What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo. JoAnn Wypijewski

could ever find themselves on the wrong side of a police investigation. Weinstein basked in the bully role, but his descent would be more satisfying if it did not rely simultaneously on conviction by say-so and a generalized agreement that he dis-empowered every man and woman who wasn’t on his security detail, from assistants to actors to journalists.

      Affirmations of powerlessness are more telling than sordid details. Not because the latter might be untrue but because the former reduce a many-layered story of sexism, violation and human weakness to a bleached tale of monstrosity and cowering. If some of the most privileged people on the planet were paralyzed by fear, this story implies, what defense do the rest of us have against the Bad Man?

      As Natalie Portman explained, we are helpless: “It’s only some men who do the harassing, but it’s all women who fear the violence and aggression. It has an effect like terror … everyone is afraid to walk down the street alone at night.”¹

      Desperate situations demand desperate measures. After the terror of 9/11: war, torture, mass surveillance, the gulag. After the terror of Weinstein, to what ends must we go to feel safe?

      That is not a glib question, nor is the terror reference insignificant. It points to a broader politics of fear structuring our time. Rage, revenge, the frisson of command as the list of accused men grew—these emotions reigned as #MeToo burst into the air-conditioning system of the culture.

      Rose McGowan joined the cry for jettisoning laws and legal distinctions (“These rape and child molestation statutes of limitations—what the fuck? That’s murder. That’s killing somebody”). Jenna Wortham imagined “the possibility of a new world order,” perhaps unaware of the term’s association with boasts of US leadership in global violence. After the appearance of the Shitty Men in Media List, the pell-mell anonymous J’accuse on the internet, Wortham expressed initial unease in The New York Times Magazine, only to conclude:

      A friend compared the feeling [after seeing the list] to the final scenes of “V for Vendetta.” She liked seeing women as digital vigilantes, knowing that men were scared. I did, too. I wanted every single man put on notice, to know that they, too, were vulnerable because we were talking.

      Teen Vogue columnist Emily Lindin tweeted of the list: “Sorry. If some innocent men’s reputations have to take a hit in undoing the patriarchy, that is a price I am absolutely willing to pay”—a curious way of putting it, since Lindin would absolutely not be the one to pay. Dylan Farrow, whose stated memories of molestation by Woody Allen are anything but simple—one brother (Ronan) launched a career off them while another brother (Moses) says they are false memories, implanted—blasts “our collective choice to see simple situations as complicated and obvious conclusions as a matter of ‘who can say?’”