#MeToo, Feelings, and Lessons from General Organa

I have hung back and read many opinions about what I, as a woman, should and should not say during this historical moment. Mostly I’m talking about other women telling me which opinions or questions are acceptable and which are unacceptable to voice right about now. They say it’s not the time to split hairs. Women need their voices to be heard, and their truths to come out, without judgment or silencing. All victims are entitled to their feelings. It’s the wrong moment to apply skepticism of any kind.

Well, it’s been a minute, so how about we talk about some things?

First, it’s fantastic that women are being heard. Yes, there have been some toxic men in power doing some horrendous things that need to stop . . . criminal things, vile things, things that should have gotten them fired and/or jailed long ago. The claims about these offenders stand up to skepticism and investigation — as all things with merit do. Not pulling our punches in examining this behavior will strengthen the movement, not weaken it. Doing so is not making excuses for men or taking a stance against women. It’s just the ethical thing to do.

A few trends have me concerned, as I watch this tide swell and swallow up nuance and meaning.

On Important Words

Any language is fluid, as meanings drift and words mutate. But, at any given point, to have meaningful civil discourse we need common understandings of what words mean. Trump-era doublespeak has already eroded our ability to communicate clearly. Just recently, in what was widely derided as a “word ban,” the CDC was given a list of seven words deemed inappropriate for official budget documents because they might trigger the current administration. That’s one way to hamper communication: obfuscation by way of euphemism. Another way is to take an important word and subsume more and more meanings under it until it becomes a bloated catch-all, a term that could mean any one of numerous things.

Let’s look at sexual assault and rape. While courts of law maintain specific legal definitions, in the past few months I have seen the definition of the term “sexual assault” rewritten in real time by people on social media to mean not just forced penetration or touching of the genital area but also: unwanted hugs, a tap on shoulder or knee, unwanted touching of any body part, cheating on a partner, unstated non-monogamy, sending of an unsolicited dick pic, asking a woman for sex, commenting on a female’s appearance, commenting on any aspect of a woman that relates to her femaleness or her body, yelling something rude from a distance, or casting an unwelcome gaze. It also seems intent doesn’t matter: if an action or statement is felt to be an assault by the victim, then it is assault.

If sexual assault means all these things, then it means nothing. This draining away of meaningful distinction does not empower women, it makes us look like we have lost our grip on vocabulary.

As I read the latest batch of articles touting a man in power being found out as a sexual predator, I have caught myself wondering, “Well, do they mean the really bad kind of sexual assault, or the mostly benign form of ‘sexual assault’?”

THIS IS NOT A THING ANYONE SHOULD EVER WONDER.

Yet, I wonder this because I have read articles with the words “sexual assault” splashed in their headlines, but, upon reading, discovered that the subject of the article had merely been accused of inappropriate hugging, patting someone on the back, or another action one regularly sees a mall Santa perform with about a hundred kids each day. Granted, there may be more salacious accusations that the journalist never mentions — but if these remain unsaid, why put “sexual” in the headline? Are we simply to assume that if a man engages in any kind of touchy-feely behavior, he will eventually be found out as a serial rapist or groper? (In fact, I have had people tell me this in all seriousness: if a powerful man hugs too much, that is solid evidence that he surely does more.) We have indeed seen some stories play out exactly this way: an accused man seems to be an affectionate, tactile type of person, or he plays off his too-familiar behavior as, “just the way a cast interacts, like family”. . . then, more serious charges emerge from multiple victims.

Still, these instances do not indicate an absolute, and we cannot let such commonplace social behavior stand as a litmus test for whether far more sinister activity is occurring. We’d be shooting a lot of horses before hitting the zebra we’re aiming for. Journalists are tripping over themselves reporting the next giant to be felled, rendering even the non-statement that “no women wish to comment” into a heavily loaded sentence that implies deep, dark goings-on. Rashida Jones and Will McCormack had to issue a statement correcting multiple stories that claimed she had left production of Toy Story 4 over unwanted sexual advances: “The break neck speed at which journalists have been naming the next perpetrator renders some reporting irresponsible and, in fact, counterproductive.… We did not leave Pixar because of unwanted advances. That is untrue.”

