarity of the past, if you have not experienced sexual coercion or if you have successfully moved on from such experiences, you would be forced to sacrifice the comforts of feminine dependency-including chivalry, protection, and ease -in disrupting masculine hegemony.
Sexual coercion is at the heart of gendered unfreedom. The objectification of an individual in their reduction to their sex is a unifying characteristic of many of the stories that Me Too has made public. It is not an accident that it is predominantly men in positions of power who can enact their visions of the world who are being called to account for acts of sexual coercion. Targets of such coercion often narrate their experiences with an emphasis on the appropriation of their bodies with their protestations being ignored, in other words, becoming sex objects.
Understanding gender oppression is to confront the fundamental ambiguity of human existence and ethics: we are simultaneously beings with material existence (what Beauvoir calls facticity) in that we have bodies that enter into a world not of our making, and we are beings whose basic morality lies in the pursuit of freedom, or to encounter the world by creating novelty, to transcend the given. Beauvoir understands humans to be fundamentally free, meaning that “every subject posits itself as a transcendence concretely, through projects; it accomplishes its freedom only by perpetual surpassing toward other freedoms” (2009,16)(2009,16). But in a world of sexual oppression, attempts are made to freeze some individuals, often women, as objects and doom them to immanence, since their projects of freedom will be forever transcended by another essential and sovereign consciousness (de Beauvoir, Borde, and MalovanyChevallier 2009, 16-17). So long as gender relations are nonreciprocal, the subordinated will never experience freedom. Instead, they will be treated as objects in powerful men’s pursuit of their own transcendence.
Existentialist ethics
Beauvoir’s starting point for imagining the problem of gender oppression and the possibility of its eradication is her existentialist ethics, which is most fully formulated in The Ethics of Ambiguity. There, as in The Second Sex, Beauvoir elaborates the tension between freedom and facticity, a tension that can never be expelled. Beauvoir’s conception of the human condition is bound to an understanding of time. The past is given to us, such that the world we enter into is not of our making. In the context of Me Too, survivors of sexual coercion cannot flee their experience; it will always be a fact. By contrast, the future is radically open, awaiting interventions to shape it into what has not yet been. The present, though, is nothing, by which Beauvoir means that the present is the moment over which one is sovereign; it is the moment of choice, responsibility, and action. It would be easy to misunderstand what Beauvoir is doing here as creating an individual who can be radically abstracted from the givenness of the world, who is most free in their ability to dominate the world and shape it in one’s own image. But Beauvoir heads off such an understanding by articulating the other crucial feature of the human condition: humans are, she argues, in a state of ambiguity; there is
not one meaning to being an individual, but two. One is a subject, one who can act in a world of objects, who has a will and an ability to act. But one is also an object, part of the facticity of others in the world who have their own subjectivity, their own wills, and their own capacity to act. So while we might be sovereign over a present, it is a limited sovereignty because we must act in a world filled with others who are also acting. This dualness, of being both subject and object, Beauvoir says, is the tragic condition of being human. All people have felt this tragedy, because the capacity to control the world is inevitably frustrated, as one must also consider one’s facticity.
The centering of human freedom to act in a world of others as the human condition sets up the proper attitude toward other values and human projects. When people grapple with their dualness genuinely, the first thing they should do is to refuse “to recognize any foreign absolute” (1948, 13); that is, they should refuse imposed moral authority because they will recognize that their individual values should relate to the fact that their own existence “is a pure contingency” (1948,14)(1948,14). There is no necessity to any single human existence, and as such, one must be responsible for how one chooses to engage the world that is given to oneself.
If one is only responsible for living a life of pure contingency, there is a risk of reading Beauvoir as unconcerned with the moral content of any individual choice. If there is no moral authority greater than, say, Harvey Weinstein, who is to say that his routine sexual abuse is wrong? But Beauvoir argues that the absence of a moral authority greater than the individual actually makes humans radically responsible. A life that wants to give itself meaning and truth becomes absolutely responsible for itself, because its errors and injuries are not expungable. One cannot turn to a God for forgiveness for one’s sins; if one has values that ground one’s actions, those values create the standards of judgment rigorously inscribed in those values themselves. But Beauvoir goes further and reminds us that no person lives in a world free of others. All values must respect the freedom of those others, and any freedom that seeks to act on the basis of the curtailment of those others is unjust oppression. Thus, we can condemn men who engage in sexual coercion because they have enacted their freedom at the expense of others; their victims are denied freedom through the assertion of their desire. Beauvoir writes, “For existentialism, it is not impersonal universal man who is the source of values, but the plurality of concrete particular men projecting themselves toward their ends on the basis of situations whose particularity is as radical and irreducible as subjectivity itself. How could men, originally separated, get together?” (1948,17)(1948,17).
