Has the Me Too Movement been taken away from the victims of sexual misconduct?

Russian president Vladimir Putin shocked the world when a few weeks ago he spoke out against the Me Too Movement. He just stopped short of explicitly stating that the campaign is a media conspiracy. “I don’t think that we should turn these questions, especially concrete cases, into some kind of campaign,” Putin said. When one of world’s most prominent leaders says something like that, the world sits up and listens.

The Me Too movement was an attempt of what can be called the desperation to do something about a problem and stop silently suffering from it. It aimed at encouraging women to speak up about the sexual transgressions that they face or have faced so that people and policy makers alike are sensitized towards how extensive the problem is and can be therefore better armed in dealing with this huge evil.  This movement is women expressing the horrors that they have faced and could not talk about it because they fear the societal judgement. The movement is an outlet for all the frustration because everyone should know that this is something that can happen to literally anyone.

So the question that arises is that why do such leaders have a problem with it, Is it just men who fear the campaign or is that we have been conditioned to ignore something like this and this movement just makes us uncomfortable because let us face it, as a society we are doing literally nothing to make sure that a woman facing sexual misconduct can at least speak up about her problem.

The Me Too Movement has faced a lot criticism as a proponent of outrage culture. Feminists criticised it for having an undefined purpose while journalists and lawyers criticised it for not having a mechanism of fact checking making it really easy to defame a person and then there was an issue of over emphasis on certain cases having big names while the ones that did not were again conveniently ignored.

A new term was coined “Me Too conspiracies” to address the cases that were solely put together with the intention of defaming certain persons. In a brief period of time we went from outrage on Me Too Movement accusations to Outrage against Me Too to believing in Me Too conspiracies and once again conveniently forgot the issue of widespread sexual harassment.

Granted for an instance that the MeToo conspiracies might be true but it can never be granted that sexual abuse is not a problem, it can never be granted that women do not have the right atmosphere to speak out about the trauma that they face due to it and it can never be granted that we had a chance to do something for the victims ofsexual misconduct and we once again failed them by taking a movement meant for them and smearing it with false accusations and conspiracies.