The Importance of Degree

Matt Damon is currently taking heat for saying, “there’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation, right?” Twitter flipped. Are there really that many people who think there ISN’T a difference? Do they believe a pat on the butt today will surely escalate into forced penetration someday soon? I’ve been patted on the butt by a guy I didn’t want near me. Using hypothetical hyperbole, if it were a choice between having 1,000 random gross guys pat me on the butt or having my child molested, there would be NO CONTEST. Bring on the spanking machine.

Bari Weiss of the New York Times calls this generalization of all so-called predators a “moral flattening.” Refusing to conflate these actions does not make me, or Weiss, or Matt Damon, a rape apologist. Rather, I think anyone who implies that a rape is equal to a pat on the butt is minimizing rape in a ridiculous, cruel, and dangerous equivocation. Denying these activities fall along a spectrum IS implying this, for an equivalence goes both ways.

Everyone has different comfort levels, I get that. I was not raised in a hugging family, so my first few hugs from acquaintances were uncomfortable. But human beings hug — we hugged before we evolved into the human species, and we need hugs and other touch to maintain our mental, and even our physical, health. I eventually came to grips with that. I grant you, it’s possible that some individual, somewhere, could suffer as much trauma from an unexpected hug as another person would suffer from being drugged and penetrated. But if such a touch-averse person exists, they would do well to receive counseling and stimulus conditioning prior to leaving the house to walk among humans.

So in the name of clarity, can we please stop applying the term “sexual assault” to common human interactions that don’t involve the “bathing suit area” our parents warned us to guard? Avoiding this term does not defend crude, inappropriate, wrong actions or repeated harassment — its helps us communicate effectively to parse degree and solve the problem. If this situation devolves into a wall of voices conflating very different actions into one indiscernible, monstrous mass, we will have a moral panic on our hands.

Panics are not productive. They feel productive, and they sure are emotionally cathartic, but when the dust settles, the whole thing is collectively remembered as something of a cultural misstep, a false alarm, or even a joke. The stages of a moral panic are concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality, and volatility. The first three have already happened, and it feels like we are smack-dab in the middle of the disproportionality stage. If we can roll this back, maybe we can avoid the final stage, which consists of the entire movement fizzling out as society turns its gaze to another shiny object — leaving behind any hope of lasting cultural change. Tina Brown, longtime editor of Vanity Fair, said we were witnessing a real “Arab Spring for women.” I worry she might be right — and I remind readers to examine how the Arab Spring played out.

Some argue that abuse cannot possibly be categorized, it’s simply all bad. What? No. Crimes are categorized all the time; this does not minimize them or hinder prosecution. Rather, it aids the pursuit of justice by avoiding disproportionality. Our whole court system is based on it. Murder and manslaughter are ranked by nuance, circumstances, use of weapons, negligence, and premeditation, all of which helps guide proper sentencing. Yet, as messy as our legal system is, what I’m seeing now — justice by public shaming — is the meth-addicted hillbilly cousin of due process. People look to their gut, and confirmation bias leads them to quickly see evidence against someone they dislike while averting their eyes from incriminating information about a hero. Giants from the left and right have toppled, along with pop culture icons, leaving fans to wring their hands in disbelief. Things held up as “proof” of guilt demonstrate a fallacy called Morton’s fork: A contrite statement expressing regret at unknowingly making women uncomfortable is seen as proof a man is a predator hiding behind a non-pology. A firm denial and defamation lawsuit is seen as proof that a man is a predator trying to silence his accuser. Voluntarily stepping away from a job is a sign of guilt. So is a decision to stay and face internal investigations. Admitting to some actions but denying — or not recalling — other, more serious ones is becoming irrelevant, since the label “abuser” or “sexual harasser” can still be applied.

