When the #MeToo moment began in earnest last October, many women felt optimistic, galvanised; others felt uncomfortable. As stories of abuse and harassment accumulated in the media, men began to experience consequences for their treatment of women. Some lost jobs, others were demoted, many faced public embarrassment. The careers of men such as Hollywood producer and alleged rapist Harvey Weinstein, masturbating comedian Louis CK, and predatory actor Kevin Spacey were declared dead. Others, like the groping chef Mario Batali, took a temporary “step back” from their public lives. A reckoning seemed to be underway, and many women felt that it was long overdue.

In the media and in private life, conversations about consent, hostile environments and power began, and there was a growing acknowledgment that a man’s unwanted sexual overtures were a symptom of broader social and political forces. Soon, these discussions were interrupted by hand-wringing and anger from male commentators – everyone from conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan to Donald Trump – who claimed the movement had gone too far before it really began. But unexpected divides emerged between feminists as well.

Some feminists urged caution; others wanted the reckoning to go further. But the most common complaint about #MeToo came from those who felt that the whole movement had very quickly become silly. Self-described feminists such as Daphne Merkin and Bari Weiss in the New York Times, Katie Roiphe in Harper’s, Germaine Greer in the Sydney Morning Herald and 100 French women in Le Monde complained that many of the incidents of harassment were too minor to warrant opprobrium. They argued that by grouping together such a wide spectrum of sexual misbehaviour, #MeToo had lost a sense of nuance. They called on women to toughen up. Whatever happened to no-nonsense rejections, they asked. Those who complained about harassment and assault, Merkin wrote, “perceive themselves to be as frail as Victorian housewives”. By this logic, women could solve the problem of sexual harassment and assault with good humour, patience and a high tolerance for pain.

This disagreement was quickly characterised in the media as generational. Older feminists, we were told – say, anyone over 40 – were sinisterly complicit, laughably outdated, or just too scared of overstepping. Younger women, depending on who you asked, were either righteously passionate, naively idealistic, or out for blood.

In part, this notion of a generational divide came from the feminist opponents and supporters of #MeToo themselves. In Harper’s, Roiphe derided the #MeToo movement as “Twitter feminism”, giving the impression that only narcissistic, social media-obsessed millennials want a reckoning over sexual assault. In her article criticising the direction #MeToo was taking, Bari Weiss emphasised the youth and naivety of an anonymous woman who made allegations against the comedian Aziz Ansari. Meanwhile, the feminist website Jezebel, whose readers and writers skew young, ran an article headlined “The Backlash to #MeToo is Second-Wave Feminism”, gesturing vaguely at a misguided crop of older feminist thinkers but not engaging much with those thinkers’ actual achievements and failures. Each side used age stereotypes, with varying degrees of cynicism – older women were crotchety or out of touch, younger women were egoists or spoiled children. None of this commentary seemed interested in the fact that the women coming forward with stories of sexual abuse were both young and old. #MeToo’s feminist detractors also come from different generations. At only 32, Weiss is young enough to be Merkin’s daughter, or Greer’s granddaughter.

The #MeToo moment and its backlash made it clear that there really was a divide among feminists, but analysis of that divide cast it as a mere catfight, or a screaming match between weary mothers and teenage daughters. The implication was that the feminist debate unfolding around #MeToo is a kind of routine domestic drama, something we’ve seen before.

This is a mistake. A closer look at the arguments being made by these two camps reveals a deeper, more serious intellectual rift. What’s really at play is that feminism has come to contain two distinct understandings of sexism, and two wildly different, often incompatible ideas of how that problem should be solved. One approach is individualist, hard-headed, grounded in ideals of pragmatism, realism and self-sufficiency. The other is expansive, communal, idealistic and premised on the ideals of mutual interest and solidarity. The clash between these two kinds of feminism has been starkly exposed by #MeToo, but the crisis is the result of shifts in feminist thought that have been decades in the making.

