One year on, origins and expansion of the #Metoo movement

“The silence breakers.” They are the women Time magazine chose for their cover to embody the early stages of the Metoo movement. Now, silence is broken, and millions of survivors dived into the Metoo era.

One year after the publication of an article in The New York Times accusing producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual misconducts, the effervescence might have ended, but the #Metoo movement is far from over. Time has come to set up a retrospective review of the movement. Contrarily to what one may think, the #Metoo movement is not shaped by an organized, planned and uniform rebellion. In the aftermath of the brutal revelations, the world has slowly woken up from a deep long sleep. Once the heroic first moments of a revolution passed, the long fight that followed revealed much more than thousands of allegations of sexual assault and harassment. For years, women have denounced the ignominy they confronted in the face of sexual violence. However, the movement only sprung up when several components finally reunited in a particular time period. We entered a new era, the Metoo era, which, contrarily to the widespread belief, covers a long and distinct period of history that did not show up abruptly. The Metoo movement found its roots in an age of globalization. To that extent, we’ll first display the significant role of social networks into the rise of the campaign. Next, we will focus on the reasons why the #Metoo movement did not spread linearly across all regions of the world. Finally, we’ll explain what the differences in norms and values are which explain that #Metoo amplified in some countries over time and faded in others.

#MeToo is a generational phenomenon that couldn’t have blossomed, expanded and spread ten years ago. Indeed, through the rise of information and communication technologies, social networks promoted greater accessibility to contents for users. The adoption of new platforms produced more substantial visibility for social movements and political ideologies which now propagate more rapidly and extensively. Consequently, the #Metoo’s campaign benefitted from the massive adoption of social media during the last decade, and more specifically from the surge of Twitter where the message appeared for the first time. Indeed, there were only 30 million accounts on Twitter in 2010 whereas, in 2018, 335 million users connect to the platform each day (1). All in all, if the #Metoo movement had an immense societal impact, it is primarily due to theexceptional rate of growth of social networks’ subscribers. The presence of a broader population on social media forged worldwide community which allowed victims to be not only single casualties but also a part of a nation of abused humans whom could expose the atrocious experiences they’ve faced on a global scale.

Furthermore, users initially used social networks such as Facebook and Twitter as tools for forging interpersonal connections. However, social media rapidly developed in an instrument used to shape protestation movements and political ideas. The #MeToo movement exemplifies how Twitter became an online reference space for the rapid transmission of revolutionary social campaigns. At the dawn of the #Metoo movement, thanks to the enlargement of this platform, feminist ideologists could initiate a bond of solidarity between all the survivors of sexual assaults which served as the starting point for the diffusion of their doctrine.

Contrarily to what one may think, the #Metoo movement didn’t spread immediately to all regions of the world. Indeed, the gender revolution’s legitimacy grew slowly from when Tarana Burke, a feminist activist, launched Metoo in 2007 to raise awareness of sexual violence in America. The climax of the movement occurred when The New York Times published the allegations of sexual assaults against the producer Harvey Weinstein.

Following this event, the U.S. concentrated most of the testimonies of women who had been sexually harassed or assaulted. Soon enough the movement enlarged to almost all developed countries. However, the campaign did not spread as quickly in the emerging world. For instance, #MeToo expanded only recently in India when the journalist Priya Ramani accused the foreign minister M.J. Akbar of sexual assault. (2) One could wonder why the movement spread at a swifter pace in developed countries than in emerging countries? And, to what extent the differences between morals and education among societies hold a crucial role in the progress of #Metoo around the globe? We could argue that this discrepancy is due to the correlations between the levels of development of countries and the way each state regards its women. #MeToo advances at a slower pace in the emerging countries than in the developed world as a result of the positive relationship between the level of GDP of countries and their levels of democracy. (3) Indeed, emerging countries are not the wealthiest and therefore tend to hold a more substantial amount of dictatorial governments than developed countries. Also, it is well-documented that women enjoy significantly fewer rights and suffer from more violence in non-democratic societies. This oppression suffered by women in the third-world is due to the possibility for political authorities within dictatorships to repress acts of social movement and contestation through the use of censorship or physical violence. Therefore, it seems entirely logical that the #Metoo movement would first expand in developed countries which have a considerably higher level of democracy than emerging countries. One could argue that some dictatorships systems such as the one present in China have a higher absolute level of GDP than some democratic nations and, consequently, could have witnessed a rapid emergence of the #MeToo movement. However, these systems generally have a lower level of GDP per capita than developed countries or, are usually accompanied by a lack of middle classes which are primordial for the creation and survival of a democratic system that would be propitious for #Metoo movement to emerge (4). China illustrates the model of traditional economies where both of these statements hold. Furthermore, emerging societies face difficulties to resist sexual violence due to deficits in their educational system leading to the lack of democracy in developing countries. Mark Roserstates: “A long-standing theory in political science stipulates that a country's level of education attainment is a key determinant of the emergence and sustainability of democratic political institutions, both because it promotes political participation at the individual level, and because itfosters a collective sense of civic duty.” (5) In conclusion, a combination of an under-average wealth and lack of democratic force through middle classes allied with a lower standard in education explain the difficulties for #MeToo to advance in the third world. The #Metoo movement has not spread equally across the globe, and its reception, in the long run, did not have the same impact on every society.

