749436

editorial2018
EJW0010.1177/1350506817749436European Journal of Women’s StudiesEditorial

Editorial EJ WS
European Journal of Women’s Studies
2018, Vol. 25(1) 3­–9
Ambiguities and dilemmas © The Author(s) 2018
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Hardly a day has passed since the accusations of sexual harassment against US film pro-
ducer Harvey Weinstein in October 2017 without a new allegation being made. Powerful
men – producers, actors, directors, politicians, well-known TV anchors, journalists and
sports doctors – have been publicly accused of sexual harassment, assault and rape by a
growing number of women.
Within days after the first accusations against Weinstein appeared in the media,
women who had had similar experiences began to use the #MeToo platform to tell their
story. Since then #MeToo has become a global phenomenon, spreading from the US to
the UK, Canada, Australia, Israel, India and beyond. The end is nowhere in sight.
Given that the new EJWS co-editor Christina Scharff is on maternity leave until April
2018, and Kathy has agreed to stay on as guest editor, we decided to use this editorial to
explore some of our concerns about #MeToo and, more generally, feminist responses to
the problem of sexual harassment and sexual violence. It is worth remembering here that
#MeToo started in the USA a decade ago as activism by Black women who had experi-
enced sexual violence. It was supposed to ‘let other survivors know they are not alone’
and create solidarity with the victims.1 This is what the present #MeToo campaign is
claiming to be doing now. However, we have found ourselves asking if this is actually
what is being accomplished. We have both worked on issues of violence against women,
and have watched the unfolding of the accusations of sexual assault around #MeToo with
mixed feelings.

Kathy: 
I came of age as a feminist in the 1970s. Sexual harassment, rape and
sexual violence were top priorities on the feminist agenda and one of
our strategies for combating them was the personal testimony of what
we at that time referred to as the ‘survivors’. I remember as a young
student helping to organize a teach-in at my university. In addition to
offering many fiery feminist speeches decrying sexual violence against
women in any form and blaming individual men (‘in every man lurks a
rapist’ was a popular slogan) or, more generally, patriarchy, we had one
– and only one – personal testimony from a woman who had been raped.
She bravely, but with a shaky voice, described her experience to a
mostly sympathetic audience, although there were a few hecklers in the
room as well. It felt daring to be breaking the silence and we were pre-
pared for contemptuous reactions from men who did not see sexual har-
assment or even sexual violence as a problem. (Those were the days
when a married woman could not be raped according to the law.)
4 European Journal of Women’s Studies 25(1)

Given this background, I should have been overjoyed at the far-reaching

responses to #MeToo and the immediate consequences of some of the
perpetrators admitting their guilt, providing public apologies, and – in
some cases – being forced to resign their jobs or step down from public
office. To my surprise, however, I felt a bit ambivalent about the #MeToo
phenomenon. And it troubles me that my response as a feminist is less
clear-cut now than it was in the 1970s.
Dubravka: 
I missed the 1970s feminist teach-ins on rape, but I have dealt with
sexual violence against both women and men in war and violent conflict
in my research on ex-Yugoslavia. I have also learned from the work of
feminists around the globe involved in research on Indian partition, the
liberation struggles in Bangladesh and Vietnam, on wars in Democratic
Republic of Congo and Darfur, and finally, on the violence perpetrated
in Abu Ghraib. One thing all this research has taught me is that the con-
text matters; and within the context the question has to be asked about
the social locations of the perpetrators and victims. Another lesson has
been that both acts of violence and their media visibility are important
to analyse. Both of these lessons have forced me to twist my brain
around #MeToo. And who better to twist it with than Kathy!
If I take a look around me, I do not see that things have changed for the
better since the 1970s regarding the voyeuristic, sexist and misogynist
nature of our societies. I have always been wary of public descriptions
of sexual assaults with vivid details. In many ways, such descriptions
re-inscribe women as sexual objects. However, the dilemma remains
how to speak about the sexual assault on a body without addressing the
hard facts of corporeality. Standing in the public eye and speaking about
an experience of assault not only takes courage; it also takes incredible
strength of mind and sense of self-possession in order to remain a per-
son, and not be reduced to, or by, the acts of violence. In the 1970s – and
still today, I might add – such acts of speaking out are usually defined
by feminists as ‘agency’ – an active defiance and resistance to the patri-
archal prescription of silence and shame.
Yet agency has always been important for feminism precisely because it
is more than an individual capacity; rather, it is practice that is instru-
mental for social change. Clearly, there has been change. Sexual assault
against women, including marital rape, has been criminalized in many
places across the world; many institutions (including the military) now
acknowledge the reality of sexual harassment and assault, and have cre-
ated mechanisms (such as ombud representatives and complaint com-
mittees) to address it. All of this is thanks to feminist activism throughout
the 1970s and 1980s. But we are all too aware what an ordeal it still is
for women to bring up legal charges and go through trials, not to men-
tion how rare it is for the perpetrator to get an appropriate punishment.
Without belittling the relevance of legal change, we also all know this is
not the same as social change. Whether and to what extent the recent
Editorial 5

