#metoo did not fail

Looking back eight years after #metoo after reading Andrea Dworkin's Right Wing Women

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If you’re a subscriber/regular reader, you might have noticed that I changed the description of this newsletter/blog so that it’s explicitly feminist. So lesbian + feminist, through literature. In honor of that, this is the first of two pieces inspired by lesbian-feminist Andrea Dworkin’s Right Wing Women.

The Abuse of Women

The accounts of rape, wife-beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and the other commonplaces of female experience that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscious in upheaval. But they do not. No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in the wind or written in the sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt¹.

When do you think this quote was written? During the #metoo movement, maybe after?

It’s a quote from Andrea Dworkin’s Right Wing Women, published in 1983.

It reminds me of a meme that went around during Black Lives Matter/George Floyd protests: ‘‘george floyd isn’t a wake up call’ the same alarm has been ringing since 1619. y’all just keep hitting snooze.’

The cry of the abused, raped women² of all races and ethnicities has been ringing for thousands of years. Rape was outlawed in our earliest known legal code; no religion condones it. Women have been crying for centuries, #metoo was just the latest, and maybe the longest collective cry.

The Movement’s Short History

As soon as the #metoo movement began, it began failing. Why did these women wait so long to come forward? What about due process? We were drowning in collective sympathy for the men credibly accused, in sorrow that men might face any consequences for their behaviors. Even after they’d been accused by multiple women. The detractors accused women of being liars, as evidenced by the fact that they had waited for a movement before coming forward. Then, they argued that it was the past. Leave it there. Don’t ruin a man’s life, that old canard that’s brought up all too often.

Because women’s testimony is not and cannot be validated by the witness of men who have experienced the same events and given them the same value, the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering.

The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings³.

I’m a survivor advocate. And through my work, I’d say that the greatest impact the movement has had is in public perception of rape. That the attitudes I laid in the paragraph above isn’t as universal as it once was. That people became less blind to the reality and frequency of rape, that we became less blind to the suffering.

Though, I believe, the real moment the general American public began to think the movement had failed was during the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial. There are many, many people writing on the internet that #metoo has failed. That the enthusiasm and fire that started the movement with millions of women sharing their stories had ended in a damp chill of so-called feminists who said they believed women, but not that woman. A so-called feminist told me that it was so clear that Amber was the abusive one. So clear, even though he texted that he wanted to kill her and rape her corpse, so clear even with the photographic evidence of her bruises.

For me, it’s deeply frightening and chilling⁴ that Amber Heard could write an article in which she did not name Johnny Depp, and he could win a defamation suit.

Why? The way that defamation laws work is (disclaimer: this isn’t legal advice, please consult a lawyer if you want that) is that the accused has to be harmed, but it also must be proven that the accuser either lied or was so reckless as to constitute harm. It’s a pretty high bar: to prove someone definitely lied. There were lawyers stating that they were telling their clients that the Heard-Depp trial signaled that women shouldn’t come forward, and if they did, they’d face the consequences that Amber Heard did.

What most people don’t get is that it goes too far to say that through a single trial, it was proven that men could rape and abuse with impunity. To say a single trial and a single victim equates to the failure of millions of women who want to stop rape goes many steps too far. The one I remember the clearest is

rayne fisher-quann

otherwise brilliant essay about the Heard-Depp, in which she wrote that “MeToo movement offered temporary catharsis in place of systemic change”, and the movement was “aesthetic”⁵.

Something I’ve learned, reflecting not only on movements but human history itself: the moral arc toward justice is not smooth; it zig zags. Sometimes, I’d argue most of the time, when we take three steps forward, we take one back. To dismiss a movement as aesthetic and feel good (or feel-cathartic) because it did not rapidly achieve systemic equality is too simplistic. To reduce it to a measurement of failure or success is too simplistic. To measure it through a trial involving two celebrities demeans the work of activists and feminists advocating for the everyday woman.

