The Catastrophic Success of #MeToo

For anyone counting #MeToo casualties with a wary eye, one of 2018's first will have stood out. On January 13, in a lengthy exposé published on a website for college-age women, a 23-year-old photographer charged comic Aziz Ansari with the crime of being a bad date. The pseudonymous Grace described yielding to his awkward sexual advances and, even though she felt uncomfortable, declining to protest or get up and leave. While women may rightly see a semblance of injustice in his arrogance and her all-too-familiar acquiescence, Grace's assessment that their date amounted to sexual assault sent the movement into crisis. Had #MeToo, cautious optimists worried, gone too far?Just as notable, though, was the ensuing intergenerational feminist-journalist feud. When the television anchor Ashleigh Banfield criticized Grace on the air, the reporter who had written her story, Katie Way, hit back by calling Banfield a second-wave-feminist has-been. What Way meant was that Banfield was 50 and held the moderate feminist views typical of professional women her age. These qualities put her out of touch with the dominant discourse, which equates male selfishness and insensitivity with sexual assault.