Me Too Movement Analysis

The “me too” movement began as a tweet in October 2017 written by actress Alyssa Milano, asking her followers to reply with “me too” if they have ever experienced sexual assault or harassment, and it exploded overnight with tens of thousands of responses. Since this, more and more women have been coming forward about their experiences, calling out men such as Harvey Weinstein and Bill O’Reilly. The more women step forward and open up about the crimes committed against them, the more it empowers other women, the ones who do not feel as secure to bring allegations forward, for fear of losing their jobs. The movement is still going strong today, bringing about the rightful downfall of many powerful and influential men, showing just how terrifyingly
Since then, it has been picked up and covered by a wide variety of other news sources, ranging from far left to far right. In general, the more left leaning news sources and more liberal public figures tend to portray the movement as a good thing, a necessary societal shift where the silence of victims is over and the stigma shifts to the actual offender. They champion the voices of women, and encourage men to support them and call out other men when they witness unacceptable behaviour. The right leaning news sources and more conservative people however, have the tendency to portray it as an undeserved and unprovoked attack on men in positions of power such as Harvey Weinstein and even the unfortunate president, Donald Trump who who was accused and actually proven to have committed sexual assault on many occasions, before he was nonetheless elected to office. Many conservatives are disgusted by the victims speaking out, and defensive of the perpetrators, saying that the Me Too movement has gone “too far”. For example, the australian director Michael Haneke publicly stated that the
The tendency to accept the word of a man over the word of dozens of women accusing him, the casual jokes about rape and sexual assault, the romanticization of violent or persisting sexual advances in the media, it all feeds into the normalization of male dominance and female complacency. When people break from this model and oppose it, it makes people uncomfortable. The ones who come forward have been ostracized and shunned, called liars and the people they accused faced no consequences for their acts of sexual violation against another person. The Silence Breakers being made people of the year in Times Magazine with an entire article dedicated to their stories and explicitly stating the names of the worst offenders has massive social implications, placing confidence and support behind a group of people who previously would have been pushed to the side, but are now being pushed into the spotlight. The encouragement of others to follow their lead and come forward, and the reassurance that they will be believed and cared for, that their attackers will face consequences is a large shift in the mindset of the general public. The stigma is shrinking and more and more people are listening to the victims and ostracizing the perpetrators instead. Countless men accused of sexual assault have already been fired or brought up on charges, including Bill