Since the Heard-Depp trial, we’ve had a non-celebrity, successful trial in which a victim received justice. In Giselé Pelicot’s 2024, public sympathy and outrage broadly lay with Pelicot. And that trial made international news, although Pelicot and her ex-husband weren’t celebrities. Pelicot was a state administrator. Ordinary folks, seemingly somewhat like you and I.

Ordinary, except for the horrors Giselé Pelicot survived, and that her husband put her through. For years, Pelicot was drugged by her husband, who found men on a website (since taken down, the founder of the website is currently in litigation) to come over and “have sex” with his unconscious wife. He took videos and photographs, and many of these men were identified and put on trial.

These men came from all walks of life: middle and working class men, some native Frenchmen, some immigrants, too many with wives, children, families of their own. In another article, I wrote

Let’s ask instead what would the average man would do if given the opportunity to rape? A small study of just over a thousand men asked if the men questioned if they would rape a woman if there was no chance that they would be prosecuted or caught. Around half of those men said yes. Half of men would rape if they could get away it. It’s uncomfortably high for most of us. To be honest, the author of the viral essay is probably correct in that far less than half of women/trans/non-binary would not, but neither of us have evidence to support our view.

Those men cried that they had families to take care of, that they hadn’t known she hadn’t consent. How silly; they were on a website designed expressly to provide them with the opportunity to rape. And since they hadn’t received any sort of confirmation that Giselé Pelicot wanted that, the emptiness of their lies is apparent.

Of the 50 (!!) defendants, 49 were convicted. There’s talk of changing the laws around the definition of rape to a more consent-focused one in France after the Pelicot case.

There’s a push forward, now it looks like the movement is succeeded. But as Tamara Burke said, we can’t define an entire movement and the experience of too many women by single trials or cases.

The Movement’s Shortcomings

For many folks not deeply invested in #metoo and the adjacent feminism, the solution to rape might appear to be systemic change through reduction of rape using the legal system. More prosecutions. More men who raped locked up.

If you ask me, that’s not enough. Legal change is very, very slow; cases can take years (eg, Weinstein’s case…eight years later), to change the law (as we must) takes years of momentum⁶. I’m not sure that’s possible, given what the legal system is, and the motivations and powers it upholds. What do I mean? I mean, as someone with a legal education, I don’t trust the legal system to work for the poor, the working class, women, people of color. It’s there to protect the interests of the powerful and wealthy. We label it “justice”, but it’s really a misnomer.

The other part of that is…why are we measuring “success” by prosecution after the fact? We need to think about and work to prevent rape before it happens. We also need to look at solutions for the rapes where the survivor doesn’t want to go through the legal system. Because I can tell you that the majority of survivors don’t want to pursue a criminal conviction; the majority that don’t want to tell the world. They instead want to put it behind them as soon as possible, they’d rather prioritize their healing, and don’t see it as their responsibility to stop the person who raped them from raping again. Some of us commend women who come forward, the Gisèle Pelicots and Chantel Millers of the world, but that we ask so much of them after they’ve been through so much is genuinely terrible.

The legal system - here in the U.S., but everywhere really - is imperfect. Too many survivors of rape struggle to call what was done to them rape, taking months to come to terms with recognizing themselves to be victims. There’s that period of time when she’s still questioning herself, asking if it was rape, asking herself if she’s sure it wasn’t her fault. This makes rape kits and hospital visit rare, and systemic issues surrounding rape kits further make this solution impossible⁷.

In California, the Department of Corrections estimates that ninety-six percent of all rape goes unreported. Rape survivors will too often tell you that they’re afraid of retaliation, of losing their friends or jobs. That’s a real fear, and I wish I could tell survivors that the risk wasn’t real. Look at Amber Heard. Anyway, even after she’s processed and tells her story, it’s often months after the fact. As a society, not enough of us understand that yet, so people demand answers as to why a survivor didn’t report immediately.

