The backlash to #MeToo was always going to begin in earnest with Al Franken. A famous celebrity and well-liked politician in the Democratic party, the harassment accusations that were made against him by eight women were met with skepticism and disdain by liberal Americans who had previously been supportive of the movement, but were unwilling to see it come for one of their own.

In July, these Americans were cheered by a New Yorker article by Jane Mayer, an investigative reporter with a history of tackling powerful figures on the right, which aimed to exonerate Franken. Uncharacteristically for the accomplished Mayer, the article was incompletely and credulously reported. It poked significant holes in the account of one Franken accuser, the radio host Leeann Tweeden, but did nothing to cast doubt on the other seven accusers. Instead, the piece dismissed their allegations with hand-waving assurances from Franken allies that they were sure he hadn’t meant any harm. Despite its failures of argument and reporting, the article accomplished its desired goal: conventional wisdom among middle-class liberals shifted to seeing Franken not as a man held responsible for his own actions, but as the victim of a nefarious plot at the hands of overzealous feminists.

It has often been observed that in sexual misconduct cases, a woman’s word is not given equal weight to a man’s. Sometimes it takes dozens of women’s testimony to be given the weight of one man’s – think of the case of Bill Cosby, in which 60 women came forward with similar allegations of drugging and sexual assault, and the comedian still needed to be tried twice. Mayer’s attempt to exonerate Franken took on an inverse logic: that even if there are many women accusing a man, only one of those women need have her credibility cast into doubt for all of their testimonies to be cast aside.

After the Mayer piece was published, legacy media publications took up the task of publishing other, similarly skeptical or damning pieces on the #MeToo movement. Unusually powerful in shaping conventional wisdom among their broad readership, these publications have begun depicting the #MeToo movement as an excessive and emotional moral panic that victimized men, rather than a political movement for women’s safety and dignity.

Publications have begun depicting the #MeToo movement as an excessive and emotional moral panic that victimized men

Days after the New Yorker published Mayer’s piece, the New York Times broadcast an uncommonly aggressive interview with Kirsten Gillibrand, then a 2020 presidential hopeful and one of the more than 30 senators who called for Franken’s resignation. Gillibrand was tasked with responding to Mayer’s piece, and in the interview, the normally soft-spoken and accommodating Michael Barbaro pressed Gillibrand with uncommon antagonism, asking if she was responsible for Franken’s downfall and whether her actions – hers, that is, not Franken’s – had hurt the Democratic party. Gillibrand, who had been widely blamed for Franken’s resignation, admirably stood her ground. But it wasn’t enough to save her campaign. She dropped out of the presidential race just days later.

Meanwhile, the New Yorker followed up its Mayer piece with a pair of lengthy interviews on its Radio Hour podcast with Alondra Nelson, a professor of sociology, and Jeannie Suk Gersen, a legal academic from Harvard. Together, they sought to grapple with Me Too cases in which people apparently “allowed sexual contact” but “because of power dynamics” those same people “weren’t actually capable of giving consent.”

An example that was provided was Louis CK, the comedian who is said to have masturbated in front of less powerful female industry insiders without their consent. Nelson notes that though those women “didn’t run out of room” that “doesn’t mean” that they gave consent – a puzzling and unnecessary reminder, which suggests Nelson thinks women could actually cast doubt on their own unwillingness by failing to flee.

For her part, Gersen claimed that the notion of consent was inherently ambiguous, even arbitrary, because “There’s a lot of sex that’s about that zone of not being sure, of being experimental. You know, even doing something and having regret later”.

Her argument grants sex a mystical and unknowable quality that it does not quite have, and waves away with a “who-can-say” faux profundity all of the pain and injustice of sexual assaults like those perpetrated by CK. The interview partook of a victim-blaming logic that attempts to use the richness of sexuality as a weapon against women seeking sexual justice.

Taken together, the pieces are evidence of a growing backlash in mainstream legacy media against #MeToo, a backlash that will privilege those who wish to roll back feminist gains and delay feminist ends. Backlash politics are nothing new – Susan Faludi wrote about the phenomenon in her 1991 opus Backlash, which described the wave of antifeminist reaction that emerged in the 1980s following the second-wave feminist movement. Anti-feminism of the backlash variety, she says, comes cloaked in the rhetoric of reasonableness and respectability – even those who see themselves as feminists are often drawn to it. “The backlash is not a conspiracy,” she writes, “with a council dispatching agents from some central control room, nor are the people who serve its ends often aware of their role … for the most part its workings are encoded and internalised, diffuse and chameleonic.” The feminist philosopher Kate Manne deftly described this phenomenon of “reasonable” anti-feminism when she said: “The misogynist’s bullying feels like a moral crusade, not a witch-hunt.”

In other words, the backlash could be thought of as a return to familiar social and intellectual habits, habits that subvert justice but which are comforting to the powerful. Among these habits are that of depicting women as incompetent and untrustworthy, of thinking of men as honorable and incapable of meaning any harm, of thinking of feminists as unreasonable, and their calls for men to think more about the emotions, rights and desires of women as unreasonable, even totalitarian. These are familiar habits to a lot of people, including people who think of themselves as good and socially conscientious, people who read the New York Times, or vote Democratic, or have a stack of New Yorkers in their living rooms. As they partake in the backlash, deriding women who come forward for doing so, doubting that these women were really unwilling, and heaping sympathy upon men who have been accused, they will think that they are being just, being nuanced, being sensitive of the vagaries and doubts that emerge when trying to do what’s right – even as they give all the benefits of all their doubts to men, and not to women.

This emerging backlash will present a challenge to the feminist movement that has emerged in the #MeToo era, but it is not a new challenge, or a surprising one: anti-feminist reaction follows every feminist movement with the certainty and regularity of the tides. “The anti-feminist backlash has been set off not by women’s achievement of full equality but by the increased possibility that they might win it,” Faludi said. “It is a pre-emptive strike that stops women long before they reach the finish line.” But the #MeToo movement has radicalized a generation of women, making them keenly aware that they do not have to silently suffer from sexual violence, or meekly accept the indignities of sexual harassment. Un-radicalizing these women, and making them accept an anti-feminist future, would be as impossible as to un-cook an omelette, or un-ring a bell.