wave of accusations will translate into any kind of substantial change

remains to be seen.
Kathy:  I want to raise the question here of who is able to speak out. There are
still many women who would not be able to participate in what has now
become the #MeToo movement, either because they don’t have access
to the (social) media or because the sanctions would be too great. While
it certainly took courage to come out on #MeToo, it was also a platform
for individual women who were confident enough to stand up and pow-
erful enough to be heard. Many of the women were well-known celebri-
ties and they situated themselves as agents, not as victims. This is a very
different kind of activism than, for example, Take Back the Night rallies
in the USA, the collective protest in India around the ubiquitous harass-
ment of women in public (called ‘eve teasing’) or OpAntiSH (Operation
Anti Sexual Harassment) in Cairo where women and men support wom-
en’s access to political demonstrations and religious festivals and rescue
them from situations where they are being harassed or assaulted. This
kind of activism does not focus on the testimony of individual woman,
but frames sexual violence as a collective issue facing all women, which
requires raising public awareness and involving both women and men in
grass-root activism as well as transforming institutions which condone
violence against women.
Dubravka: 
Yes, who speaks and who is heard remains crucial! Today the most vis-
ible #MeToo women are powerful: rich and famous celebrities, well-
known TV personalities, journalists, and members of political elites.
The fact that they are famous and that many are speaking at the same
time, makes all the difference in allowing their accusations to be heard
and believed. I am reminded of Nafissatou Diallo, the New York hotel
maid who accused Strauss-Khan of sexual assault in 2011. She stood no
chance, precisely because their social locations were so hugely, un-com-
parably different: she was a black immigrant hotel maid, he was a white
national of a powerful European state and the director of one of the most
powerful financial agencies in the world. And Kathy, as you wrote in the
editorial of the time, feminists at that time missed an opportunity to join
with protesting chamber maids who stood by Diallo (Davis, 2012).
When Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment in
1991, she stood no chance because she was the only one who spoke
against him. Worse still, because both she and Thomas were black, she
was accused of kindling racism against Thomas and harming the black
cause in the US. In both cases, media have turned against the accusers,
not the accused. Today, we see the opposite: media seem to believe the
accusers, fully and unconditionally – precisely what feminists hoped for
since the 1970s! But should we rejoice about it? What are media doing
here?
Kathy:  This makes me think of a particularly disturbing example of the power
of the media in the #MeToo campaign which recently occurred in the
6 European Journal of Women’s Studies 25(1)