Then, even after a survivor decides to come forward, too many of us demand answers of why she did, why she’s choosing to ruin a man’s life over something that’s already happened, something that should be forgotten, and is she sure that she’s not doing this because she wants revenge? Or lying? People sometimes vocalize this, far more people - both women and men - it shows in their attitude, their vindictive, destructive tendency to discredit a survivor, to cast up every word or gesture, as the world saw with Amber Heard, Christine Blasey Ford, or E. Jean Carroll.

I wish all of the above wasn’t true. It’s all terribly misogynistic, isn’t it? We ask so much of survivors, so much of it that women have internalized taking the blame for the times the world around them wasn’t kind or decent, and so much of it that so much of the world around us is ignorant and doesn’t think or want knowledge about this stuff because it’s too hard. It’s too unpleasant to think about, better to focus on fun, light-hearted stuff.

It would be nice, maybe make you feel more catharsis, if I wrote some hot philosophical takes on ending rape culture and the terribleness of men? The answer isn’t that men are all terrible, it’s that people still don’t trust women. People still see women as lesser than men. People still expect women to conform to a certain standard. If she’s abused, she should fit what they think a victim should look like. A little sad, but not too sad. Not too emotional. But a little emotional. Definitely not angry.

Women who speak up, who don’t conform to some gender standard that dictates smiling, cheerful docility and submissiveness - who don’t turn the other cheek - are reduced even further. That’s not only by men. Too many women agree with that stance, are too eager to punish other women who don’t conform as they have.

Another part of this is that we approach rape through sociology and philosophy. We look at rape culture and feminism to reduce rape to hatred of women. Important and true, but it ignores two things: that not only women are raped, and that there are other psychological elements to rape. One out of thirteen men will be the victim of either rape or attempted rape, and non-binary and trans folks are raped and abused at higher rates than cis-women. Women of color are raped at higher rates than white women. We need to address inequality at multiple levels, not just between men and women.

What the normative feminist, anti-misogynistic writing/posting leaves out is that the men (and others) who rape and abuse often have complicated histories of childhood trauma. If we want to stop rape, we also have address that we as a society allow children to grow up in deeply unhealthy households, and write that off as parental rights, as parents knowing best. There’s a high correlation between growing up with divorced parents and growing up to rape/abuse as an adult; there’s an even higher correlation with growing up around substance abuse and alcoholism, and later struggling with those problems yourself, and becoming an abuser or a rapist. There’s also a high correlation between surviving abuse and rape and growing up in a household that has those problems also.

Yet, it’s also too simple to say that growing up under terrible circumstances turns someone into someone who rapes and abuses; a lot of people grow up in those circumstances yet do not become abusive teens and adults. Not everyone, but too many end up traumatized from those circumstances. So addressing childhood traumas is but one step of many.

The psychological elements of rape are tangled with roots with toxic patriarchy - the idea that a man is the head of the household and has dominion over his wife, female and male children. Therefore can and should use dominance to maintain that, and an strong, unemotional masculinity is enforced in male children so that they can grow up to control and dominate - are ideas that bell hooks described so well in The Will to Change⁸. Rape and abuse are forms of dominance. Especially to control women who do not fit where the patriarchy wants them to fit.

Rape and abuse is targeting others who are vulnerable. It’s in part about control and domination, there’s an element of sadistic self-centeredness about it.

The Movement’s Successes

I’ve been a survivor advocate and accountability facilitator since the end of fall of 2016. I also have a J.D. (that’s a U.S. law degree), though I chose not to practice law. I want to stop rape now. We can and should make incremental change to save individual victims as well as aim for the grander sweeping societal ones. If I can prevent a single rape⁹, then the fight is worthwhile. There’s a lot we can do, a lot that’s been done, and a lot we have left to do.

#metoo is still in its infancy. The founder of movement, Taruna Burke said:

“Every time there’s a legal setback, the movement is declared dead in the water. A legal success, and presto, it’s alive again…The #MeToo reckoning is greater than any court case. It’s still there, and it’s working.”

