Afterward, Sulkowicz grumbled about Obama not discussing the issue in his speech—but he was wise to steer clear of it. The “rapist” in question had already survived a campus disciplinary hearing—of the type sorely tilted against the accused—and was found “not responsible” for the event; Sulkowicz had already ceased to pursue the report she had filed with the New York police. As Ari Cohn of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education pointed out, Gillibrand had laid bare “her disregard for rights of the accused.” For the senator, “allegations of rape = guilty of rape,” Cohn tweeted. Gillibrand not only supported the Obama-era sexual-assault recommendations, which robbed the accused of due process, but co-authored her own bill on college sexual assault, which, like the one on military sexual assault, failed to pass.

And then came the allegations that Al Franken had groped six women, and forced a kiss on one of them. While many of his colleagues in the Senate dithered about whether this was really grounds for banishing him, Gillibrand wrote a 600-word Facebook post entitled “Senator Franken Should Resign.” Within 90 minutes, 15 more Democrats, and one Republican, had joined her in a coordinated push for his ouster. By day’s end, the great majority of Democratic senators sided with her—perhaps because she had persuaded them, and perhaps because #MeToo has made cowards of many people who are terrified of having the mob turn on them. It was after this victory that she gave her news conference about having “the wrong conversation.”

There were a few women who were willing to stand up for Franken. The law professor—and feminist—Zephyr Teachout wrote in The New York Times that she was not convinced Franken should quit: “Zero tolerance should go hand in hand with two other things: due process and proportionality.” These words—a balm of Gilead for anyone hoping to strengthen the movement by adding reason and fairness to its core ideals—seemed not to register within the larger, “burn it down” spirit animating the mob.

Bill Maher told his audience about the trouble Matt Damon got into for saying that “There’s a difference between patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation.” That prompted Minnie Driver to tweet, “No. You don’t get to be hierarchical about abuse. You don’t get to tell women that because some guy only showed them his penis, their pain isn’t as great as a woman who was raped.”

It was like the kind of hyper-gendered conversation that women’s magazines of yesteryear loved to decode for their readers: He was talking about facts; she was talking about feelings.

Men spend a lot of time asking women to calm down, to be reasonable. I’ll help you, they say in one way or another, but you have to stop yelling. Women are wary of these recommendations. How many of Larry Nassar’s young victims were persuasively told to calm down, to listen to reason? And how many women have alienated the very people they need to make this movement successful because they are so blinded by rage that they can only speak in radical and alienating terms? Add the opportunists who see in this movement a potent opportunity for self promotion, and we begin to see the rocky path that #MeToo must travel if it is to grow from a vehicle of outrage to a mechanism for lasting change.