Remember, too, that we cannot take a company’s actions or rulings as any real indicator of an individual’s guilt. Companies are not courts of law. Every corporation has different rules, and decisions are often motivated not by innocence or guilt but by public opinion, bad optics, or potential lawsuits (whether well-founded or not). When discussing an article about NPR’s Garrison Keillor that mentioned nothing beyond him putting his hand on someone’s back, I was surprised at how many people countered my questions with the pronouncement that he was obviously guilty of something far worse (just unmentioned), because Minnesota Public Radio investigated internally and took action. I saw this as a leap, but it seemed a natural assumption to many. Think of the last boss you had. Would you want that person in charge of whether you were seen by the entire world as a predator? We don’t trust companies to treat whistleblowers fairly because they have a long history of protecting their own best interests at the cost of an individual employee. But replace “whistleblower” with “accused harasser” and suddenly corporations have our complete confidence to do the right thing.

In Kansas, democratic U.S. House candidate Andrea Ramsey has dropped out of her race over sexual harassment allegations from a dozen years ago — allegations that had been settled by the company she worked for without her knowledge or participation. “Had those allegations, those false allegations, been brought against me directly instead of the company I would have fought to exonerate my name. I never would’ve settled,” Ramsey said in an interview. “And I would have sued the disgruntled, vindictive employee for defamation.” LabOne, as the litigant’s employer, settled the lawsuit back in 2005, and Ramsey was not party to it. “In its rush to claim the high ground in our roiling national conversation about harassment, the Democratic Party has implemented a zero-tolerance standard,” Ramsey continued. “For me, that means a vindictive, terminated employee’s false allegations are enough. . . . We are in a national moment where rough justice stands in place of careful analysis, nuance and due process.”

When Sharing Becomes Revenge

Speaking of rough justice, mobs of angry people have a new tool literally at their fingertips. Weaponized social media has become the latest enemy of fairness and reason. If I were accused of a crime, or even just a crude impropriety, I think I’d probably prefer any method of judgment — a jury of my peers, trial by combat, testing whether I weigh the same as a duck — to the vagaries of public opinion. As Jon Ronson writes in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, “with social media, we’ve created a stage for constant artificial high drama. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain.”

Whether it’s vaguebooking, bragplaining, or slactivism (three words unheard of a decade ago), people love to virtually participate. I typed out a #MeToo post, as did many of you. It felt good to participate, and it was certainly more important than posting a Unicorn Frappuccino selfie: this trend at least served a social justice goal and didn’t come with a $5.95 price tag and 59 grams of sugar.

Then I noticed an ugly underbelly developing in little pockets of my social media bubble. A few guys were getting thrown under the bus very publicly for things that really didn’t seem to warrant the collective anger piled upon them. It smelled like a clear case of scapegoating, which tends to go hand-in-hand with mob justice. But wait — was I letting cognitive dissonance get in the way? Had I been brainwashed by lifelong exposure to the patriarchy into giving men a gigantic benefit of the doubt?

I tried genderbending the situation in my head. What would I say if a female acquaintance of mine was called out by an ex-boyfriend on Facebook for sleeping around, and then he gathered a group of his buddies and tried to make “all men aware” of her sexual behavior and preference for non-monogamy, thus inciting a storm that impacted her job, her volunteer positions, her relationship with her young children, and her mental health? What if, when questioned about whether such actions were defamation, these men laughed and said she has a low-paying academic job and could never afford a lawyer? That’s an absolutely clear case of slut-shaming, bullying, and harassment — men believing they have the right to control a woman’s body and even mocking her for not being financially able to fight back. Yet, when it happened to a man I know, it was done in the name of #MeToo and cloaked in the shiny armor of social justice. And those participating were liberal, caring, feminists who would have surely rushed to defend a woman if she were undergoing the exact same attack.

Another genderbent version of a real scenario I watched unfold: a nude picture of a woman was circulated online, thanks to an ex-colleague and several of his friends. She refused to comment for a long time, but finally broke her silence to state that the photo had been sent in a mutual exchange between two consensual adults having a long-distance private relationship that had since ended. Many did not believe her side of the story, and the photo, along with an article about why this woman is a danger to the community, was shared and re-shared hundreds of times in an effort to heap public disgrace upon her. At worst this is public-aided revenge porn. At best it’s a group of people believing they are qualified to be arbiters of right and wrong in what should be a private, personal matter. But this involved a photo of a naked man, so it was unabashedly shared, no questions asked, along with a sense of righteous moral indignation.