This question, of how individuals, originally separated, can come together shifts Beauvoir into a political register. She sees the benefit of existentialism in the fact that "the ethics of ambiguity will be one which will refuse to deny a priori that separate existants can, at the same time, be bound to each other,
that their individual freedoms can forge laws valid for all" (1948,17)(1948,17). If one assumes one’s freedom, then, one must obey the law that freedom entails. Namely, “the freedom of other men must be respected and they must be helped to free themselves. Such a law imposes limits upon action and at the same time immediately gives it a content” (1948,65)(1948,65). To strive for sexual freedom is not to sanction the actions of the powerful. Instead, sexual freedom imposes a limit on action such that we must strive for the freedom of all sexuate beings. The irreducible facts of relationality between the self, the world, and other people create the form within which an ethics born out of human freedom can find its justification.
One can begin to see how an ethics of ambiguity might respond to the nonreciprocal alterity constituted by sexual coercion and gender oppression. If our action, both sexual and political, remained focused on the fact that we ought to support the freedom of others even as we act in our own freedom, then that action would both reject the terms of sexual coercion and be dedicated to supporting the others with whom we share the world. Beauvoir does not suggest that such an ethics would settle gender relations permanently, but a principled dedication to the freedom of the self and other given our worldly constraints points to the possibility of reaching new futures.
It is through the articulation of our values through our habits and actions that we come to make our values into laws that have the power to compel others, while those laws can be accepted or rejected by these others. Beauvoir recognizes that this condition means that there will always be problems, but, as she says, there would be no ethics without problems to be resolved. More precisely, “This is why political choice is an ethical choice: it is a wager as well as a decision; one bets on the chances and risks of the measure under consideration; but whether chances and risks must be assumed or not in the given circumstances must be decided without help and in so doing one sets up values” (1948, 160-61, emphasis mine). As members of a society grappling with sexual coercion, we are called to both wager and decide on how we will relate to Me Too.
Gender equality and freedom
So how could we imagine what sexed freedom under the conditions existentialist ethics might entail? Beauvoir believes both men and women will be freed if they have different relations to alterity, but both must risk the safety of their places if they are to do so. Beauvoir recognizes how fraught this new relationality is for both men and women. As outlined earlier, women give up the comfort of passivity. While the comfort is not all it is promised (as she writes, irresponsibility is characterized as the “best part” of being dominated: "the people who have the best part always shout to their benefactors: It’s too much! I’ll settle for yours! But the magnanimous capitalists, the generous colonialists,
the superb males persist: Keep the best part! Keep it!" [2009, 757]), it is all women have known when they have been raised with the expectation of being wives and mothers first and foremost. But men confront a different difficulty. “Justice can never be created within injustice. It is impossible for a colonial administrator to conduct himself well with the indigenous population…but a man cannot prevent himself from being a man. So here he is, guilty in spite of himself and oppressed by this fault that he has not committed himself” (de Beauvoir, Borde, and Malovany-Chevallier 2009, 759). Given this circumstance, men can take on their roles as oppressors or they can succumb to the claims of women against them and feel injured; either option is frustrating and fails to overcome the condition of male complicity with gender oppression. The response of #NotAllMen to claims of systemic patriarchy or misogyny exemplifies the dilemma of masculine guilt.
Part of the solution to gender inequality is to change the “laws, institutions, customs, public opinion and the whole social context,” certainly not a small feat and one which Beauvoir recognizes has never been achieved. But even that monumental political and social task might be insufficient. Intimacy is both the site of women’s oppression and the space where reframing relations are necessary for equality and freedom. Beauvoir describes the act of sex in the context of gender oppression, where women might find it humiliating to “lie under the man and be penetrated by him” and tense up in frigidity. Men at the same time will claim their “virile aggressiveness” (de Beauvoir, Borde, and Malovany-Chevallier 2009, 763). But there is another way:
man is, like woman, a flesh, thus a passivity, the plaything of his hormones and the species, uneasy prey to his desire; and she, like him, in the heart of carnal fever, is consent, voluntary gift, and activity; each of them lives the strange ambiguity of existence made body in his or her own way…If both assumed with lucid modesty, as the correlate of authentic pride, they would recognize each other as peers and live the erotic drama in harmony…The same drama of flesh and spirit, and of finitude and transcendence, plays itself out in both sexes; both are eaten away by time, stalked by death, they have the same essential need of the other; and they can take that same glory from their freedom; if they know how to savor it, they would no longer be tempted to contend for false privileges; and fraternity could then be born between them. (2009,763)(2009,763)
Thus, in the recognition of one’s fleshiness as something shared among all humans, it could be possible to live in friendship and solidarity. Again, Me Too is demonstrative of what that friendship and solidarity might look like. The slogan “Me Too” begins from the premise that the recognition of the vulnerability of the body to sexual coercion and the risks of narrating experience can help constitute a solidarity around working for a different world. We see that modesty in the face of our facticity must coexist with our desire to create new
futures. In this sense, then, existentialist freedom requires concern for the freedom of others as part of a future of gender equality.
