I'm seeing what I hope are good signs that the movement is slowing down for a dose of rationality.
When even feminist writers are worried about people going too far (they look back at what happened on college campuses and don't like how that turned out), denying the accused even the simplest items of fairness. For example, NY Public Radio's Leonard Lopate was suspended from his radio show and escorted off the premises last week -
without even being told what the accusations against him were.http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/06/media/leonard-lopate-jonathan-schwartz-wnyc/index.htmlWhy the #MeToo Movement Should Be Ready for a BacklashAs a much-needed reckoning happens in the workplace, look to college campuses for a note of caution.
By EMILY YOFFE, Politico, December 10, 2017
In August, four feminist Harvard Law professors—Gersen, Elizabeth Bartholet, Nancy Gertner and Janet Halley—released a paper, titled “Fairness for All,” writing that the procedures on campus today “are frequently so unfair as to be truly shocking.” For example, “some colleges and universities fail even to give students the complaint against them, or notice of the factual basis of the charges, the evidence gathered, or the identities of witnesses.”
For years now, Democrats have described our nation’s campuses as places of overwhelming danger, where female students are at the mercy of predatory male classmates and callous administrators....
There is no good evidence that sociopathic predators beset campuses (a single study that made this assertion has been thoroughly debunked) or that callous administrators routinely abet such offenders. Nearly all of the many dozens of people I’ve interviewed—campus administrators, higher education experts, Department of Education civil rights investigators, professors, attorneys—describe the vast majority of cases as involving two students, usually in their first or second year, who are inexperienced at sex, and who frequently have been **94**, beginning an encounter that both parties often agree began consensually, and about which recollections later diverge.
The movement to stop sexual harassment in the workplace will eventually move past this moment of shocking allegations against famous men, and should soon focus on the many nonfamous people in quotidian circumstances. But top news organizations are not likely to provide as much due diligence about those cases. No doubt many disputes will more resemble those on campus, in that the charges will be about ambiguous situations for which there is little evidence. This amazing moment has a chance to be truly transformative. But it could also go off track if all accusations are taken on faith, if due process is seen as an impediment rather than a requirement and an underpinning of justice, and if men and women grow wary of each other in the workplace. As Laura Kipnis, a feminist professor at Northwestern, writes in her book,
Unwanted Advances, “I can think of no better way to subjugate women than to convince us that assault is around every corner.”