A while ago, but it can’t have been that long ago, I was asked to give a talk about October 7 and the feminists. Why, the prompt was, were feminists not bothered about all the raping? Presumably you can want to free Palestine but deem some methods unacceptable, so what, in effect, was the progressive left’s deal?
I said that I didn’t see any sort of conflict, because there is no more such thing as a set of usual suspects concerned with women’s safety above all else. This was a fad, it had its moment, nobody cared. The beyond-rapey elderly Frenchman evidently kept at it until 2020, kept torturing his wife, almost as if 2017 didn’t happen. We’ve seen all manner of outright antifeminist backlash, all over the place, because—isn’t it always thus—it feels as though the feminists won, that the feminists overreached, but nothing much was reached.
The legacy of #MeToo is thus not a world free of gender-based violence or mansplaining or whatever else but rather a world free of women being allowed to enjoy themselves in uncomplicated ways. This was my takeaway, I guess, from the book I just reviewed over at The Canadian Jewish News, Jill Ciment’s memoir Consent. Ciment had what sounds like a long and happy marriage to a man she admired to the end, who was a decent sort, even if one sets the bar a bit higher than French sadists. But the entire book felt a bit as though she felt as if she owed it—to whom?—to grapple with the problematicness of her having been 17 rather than 18 or 38 or whatever when the two of them got together. But at the end of the day, she was happy. Isn’t that what everyone wants?
The review goes into more of that angle, but I am now somehow very stuck on the fleetingness of #MeToo, of how quaint it all feels.
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