Netherlands. A popular male journalist accused a male TV producer of

drugging him and forcing him to have oral sex. His story appeared first
in a local newspaper and a few days later he talked about his experience
in a TV talk show. The accused appeared a week later on the same talk
show, accompanied by his lawyer. He was clearly shaken. He denied
that he had forced the journalist into having sex with him. Although he
agreed that the experience had not been particularly memorable, it had
certainly not been a rape. However, this accusation so many years later
had done irreparable damage to his reputation and career. I found myself
wondering uncomfortably who was right, but, more importantly, I won-
dered why we, the general public, were being called upon to decide
about the innocence or guilt of these two individuals in the first place.
The #MeToo phenomenon has provided public recognition and support
for individuals who have experienced sexual harassment or sexual vio-
lence. However, it has also generated a ‘trial by media’ where individual
men are publicly ‘blamed and shamed’ for actions for which they often
suffer severe consequences, and before having a chance to defend them-
selves. As imperfect as the legal system is, I must admit that I really
longed for a juridical procedure here.
Dubravka: The media – and especially social media – have made a huge difference
for #MeToo, allowing it to become much easier to spread the word. But
I share your discomfort. We should be concerned about a number of
things here. First, we should not assume that what is happening among
the political and cultural elites will automatically ‘trickle down’ to the
streets. In other words, we should not expect that office workers, teach-
ers, shop owners or policemen will be equally easily publicly ‘blamed
and shamed’ or dismissed from their jobs because they have harassed
and assaulted dozens of women (and men). Second, as someone who
has studied media representations, I am also worried that visibility and
exposure will be taken as a solution to the problem of sexual violence.
In other words, I am worried that ‘making a person (especially the
accused) visible’ will be mistaken for ‘making the problem visible’.
Sadly, this is not the same, and the former can actually hamper the latter.
Making powerful men as perpetrators and young, beautiful women
celebrities visible as victims carries a danger of forgetting that sexual
harassment, assault and violence are very much part of everyday life of
many different women and men, and that when feminists say it is a mat-
ter of ‘power relations’ we do not actually reduce this power to a number
of powerful men. We want to look at larger power structures that allow
men – be they ‘powerful’ or not – to treat women as their sex objects.
And this is where I also see the danger of this current mode of public
‘blaming and shaming’ of specific ‘bad men’. This is a moralizing
approach that takes us back to the 1950s when anything that had to do
with sexual violence against women was seen as an attack on morality,
decency, etc.
Editorial 7

Kathy:  It used to be easy to think of sexual harassment in terms of oppressors

(men) and victims (women). However, things have become more com-
plicated in our postfeminist era in which harassment is embedded in a
culture where pornography is ubiquitous and women’s autonomy is
translated into always being ‘up for it’ (Gill, 2007). There are plenty of
instances of powerful men who believe they are entitled to do what they
like (Trump’s ‘grab her pussy’ remark comes to mind). However, there
are nuances and differences in acts and in actors and we need to look at
sexual harassment with the same careful attention that we give to any
other experience where individuals are negotiating complicated and
often ambiguous relations involving sexuality and power. There are
grey areas and we need to expect misunderstandings. I was really struck,
Dubravka, by a recent incident at your university where a young male
student was accused of groping by two female students. While his
behaviour was clearly out of line and the female students were right to
initiate an official complaint process, he was baffled by their response
and didn’t seem to understand that what he did was wrong. At this point,
you might have cast your eyes upward with a disgusted: ‘Yeah, right,
where have we heard that before?’ But I think your response was actu-
ally much more perceptive. You said: ‘He’s very young, has come from
a traumatic war situation, and finds himself in a place he doesn’t under-
stand very well. I keep thinking: what kind of man is he going to
become?’ I think that that is exactly what we need to be worried about.
The #MeToo phenomenon avoids thinking about the ambiguities
involved in doing masculinity (or, for that matter, doing femininity),
especially in a globalizing world where men and women are confronted
with different and sometimes confusing norms concerning gender and
sexual relations.
Dubravka: 
There are a few things to consider when it comes to men: one is what
kind of masculinities are offered as ideals to boys and young men, and
how to make them not just aware that sexual harassment is simply unac-
ceptable, but also to recognize it and act in the situations in which they
see other men do it. I agree with you that there is a grey area there. If
young men learn at every step that they need to pursue a girl until she
gives in, that ‘no’ means ‘yes’ or at least ‘maybe’, or that sexy clothing
means a girl is a ‘slut’ – then there has to be, in my view, some space that
allows the idea that these young men can – and can be willing to –
change. If there is a hope from the current wave of exposures of harass-
ers, then maybe it is a message to the young men that these are not the
role models they should follow, however rich, powerful or famous the
harassers might be. And this might mean that we need to make a differ-
ence between such (young) men, and the ‘grab-her-pussy’ types who do
it with an absolute sense of entitlement. And we also have to look at men
who sit on the fence. We should not forget that many (by your and my
standard) very powerful men and women have known of others’
8 European Journal of Women’s Studies 25(1)

