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.
