2018FHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (3): 420–425

SHORTCUTS: #MeToo

#MeToo is nowhere near enough

Micaela DI L E O N A R D O , Northwestern University

Prolegomenon ference—I immediately shut down the partner who

#MeToo. I am a rape and battery survivor, an assault
survivor, a date-rape survivor, and the victim of literally
hundreds of individual acts of sexual harassment, both
on the job and on the street. When I was an undergrad-
uate, a senior white male professor asked me, during a
formal office consultation, basically out of nowhere, if I
was frigid. (Never mind that that term is so much sexist
bullshit. This was the 1960s.) One of my intimate male
partners, during an argument many years ago, hauled off
and knocked me to the ground. When I was a graduate
student, a white male student I had thought was a friend
told me, leering, that in New York City, his hometown,
“all the Italian girls were the dirty girls.” For a decade, I
and the other women in my condo building suffered
from a delusional, single male owner who assumed that
any woman saying hello to him on the stairwell or the
laundry room must immediately want sex. (He grabbed
me on the back stairs as I was attempting to get past
him, and tried to kiss me on the mouth.) The local police
started a file on him, but he was canny enough to pull
back from any action that could lead to arrest. We were
finally rid of him when a helpful (and black, male, very
large) neighbor decided it was time to frighten him
enough that he would sell out and move away.
And I am not the least bit unusual. Most women,
globally, experience multiple instances of both male as-
sault and harassment over their lifetimes. And intimate-
partner battery is unfortunately very common around
the world (United Nations 2017).
I was not to blame for these offenses; neither were all
the women against whom these daily acts are committed.
The men were to blame. That simple radical declaration,
unfortunately, needs to be made over and over until peo-
ple, including other women, and the victims themselves,
absorb it in a visceral way, and genuinely believe it.
I am a feminist. I was already a feminist when I ex-
perienced nearly all of these attacks. It made little dif-
hit me, but there was no point in calling the police.
And there really was and is no recourse against street
harassment—although the guerrilla videos made and
posted by younger women nowadays, with the hope
of naming and shaming repeat harassers in urban set-
tings, can be very effective in reducing public harass-
ment. Employment-related harassment claims are no-
toriously difficult to bring, and almost never succeed
unless the harasser/rapist victimizes so many women
that they can band together and use the court of public
opinion to influence authorities to act—as we have seen
with the cases of Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly,
Charlie Rose, and Harvey Weinstein.
In the late 1970s, I was so upset about having experi-
enced daily street harassment for more than a decade
that I wrote what is perhaps the first analytic essay on
the phenomenon, “The political economy of street ha-
rassment,” which then became a resource for both schol-
ars and activists (di Leonardo 1981). In 1992, five years
after I was knocked down a ravine by a strange black
man while out running in broad daylight in New Haven,
Connecticut, then beaten and raped, I published a cover
story in the Village Voice that, ironically, was mainly a
strong argument against then-dominant underclass ide-
ology (1992). Why? Because most of the people I spoke
to about the rape, white and black, assumed that my ex-
perience was the norm.
It wasn’t. It was aberrant, representing perhaps one
out of every nine sexual assaults. Most rape is acquain-
tance rape, and takes place within women’s class, race,
and nationality populations (National Institute of Jus-
tice 2017; RAINN n.d.). I ought to know: I gave up enor-
mous amounts of time for two years in Berkeley, Cali-
fornia, as a rape crisis center volunteer. As we now are
more aware, because of #MeToo and #TimesUp, power-
ful white men can be the worst abusers, precisely be-
cause of their social power. As I was recovering from
my rape/battery experience, I became weary of hearing

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Volume 8, number 3. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/701005