Should a woman be publicly shamed over situations like this? Should a man? Should anyone?

Some are not concerned by the fallout: Teen Vogue columnist Emily Linden famously tweeted in late November that if innocent men’s reputations go down along with the patriarchy, that’s a price she is “absolutely willing to pay.” (Or, rather, a price she was fine with other people paying.) She subsequently shut down her Twitter account due to the backlash, but not before she explained that women have endured far worse for far longer, and false accusations are extremely rare. They are, but understanding that blanket statement requires nuance. We’ll get to that.

Impression Management and Larger Truths

The “Believe All Women” directive doesn’t make sense to me, on its face. Not just because of the examples I mentioned earlier, but because believing half the population is incapable of lying (or being mistaken) is simply ludicrous. I don’t automatically believe a female car salesperson, or a female telemarketer, or a female politician, or a female journalist, until I check out her claims. And what if women themselves disagree — as many do on matters of sexual assault and harassment? Take for instance the 36 women of SNL who signed a letter of support for Al Franken, or the statement of Sylvester Stallone’s ex-wife Brigitte Neilson claiming she was absolutely sure he was with her on the night he was accused (decades later) of raping a teen in Las Vegas. We cannot believe two opposite scenarios simply because both were told to us by women.

Bari Weiss puts it this way: the notion of believing all women actually fetishizes them. It puts them in a category above reproach, “no longer human and flawed.” Weiss goes on, “It’s condescending to think that women and their claims can’t stand up to interrogation and can’t handle skepticism. I believe that facts serve feminists far better than faith. That due process is better than mob rule.” So, let’s bypass social media and everyone’s feelings . . . let’s turn to metrics.

There is indeed a whole shelf of data showing that false accusations of rape — specifically, a woman walking into a police station and filing a provably false/fabricated report that she has been raped — are extremely rare. Thankfully, more police are being trained to take rape accusations seriously: many now undergo training supplemented by local rape crisis centers and victim-oriented community groups. Activists have spoken often about the fear that many female rape victims have about reporting sexual assault, namely that police will think she’s lying. This is a legitimate fear that victims do have, one that surely keeps many from reporting the crime. There is no shortage of harrowing accounts in the media that detail particular instances of rape victims being dismissed, mistreated, and even abused at the hands of incompetent officers — individually, these stories certainly do stoke fear, and create the impression that most or all police are against rape victims from the start. But what do numbers say? While new officers do grossly overestimate how many rape claims are false, surveys show that experienced officers (those with more than seven years working with victims of sexual assault) estimate the percentage of false rape claims at only around 8 to 10 percent, which is close to the 2 to 8 percent that experts at the National Center for Prosecution of Violence against Women (NCPVAW) have calculated. So, in short, most officers — and certainly those who aren’t rookies — do believe victims.

A confounding factor that could account for some of the discrepancy shown by inexperienced police is that many victims of rape do also lie when they walk into that police station. This makes it messy to sort the data when it comes to women who are denied justice because police or prosecutors doubt their story (or some aspect of it).

Martin Schwartz, in his report “Police Investigation of Rapes: Roadblocks and Solutions,” identifies a type of lying he calls “impression management” as the greatest obstacle to rape convictions. Rape victims lie in order to gloss over certain self-incriminating details: their immigration status, how many drinks they had, or whether they were doing drugs. Adolescent girls make up stories about being kidnapped to hide the fact that they had ventured off on their own to a forbidden party. When it later comes out that the victim was drunk or high, despite her claims otherwise, or surveillance video shows the girl was never at the corner she claimed to be snatched from, it can tarnish credibility enough to ruin a case. These victims are not branded false accusers or fabricators, per se, but their case falls victim to their own efforts at impression management.

