Nuttier than I thought

It took a bit of Googling, but I finally turned up an accessible copy of Helen Dale's opinion piece in the Weekend Australian, about the #MeToo movement.    (I was alerted to its existence by Sinclair Davidson posting about it with approval - with Dale, it's always with his approval - at Catallaxy.)   I'm not sure if it will work for you, but here's the link that got me to it.

The piece starts with a bit of lightweight autobiography (let's assume it's true, even though many have questioned some other autobiographical claims) which seems largely irrelevant to the #MeToo movement:   it's about her regret that workplaces have "lost something" by virtue of not being able to feature female nudey pics on the wall any more.  She says that when she was nearly 15 she was working at a place where her "first boss" had, amongst other sexually explicit things on the wall, a Pirelli calendar.   Years later when she visited again these were gone because it was by then "illegal" to have then in the workplace.

This, Dale regretted (and apparently still does?) because, well, she didn't mind them and, presumably, the rest of (not queer) young women who might work there should just suck it up.   Bizarrely, she doesn't seem to make allowance for the fact that her own open queer status meant that she would be an unlikely workplace male target for sexual favours, and as such could afford to take a more carefree attitude to a sexualised workplace where males could feel free to drool and joke about the naked women on the wall.    And let's not pretend the Pirelli calendars were subtle - here's one from 1986, which should match the year she says she was working at this place.  No pubic hair allowed, but apart from that, of course they should not be a on workplace wall.    On the wall in some wannabe Hugh Hefner's den, sure.  The workplace - no.

Then we get to the core nonsense of her criticism of the #MeToo movement:  it's got a large element of slut-shaming, apparently!:

I have a similar sense about the recent #MeToo movement, much of which seems to be so very high school: all the pretty girls from good families are congratulating each other for “bravely speaking out” about the advances they refused, while the women who made a calculation and opted to get their knees dirty are wisely keeping quiet.

There’s a smugly slut-shaming flip side to the solidarity: wearing black to the Golden Globes, telling stories about who touched whose knee, applauding Oprah Winfrey’s speech.  ...

....Women who accede to male entreaties — those who get their knees dirty — can be written off as sluts (something women do to other women far more frequently than men do to women), which burnishes the refusers’ reputations.

This, it seems to me until I see some evidence to the contrary, is entirely a matter from Dale's imagination.   She also seems to suffer from silly overuse of "get their knees dirty".

And to illustrate the degree to which she's wrong, one of the key controversial pieces in the #MeToo movement was that essay published by a young woman about a date that went wrong with Aziz Anzari.   The complainant had dinner, went back to his apartment, partook in some foreplay, but found his insistent manner that they now proceed to intercourse off putting, and she left and wrote a column about it.   Aziz later said he thought everything had been consensual - she apparently thought he could read her mind that she didn't like some of his "moves".   You can read here a piece critical of this woman's attitude.

There was much debate over this essay, and I do not recall any of it from the feminist, #MeToo supporting side involving  "slut shaming".  Sure, from the conservative side, some men in particular might have said "jeez, this was just a first date hook up that you decided to back out off after happily starting with sex.  Boo hoo."  But a #MeToo supporter who called her a slut for doing that?  Not that I've seen.

I don't recall anything in #MeToo involving women "slut shaming" other women - in fact, if you discount (as everyone does) nutty Dworkin style "all intercourse is rape" theorising, it's just not something feminism does.

If Dale has got some examples of women saying "so, actress Y says she slept with director X to get a role - shame on actress Y!"  I'd like to see them.

This is all not to say that the #MeToo movement is beyond criticism - just that Dale's criticism seems to me more fantasy than reality.  For one thing, if all women who (gawd) "got their knees dirty" are "wisely keeping quiet", how does Dale even know what they think about their decision?   

The piece is, perhaps, just Dale's attempt to get more publicity for her novel, which, as far as I can tell, has hardly set the literary world alight with attention or sales.   But does she have to mount such a silly argument to do so?

Update:  I haven't even addressed the bit in her article which upset the Catallaxy crowd - where she notes that a mutual willingness to "slut shame" helps account for a claimed "now-common alliance between feminists and religious conservatives — including, bewilderingly, Islamic conservatives",  but it is just as silly as the rest of her article.  Yes, some feminists make excuses for elements of Islamic practice which separate women as being empowering to the women who want to be separated.  (It's not a million miles from the idea that women joining a nunnery in centuries past was empowering compared to being a husband's chattel.) But feminists supporting Islam because they think Western women are slutty sex addicts - come on, show us the examples, Helen.