A Carly Hoilman Blames Feminism for “Sexgate 2017”
The title read, “Want to Stop Sexgate 2017? Stop Feminism”.
Do I want to drink from this firehose? We often ask ourselves from the burning wreckage of political posts we navigate from friends, colleagues, distant relatives and relative strangers.
A very Catholic cousin of mine, whom I haven’t seen since our Grandma’s funeral mass exactly twenty-five years ago, only posts articles from Catholic outlets about Catholics and Catholicism. Many of them are heartwarming and inspirational.
But this dredged up victim-blaming like sludge in an abandoned well. Full disclosure: I do not self-identify as a feminist for a number of reasons. Let alone with a capital F. And I will not take any time here to explain that women do not have to be Feminists just because they’re female. But I unequivocally agree with the no-shit tenets of feminism that overlap with secular humanism.
Nevertheless. Before I’ve even clicked on the article itself I see two red flags in the title alone, the second of which will likely be a logical fallacy in reasoning and in policy recommendation.
1.) Adding -gate to any trending topic since “Monicagate” is a kitschy labeling gimmick that self-promotes the story while simultaneously marginalizing whomever the story is about. This particular red flag indicates that whoever wrote this piece might think this national watershed moment with international ripple effects is a sensationalistic flash in the pan – that holding sexual predators accountable for their crimes and manipulation of victims is “sex-gate”? What does that even mean? That we’re just talking about sex too much? That the media is glorifying sex? She never defines “sexgate” for her further socio-cultural analysis.
2.) Not only does “Stop Feminism” read like knee-jerk conservatism of the “pearl-clutching” variety, that directive is about as effective as Tipper Gore’s parental advisory warning labels on music back in the day. For what it’s worth, I suspect this is deliberate. Her writing of this piece reads more about her than it does about her fellow Americans, like a showcase of the kind of woman she wants to be perceived to be rather than a prescription for what ails our society. She establishes herself as an old-fashioned “good woman” rather than the problematic and too-modern “man-hating feminazi”, as many feminists were derided when I was a kid and I first started hearing those terms. But she picked the wrong topic for feminine posturing.
What any article purporting to offer a solution to (what I think) sexgate means should be titled something like, Want to Stop Rape? Stop Rapists. Or, Want to Stop Workplace Sexual Harassment? Fire Employees Who Sexually Harasses Anyone In the Workplace.
Nevertheless. I clicked on it. It took me more than a week to do it but I knew there was no way I wouldn’t eventually.
The first thing I’m greeted by is a pop-up that reads: “Make Your Inbox Great Again. Sign Up.” I sincerely hope www.catholicvote.org does not align itself in the way that this implies. I decline the opportunity to get their e-newsletter.
Many of the social ills of our day can be traced back to feminism, and the recent explosion of sexual allegations against high-profile men is no exception.
We’re not off to a logical start as this statement pseudo-authoritatively sums up her introductory paragraph – an anecdote that details her frustration with “several able-bodied men” who did not break up a subway fight and neglected even to protect the author, a five-months-pregnant woman, and an elderly woman with a cane. But, she laments, they had chosen not to give up their seat for her so it’s not surprising that they would not intervene in an altercation. It also implies a staggering fallacy that sexual abuse against women simultaneously began with the feminist movement? I want to believe that the author in no way intended to imply even correlation, let alone causation. Could she really believe that “social ills of our day can be traced back to feminism”? As in they didn’t exist before that? As in women are more affected by social ills now than they were before the feminist movement started messing everything up? No. Her point is peripheral at best. And if I’m connecting the dots of her meandering anecdotes correctly, I think she’s saying today’s “social ills”, (also vague, at best,) are the same as they always were. It’s not that things are worse for women it’s that good men are now afraid to protect us from bad men because feminism. Because they’re afraid they’ll be called chauvenists or be falsely accused of acts far worse.
For what it’s worth I share her distaste for “able-bodied men” who do not offer their seats to women on public transportation. It has happened to me more than once. And I share her consternation at able-bodied men who do not intervene in fights, even fights they are not responsible for. I fumed when I, 95 pounds at the time, was the only one who intervened in a fight between my sober friend and a drunken regular at a local bar. At our table, no fewer than three men – our friends, by the way, sat and watched and continued to sip their beers and not get up from the table.
My own anecdotes notwithstanding, the decline of chivalry CANNOT BE EQUATED to the “sexual allegations against high-profile men”. The accusations of sexual misconduct against high-profile men can only be traced back to … the sexual misconduct of high-profile men. I don’t know how else to emphasize this without tautological reasoning. And I’m unclear about how there’s any confusion there. Anyone – male, female, high-profile, dead-broke – engaging in sexual misconduct is responsible for that sexual misconduct. And anyone serving their own sexuality at the expense of anyone who did not consent needs to suffer consequences.
Feminism is Misogyny – Because feminism set the bar so low, creeps like Harvey Weinstein, Al Franken, and Mario Batali have been able to dominate media, politics, and entertainment while earning the title “pro-women” because they decry the mythical wage gap and support abortion. Feminism taught these men that it is far more important to say the right thing than to actually do the right thing.
