Personal Responsibility: A New Paradigm of Consent Post-#MeToo

The discourse is shifting.

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In 2017 when the #MeToo^[1] movement went viral and became a global sensation (after many years of hard work already done by Tarana Burke), we saw a lot of improvements to the discourse around consent and consent education, but we also saw some unintended consequences that we are just beginning to undo with better strategies.

One unexpected outcome was a rise in misandry. Misandry, or the hatred of men, unfortunately doesn’t do anything to inspire men to learn or to change. It positions men as the problem in a society that sculpts them. While some men are exceptionally problematic, and others complicit with hope for growth, many men actively seek to do better, be better, and unlearn cultural, sexual, and gender norms. Hating these men eats away at the very social webbing they could lean on for support in that growth. The impact of misandry on a woman also has to be considered. When a cis, heterosexual woman adopts misandrist views, she typically begins to believe that her safety and wellbeing in romantic and sexual relationships is contingent on men changing. To me, this is antithetical to the project of women’s–or anyone’s–empowerment. To say it slightly differently, I find it incredibly disempowering to believe that my safety is contingent on other people changing. This strips me of agency. I become powerless to create conditions in which I feel safe/r.

We received an unequivocal mandate for our t-shirts and embroidered pillows: BELIEVE WOMEN. Now, I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t believe women; that would be a wildly bad faith read of my point. What I think “believe women” initially meant was that when a group of women tell you they’ve been assaulted by a man in a position of power, believe them. When an individual women tells you she’s been sexually assaulted, believe her. But we can’t ignore any and all other context. Women are no less prone to lying, manipulating, forgetting, altering memories in hindsight, or blaming other people for their icky feelings than any other gender. Unfortunately, some women do make up sexual assaults and I have to imagine they’re experiencing a lot of pain and suffering from perhaps a lifetime of not being heard, but these women are in the minority and what they’re doing, quite frankly, is a huge slap in the face to people who’ve actually experienced sexual assault. I think what happens much more often is that a woman had sex she may have felt conflicted or ambivalent about it (ex. I liked him and wanted to have sex but didn’t like the sex, or I was really tired but agreed to have sex anyway and now that he hasn’t called me back I feel resentful and I regret the sex) and in hindsight, the sex feels less than consensual. She may tell her friend that she had sex she didn’t feel great about, or wasn’t “enthusiastic” about, and due to black and white thinking on matters related to sex that stems from bumper sticker education like “Anything other than an enthusiastic yes is a no,” her friend may label her experience as rape or assault and pressure her to report it or, god forbid, make a TikTok video about it. Her friends might say, “We need to hold men accountable!”

But, to my first point, the cry, “Hold men accountable!” so often stems from misandry. It’s not about holding an individual man accountable for his actions, it’s usually more about holding one man disproportionately accountable for the entire history of patriarchy on this planet. We want to make an example out of him, burn him at the stake for the sins of all men who came before. Meanwhile, many of these women (including the bisexual ones) continue to date men which creates a horrible environment in which that man is supposed to learn and grow while being constantly shat on by the woman he loves.

And I have to ask if the misandry and the blanket statements have actually helped make sex and relationships better or improved the quality of life of women and survivors of sexual assault and rape. Has blaming men, attempting to ‘hold men accountable,’ and taking people at their word without considering any factors other than what they said helped survivors get the support they need to heal? Has it brought consent education to the masses? Has it reduced rape? Has it improved people’s sex lives and relationships? I dream of a world in which shame, guilt, and fear of exile and punishment aren’t the motivating factors to being a half decent human being.

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Anni Albers