Gender equality lies in an ethics of freedom. If we are properly attuned to both our mutual dependence and our plurality, then we can orient our projects for the future in such a way that we can desire our own freedom in concert with the freedom of others while attending to our bodily needs. This future is not utopian, but we currently cannot imagine what “new carnal and affective relations” this future might open up, in part because it would be the expression of a future that cannot be enclosed in the past or present.
The inevitability of failure
What marks this future as more than a utopic vision is Beauvoir’s commitment to the inevitable failure of our ethical striving for freedom. She argues that we come to know the world through its resistance to our aims. Beauvoir presents the image of a person banging their fist against a stone wall. Surely, she suggests, continuing to bang your fist against a wall is a “useless gesture” (1948, 28). But giving up in the face of the intransigence of the wall should not be called freedom either; such passivity in the face of failure might be an abstract freedom, she says, but it has no content or truth. Rather, when one meets the obstacles of the world, one should “pass beyond” in both heartbreak and joy, to plan for new possibilities. Imagining Beauvoir’s stone wall, we could think about attempting to scale the wall or painting a mural on the wall instead of beating your fist in futility. In this way the obstacles of the world as it exists will always frustrate our pursuit of freedom in the mode of mastery but such a conclusion does not foreclose action; it actually opens the possibility for new futures.
Thus, when we turn to creating new gender relations, we can think alongside the dual heartbreak and joy that is required in striving for gender equality. There are certainly features of the world that are encountered as immoveable with regards to gender relations. For instance, the Women’s March of January 2017 could not stop the ascension of Donald Trump as president. Calls for impeachment in 2017 are similar to striking one’s fist against a stone wall. But instead of resignation to this political reality, an utterly new future has emerged through an integration of this given past with a dream of a new future where people are held accountable for sexual misconduct and targets of sexual assault are supported and valued. Grappling with the inevitable immovability of the past requires integrating that past into our striving for the future, which means our free action is always in the context of its partiality and, indeed, its failure.
In the next section I will apply Beauvoir’s understanding of the source of gender oppression in the context of nonreciprocal alterity and the pursuit of feminist freedom to Me Too’s emergence and importance. In the following
section I will use her conceptions of the alternative reactions to gendered oppression and the inevitability of failure to contextualize the responses to Me Too. My hope is that a Beauvoirian diagnosis of our current moment of Me Too will help readers understand the stakes of our shared political moment and provide a resource for continuing to strive for a world of gender equality.
Me Too and constituting a new political reality
What does it mean for a person to narrate his or her experience with sexual coercion publicly? In one sense, it represents a significant break with the past. In many instances, a “whisper network” already existed to warn others of the existence of sexual wrongdoing. In the world of comedy, it was long rumored that Louis C.K. often masturbated in front of women without their consent (Redden 2017); media and journalism have had their own networks, including a short-lived “shitty media men” list to warn one another (Donegan 2018); for years, hospitality unions have urged employers to give staff panic buttons, given how prevalent hotel guests exposing themselves is (Mody 2018). These moves can be understood as genres of survival strategies; for those who aspire to work in situations where the approval of one or two powerful people can determine one’s life or who must work in situations where labor protections are either nonexistent or unenforced, learning how to avoid those who most readily sexually abuse becomes a way to keep living day to day. But despite rumors, open secrets, jokes that are actually warnings, and political organizing, to actually publicly tell one’s story about being sexually coerced is uniquely exposing and a different genre of action. One risks being ignored, disbelieved, or further harassed by the public. One can lose his or her job, friends, and support networks. In effect, even now during the fervor of Me Too, making sexual coercion public is to risk one’s material safety and sense of self.