…in response to the overturning of Harvey Weinstein’s conviction in 2024¹⁰. She rightly points out that ten years prior, getting someone like Harvey Weinstein, or for that matter Johnny Depp, into a courtroom was impossible.

The rates of convictions and reductions in percentage of women experiencing rape gives me a lot of hope too. Before #metoo, RAINN¹¹ data showed convictions went from 6 out of 1,000 to 25 out of 1,000 post 2017. Their data also shows that before #metoo, one out of five women (and one out of four GNC folks) were victims of rape or attempted rape. Current estimates (within the last year) are one out of six¹². When I went through school, college, law school, there was no consent education¹³. Nowadays, there’s education on consent and saying no, and I’d like to think that it’s making a difference. Also, the incremental systemic, legal changes, eg., affirmative consent (yes means yes instead of no means no) is the law for college campuses in California, show a positive trend. However small, these are quantifiable, concrete signals, though on the surface they’re teeny-tiny steps by teeny-tiny steps.

When I was assaulted in 2016, very few folks (friends) believed me, even though I wasn’t the first person that person assaulted. It wasn’t about believing me, or believing women. What it was, and is still, is whether or not a women got what she deserved. It was about whether I was the right type of woman, that is, a well-behaved, docile, calm but not too calm, cooperative.

The reasons no perfect victim exists are manifold. I can’t name a single blameless victim. We’re human, and to ask us to be perfect is to deny our humanity.

Reader, I’m not on the face of things. I will also say that in the immediate aftermath of the rape, I was a wreak, and that was used against me. It’s called DARVO - deny, attack, reverse-victim-offender. Rapists and abusers still use it today, too often use a survivor’s trauma against her. The modern therapy-speak takes of crazy include“bipolar”, “borderline personality disorder”, or “already had trauma”. The difference is that a lot more people know that acronym and/or recognize when some raping asshole is trying to discredit his survivor. A lot more folks in 2025 versus 2016 recognize what it looks like when a survivor is acting out of trauma: that her anger, rage, tears, inconsistencies and unreliabilities, her inability to function…aren’t a sign that she’s a liar and “crazy”, but rather, the result of the extreme horror of the abuse she’s survived.

Its past and future

I think a lot about the Pro Publica article that won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize: An Unbelievable Story of Rape. If you haven’t read it, it’s beautifully, affectively written, and very much deserved the prize. It’s the story of once-eighteen-year-old girl was raped but accused of lying about her rape. “Marie” had come forward after being raped by a stranger at knife point. The police she reported to didn’t believe her. Her foster mother didn’t believe her either. She wasn’t anywhere near a perfect victim: she had grown up in group homes, and was sexually and physically abused as a child. In desperation, she wound up recanting her story - so desperate that she was willing to pay a $500 fine to avoid the charge of filing a false report. Marie was assaulted in 2008, two and a half years later, her rapist was apprehended…and a photo of her was found in his “souvenirs” of rape. Now the police knew she hadn’t lied, but she was treated so badly post-rape that it was easier for her to deny it and move on.

I think about that story a lot because it’s one anecdote of why we should listen to women, and err toward believing them. It’s also an example of how difficult society makes life for women who do come forward.

In the new forward to Andrea Dworkin’s newly re-released Right Wing Women, Moira Donegan wrote of how critics of Dworkin discredited her because Dworkin had been molested as a child, horrifically abused by a husband in Amsterdam, that the violence that she experienced made her unreliable, untrustworthy, psychologically incapable of perceiving reality. The same sorts of accusations that are levied at women when they “lie” about abuse. Either way, women are discredited for simply coming forward, for breaking the social contract that demands silence in the face of rape and abuse.

Dworkin was widely criticized for being too extreme, for what Donegan called “feminism’s…unsexy excesses”, which is apt as she wrote against pornography, compared wifedom to chattel-based slavery (too far, if you ask me), and focuses nearly exclusively on the joyless parts of femininity.