The central claim of the anti-#MeToo feminists is that the movement does not treat individual women as moral agents with the capacity to say no, to enjoy and pursue sex, and to do wrong. From this perspective, women who come forward about their experiences of harassment or assault should often be given more responsibility for those experiences than the rhetoric of #MeToo assigns them. This thinking partakes in a long moral tradition – one that’s highly compatible with capitalism – in which personal responsibility, independence, and willingness to withstand hardship are revered as particularly valuable virtues. It’s an ethos of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps – from poverty into prosperity, or, in the anti-#MeToo feminists’ logic, from “feminine” victimhood into “masculine” strength. They believe that the pervasiveness of sexual harassment suggests that it is inevitable, and that the best response is not anger, but resolve. Theirs is a feminism that posits that individual women have the power to make choices to diminish the negative impact of sexism, and to endure any sexist unpleasantness that can’t be avoided – if only they have the grit to handle it.

On the other hand, there is the #MeToo movement. It might seem strange to assert that #MeToo can be spoken of as a single ideology at all – that this cultural moment, which has exposed such a broad array of bad behaviour across so many industries and disciplines, could ever be coherent enough to have an agenda. But #MeToo, as a social movement and as a personal gesture, makes certain assumptions that aren’t compatible with the intellectual habits of most mainstream feminisms that have preceded it. By saying “me too”, an individual woman makes herself a part of a broader group, and chooses to stand with others who have been harassed, assaulted or raped. This solidarity is powerful. It is still rare to see such a large group of women identifying their suffering as women’s suffering, claiming that they have all been harmed by the same forces of sexism, and together demanding that those forces be defeated.

A #MeToo rally in New York, December 2017. Photograph: Zuma Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

In this light, the diversity and breadth of the #MeToo movement is not a weakness, but a strength. After all, if so many women, with so many different kinds of lives, have experienced the same sexist behaviour from men, then it becomes easier to believe that the problem goes beyond individuals and instead relates to wider cultural forces. The ubiquity of sexual harassment means that an individual can’t simply avoid it by making the right choices, or by steeling herself with forceful determination; the demand that she do so begins to look absurd.

Call it, then, a conflict between “individualist” and “social” feminisms. In part, the rift is between visions of how to undertake the feminist project, of which tactics are best: whether through individual empowerment, or through collective liberation. But there is a greater moral divide between these two strands of thought, because #MeToo and its critics also disagree over where to locate responsibility for sexual abuse: whether it is a woman’s responsibility to navigate, withstand and overcome the misogyny that she encounters, or whether it is the shared responsibility of all of us to eliminate sexism, so that she never encounters it in the first place.

This tension, between individualist and social feminisms, has dogged the women’s movement since its revival in the mid-20th century. According to the individualist model of feminism, personal responsibility, individual freedoms and psychological adjustments offer a woman meaningful routes out of the suffering imposed by patriarchy, and into equality with men. Many of the most famous western feminists have been working in this tradition. For instance, Betty Friedan, author of the hugely influential 1960s feminist text The Feminine Mystique, argued that sexist cultural codes prevent women from achieving personal happiness. Friedan, a psychologist by training, focused on the inner lives of white, American, middle-class women at midcentury. More recently, individualist feminism found a high-profile advocate when Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, published her memoir-cum-manifesto Lean In in 2013. Sandberg laments the lack of women in leadership positions, and her book is a how-to manual for women with lofty corporate ambitions.

Social feminism has a similarly long, if less well-known, history. Soon after Friedan’s book became a bestseller, Italian feminists such as Leopoldina Fortunati and Silvia Federici began to formulate a different way of looking at the problems that women faced. As Marxists, they sought to analyse how men as a class related to women as a class. They were less interested in ideas of empowerment and self-actualisation than they were in divisions of labour, living conditions and cold, hard cash. They argued that so-called “women’s work” – everything from mopping floors to dressing wounds to breastfeeding, cooking, prostitution, laundry and tending to the elderly – should not only be seen as work, but as essential to the capitalist wage-labour system. If men did not have these functions performed for them at home, these women argued, they would not be able to return to work and produce effectively. Male work in the factory relied upon female work in the home.