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421
friends, white and other, falsely assume that my partic-
ular assault experience was somehow “normal,” was the
modal form of male sexual violence against women. I re-
membered the vile, predatory actions of the senior white
male neurologist, whom I consulted in the early 1970s
when I was experiencing widespread, undiagnosed numb-
ness across half of my skin surface. Having gotten me un-
dressed and vulnerable in the examining room, and hav-
ing thoroughly terrified me with the specter of multiple
sclerosis, he embarrassingly declared that he would “dig
getting to know” me, and that he would then “take care”
of me.
Then there was the senior white cultural anthropol-
ogist who taught Berkeley summer school classes when
I was still an undergraduate, who praised my work, and
encouraged me to apply to do an anthropology PhD.
But once admitted to Berkeley, I found that the scene
had changed: the radical grad students from whom
I’d learned much were gone, and the only feminist fac-
ulty member was recruited, in the new “second wave”
feminist flurry, to be a high-paid administrator at an-
other UC campus. Attending the AAA meetings in New
Orleans that year, I hoped to reconnect with my old pro-
fessor and get advice on how to proceed in this new, less
supportive environment.
My old professor’s approach to the situation was, in-
stead, that he would lure me into his hotel room, lie on
the bed while I sat on a chair, and tell me about how we
had always had a “special relationship” and were “good
friends.” We were supposed to end up together in that
bed. Catching on to what he was planning much too
late, through sheer luck I was inspired to launch into
a long narrative of my mysterious undiagnosed illness.
Instinctively, I made myself unsexy by defining myself
as physically spoiled. I could actually see the professor
deflating, losing sexual interest in me, as I laid out my
scary symptoms and my pilgrimages to one disappoint-
ingly witless neurologist after another.
After I escaped him, I walked down New Orleans’s
Esplanade Avenue, crying for what I had lost. Not only
had a crime been committed against me about which I
could do nothing, but a senior scholar who had helped
me to believe in my intelligence—and this was in the
early 1970s, when the majority of Americans didn’t re-
ally imagine that women were capable of doing any kind
of skilled, prestigious work—had just fatally ruined that
favor. I was going to have manage that on my own.
But the real pain, the worse betrayal, came from the
women I told about the event. My closest friend at the
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#METOO IS NOWHERE NEAR ENOUGH
time had also been in that professor’s summer school
classes. Instead of understanding how upset and humil-
iated I felt, she was jealous. She said, with a real sense of
injury, that he had never come on to her.
And then when I later confessed the disastrous event
to a woman faculty member, an avowed feminist, she
again ignored my distress. Instead, she got a funny look
on her face, and, looking away from me and smiling,
exclaimed: “AAA Meetings are very sexy places!” She
proceeded to tell me happily, à la Catherine Deneuve,
about her various liaisons with married men at anthro-
pology meetings.
What a long way we had not come, baby. These seem-
ingly politically aware women could not see their sister
feminist’s suffering because their bad-faith obsessions
with their own sexual attractiveness to men—to any
man—got in the way.
The same thing happened to me when I arrived at
one of my many college and university jobs some de-
cades ago. An elderly white male colleague hectored
me, while leering at my chest, with his claim that in
“sophisticated” Europe, women attend parties bare-
breasted. Sure they do. He later sexually harassed one
of my grad students. But when I brought up the issue
with the other women in the department, they were of-
fended that I would dare criticize their “nice” colleague.
Thus when I did experience stranger rape, I wasn’t
fooled by it into associating “rape culture” with impov-
erished minority men. I knew the statistics from my
work as an antirape activist. And I carried visceral mem-
ories of the long parade of entitled white men who had
attempted to force unwanted sexual advances upon me
through using their social power.
And in fact, the use of a woman’s sexuality to de-
mean her is not limited to overt sexual harassment.
In one of my positions, I naively responded that I would
obey the actual rules when a senior male colleague de-
manded that I act illegally on a committee to bring about
the result he wanted. I did, he did not receive his result,
and so he commenced on a more-than-a-year campaign
of claiming to carefully chosen powerless professors and
grad students that I was engaging in simultaneous affairs
with two of my colleagues. I had beaten him intellectually
and bureaucratically, so his response was to label me a
slut. When someone finally informed me of the lie, I
called one of these male colleagues, and said with great,
sardonic satisfaction—the only satisfaction I received
in the whole ugly mess—“X, did you know we were hav-
ing an affair?” He was stupefied, and then outraged. I as-
 Micaela DI LEONARDO
sumed that the evil liar would be punished, but no. He
was male and senior, and it was decades ago, long prior
to #MeToo, or even most university sexual harassment
codes, and nothing happened. Then he did it again to an-
other young female professor.
Historical context