Drucilla Cornell (1995) has argued that one of the primary harms of sexual harassment is that it denies individuals their capacity to fully individuate or to come to see oneself as a fully formed person. Sexual harassment entails reducing women to their sex through mechanisms of demeaning women because of their sex, of reducing women’s worth to their sex, or by penalizing women for their withdrawal of consent to their sex. Harassment, and sexual coercion more broadly, is a form of objectification that denies someone the capacity to imagine oneself as a subject as well. It reduces the ability for people to have a sense of their own value and to feel confident in their ability to pursue their own intentions, two crucial aspects of self-respect (Cornell 1995, 211). Even this compromised sense of self becomes endangered through the act of speaking out. One must confront the shame of being the target of sexual coercion when one goes public. The work of internalized shame has been thoroughly documented in regards to sexual harassment and
assault. Women wonder whether they had brought it upon themselves. Did they dress too provocatively? Drink too much? Inadvertently flirt?
This internal questioning is reinforced by cultural stereotypes that divide women in general between good girls and bad girls, those women who are morally pure and beyond reproach and those whose sexuality or gender presentation mark them as sexually licentious or false temptresses of vulnerable and weak men. The notion that women were “asking for it” are aligned with defenses of perpetrators that paint them as innocent: they misread the other’s desires, were clumsy romantics, or were merely being complimentary (Hockenberry 2018). The external stigma of being a target of sexual coercion, of being marked by one’s status of being sexually violated, can produce internalized shame where one comes to wonder whether the offense happened at all or if one had consented to the initial contacts. Beyond internalized shame, the stigma of being a target of sexual coercion can manifest in lost employment, endangering one’s livelihood, lost family and friends, especially if the perpetrator is known and/or liked, and the potential of one’s notoriety as forever associated with being a “victim” binding one’s future to experiences of potential trauma for the duration of their lives. Such a complex of shame and stigma makes silence seem preferable. In a Beauvoirian sense, then, sexual harassment that reduces people to their sex is a mechanism of establishing gender difference by marking some subjects as just their sex because consent is rendered meaningless or irrelevant. Sexual shame reinforces that one cannot claim their sexual identity as his or her own, ensuring that any attempt to claim oneself as a sexual subject will be met with loss of material resources or emotional support.
Me Too and the unprecedented level of individuals making their experiences with sexual coercion public must be interpreted in the context of this sexual shame and stigma. When victims share their stories of assault, they simultaneously challenge two aspects of the construction of gender and sex even while risking and even experiencing the negative consequences of stigma. First, targets of coercion refuse to be reduced to their sex. Speaking out can be interpreted as an attempt to reclaim one’s value and intentionality or a recuperation of a self as subject. Narrating experience requires people to claim their existence as a subject because they are both recounting an event and providing its meaning and potential interpretation. Feminist theory has long argued that lived experience should be considered a form of knowledge alongside scientific inquiry, logic, and so forth, because all knowledge is situated by our objective capacities and our subjective imaginative frameworks (Haraway 1988). The countless narratives of sexual coercion that have constituted the most diffuse aspects of Me Too work to individually claim spaces of subjectivity while actively producing a new form of knowledge about what it means to be situated as a sexed being in a gender oppressive society. But further, speaking publicly calls into question the responsibility of
those who listen. When people describe their experience with sexual coercion publicly, the persons who listen are confronted with their own set of choices. They may engage in avoidance, which would be an ethical and political failure, or they might realize in the listening to others that they are called to respond. That call to action, if it is to be ethical, must be geared toward enabling the freedom of those with whom we are in relation.
Second, those who narrate their experience are creating the capacity for new community formation. This community formation involves inevitable risks and disagreements. Tarana Burke’s original work was based on creating spaces and securing resources for healing and support of survivors; as Jaffe notes (2018), Burke worried that the shift toward outing perpetrators would overshadow her work and focus. Other scholars have pointed out how the media framing of outing accusers has a second potentially negative side effect of obscuring the systemic nature of sexual violence in favor of individualizing stories and accusations (Johnson Hostler and O’Neill 2018).