A painful irony is that women in this situation are lying in order to appear less complicit and more believable — which in turn makes their entire story less believable. What sways an interviewing officer or a district attorney toward not believing a rape victim is thus not her gender or her status as a victim but rather the lies included in her story. One solution to this is to train rookie officers, as well as prosecutors and jurors, to recognize these inconsistencies for what they are, rather than letting them unravel a rape case. In addition, Schwartz emphasizes that “there needs to be some educational mechanism to convince potential rape victims to tell the complete truth immediately, to avoid having the cases dropped.” Indeed, an NCPVAW report sums up this vicious circle that traps so many women: “Many victims give information that is incomplete, inconsistent, or untrue because they are afraid that they won’t be believed” (emphasis mine). If fear of being disbelieved actually motivates these lies, then another good strategy might be to stop pre-emptively telling women over and over again that police are not likely to believe their claims of sexual assault. And to stop, as Weiss put it, fetishizing women as above reproach and without flaw.

Catherine Burr, a university complaints investigator, argues that we shouldn’t think of sexual allegations as “true” or “false,” but rather consider whether the complaint has merit — which is a subtler distinction. A person alleging sexual harassment or assault may be telling the truth as they remember it, but the context and actions, despite being inappropriate, simply may not add up to what a reasonable person would categorize as harassment or assault. Likewise, the behavior might have begun mutually and then circumstances changed for one party. Or, the accused person might have had no reasonable way of knowing the behavior was unwelcome. Lying also does not automatically make an accusation false: impression management is not limited to the setting of a police station. Humans are remarkably prone to leaving out or altering details of a story that cast themselves in a poor light. A situation must be branded an entire fabrication — not just a slanted one — in order to be called a false allegation. Identifying such fabricated allegations can also be as tricky as trying to prove a negative.

Then we have people who embellish their story, not so much for impression management, but purposefully, in the name of some greater good. Last month, Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended the President’s tweeting of debunked anti-Muslim videos because, though the specific videos were false, she — and presumably her boss, Donald Trump — believed they told a larger truth. By this logic, a lie is not morally wrong if told in the service of the public good.

Someone I know was targeted with a false accusation just a few years ago — not the rare kind of false accusation that police see, but rather the easier, less fact-checked kind: a social media airing of vague grievances aimed to garner sympathy without the hassle, and criminal risk, of actually pressing false charges. In the ensuing legal dustup, the accuser explained that the blog post she’d authored, detailing years of abuse and harassment she personally endured from a misogynistic colleague, was not actually based on her own experiences but rather was a tour of the many types of harassment women endure. A compilation, she said, of things that do happen: just, they hadn’t necessarily happened to her. She said this with a straight face, as if it were a valid explanation and something any sensible person wishing to spice up their autobiography would do. Perhaps she had the same outlook as Emily Linden: if a few innocent guys go down in the crossfire, it’s still worth it to give a voice to victims of harassment, to tell this “larger truth.” Or maybe the blog post was simply designed to harvest clicks, as many blog posts are, and before she knew it the story had spun out of control. This is a problem in any popular movement: there will be careless people who wish to latch onto its momentum, either for their own publicity or for some benefit they imagine their actions will garner for the public good — or, they tell themselves, for both.

Memory Maybes: Neither Truth nor Lie

Looking beyond police practice, company rulings, and bending the truth for some greater good, let’s examine the psychology of experiences and memory. It’s a false dichotomy to say that either someone had an experience just as they retell it, or they are lying. There’s a third option: being mistaken.

But how could anyone possibly be mistaken about suffering harassment or sexual assault? Of course it would be insulting and degrading to tell a rape victim that she might be wrong about what she just experienced. But let’s look at events of a lesser degree that may have happened years or decades ago, as many of the #MeToo stories and public allegations have involved. For instance, I was groped in college — more than once. I went to parties and dance clubs and did the things college kids do. And I’m being perfectly honest when I say I cannot remember the details or the context of any particular groping clearly. This is absolutely not to excuse the behavior, then or now, but rather it’s to make the point that our memories are not perfect recordings. They corrode over time, and our sense of what happened changes slightly whenever we recount the experience.

