On Franken: The Imaginary Invisible Feminists Are On the Attack!

Now that Jane Mayer and others in the mainstream media are reviving a fresh round of himpathy* for poor Al Franken, who resigned from the US Senate in 2017 after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct, it's time to address a common trope related to the #MeToo movement.

Via The Guardian (which uses Mayer's New Yorker piece as its source):

"While Franken claims to feel sorry for the women who accused him, he believes 'differentiating different kinds of behaviour is important'.

"He said: 'The idea that anybody who accuses someone of something is always right –that’s not the case. That isn’t reality.'”

The argument that "differentiating different kinds of behaviour is important" is often used to suggest that #MeToo advocates (ie, feminists) are not currently doing this, that we are burning men alive at the stake for both innocuous and illegal behaviors, and thus "the #MeToo movement has gone too far."

Yet, as I tweeted yesterday**, who exactly are the imaginary figments of people's imaginations who are saying, "Zero distinctions exist between different acts of sexual misconduct"? Do they hang out with the feminists of lore who scream at men all day for holding open doors?

I follow the work of more feminists than probably most Americans do, and I know of no major advocate who has made that argument. Rather, it seems mostly like a straw argument designed to prop up rape culture and male supremacy by suggesting that men are living with copious amounts of fear because feminists these days are hysterical, irrational, lying, immensely powerful, ambitious, and very stupid women. (Also, LOL at "these days." That's been rape culture patriarchy's line about women since time immemorial).

As a related point, notice how Franken slides the argument that "differentiating different kinds of behaviour is important" right into "The idea that anybody who accuses someone of something is always right- that's not the case. That isn't reality."

So, first, a lecture that women are not smart, rational, or sophisticated enough to make distinctions between different types of behavior and, in conclusion, those bitches are lying, anyway.

I reckon that part of the problem here is that a lot of people, especially men, in the media don't actually follow, read, or analyze progressive female feminists to even know what they/we are saying about #MeToo.  The secondhand accounts and stereotypes of feminists ("She's crazy," "She's trash, "She's cancelled") carry the day and they don't often investigate for themselves.

As I noted on Twitter yesterday, sometimes when I encounter a bad male opinion, I scroll that person's Twitter feed and notice they go months or weeks without positively retweeting or engaging a woman, let alone a progressive women who is also a feminist.  For all their blathering about "diversity of opinion," a lot of men are in an echo chamber of their own making, and what that echo chamber is affirming to them are a fuckton of rape culture narratives.

Relatedly, I noticed many women who I follow on Twitter writing about Al Franken, and yet a lot of moderate-to-leftist men on the platform were talking about the situation primarily with or to other men, without reference to anything progressive feminists - people who analyze rape culture on the regular - were saying. Nate Silver, for instance, critiqued the Jane Mayer piece, and men engaged that as though he was the be-all, authoritative voice on the matter.

In addition to the abuse that progressive feminists endure, the act of progressive feminists being widely ignored by the mainstream also has an indignity to it as we are simply not treated as authorities on sexual violence, rape culture, and misogyny.

Nonetheless, what this entire situation suggests to me, including and especially Jane Mayer's recent piece about him, is that Al Franken seems like vindictive ego-centric abuser who could have nipped all of this in the bud - including the misosgynistic and disproportionate attacks on Kirsten Gillibrand- by pulling up his goddamn socks and owning his behavior. Instead, he's proven to be like so many other liberal-left faux male allies who take up way too much space in the discourse, demand (and receive) far more empathy than any woman, and perpetuate rape culture narratives in their response to allegations of misconduct.

The only question now is when can we expect his bitter, cruelty-fueled comedy duo with Louis CK?


*Credit for this term goes to Kate Manne.

**Oops, LOL my Twitter break.