Her use of language can be affective and inflammatory. An example: “the flourishing pornography industry in which women are sexually consumed and then shit out and left to collect flies” (p 141), and her prolific use of the word fuck (sometimes multiple times in a page). It can be exhausting; both the subject matter and the depressing world view it presents, but that’s exacerbated by the emotional heights of her writing style. Despite all of that, Right Wing Women is the best books I’ve read so far this year. Her observations are too astute, too much of it what I’ve thought and articulated over my lifetime, but not so concisely, nor in a single book.

That Picador republished (reissued) three of Dworkin’s books gives me hope. They wouldn’t do so unless they thought there was a market for them, unless their data showed a deep interest in incisive feminist thinking. With that interest, I’d love to see a resurgence and renewed interest in stopping rape and abuse. Right Wing Women talks about rape in connection with feminism almost immediately. It was originally published in part as a response to the election of Reagan, and it’s timely that it’s republished now. #metoo as a popular hashtag arose in response to the first election of the current U.S. president. The timing was apropos. Even though it became a popular hashtag in late 2017, Taruna Burke coined #metoo years earlier, and used it to address intersectional rape on MySpace. Burke’s cry is present in the work of Artemisia Gentileschi, the 17th century painter who raped as a teenager. It’s in the work of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon. We saw it succeed with Gisèle Pelicot, her bravery in asking to be named, her cry that the shame wasn’t hers to bear. The movement has been around for centuries, too strongly tied to the feminist movement to be separated out. It waxes and wanes, and we desperately need for it strengthen in light of the forces that are besieging us now.

1. Dworkin, Andrea. Right Wing Women. (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1983. Republished New York: Picador, 2025.) p. 10

2. Throughout this piece, I use the gender binary (men, women) because of its common usage, easy readability, historic use in second wave feminism and #metoo movement, and my personal experience as an advocate that’s helped mostly women. However, trans and nonbinary folks are assaulted and abused at very high rates (according to 2023 data from RAINN, one out of five women will experience rape or attempted rape, but one of out four non-binary folk will). It might be more accurate to say “non-men”, but I don’t want to reduce women, non-binary folks, and trans folks to what they are not.

And of course, men can be raped too. The estimates for men who experience rape or attempted rape are 1 out of 13. However, my piece is focused on the rape of women (non-men) by men for the above reasons, and because that is more common than the rape of men.

3. I meant as in chills other survivors coming forward; but it works both ways!

4. Fisher-Quann. who’s afraid of amber heard? Internet Princess. June 10, 2022.

5. I have a lot of ideas about legal changes that are needed, eg., burdens of evidence, defamation/libel/slander. These are interesting, but to go into them would be another essay itself.

6. As well, hospitals do not always have a SANE (sexual-assault nurse examiner) at hand to administer kits, kits are not always available/access, many police departments have backlogs of kits…there’s a host of issues that need to be fixed, and can be fixed systemically. The issue of survivor’s time in processing and coming to terms with their assault is not systemic; it’s psychological and emotional.

The average survivor waits ten months to file a police report; in California (according to the CA department of correction, 2023 lecture, only 4% of rape is reported).

7. If you want to read a book about this, I’d recommend bell hooks The Will to Change. I summarized it here:

bell hooks the will to change

8. I can say that I have prevented more than one rape; through both educating other people to see the signs of predation, and by intervening directly to warn women who were being preyed upon or otherwise engaging with men accused of assault.

9. Noveck, Jocelyn. #MeToo advocates vow the reckoning will continue after Weinstein’s conviction is overturned. NPR. April 26, 2024.

10. RAINN is the largest non-profit in the US addressing rape and incest.

11. These numbers take into account underreporting, but I’m uncertain about the methodology used to do so.

12. I graduated from law school a little before #metoo

13. Dworkin, Andrea. Right Wing Women. (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1983. Republished New York: Picador, 2025.) p. 10 - 11.