behaviour and never spoke up. Speaking up comes with a price and
many are not ready to pay it. They literally do not want to lose money,
position, prestige by going after predators from whom they earn this
same money, position and prestige. In some African countries there is a
term ‘Big Man’, which not only specifies a particular powerful man, but
that he is powerful because he is located within the social structures that
keep him so. So I am worried that the fact that some of the famous Big
Men – like Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey – are basically finished,
does not signal a social change. Rather it simply illustrates the mecha-
nisms of self-preservation of a system that both makes these men the
way they are, and then pukes them out when they become a liability.
After Abu Ghraib ‘a few bad apples’ discourses have been used to jus-
tify firing several officers (one of them a high ranking female officer),
but all the effort was put to present and preserve the US military as a
‘healthy tree’. And with the ‘Groper-in-chief’ heading the US, it is clear
that some structures of power are more difficult to shake than others and
some contexts of harassment are more ambivalent than others. It is not
the 1970s clear-cut oppressors-men and victims-women situation any
longer. Even though men are clearly still the main perpetrators, these
days we hear much more about sexual assaults on men, and a number of
men also spoke publicly in the last few weeks about being harassed and
assaulted. But whether that will make any difference for activism against
sexual harassment is yet to be seen.
Kathy:  So, where should we as critical feminist scholars go from here? I recently
read a wonderful piece on cultivating ambivalence (Kierans and Bell,
2017) as a strategy for understanding social problems and it applies to
the recent moral panic around sexual harassment. Sexual harassment is
an urgent issue which clearly needs to be addressed. While earlier femi-
nist critiques were primarily faced with the task of establishing it as a
problem, the #MeToo movement is showing just how widespread sexual
harassment is and how it affects countless women (and men) across the
globe. This is a welcome development in feminist struggles for more
gender justice and a more equitable social world. However, I think that
a moralizing discourse which evaluates, judges and sanctions, all in one
go, may not be the best way to address the problem. Instead I think our
task may be a more difficult one – namely, directing our attention to the
murky and complicated ambivalences in which sexual harassment and
the #MeToo movement itself are embedded. Nowadays we as feminist
scholars do not have the comfort of always knowing what side we are
on. We need to be able to embrace ambivalence and to ask the often
uncomfortable question: What is going on here?
Dubravka: 
I think the question is whether something such as #MeToo, which is
essentially a (social) media movement, can also engender other actions
and forms of activism. While there seem to be a few law suits in the
making against celebrities and politicians, so far many #MeToo stories
Editorial 9

have been coming-out-with-righteousness narratives of rich, famous,

young and beautiful women. The need for recognition of being wronged
is essential to victims of violence and injustice, as it is essential for the
societies to publicly distinguish what is and what is not acceptable
within their value systems. But when too much public sympathy and
understanding are expressed towards victims of sexual violence from
within essentially sexist, racist and classist societies and institutions
(such as entertainment and politics) than the question: What is going on
here is really the one we need to be asking. We can still hope for the best,
but maybe we shouldn’t hold our breath for too long.

Note
1. http://wapo.st/2yrg9rt?tid=ss_mail&utm_term=.2ffc7e8dcdd3 and www.washingtonpost.
com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/10/19/the-woman-behind-me-too-knew-the-power-of-the-
phrase-when-she-created-it-10-years-ago/?utm_term=.2ffc7e8dcdd3

References
Davis K (2012) ‘Stand by your man’ or: How feminism was framed in the DSK affair. European
Journal of Women’s Studies 19(1): 3–6.
Gill R (2007) Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility. European Journal of Cultural
Studies 10(2): 147–166.
Kierans C and Bell K (2017) Cultivating ambivalence: Some methodological considerations for
anthropology. Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7(2): 23–44.

Dubravka Zarkov
International Institute of Social Studies/ EUR, The Netherlands

Kathy Davis
VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands