Contrary to the claims of the serial hashtagers, #MeToo has become an engine of shame, mob justice and vindictive abuse against masculinity. It is no longer a legitimate campaign to help female victims of abuse.
Amid all the pathological gossip and ritual destruction of people’s careers, we are also only hearing one side of the abuse story. The rage fuelled madness of #MeToo and its one-sided nature serve to cover up a very inconvenient fact about human relationships: Women are just as abusive as men.
Of course it is rare to find the kind of physically threatening thug-like Harvey Weinstein-types among women. However, there are plenty of women who behave equally badly and who destroy lives as they do so.
The difficulty in proving this lies in the fact that whereas men abuse physically, or harness their power in the material world to get what they want, women abusers often use psychological techniques, shame tactics, emotional blackmail and gaslighting.
In a fascinating and heartbreaking Ted Talk by Tim Golden, he describes the ways in which men end up in abusive situations. A mixture of social programming on emotional repression, and the psychological erosion of their inner integrity at the hands of abusive women, can literally cause the death of thousands of men.
In his talk he describes a man who grew up in a ‘hyper-masculine’ culture, that taught him to avoid being emotional. This man went on to form a marriage with a women who attacked his self-esteem and psychological integrity over a period of years, moving from passing hurtful comments about his appearance and mocking his looks, to outright outbursts of vindictive rage.
These attacks became so common he could predict when he was due for his next six-monthly bout of outward abuse about his lack of sexual attractiveness. This cycle of abuse eventually led to a complete withholding of sex until he promised to become less overweight and more attractive.
Tim eventually admits that the man’s life he is describing is his own. The abuse he experienced led him more than once to attempt suicide. The relief of ending his pain was still preferable to compromising his perceived ‘masculinity’ and admitting that he had been a victim of abuse.
Whereas the abuse of men like Harvey Weinstein is the abuse of a shameless and explicit tyrant, the abuse at the hands of toxic women is abuse by a thousand cuts.
The novelist Margaret Atwood recently wrote in the Globe and Mail that simply criticising women or the #MeToo movement has rendered her ex-communicated as a Bad Feminist. Atwood’s simple point was the ultimate sacrilege for modern feminism: that men and women are equally capable of evil and abuse.
She wrote: ‘My fundamental position is that women are human beings, with the full range of saintly and demonic behaviours this entails, including criminal ones. They're not angels, incapable of wrongdoing. If they were, we wouldn't need a legal system.’
The fact that #MeToo can’t withstands this kind of dissent exposes its illegitimate and sinister motives. Rather than actually being an effective campaign to help victims of abuse get the justice they deserve, it has become an aggressive and dangerous orgy of virtue-signalling and hate towards men.
It has itself become a form of abuse, in that it has created a culture of guilty-until-proven-innocent and uses public shaming to satisfy the mob’s pathological schadenfreude.
Dr Tara J Palmatier, a psychologist who specialises in helping men free themselves from abusive relationships, writes on her website shrink4men.com that we are living in a culture which reacts vehemently to reports of women being abused but which explains away the behaviours of abusive women abusers as the actions of victims of mental illness or those simply acting out on their own experiences of abuse.
Palmatier’s website states: ‘When a man is abusive, he’s designated a jerk and we encourage his wife or girlfriend to end the relationship. Abusive men are publicly humiliated, vilified and often imprisoned for their violent behavior. When a woman is abusive, we advise her male target that she’s just emotional, she was abused as child, so he needs to be patient and sensitive to her feelings and stick with her no matter the personal cost.’
Of course none of this is being discussed to diminish the pain of the women who are right now seeking to heal from monstrous pain inflicted upon them by abusive men. However, the #MeToo movement has become nothing more than a kind of PR tactic for women who are themselves quite abusive and who wish to vent their rage and purify their own sins by attacking easy targets.
Abuse exists. We have laws to deal with it. Anyone who feels they have been abused should report these things to the police, not social media. And if there are barriers to justice discovered within the system, that is something that needs to be addressed, through parliament or political campaigns.
However, any attempt to right abusive wrongs should have nothing to do with social media and have nothing to do with celebrity culture. If we continue to add fuel to the #MeToo mania, we will allow gossip and mob tactics to cause a critical breakdown in human relationships, and we will continue to whitewash the reality of toxic femininity and to only tell one half of the story of abuse.
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