When Federici’s Wages for Housework campaign launched in 1972, it attracted fierce public debate – first in Italy, and then in the US after Federici moved to New York and opened a Wages for Housework office in Brooklyn. The political mainstream found Federici’s idea ridiculous. Could she really mean that a woman should be paid for scrubbing the floors in her husband’s house? But the movement relied on the understanding that a wage was necessary for work to be seen as work, and for the people who did it to be seen as worthy of dignity and protection. More a rhetorical device than an immediate policy prescription, the demand “wages for housework” relied on a conception of women as a “class” in the same sense as a class of workers – a group of people with something in common who could organise on behalf of their shared interests.

The Wages for Housework movement fizzled out, but its influence has lived on in campaigns for racial justice, gay rights, housing rights and sex workers’ rights. Behind Wages for Housework lay the idea that women’s oppression was widespread, that it had common features even for women who lived very different lives, and that it was more than just a personal experience – it was a political phenomenon. But because sexism beats so many people down, that also meant that there was a community of women who could pull each other up. Those who experience gendered oppression can band together to end it.

Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, in 1986. Photograph: Bettmann Archive

Something similar is at stake in #MeToo’s assertions that sexual harassment and assault are systemic, and that women can unite to demand an end to them. While individualist feminists such as Friedan and Sandberg have examined the problem of sexism by zooming in, to consider women’s psyches and attitudes, Wages for Housework zoomed out, to examine how women were oppressed by the economic forces of capitalism. #MeToo has a less ideological, more ad hoc approach to its analysis of patriarchy. But its gesture proceeds from the assumption that misogyny is structural, and that women have a shared interest in fighting it.

This does not mean that #MeToo treats all women’s experiences as the same. The movement has included stories from women of different races, orientations and religions. It has brought testimony from women who are rich and poor, healthy and chronically ill, cis and trans, famous and anonymous. This variety has led to an increasing acknowledgment that misogyny takes different forms, and that not all women have access to the same tools used to mitigate it.



At its best, #MeToo’s social feminism has been heavily influenced by black American feminist scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, whose work aims to confront the combined nature of racism and sexism in the lives of black women, and to analyse how, for the people who experience both racism and sexism, the phenomena don’t feel distinct at all. In her 1989 legal article Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex, Crenshaw called for a new way of understanding oppression that she referred to as “intersectionality”. Put very simply, this meant taking into account the ways that oppression looks different for different people, and how individuals experience oppression along more than one axis at once. In practice, Crenshaw’s approach suggests that an effective movement against patriarchal oppression must also confront other systemic inequalities – ones that lend power and viciousness to many women’s experiences of sexism.

Intersectionality has given #MeToo a more expansive understanding of sexual harassment and assault. The gesture of saying “me too” implies solidarity with all women who have had these experiences, but the form the movement has taken has also allowed for it to be a specific, personal declaration, and for those testimonies to come from women with different stories and in different circumstances. For every anti-#MeToo feminist who scornfully asks, “Why didn’t you just leave?”, there have been dozens of women explaining the circumstances of their lives that effectively barred the door. Often, these stories have made it heartbreakingly clear that not everyone can risk their job by giving a firm, uncompromising “no” to a handsy boss or coworker; that not everyone can afford to call an emergency cab; that not everyone has the privileges that make it easy to act in the ways that the individualist feminists so often prescribe.

#MeToo’s sheer number of testimonies has vindicated theories of sexism as a universal, but not uniform, force –that is, as something that every woman will experience, but that every woman will experience in different ways. But in its solidarity, its public gesture of women coming together to demand an end to harassment and assault, the movement also continues the tradition of women’s class consciousness, unity and need for confrontation with systemic injustice. Call it the “too” of #MeToo: the understanding that meaningful liberation from misogyny will only be achieved collectively, with changes at the structural, cultural and institutional levels. Social feminism does not aspire to enable a few women to gain positions of power in patriarchal systems. It’s not about giving women “a seat at the table”. It’s about taking the table apart, so that we can build a new one together.

