Did #metoo fail?
A retrospective, eight years later, on the successes and failures of the movement, and Andrea Dworkin's Right Wing Women
What’s #metoo?
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.
Did it fail?
I first heard that #metoo had failed when the Aziz Ansari article3 came out, that’s when I felt the first cooling and the first allegations that the movement had gone too far. Post 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 ended in a damp chill of so-called feminists who said they believed women, but not that woman. That the end of the Heard-Depp trial signaled that women shouldn’t come forward, and if they did, they’d face the consequences that Amber Heard did. Admittedly, 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 against her for merely that.
I think, though, it goes too far to say that through a single trial, it was proven that men could rape and abuse with impunity and that we’ve failed in stopping this from happening. In an otherwise brilliant essay, popular writer
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.
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. 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. We need to look at preventing rape before it happens instead of imprisoning rapists years after the fact. 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 rare7, and systemic issues make those impossible. 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. 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 when she does, 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? 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 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. That not just men, too many women agree with that stance.
Rape isn’t simply about misogyny. The causes are incredibly complex. 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. There’s a high correlation between divorced parents and raping/abusing as an adult; there’s an even higher correlation with growing up around substance abuse and alcoholism, and struggling with those problems yourself. There’s also a high correlation between surviving abuse and rape and growing up in a household that has those problems also. Those are generational patterns, the roots of them are often toxic patriarchy8, and they will take generations to solve. It’s also too simple to say that growing up under terrible circumstances turns someone into someone who rapes; a lot of people do and choose not to.
The 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.”
…after Harvey Weinstein’s conviction was overturned in 2024. She rightly points out that ten years ago, getting someone like Harvey Weinstein10, or for that matter Johnny Depp, into a courtroom was impossible. Recently, years after Amber Heard, several (!) of the men that raped Gisèle Pelicot’s 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. We hope, and we keep fighting.
There have been some improvements in reduction in number of rapes and convictions. There are incremental legal changes, eg., affirmative consent (yes means yes instead of no means no) is the law for college campuses in California. Before #metoo, RAINN 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 six11. When I went through school, college, law school, there was no consent education. Nowadays, there’s education on consent and saying no, and I’d like to think that it’s making a difference. However small, these are quantifiable, concrete signals that we’re headed (teeny-tiny step by teeny-tiny step) in the right direction.
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 beings12.
The greatest impact the movement has had is in public perception of rape. The negation that Andrea Dworkin wrote about was diluted through the adjacent #believewomen. 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. She’s a real victim, the perfect victim, the type of woman who deserves protection, and she’s so rare that I can’t name a single one. 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. 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.
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. In that story, eighteen-year-old “Marie” came 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 had grown up in group homes, she 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. She hadn’t lied, but she was treated so badly post-rape that it was easier for her to deny it and move on. That’s just one example of how difficult society makes life for women who 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, stating 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 even in the face of rape and abuse. Dworkin was widely discredited 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). Her use of language can be affective and inflammatory. An example (against pornography as an industry): “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), but I think 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. For my next essay, I’ll write a piece that addresses the book and its subject matter more directly.
That Dworkin was republished is to me a sign that feminism is going to resurge, and I hope, with it, we start talking about stopping rape and abuse. Right Wing Women 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, who is president again. Even though it became a popular hashtag in late 2017, Taruna Burke coined the term 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 I want to push for it wax and grow stronger because we need it now more than ever.
Dworkin, Andrea. Right Wing Women. (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1983. Republished New York: Picador, 2025.) p. 10
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.
Way, Katie. I went on a date with Aziz Ansari. It turned into the worst night of my life. Babe.net.
I meant as in chills other survivors coming forward; but it works both ways!
Fisher-Quann. who’s afraid of amber heard? Internet Princess. June 10, 2022.
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.
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).
If you want to read a book about this, I’d recommend bell hooks The Will to Change. I summarized it here:
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.
Noveck, Jocelyn. #MeToo advocates vow the reckoning will continue after Weinstein’s conviction is overturned. NPR. April 26, 2024.
These numbers take into account underreporting, but I’m uncertain about the methodology used to do so.
Dworkin, Andrea. Right Wing Women. (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1983. Republished New York: Picador, 2025.) p. 10 - 11.