Memory researchers like Elizabeth Loftus have shown that events we recall in our own personal history can be altered or even cut from whole cloth and implanted, with the right suggestions and cues. This little bug in our brain wiring is what led to widespread fear over what was later called the Satanic Panic, as victims undergoing regression therapy began “remembering” horrendous ritual abuse. This abuse was later proven to have never occurred, but not before many innocent people were jailed. But the memories need not be of such horrendous nature, nor the memory shuffling so extreme, for our brains to recall things inaccurately. We all experience lesser versions of this memory tweaking nearly constantly. Information given after the fact can alter a memory. Did you see Joey Roberts streak across the football field sophomore year? Or did your best friend tell you all about it? No, wait — Susan said she remembers you there. Yeah, you’re pretty sure you were there, and it was hilarious. Ask anyone who works in memory research what their biggest fear is, and they’ll tell you it’s being pinned for a crime they didn’t commit. Eyewitnesses are notoriously fallible, and recalling details of events, even ones you are sure you remember with sparkling clarity, is a craps shoot. Layer a few decades onto the mix and we have a miasma of maybe.

As my mother always told me: Write everything down, because you’ll forget. Or more accurately, you’ll remember something, but it will be wrong.

What about before something becomes a memory? Can two people experience the same thing but have completely different internal translations of what is taking place? Social psychologist and feminist Carol Tavris explains deftly how this happens in her 2014 talk, “The He Said/She Said Gap in Sexual Allegations.” Women and men can, and do, come away from the same encounter with very different notions of what just happened. (As a married person, I attest to seeing this firsthand on a regular basis, with much more mundane topics like how a party went or whether an acquaintance was charming or rude). Silence and a coy smile might be meant to convey nervous reluctance on her part, while he views it as wordless but cheerful consent. She sees him as large and intimidating, he views himself as chubby and meek. On any given date, we have two young adults with opposing internal engines chugging along on hormones and cognitive bias, and this can — and does — produce two accounts from well-meaning participants who honestly remember it so differently.

Slowly, we see this age-old phenomenon being tackled. Psychological loopholes like these are being taught and written about. More men are making the effort to get clear answers about whether a woman is granting enthusiastic consent or not. Women are being more vocal about their boundaries and wishes. This is good. This is progress. Let’s do what we can to see it continue.

Right now, on one side of the spectrum, I see women with potentially half-remembered accounts about creepy yet certainly not criminal behavior, from decades ago, taking their complaints to social media and demanding consequences in the name of believing all women. On the other end, we have women who were drugged and raped, or endured ongoing sexual harassment or assault, who kept records of it and took appropriate steps at the time yet were ignored or suffered consequences for seeking justice. Scholars of law, psychology, memory, and criminal justice — as well as anyone with a modicum of skeptical common sense — cannot give equal weight to these different types of accounts. Are the women on that less severe side of the spectrum not entitled to their feelings, their anger, the right to tell their story? They absolutely are. My frustration lies in the public equivocation of these stories into an all-encompassing tsunami, and the elevation of feelings as the most important evidence for harassment — the sure indicator that a wrongful act occurred. Often we forget important details of past events but recall an emotion, and that emotion can fester and grow and cloud our recollection even further. Hearing someone had strong emotions makes me trust their account of things less, not more.

But right now expressing any type of frustration at the flattening of all offenses to “equally bad” and “equally accurate” is somehow branded as going against all women. In that recent interview, Matt Damon tried to express this same worry about equivocation — except that due to timing and his gender, it wasn’t expression, it was “mansplaining” to women how they should feel. The resulting deluge of criticism included a clapback from Minnie Driver, who said there is “no hierarchy of abuse,” and another from Alyssa Milano, who complained that categorizing abuse was as ridiculous as categorizing cancer. I wonder if Milano could hear the clack as several thousand oncologists slammed their heads onto their desks after reading her comparison.

Of Princesses and Generals

Categorizing hierarchies of a phenomenon, weighing data, evidence, and trustworthiness of memory while pushing feelings aside as somewhat irrelevant is not seen as a feminine trait — at least that’s the impression I got from the women online who insisted I must be a sock puppet account run by some man. I sounded “too sciencey” and too analytical to be a woman. Yes, that’s happened more than once, in response to my asking questions and following a skeptical, logic-based approach. As a woman, that offends the fuck out of me. Men do not have a monopoly on rational thought, while we of the “weaker” sex run about getting the vapors and suffering the histrionic vagaries of a wandering uterus. And yes, I did pick up on the irony of having my voice shut down by other women proclaiming that “every woman must be heard.”