These risks of focusing on the actions of bad men who then become extraordinary but exceptional examples of bad behavior are real. Johnson Hostler and O’Neill (2018) point out that individuals struggle to understand the systemic aspects sexual violence, instead focusing on internal motivations and individual moral failings. Media reporting repeatedly focuses on the most famous accusers or accused and by mid-2018, a new theme emerged around when men who had been accused were “allowed” to return to their public roles, sometimes though retrospective essays of these now “fallen” men (see, for instance Ghomeshi 2018; Hockenberry 2018). At the same time, when Time magazine named “The Silence Breakers” its “Person of the Year” in 2017, the cover story carefully highlighted the gender-formation aspects of sexual violence by connecting the narratives of celebrity with those who were raised to celebrity because of their accounts (like Susan Fowler whose blogged accounts of sex discrimination at Uber made her unwittingly famous), those who were already working as advocates of survivors and legal change without such fame, and those who remain anonymous because of the fear of repercussions of speaking out. A sense of potential solidarity through community formation undergirds the new systemic focus of Me Too.
This solidarity’s potential lies in relation to the fact that sexual harassment and assault are both structural features of various institutions, including educational settings, workplaces, and intimate relationships, but also in that the pervasiveness of sexual coercion structures gendered identity. The Beauvoirian insights that men qua gender are situated as subjects who can transcend the facticity of the world while women qua gender are reduced to their sex explains the presumption that men can legitimately treat women (and feminized men) as mere bodies while institutions work to protect the subject position of such men. Furthermore, while such situatedness begins in
a gender-binary, where men are perpetrators and women targets, the nonreciprocal alterity that undergirds gender oppression can shift to accommodate women as perpetrators and men as targets. Beauvoir recognizes that the masculine position is attractive for anyone who can apprehend it. Early in the Second Sex, Beauvoir relates an anecdote of a woman who refused to be part of a photographed series of women writers who demanded to be included in the man’s category and who used her husband’s influence to secure that position (de Beauvoir, Borde, and Malovany-Chevallier 2009, 4). We can understand that this woman desired the prestige accorded to men writers and that she used her own power and institutional connections (in this case, the connection to her husband) to appropriate male privilege. It is the structuring of masculine and feminine that can adhere to particularly sexed bodies, more than the bodies themselves, that places us into gendered relations that include vulnerability to sexual violence.
What does this have to do with solidarity? A situational affinity can develop around the public contestation of sexual coercion because of the centrality of sexual coercion to the constitution of gender. Because it is pervasive and structural, people are placed in relation to others because of its presence and its function to separate masculine privilege of freedom and actions from feminized objectification. Those who have been rendered objects can create the conditions to reject the completeness of that objectification and act with others to contest the terms that rendered them objects in the first place. Alianza Nacional de Campesinas’s (the National Farmworkers Women’s Alliance) letter in support of the “Take Back the Workplace March,” organized by the Feminist Majority Foundation, a grassroots organization dedicated to direct action; Civican, an organization dedicated to using social networking for political action; and We for She, an organization working toward gender balance in television, was exemplary of the potential of affinity to produce solidarity. The letter noted that while the television and film stars who were the focus of the March and much of the publicity of Me Too lived lives far removed from the 700,000 women who worked in agriculture and food packing, they shared a common relation to vulnerability to sexual coercion. I will quote the letter, published in Time magazine at length:
We share a common experience of being preyed upon by individuals who have the power to hire, fire, blacklist and otherwise threaten our economic, physical and emotional security. Like you, there are few positions available to us and reporting any kind of harm or injustice committed against us doesn’t seem like a viable option. Complaining about anything-even sexual harassment-seems unthinkable because too much is at risk, including the ability to feed our families and preserve our reputations. We understand the hurt, confusion, isolation and betrayal that you might feel. We also carry shame and fear resulting from this violence. It sits on our backs like oppressive weights. But, deep in our hearts we
know that it is not our fault. The only people at fault are the individuals who choose to abuse their power to harass, threaten and harm us, like they have harmed you. In these moments of despair, and as you cope with scrutiny and criticism because you have bravely chosen to speak out against the harrowing acts that were committed against you, please know that you’re not alone. We believe and stand with you. (Time 2017)
The Time’s Up campaign that was spurred by those Hollywood stars took a reciprocal step of setting up a legal defense fund for people reporting sexual harassment, regardless of “industry, rank, or role” (National Women’s Law Center 2018). By March 2018 the fund had more than 2121\21 21 million and over 1,800 women had reached out for legal help (Blair 2018). Such potential has also been realized in the form of class actions lawsuits, a sexual harassmentbased strike of MacDonald’s fast food chain, and reports of women who came forward who say they have leaned on others in their industry for support after their own public accounts (Dockterman 2018). Of course, such solidarity will always grapple with its own limits; Bernice Yeung (2018) published an account of 17 women who say that Me Too has not “come for them.” Me Too is also vulnerable to criticisms that it has primarily elevated the experience of white, privileged women and that its focus on legal remedies once again falls into the trap of individuating fault rather than sustaining focus on the structural nature of sexual coercion. As with any potential, the potential solidarity of Me Too cannot be assumed nor should it be automatically ratified as an unalloyed social good.