It is thus with these life experiences, as well as nearly a
half-century of feminist scholarship and activism, that I
evaluate the #MeToo phenomenon. In the heat of the
1970s Second Wave of global feminism, we actually be-
lieved that we were defeating rape culture. Like Friedrich
Engels theorizing the lowered social status of women
with the rise of private property as the “world-historical
defeat of the female sex” ([1884] 1972), we believed we
were part of the world-historical achievement of equal
rights for women and girls. But despite multiple United
Nations “Years of the Woman,” some legal changes in
various countries, significant progress in terms of em-
ployment and careers in many places, and the establish-
ment of various in-house corporate, university, and gov-
ernment bureaucracies for dealing with harassment and
assault claims, we see no diminution in the frequency of
women and girls (and some men and boys) being victim-
ized.
And it is now forty years later. That is, what should
have been two generations of wholesale change have
proceeded with little improvement. Instead, in 2016,
53 percent of White American women voted for Donald
Trump, a confessed, documented sexual harasser and
probable rapist. Instead, Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes,
Charlie Rose, Bill O’Reilly, and Bill Cosby for decades
rained terror and pain down on women seeking their
professional help. Or simply being unlucky enough to
catch their eye. As did and do thousands, probably hun-
dreds of thousands and perhaps millions of men, glob-
ally, not yet caught, not yet complained about. In other
words, on the violence against women front, we failed.
Time to start over.
So forgive me if I am not terribly upset about the spec-
ter of “mob rule” by #MeToo and other “name and
shame” efforts by women, but also by antiracists, LBGTQ
activists, antixenophobes, and social democrats as they
attempt to use social media to alert the public to and pos-
sibly gain traction in fighting against the ugly, harmful,
illegal behavior of only a small percentage of the sexist,
racist, individual and corporate and governmental evil-
doers in the United States and elsewhere.
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422
Yes, there is a definite need for a sense of nuance, for
considering the human rights of the accused. Compar-
ing Senator Al Franken’s few small-potatoes and largely
scripted comedy actions to the hundreds of assaults
committed by monsters like Weinstein, O’Reilly, Cosby,
Ailes, or Rose is ridiculous. But Congressional Demo-
crats have a much higher bar for the behavior of their
own than does the public at large—and certainly than
the Republicans, who simply don’t care. Look whom
they are still supporting as president, despite the histor-
ically unprecedented avalanche of his illegal, treasonous
acts. Junot Díaz’s complex case, involving his own expe-
rience of sexual abuse as a child and then his poor and
sometimes brutal behavior with a variety of women—
and his public and wholehearted apology—deserves
the careful evaluation it is receiving from Latina and
other feminists (“Open letter against media treatment
of Junot Díaz” 2018; Alcoff 2018; Simmonds 2018).
And we need to think contextually as well: as Lisa Duggan
insightfully points out, while LBGTQ individuals may
also perpetrate these crimes, they, rather than the infi-
nitely more numerous heterosexual men who commit
most harassment, seem to be the most severely pun-
ished by institutions (2018).
And we need space to recognize that sexual expres-
sion, when not used as a bludgeon, can be a very great
pleasure, for both opposite-sex and same-sex (or
whatever-sex) partners. In my long-ago street harass-
ment piece, I recognized the widespread nature and fun
of badinage, of flirting. But I noted that men are very well
aware when that badinage is consensual and when it is
not—when the woman’s eyes light up and she gives as
good as she gets, or when she is unwilling and fearful—
on the street, in the workplace, at a party. If she’s not that
into you, just go away, okay?
Ongoing horrors
But most importantly: What the very framing of the is-
sue for this special forum elides—the key set of facts
missing from the description—is, first, the utter ubiq-
uity of male sexual violence against women globally—
including deliberate acts of “femicide” by delusional
men who imagine that they can rid the world of uppity
women who want decent jobs and the right to direct
their own sexual and reproductive lives (World Health
Organization 2012). Second, the sheer paucity of legal
remedies to end and punish that violence. Most victims
423
never report, because they know they will be disbelieved
and/or stigmatized, often blamed for their own victim-
ization. Third, the “permission from above” for misog-
ynist, racist, xenophobic behavior that we experience in
far too many states around the world, and most cer-
tainly in the United States today. (The Southern Poverty
Law Center, which keeps a running tab of hate crimes,
has documented a large spike in attacks since Trump’s
election [Beutel 2018].) Thus, arguing that we should
rely on “legal remedies” alone and not engage in every
possible form of activist organizing fails to take into ac-
count ongoing and even increasing extreme power and
powerlessness. It is like advising Mahatma Gandhi to
pursue India’s decolonization solely through the Brit-
ish colonial courts.
Finally, the framing of the question prevents us from
considering the most promising development of this
whole complex, messy, rapid social-media-fueled shift:
the creation of #TimesUp by Hollywood women.1 Not
just the militant demand that it is past time for white
women and all racial minorities in the entertainment
business to receive their fair representation of high ad-
ministrative positions and equal salaries with the white
men doing the same work. Not just that the ubiquitous
sexual harassment in the business must stop—now! But,
and this is the most important feature, women heading
up working women’s associations like the United Farm-
workers and Domestic Workers United openly reached
out to the Hollywood women, pointing out that hotel
maids, farmworkers, care workers, waitresses, fast-food
workers, and other working-class and often minority
and/or immigrant women work hard jobs for little
pay, often facing even worse harassment conditions
than the Hollywood actresses. To their credit, the Hol-
lywood women immediately responded positively, set
up a series of meetings, gave tens of millions of dollars
to these organizations, and walked the red carpet with a
number of working women’s activists at the 2018
Oscars. That is the class-and-race-sensitive #MeToo
and #TimesUp activism with which I identify and
which I hope will spread (Corkery 2018).
In closing, let me address the elephant in the room
in this debate: male fears of unwarranted female accu-
sations, male concerns that their careers could be de-
stroyed by a misunderstanding, or simply lying woman.
1. https://www.timesupnow.com.
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#METOO IS NOWHERE NEAR ENOUGH
First, such false accusations are as rare as fraudulent
voting in the United States (Lonsway, Archambault,
and Lisak 2009), and yet belief in falsehood here is as
strong as is Republican belief in widespread voter
fraud—which has been repeatedly debunked by careful
studies, to no avail.
Second, stop for a moment and think about the
thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of wom-
en’s and girls’ lives that have been blighted—and some-
times ended—by harassment, abuse, and assault, with
no recourse, for most of human history. Whose lives
matter? If you are a man, would you prefer to have my
ordinary woman’s lifetime’s worth of assault, battery,
and harassment experiences, would you like to have
my daily extreme PTSD symptoms—or would you pre-
fer to remain a man, and handle your fear that a very un-
likely event might happen sometime in the future? Just a
wild guess—you still want to be a man, right?
Let me give the last words to my hero Sybil Wilkes,
the news anchor for the most popular black American
radio show you never heard of, the Tom Joyner Morn-
ing Show (TJMS). The show is twenty-four years old,
drive-time, serves a working-class audience of approx-
imately eight million, syndicated to black radio stations
all over the country, and is unabashedly progressive.
Sybil has always been the political standard bearer for
the show, and has highlighted violence against women
issues from day one (see my Black radio/Black resis-
tance: The life & times of the Tom Joyner Morning Show
[di Leonardo forthcoming]). So the show noted and
celebrated the downfall of Weinstein, Cosby, O’Reilly,
Ailes, and Rose, but, unlike mainstream media, also
has followed cases of missing African American girls
and women, and sadly notes each transwoman of col-
or’s murder. (They are killed at very high rates, and
few outlets cover the phenomenon [Buncombe 2017].)
On December 5, 2017, the male anchors and guests
on the TJMS were seriously discussing new sexual ha-
rassment claims for various celebrities. Tom Joyner,
the host, asked Sybil:
“I get these texts every time, why don’t the women
bring it up earlier?”
Sybil goes into a full-throated defense of the victimized
women, pointing out the crippling fear harassment
victims feel, fear of having no career, or simply of los-
ing their jobs, when they may have children to care for.
Lavell Crawford, guest comic, then asks plaintively:
“What if it’s ‘just looks?’”
 Micaela DI LEONARDO
Sybil is again eloquent. “Yes, it’s a gray area, and women
can sound like children—‘He looked at me!’ But the men
know what they’re doing.” She then goes on a rant: “If
you are doing it, stop it. If you are a man and see it done,
say something. If you are another woman, say some-
thing!” She’s careful to acknowledge that men may be
victimized.
At the end of the show, Tom reports that audience
texters are writing in: “Preach, Sybil! Tell ’em, Sybil!”
Preach, Sybil! To men and women. We all still need our
consciousnesses raised.
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425 #METOO IS NOWHERE NEAR ENOUGH

Micaela DI LEONARDO is a cultural anthropologist at Northwestern University who focuses on social and economic
inequalities by race, gender/sexuality, and class in the urban United States. She has written The varieties of ethnic
experience (1984) and Exotics at home: Anthropologies, others, American modernity (1998), and edited or coedited
Gender at the crossroads of knowledge: Feminist anthropology in the postmodern era (1991), The gender/sexuality
reader (1998), and New landscapes of inequality: Neoliberalism and the erosion of American democracy (2007).
Her Black radio/Black resistance will appear with Oxford in 2019. She is a Faculty Fellow at the Kaplan Humanities
Center this year, finishing her ethnography on political economy and public culture in New Haven, Connecticut.
Micaela di Leonardo
Department of Anthropology
Northwestern University
1810 Hinman Avenue
Evanston, IL 60208
USA
L-di@northwestern.edu

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