I am concerned that she only lists and labels as creeps well-known liberals. She does not denounce bombastic conservatives Bill O’Reilly or Roger Ailes. And glaringly absent from her list and indictment of hypocrisy is the current sitting, (read: golfing), president of the United States who has open lawsuits against him for varying degrees of sexual abuse and has admitted to sexually assaulting women. Respected journalists now use the word “pussy” without flinching after his recorded admission of “pussy-grabbing” normalized a word once taboo in every mainstream media.
Her main concern, in fact, seems to be hypocrisy – not sexual assault. Which is fine. But that is a different article that requires a different title offering a different solution.
And let us be nothing but clear about this – ALL ideologies are fraught with adherents who loudly and proudly proclaim the right thing without doing what they believe the “right thing” to be. Often times, they will practice the exact opposite of what they preach. Every religion, political party and social movement is plagued by members who fail to walk the walk – not least of which is my own Catholic religion. We are guilty of centuries of hypocrisy that resulted in far worse than hypocrisy on twitter. And I’m not saying she has to preface her piece with a lengthy preamble about the Crusades, the Reformation, the Inquisition or the sex abuse perpetrated by clergy and enabled by dioceses far and wide. But her article is very narrowly about the hypocrisy of high-profile liberal men who self-identify as feminists while abusing the power from their platforms to prey on women.
That is a perfectly salient point. And one she should stick to instead of making the hasty generalization that feminism as a whole causes sexual harassment/assault/abuse.
Feminism has been so successful in its efforts to abolish sexual differences that many would-be good men have abandoned masculine virtue for sheepish complacency.
Here she makes a new assertion, also interesting, but also completely non-causal to the purported topic. Anthropological and socialized sexual dimorphism used to clearly delineate two genders and society prized both extremes – women used to be feminine and lovely, men used to be strong and masculine. But it is a catastrophically misinformed overreach to equate the androgenization of gender roles, aesthetic archetypes and sexual dynamics to the complacency of men in Weinstein’s orbit who did not intervene to slay that particular dragon and thus save the many maidens in his clutches. Yes, she uses the words dragon, damsel, white knight and maidens – more than once. Her extensive use of Arthurian language implies a childlike romanticization of gender roles, not merely an anachronistic longing for what I would consider basic human decency – don’t let people hurt other people if you are in a position to prevent it. Gentlemen are not the only ones bearing a moral responsibility to help one another. After all, largely complicit in Weinstein’s particular methodology were the “honeypots”, the female assistants scheduled to meet with beautiful actresses in restaurants or hotel bars or hotel rooms in order to create a false sense of professionalism and normalcy before the bait-and-switch. Hoilman is not outraged that these women, likely knowingly, facilitated decades of predation. Instead, she hyper-focuses, without naming, the men who likely knew about it but didn’t intervene or report him. This is a far more multifaceted mess than she even addresses. There are circles of hell around him, to be certain. Should assistants have effectively quit their jobs by refusing to do what their boss instructed? Should people have filed police reports without evidence? Should people have tried to get evidence knowing that someone would have to get hurt in order to get a crime recorded or filmed? There are so many financial and legal implications in any of the normative arguments she implies without actually making. That’s why he got away with it for so long.
The responsibility to intervene in any kind of injustice is the responsibility of everyone – not just gentlemen. And a practicing Catholic should hold that as a cherished and lived belief. Perhaps she should review our liberation theology.
Fourteen-year-old actor Finn Wolfhard was more succinct in one professional decision and one tweet after firing his agent who’d been accused of sexual harassment: “As the father of no daughters because I’m literally in 8th grade, I think sexual harassment is bad.”
Denouncing and even actively preventing sexism and sexual abuse should not stem from your relationship to women. It shouldn’t matter if you love your mother or how kind your wife is or how many daughters you have. Many famous men frame their denouncement of the sexual misdeeds of bad men with their love of the women in their lives. But sexual harassment/assault/abuse is wrong whether or not Paul Ryan loves his mom or Mitch McConnell has daughters. People should denounce abuse of other people because it’s wrong – not because of the gender of the victims.
Look. I’m old-fashioned. I appreciate it when men hold doors open and pull my chair out or help me with my coat. But I also have have female friends who so don’t appreciate these gestures they are actually offended by them. We do not understand each other. And I don’t have a solution that satisfies all parties. But I’m also not trying to associate that issue and its myriad facets with a topic that is, at best, tangentially related. Hoilman is trying to play pin-the-tail on the passing airplane.
Feminism is the disease, not the cure to America’s sex problem.
If I had to say one thing was the disease that is causing “America’s sex problem”, (presuming we’re all on the same page about what our “sex problem” even is), and only one thing, I wouldn’t. Because it’s more complex than that. But if I were to counter Ms. Carly Hoilman’s dialectic I would say male entitlement is the biggest culprit in any “sexgate” anywhere. Not just 2017. Not just high-profile men. But I’ll leave that one to the experts to unpack – the cultural anthropologists and social psychologists and armchair philosophers. Maybe Hoilman is right. Maybe “feminism turns men into dweebs.” Yes. A so-called journalist actually wrote that. Her threadbare thinkpiece free-falls into a false dichotomy here – another choice I don’t actually have to make. But if society were as simple as she believes it to be then I’d rather be not raped by a dweeb than get raped by an old-fashioned gentleman.