Confronting critique and failure: The promise of ambiguity for thinking Me Too
The gaps and the failures of Me Too must remain in our telling because they help us grapple with Beauvoir’s contention that both ethics and freedom only exist when they cannot claim mastery. But so too must we grapple with the criticisms of the movement because they may represent a failure of imagination in how people currently claim Me Too. In this section I will review some of the incompleteness and gaps of the movement as it stands but what such incompleteness can tell us about the value of an ethics of ambiguity grounded in an existentialist freedom. Second, I will turn to two of the most prominent criticisms of the world Me Too seems to be inaugurating: that Me Too leaves too many women and men behind and that Me Too is creating a new sexually repressive order. These criticisms, often framed as backlash, could be encountered more productively as an invitation to embrace the partiality and uncertainty that accompanies freedom.
Early in the viral history of the hashtag #MeToo, Tarana Burke penned an essay that appeared in The Washington Post. In it she expressed fears that with the uptake of the phrase by famous white women, the stories and needs
of others would be sidelined. As she writes, “What history has shown us time and again is that if marginalized voices-those of people of color, queer people, disabled people, poor people-aren’t centered in our movements then they tend to become no more than a footnote” (Burke 2017). Notably, Lupita Nyong’o’s account of her assault by Harvey Weinstein was the only one to receive significant pushback from Weinstein’s lawyers; R. Kelly’s sexual crimes have yet to result in the sort of distancing and denigration that has taken down white male perpetrators. 6{ }^{6} While both of these experiences remain as anecdotes of celebrity, the larger point, that the differences in circumstance, reaction, and publicity of the sexual coercion of women of color remain a footnote in thinking about Me Too.
Articles also note the scores of folks who seem to be missing from the public consciousness of sexual coercion: military women, LGBTQ survivors, men, sex workers, domestic violence survivors, conservative women, and incarcerated women, to name a few. We should neither be surprised nor complacent in the face of the elisions of particular stories from collective understanding of sexual coercion and differential vulnerability. Access to the public sphere has continually been mediated by the construction of one’s legitimacy as a speaking subject. Forms of powerlessness that mark groups, such as women of color, male targets of sexual assault, people with disabilities, gender nonconforming people, and undocumented immigrants, also mar their ability to speak and be heard. Furthermore, as Michael Warner (2002) has demonstrated and as social media has exacerbated, we inhabit a universe of various publics and counterpublics. Counterpublics, for Warner, are defined by their knowledge of their subordinate status in relation to the dominant public even if their members are not themselves subordinate. But counterpublics are also characterized by their capacity for worldmaking; for their members, they are formed as a community through the networks of action and communication that are then transformative of identity. Thus, the exclusion of these voices from what some would characterize as a monolithic Me Too is not an end point but should be understood through the fact that we are in media res; the future direction of Me Too is not predetermined and the fact that conversations around sexual coercion are being had in counterpublics, including conversations about the fact of the exclusion of those conversations from a dominant public, speaks to the openness and freedom of our future of contesting gender oppression in unanticipated ways. Their current exclusion or subordination is a stark reminder that Me Too is intervening in a world only partially transformed by feminist activism and thus has to contend with the same constraints that mark all progressive activism: racial hierarchy, undemocratic organization of work, xenophobia, anti-queer aggression, and ableism, to name a few.
Here, then, it is useful to return to Beauvoir. The ethics of ambiguity reminds us that we are always situated in a world not of our making, but in order to act, we must imagine that we are free while recognizing those
constraints. This seeming contradiction of situatedness as both immanence and transcendence should help us confront the partiality of our attempts. But even further, for Beauvoir, to act with an ethic of freedom means to support the freedom of others as well. In that way the partiality of our actions can recursively return to the meaning of freedom in order to act again with renewed attention to how one should orient one’s action such that others too can express their freedom through their own action. Thus, holding the dominant voices of Me Too accountable for what is missing is part and parcel of freedom. To do so also opens the possibility for continued transformation of the regulation of gender through the use of violence.
