For someone who is against simplistic outlooks, you sure are reductionist toward the #MeToo movement and the #LockHerUp chant. Who are you to say that the people (men and women) who used that hashtag are simply jumping on a bandwagon? Especially for victims of sexual assault, you’re demeaning their experience by dismissing their stories. “Don’t hop on board a boat unless you know exactly where it’s going.” Many people just wanted to no longer be silent. That’s what the movement was made to enable. Every time you confess that you think people using the hashtag are part of an unquestioning mass, you’re telling me that you disbelieve me, an individual with a very real experience of severe trauma, and all other disparate individuals with a very different experience. I don’t want to be in this group, however heterogeneous, believe me. I have no interest in ruining someone’s life, but make no mistake that mine was ruined by the assault, and that’s why #MeToo is empowering. It’s the thought of not being alone.
Moreover, you’re confusing #MeToo with “simplistic labels such as ‘mansplaining’ or ‘all men are trash’.” You haven’t been paying attention to the conversation if you think that’s all there is to it. There is discussion of nuance, quite a bit of it here on Medium, yet by regurgitating your article in your response to me and calling for respectful debate to posture yourself as the “reasonable party,” you’ve revealed that you don’t understand the issue well enough to make any arguments about it. Moreover, it didn’t really add anything to your article, so I suspect you just want to shoehorn it in safely express your disdain for a movement that’s empowered a lot of people, or for Trump supporters whose position you disregard as sheep even though there’s quite a bit of variation among them. And because Hillary Clinton was corrupt, the use of that chant is almost justifiable, even it was uttered by people who don’t know all the details. Yet you link the two phenomena and express your moral superiority by your assertion that you don’t bandwagon…although your simplistic take on the two suggests that you haven’t given them enough thought to justify your posture.