Even though #MeToo propagated with more ease in the developed world, the movement has faded rapidly after its apparition in many advanced democracies in western and non-western civilizations. If some countries, such as the USA and the UK, are still into the urge to find solutions against sexual misconducts, other countries seem to have turned the page, considering #Metoo asno more than just a societal phase. Therefore, we can question the extent to which countries’cultural norms and values shape the likelihood for a movement like #Metoo to stand the test of time. Admittedly, Anglo-Saxon societies tend to be more puritans when it comes to sexual behaviors of their elites than European Latin societies. Seemingly, Anglo-Saxon nations identifywith the cultural feminism thesis which defines traditional male behaviors such as “aggressiveness,competitiveness, and domination” (6) as harmful to society. On the other hand, the liberal feminism thesis, embodied by European Latin countries, deems that male and female opportunity differences are a product of current societies’ structures and, therefore, can be modified through better designs of political and legal constructions. Simona Siri, an Italian journalist, argues that“we [Italian people] have a very high bar for what constitutes sexual harassment, both socially and legally.” (7) As a result, even if the hashtag #QuellaVoltaChe circulated temporarily, the robust sexism in Italian culture resurged promptly and seems impossible to reverse without politicalactions which would modify what Italians consider “appropriate” behaviors.

The French reception of the movement also demonstrates a certain ambivalence. Indeed, many women condemned sexual assaults and harassments but, in the meantime, other strong viewpoints came along. French actress Catherine Deneuve, with a collective of 99 other French women, decided to share their opinion in an article written in Le Monde. In it, they stated that men shouldhave “an essential freedom to offend” (8) and argue that the #Metoo movement exceeded the limitsof reasons and nurtured the hatred of men. Hence, we observe that in the long run, the culturalroots of a given nation shaped its population’s beliefs and remained more influential than #MeToo regarding the questions of sexual norms and boundaries. It stands coherent that the movement survived, intensified and expanded further than a fight against sexual crimes in Anglo-Saxonsocieties such as the U.S. and the U.K as they vilify and condemn men’s behaviors. Whereas, the campaign slowly died in Italy, France or Spain as populations of these nations did not associate sexual crimes to an inherent evil in men’s practices. These nations accord substantially more credit to men’s actions and consider as a primordial freedom the right to attempt to seduce a woman through verbal, physical and psychological approaches without being regarded as a sexual offender.

The birth of #Metoo has opened Pandora’s box for many sexual criminals. However, the direction,the viability and the survival of the movement endure being uncertain. Indeed, the campaign suffered from various recent blows such as the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh at the U.S. Supreme Court while he faced sexual assaults accusation. This appointment attests of the remaining fragility of the consideration that politicians give to the #Metoo movement. Hence, we can question whether the so-called #Metoo movement will, finally, end up being no more than just a #Metoo moment?

References

1) Number of monthly active Twitter users worldwide from 1st quarter 2010 to 3rd quarter 2018. Statista 2018. Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-monthly-active-twitter-users/

2) Newsroom, (October 16, 2018). MJ Akbar: Sexual Harassment Allegations Will Be Examined, says Amit Shah. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.huffingtonpost.in/2018/10/13/mj-akbar-sexual-harassment- allegations-will-be-examined-says-amit-shah_a_23559687/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer_us=aHR0cHM6L y93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmZyLw&guce_referrer_cs= htt0O0JVYhINcs4xmro1ew

3.4.5) Max Roser, Democracy, Our world in data. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/democracy 6) Jone Johnson Levis, (March 14, 2018). Cultural feminism, what is the essence of being a woman? ThoughtCo.

Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/cultural-feminism-definition-3528996

7) Simona Siri, (December 14, 2017). Having a misogynist leader has consequences. And no, I don’t mean Trump.Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2017/12/14/the-metoo- movements-disturbing-failure-in-italy/?utm_term=.ad58906a3fa8

8) Valeriya Safronova, (January 9, 2018). Catherine Deneuve and others denounce the #Metoo Movement, The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/movies/catherine-deneuve-and-others-denounce- the-metoo-movement.html

E.R.