Me Too has been criticized not just for the exclusion of particular bodies and experiences; it has also been criticized for what is perceived to be overcorrection. Within a couple of months of the hashtag going viral, reports of perceived “overreach” were already filtering into the media (Tolentino 2018). Such claims of overreaction intensified after the confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court. The notion that activists do not or cannot discern a difference between rape, pervasive harassment, and a person who acts a little creepily characterizes Me Too as a sex panic. Sex panics, as understood by Gilbert Herdt, occur when “people become totally overwhelmed by and defined through the meanings and rhetoric of sexual threats and fears. The sexual ‘folk devil’-the sexual other, whether oversexed or undersexed-is stripped of rights, and the cultural imagination becomes obsessed with anxieties about what this evil sexuality will do to warp society and future generations” (2009, 5). Understood as a sex panic, Me Too could be seen as creating a folk devil out of men, demanding that those accused lose their social standing, including employment, and be driven out of positions of power through extrajudicial shame, if not a demand to criminally prosecute men in biased and rushed trials. For some, Me Too is a (caricatured) return to the puritanical feminism of the sex wars of the 1980s, where women are understood to be sexually inert and any expression of sexual desire or arousal is conflated with aggression and domination. An open letter written by Sarah Chiche, Catherine Millet, Catherine Robbe-Grillet, Peggy Sastre, and Abnousse Shalmani and signed by over 100 French women warned of the dangers of Me Too as a sexual panic that would ultimately shut down women’s sexual freedom: “This frenzy for sending the ‘pigs’ to the slaughterhouse, far from helping women empower themselves, actually serves the interests of the enemies of sexual freedom, the religious extremists, the reactionaries and those who believe-in their righteousness and the Victorian moral outlook that goes with it-that women are a species ‘apart,’ children with adult faces who demand to be protected” (“Full Translation” 2018). These women proclaimed that “the right to bother,” to make clumsy sexual advances, was part of sexual freedom more broadly and that the Me Too movement’s conflation of men who “try to steal a kiss” or "send sexually charged messages to women who did
not return their interest" with sexually violent men threatened much more than to punish innocent men. It threatened the very terms of women’s freedom as sexuate beings.
Weigel (2018) coined the term “straw girl” to refer to arguments premised on the inability of pro-Me Too advocates to distinguish between a stolen kiss and rape. She argues that the mischaracterization of Me Too is actually a symptom of the fact that the movement is focused on sexual coercion as a systemic and structural issue; obviously, the act of unwantedly kissing someone is distinct from rape but both might be expressions of a wider underlying phenomenon of masculine claims to the bodies of those who are reduced to their sex. While Weigel’s response is a valuable rebuttal to the claim that Me Too is overzealous and seeking to prosecute all men who have made sexual missteps, the worry of a sex panic reveals both the underlying threat of Me Too to current relations of gender oppression and that all transformations of systems of oppression risk producing undesirable new forms of relation. Beauvoir herself recognized this danger. “All oppression creates a state of war” (2009,754)(2009,754) such that women may attempt to “abolish this inferiority by destroying male superiority. She does her utmost to mutilate, to dominate man, she contradicts him, she denies his truth and values” (2009, 754). The possibility that women, whose sexual violation has mirrored the Victorian ideals of purity, virginity, and sexual disinterest, would impose the same values that have dominated their sexual unfreedom on men is real because one potential response to oppression is revenge. Denying the presence of the desire for revenge in any movement against oppression is dangerous because such denial will merely repress this future until it becomes our past and thus determine our facticity. Just as one might object to the open letter of Millet and her coauthors based on its broad brushstrokes that associate an entire decentralized movement with puritanical fervor to deny men their sexual beings, we should object to any characterization of Me Too totally pure and free from the desire for revenge. The difficulties of grappling with the ambiguities and failures of being a sexed being require allowance for stumbling and failing in attempts to regulate sex as a component of seeking true reciprocal relations among people of all genders.
Conclusion
Remaking sexual relations, given that gender oppression seems to have no history, is certain to be a fraught ethical endeavor with fits and starts, reversals, and exclusions. Me Too represents the public emergence of the grassroots work that has been undertaken for decades as an incredibly significant public reckoning with the current place of sexual coercion in making gender and the feminist demands to produce truly reciprocal gender relations. Such public emergence contains multitudes because it is an exercise
of the ambiguity of embodied freedom. Each target of sexual coercion who comes forward with their story is in a kind of rebellion against their facticity but one which they recognize is inescapable. In a radical way, where many survivors have lived their lives as a kind of lie, where they had to deny what happened to their bodies or to deny how significant it was in their constitution of their subjectivity, by saying “Me Too,” they are simultaneously recognizing the facticity of their bodies and the facticity of a past which they did not choose is inescapable and their inherent human capacity to remake the future through their freedom. As such, they are enacting the ethics of ambiguity and providing an object lesson in how politics and political theory can dwell in the paradox of human existence. We are neither the mechanical creatures of predictive models nor the pure being of ontological freedom, and yet we are also both at the same time.
