“We’re Good at Punishing #MeToo Men. Can We Ever Forgive Them?” asked a recent headline in The New York Times. Some variation of this question has been posed for seven years now, most often in the context of attempted comebacks by disgraced men, and always with the assumption that the women who levied accusations, and those who support them, share a psychological profile defined by rage and retribution. Will we ever be able to forgive? Or accept that decent, even good people can sometimes do bad things?
While reporting for Complicit, my book about our culture’s enablement of misbehaving men, I spoke with scores of women who had raised #MeToo accusations involving sexual misconduct against their former bosses or colleagues. Their perspectives frequently defied the prevailing narrative in two ways.
First, they were far more reflective than they were vengeful—they were far more absorbed by the phenomenon of what had happened to them than by the narcissistic a-hole who did it. Yes, their anger was righteous, but so, too, was their introspection and humor.
As I know from my own experience being sexually harassed by my former boss Charlie Rose, abuse is not a simple story—nor was my vulnerability simple. For me, the #MeToo movement was a personal reckoning with the inadequate narratives that I had used to navigate the gender and power dynamics of my professional and personal lives. Anger was the special sauce to my decision to go on the record against Rose, but the meat of it was something else—an entire culture and a lifetime of social conditioning that had undermined my own safety and well-being as a woman.
As I know from my own experience being sexually harassed by my former boss Charlie Rose, abuse is not a simple story—nor was my vulnerability simple.
The second way the women I interviewed contradicted popular conceptions was the extent to which many of them proactively protected their already disgraced perpetrators—upon whom they didn’t want to inflict additional suffering. They frequently asked to speak off the record when acknowledging these men’s psychological precariousness, childhood abuse, crippling loneliness, or debilitating insecurities with their height or weight. One source asked me to remove “frumpy” from the description she had given of her abuser, telling me: “I don’t think he needs to read that.”
The author and family therapist Terry Real, who specializes in issues of gender and power, believes that one of the most unrecognized psychological forces in the world is a female impulse to safeguard the male sense of self. “Whoever inhabits the feminine side of the equation has a deep compulsion to protect the disowned fragility of whoever is on the masculine side of the equation, even while being hurt by that person,” says Real. “You protect your perpetrator. You protect power.”
Real believes that what made the #MeToo movement so revolutionary was that it dared to go against this tendency, which he considers a core pillar of the patriarchy. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that such a deeply entrenched reflex remained evident even among women who had spoken out. And just maybe, they weren’t angry enough.
#MeToo was, if anything, a story disruptor. Women spoke out to set the record straight about their lived experiences with sexism and abuse. They wanted accountability and, ultimately, change. But our overly simplistic narratives are still failing them, as well as our moment.
Aside from the obvious considerations about what constitutes true reconciliation (spoiler alert: it’s a two-sided endeavor that demands something of the wrongdoer), neither these men’s victims nor the court of public opinion is deciding their professional futures; profit-driven companies in a world full of both talent and options are deciding them.
To so heavily couch our collective path forward in terms of women’s capacity to forgive and move on does more than miss the point—it reduces women to a convenient sticking point. If one thing remains the same, even after the advent of #MeToo, it’s our misguided generalizations about women’s characters. The script may have changed, but our refusal to recognize women as complex, multifaceted characters has not.
Reah Bravo is a Brussels-based speechwriter. Earlier in her career, she worked as a producer for Charlie Rose—a stint that ended in 2008, when she joined the nearly half of all sexually harassed women in America who leave their jobs