This is not a simple proposition. As an approach, social feminism has real flaws, though its most significant weaknesses are not the ones that #MeToo’s prominent critics choose to address. The real weakness of social feminism is not that it encourages women to be oversensitive about discomforts, but that it is so broad. The call for women to unite can overlook the kinds of pain and conflict that can exist between them.

After all, who do we mean when we talk about “women”? What experiences or conditions, exactly, do we identify as common to all women? It is difficult to generalise about so many people at once, and questions of injustice, inequality and privilege mean that doing so puts us at the risk of ignoring vital differences. Women are a varied bunch, and they encounter intersecting oppressions that are not of patriarchy’s exclusive making: racism, classism, ability and sexuality. Often, these oppressions are enforced by other women. There are vast gulfs that separate women from one another: gulfs of racism and money, of colonialism, bigotry, history, resentment, defensiveness, ignorance and hurt. It can be very hard to see each other across them.

#MeToo, however, has made it clear that solidarity among women is possible. The working definition of “women”, as #MeToo has constructed it, can be understood simply: as everyone who has experienced misogyny. It’s a bleak kind of solidarity, this acknowledgment of shared suffering. But #MeToo has transformed that mournful acknowledgment into something much more hopeful. If the #MeToo movement has prompted many women to focus on misogynist behaviour with a unifying grief and anger, it has also led many of them to contemplate our shared power and common vision for a different world. When the social feminists of #MeToo call for changes that would make harassment, assault and other forms of misogyny rare, their very act of collective imagining makes such a world more possible: the more we stand together in this demand, the easier it becomes to imagine a world where respect is common, where cruelty is rare, where all of us think with more empathy and intelligence about the lives of others, and where being women will not doom us to suffering or limitation.

American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. Photograph: Felix Clay/The Guardian

Again, this is an old debate: whether feminism’s aim should be to transform society, or to better equip individual women to navigate within it. But why, then, has this clash been framed as generational, when it is clear that the two visions of feminism have been doing battle for decades? Part of it, of course, is ageism and incuriosity – the reflexive tendency to presume that the old are too timid and the young are too reckless. And there is the idea, unique to feminism among all other strands of political thought, that feminism is a social movement that must occur in discrete, coherent and temporal “waves”.

But another reason why #MeToo has been framed as a generational conflict is because the individualist feminists of the anti-#MeToo backlash have framed their own resistance to the movement as grounded in wisdom, realism and, above all, maturity. To them, all this talk of a reimagined, recreated new world sounds hopelessly naive. Daphne Merkin summed up the tenor of the anti-#MeToo assessment in her article in the New York Times, when she wrote to the women coming forward: “Grow up, this is real life”.

This is a common, but still very strange belief: that the epitome of maturity and personal strength is the resigned acceptance that the world cannot be better than it is, that we cannot be kinder to one another, that male entitlement, crassness and predation are permanent and unchangeable and must be endured. It is a bizarre conception of strength, one that dismisses as childish weakness any demand for a better world, any hope that things might one day be different. There is a way of thinking that makes this approach by the anti-#MeToo feminists seem strong and pragmatic. But there is another way of thinking that makes it seem very sad.

In her book Trauma and Recovery, about the treatment of rape victims and other psychiatric patients who have undergone horrible abuse, the Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman writes of the temptation to sympathise with a patient’s abuser. “It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator,” she writes. “All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain.” Something similar may be at work in the anti-#MeToo feminists’ desire to advocate for an individualist feminism. Their call to sympathise more with the perpetrators of sexual assault, and to place greater responsibility for those assaults on the choices of women who experience them, is part of an effort not to feel implicated in the suffering of others, not to share that burden of pain. #MeToo and the reckoning that it has provoked has given us all knowledge we would rather not have – knowledge of just how normal some terrible things are, of just how much some of us have suffered. The anti-#MeToo feminists of the world are not the only ones who feel tempted to look away. I urge them not to.

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Main illustration by Eleanor Shakespeare