The actors of the Me Too movement are exemplars of Beauvoirian freedom in another way as well: they have taken responsibility for their freedom in confronting the risks of losing the security of the previous order and as part of that responsibility, seek to extend the possibility of freedom to others. Tarana Burke’s first use of “Me Too” was a way to cope with her own speechlessness hearing a 13-year-old girl narrate her experience of sexual assault. Speechlessness and resourcelessness went hand in hand for Burke, and so saying “Me Too” and providing resources for survivors were ways to help claim a future never free from that trauma but one that could move beyond it. When the contingency of human affairs moved the phrase from Burke’s grassroots organizing to a global social media phenomenon by a tweet by Alyssa Milano, something new emerged from what came before. Both Burke and Milano, though, acted in ways that demonstrated this notion of freedom as requiring concern for the freedom of others; Milano credited Burke for her work and Burke herself said that Me Too was bigger than either herself or Milano: “Neither one of us should be centered in this work. This is about survivors” (2017).
We should resist the urge to pen a panegyric to the movement because a search for unadulterated praise will deny the reality not only of Me Too but of freedom itself. Humans are not pure transcendence and so grappling with our facticity means grappling with our fallibility and incompleteness. Only an honest reckoning and continued openness to listen, clarify, and transform will maintain the feminist politics that have thus far animated this current moment. We should feel the freedom to fail in our attempts at remaking gender relationality and appreciate the dangers inherent in our efforts. If justice can never emerge from injustice, we have to recognize that in a world of gender, racial, and multitudes of other injustices, even in our moves of freedom, we are guilty in spite of ourselves. If we currently have no satisfactory solutions to the conditions of sexual coercion, our only option is to work to create satisfactory conditions for the future through the production of solidarity and the continual claiming of our freedom.
Notes
- The characterization of Me Too as a movement is one I will follow here, recognizing that such a characterization is partial, given the new mechanisms of social media’s role in transforming the terms of mass mobilization. A wider consideration of whether Me Too fits in our current theories of movement emergence is beyond the scope of this article.
- In this article I will use the term “sexual coercion” to connote the range of sexual abuses that have been made public under the banner of #MeToo. Coercion refers to the act of forcing someone to act or not act by use of manipulation, threats, or violence. It covers a range of sexual misconduct from emotional and psychological abuse and gaslighting to secure sex, workplace harassment, and sexual assault and rape. I use the term to acknowledge that #MeToo has been used to publicize the full range of sexual misconduct that includes but is not exhausted by illegal acts. Furthermore, as several commentators have noted, the experience of sexual misconduct is part of a wider culture that trains women to see sex as something to be borne and not something in which they are an active participant.
- In reconstructing Beauvoir’s argument in The Second Sex, I will retain her focus on the binary relations of man and woman. There are obvious limitations of such a framework in thinking about sexual coercion. First, gender non-conforming and transgender people are at heightened vulnerability to all forms of sexual coercion and especially sexual violence. Second, men are vulnerable to sexual coercion at lower rates than women or gender non-conforming people, but that vulnerability is rarely acknowledged. I think Beauvoir’s framework that sees the reduction of women to her sex in the gender binary helps explain why violating gender norms increases sexual vulnerability and the dynamics of subjecting men to sexual coercion exposes similar dynamics of objectification of the less powerful as their sex. In reconstructing Beauvoir, I will retain her man/woman binary but I will gesture toward the fact that her thinking can be reconfigured to make sense of the broader dynamics of sexual coercion and gender.
- Numerous scholars have criticized Beauvoir’s Western-centrism and a gender binary that guides much of the writing of the book. Beauvoir does make some global claims and some characterizations of non-Western women that should give us pause (Kruks 2012). But scholars have found her contention of that gender is socially constituted through relationality to serve as a resource for theorizing beyond the limits of her own thinking (Deutscher 2008).
- Although Beauvoir is describing the constitution of women’s subordination as a class, in the context of sexual coercion, the relation of the masculine and the feminine does not have to map onto men and women so neatly.
- At the time of publication, public sentiment seems to be turning against R. Kelly.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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