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LRT: For the past two years, I’ve noticed that stories we used to call “feminist” are increasingly lumped together under the rubric of “#MeToo stories,” and I think that is stunting our understanding in some really important ways.
Rape and sexual assault are one manifestation of sexism. A very important manifestation, because they are the blunt-force tool used to keep women in line (along with domestic violence) and rape culture is how we numb young men into seeing women as less than human.
But violence exists on a spectrum - from rape to verbal/emotional abuse & harassment to workplace discrimination to sexist stereotyping to just not respecting women or taking them seriously, with a thousand other things in between - and that spectrum is what we call “sexism.”
If our question to determine whether a guy is problematic is “does this count as #MeToo?” we end up discounting forms of sexism that don’t look violent but are still life-ruining. Our question should be “does this reinforce second-class or less-than-human status for women?”
You don’t have to burn crosses on lawns to be racist, you don’t have to beat queer people up to be a homophobe, you don’t have to rape people to be sexist. This should be simple but people resist it.
The reason people resist this is that it implicates them. It says that telling a sexist joke or condescending to female colleagues helps build the system that makes rape happen. Which is true. And important. And something we really don’t like thinking about.
Biden’s cuddling habit isn’t sexual as most people define the term. It’s paternalistic. He’s treating women like children, or like pets. He’s reinforcing women’s inhumanity, though, and that’s what counts. That’s just as serious no matter what hashtag you put on it.
To resist the structural dehumanization of women, we have to be willing to get just as angry at benevolent or passive or structural sexism as we do at overt misogynist violence. Sexism is the cage, rapists are just the guards standing outside it. That’s all.