During the periods in history when women had absolutely no political power —which was pretty near all of it — some females found small, socially acceptable ways to exert influence. A few turned to piety and used the holiness of their unstained womanhood to garner some small measure of respect and authority. Some were able to exert influence over husbands or male members of their families by playing up their vulnerabilities, by gaining sympathy, by exaggerating an illness or drawing attention to their suffering during pregnancy and childbirth. Unable to access legitimate routes to government and power, women traded in whispers, rumor, and manipulation. These methods were indirect and born of subservience, and the one sure weapon a subservient female had was her feelings. Melancholy princesses singing about their feelings is not a trope pulled out of thin air.

But fuck that fucking shit all the way to Fucktown. Now is not then. We do not need to hold up our feelings as our greatest weapon. We are not princesses. We can and must operate in the realm of law, pursue a just government, and champion due process and the rational examination of evidence. “Believe all women” tosses that right out. Sure, I can understand it on an emotional level, as a repercussion to the years of women feeling relegated to a second-class existence, to being silenced. But that’s just it: it only makes sense on an emotional level.

We must stop dragging this moment backward, canonizing emotions through public sharing and hashtag catharsis. This means looking forward strategically for smart, fair solutions, and supporting women (and, yes, men) in Congress who are offering up these solutions. It means calling for the press to pay more attention to policy and due process rather than covering the latest social media shaming as if it’s juicy gossip. It means having the courage to speak up in the moment when you find yourself in a situation you might look back on as abuse or harassment, so your experience and feelings do not remain invisible and fester for years. It means valuing yourself enough to confront a colleague or boss; he might be socially dimwitted or he might be a predator — if he’s the former, you will educate the poor bastard, and if he’s the latter, you will hopefully be part of his undoing. It means not conflating sexual assault with general creepiness, and having the intellectual honesty to admit that all things must be categorized and quantified if we want to study them thoroughly. It means examining how the victim halo does real harm to real rape victims, and finding ways to let them know they can be imperfect and still get justice. It means pressing charges where there has been a crime and not settling for quick-and-easy social media poisoning as the next best thing — virtually kicking the can down the road and hoping society will act as judge and jury. It means not turning a blind eye when a movement becomes cruel and claims scapegoats. We must realize that applying skepticism to women does not attack or weaken us, it strengthens any allegation founded in fact.

Remember, as the late great Carrie Fisher has shown us, princesses can grow into generals. One fights with feelings, the other fights strategically to win.

Sources

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Martin D. Schwartz, “National Institute of Justice Visiting Fellowship: Police Investigation of Rapes — Roadblocks and Solutions,” Document №232667, Department of Justice (2010).

Ken Armstrong and T. Christina Miller, “When Sexual Assault Victims Are Charged with Lying,” New York Times, November 24, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/24/opinion/sunday/sexual-assault-victims-lying.html

Catherine Burr, “False Allegations of Sexual Harassment: Misunderstandings and Realities” Academic Matters: OCUFA’s Journal of Higher Education (Oct.-Nov. 2011).

Gabriella Paiella, “Garrison Keillor Fired over Sexual Misconduct Allegations,” The Cut, November 29, 2017. https://www.thecut.com/2017/11/garrison-keillor-fired-over-sexual-misconduct-allegations.html

Lindsay Wise and Bryan Lowry, “Kansas Dem Andrea Ramsey, Accused of Sexual Harassment, Will Drop out of U.S. House Race,” The Kansas City Star, December 15, 2017. http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article189931704.html

Carol Tavris, “Who’s Lying, Who’s Self-Justifying? Origins of the He Said/She Said Gap in Sexual Allegations,” The Amazing Meeting 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SpVVsOUsLo

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Elizabeth Loftus, “How Reliable Is Your Memory?” TEDGlobal 2013. https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_the_fiction_of_memory

Edward Helmore, “Minnie Driver: Men Like Matt Damon Cannot Possibly Understand What Abuse Is Like,” The Guardian, US Edition, December 17, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/dec/16/minnie-driver-matt-damon-men-cannot-understand-abuse

Magdalena S. Sánchez, The Empress, the Queen, and the Nun: Women and Power at the Court of Phillip III of Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).