Luckily by that stage our instructor, a worldly wise third-year, had made it helpfully clear that this was a test with only one correct answer. If you looked closely enough, it always turned out that, in attempting to have sex, things had gone disastrously, perhaps irreparably, morally wrong for our male protagonist. He was the perennial villain of the piece. Indeed, the more creatively unforgiving you could make your interpretation of his offense, the more notional “points” you seemed to earn in the resulting discussion (the rule of thumb, I suppose, being that the more esoteric an injustice, the graver it is, because the more often “marginalized” by society at large).

As the vignettes took on the textual complexity of High Victorian literature, I saw a seasick look creep into the faces of some of my heterosexual male peers. Most of them were self-aware enough to realize that the odds were already stacked against them in the sexual marketplace; but this degree of liability was greater than they could ever have feared. One asked, subversively, why, if workshops like these in fact helped to reduce sexual wrongdoing, they were not used by the state to combat other kinds of crime. I interjected that his rhetorical question sounded rather “problematic” to me and mentally awarded myself another point. By the end of the struggle session, I watched these defeated young men trudge from the room contemplating an immediate future of nervous celibacy.

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Stop weaponising suicide

By Kathleen Stock

Of course, no political ideology is ever flattered by having its central tenets filtered through the minds of zealous, under-socialized, Oxbridge freshers. Yet, within the MeToo movement proper, there is significant reason to fear that the tendency toward a certain kind of moral hallucination is a feature, rather than a bug — the pressure to discover heightened moral seriousness in minor as well as major infractions being key to the movement’s forward propulsion.

One tension within MeToo has always been that it is simultaneously a project of vigilante sexual justice (aiming to take out select famous and powerful men) and a social movement that aspires to recast collective social norms in a more progressive mold.

In achieving the first aim (claiming famous male scalps), all kinds of sensationalist smear tactics are usually deemed to be fair game. Revelations merely trashing the characters of the rich and famous share frontpage space with allegations of more obvious criminal seriousness. When there is no smoking gun, the strategy can seem to devolve into something like “death by a thousand reputational cuts” — no single anecdote or detail needing to be probative, the prosecution’s case resting on the quantity, rather than quality, of the loosely gathered evidence.

Indeed, there is an unsettling sense in which MeToo attack jobs sometimes indulge the very same, unnervingly tabloid, urges of the era they claim to despise. Their fixation with inspecting the lives of celebrity targets for unedifying (but often non-criminal) behavior is frequently only faintly disguised by the new puritanical lens used to justify their exposés.

This all is, you may think, part of the bargain the famous strike for notoriety. But the approach prototypical MeToo activists take to indicting their celebrity targets spells disaster when coupled with the movement’s other aim — that of motivating better collective social-sexual norms. In this conflation of the criminal and the creepy, the clear-cut and the vague, the movement has sown moral confusions that end up pathologizing vast swathes of ordinary life. This tendency would probably more often be called out were it not that criticism of the movement’s tactics was in turn so often glibly conflated with condoning the wrongdoing of the criminals it sometimes unmasks.

Just look at recent weeks. Russell Brand will spend 10 years in prison for a rape conviction; following a long-anticipated joint ITV and Guardian investigation, David Walliams now too stands accused of potentially serious criminal wrongdoing in his behavior towards young girls who were below the age of consent. (The Met has announced it is now investigating historical claims against Walliams, too.) Yet in the same breath as these bleak allegations are relayed, further aspersions are attached of a less obviously criminal, more dubiously moralistic kind: exploiting their “power” and “status”, and behaving in lewd or “inappropriate” ways. Rolled in as part of a package deal frontloaded with graver allegations, the implication seems to be that the wider public should accept that these lesser offenses too are now grounds to socially and professionally destroy someone.

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Beware the fauxmosexual

By Julie Burchill

The move to indict grubby but consensual sexual behavior becomes destabilized when one remembers that, in their wider thinking about social-sexual norms, many MeToo activists are uncompromisingly “sex positive”: they think of mutual consent as the final word when it comes to judging the moral appropriateness of all sexual interactions.

The underlying tension that results is unmanageable. The reluctance to articulate stable standards of wrongdoing that go beyond consent-violation leads to a heavy reliance on less specific insinuations. Wrongdoers are typically accused of “manipulating” or “exploiting” their “positions of power”. (When interpreted in a thinly relational way, it can become quite unclear who the “powerful” can enjoy a morally acceptable sexual “dynamic” with — only those, perhaps, exactly as rich and powerful as themselves?) In news reports, women who were young adults at the time they met Walliams are spoken of as having been “groomed” by him: a phrase once reserved for children, now applied freely to fully adult, but vulnerably non-famous, people too. The rhetorical effect of such “concept creep” is to extend the scope of a term while attempting to smoothly retain its original moral severity (a bit like calling every political development you dislike “fascist”).

The Guardian’s extensive investigation into Walliams’s sexual life certainly suggests it was an insalubrious affair. Walliams, it is alleged, routinely courted women many years younger than himself, often contacting them through friends at modeling agencies; he would send them unctuous handwritten notes; when one woman sofa-surfed at his London townhouse he “pawed” at her to come and share his bed. While serving as a judge on Britain’s Got Talent, Walliams allegedly “stared at [the] chest” of a female runner on the show “in a way that made her feel uncomfortable”; later he was overheard referring to her as “the one with the arse”. A different complainant recollects that, while visiting Walliams’s TV dressing room as part of a larger group, “the door was shut and we were alone with him” in a way that “she now feels that was inappropriate”. Sitting alongside far grimmer (and potentially criminal) allegations, it is difficult to know what to make of reports of mere creepiness or indeed anecdotes that read as something closer to innuendo (since when was “shutting doors” any part of a case for wholesale reputational ruin?).

On occasion, the quoted verdicts of complainants are used as interpretive ballast: Walliams was, in their words, “pushy”, “highly inappropriate”, and “a weird old man, like, trying his luck”. One woman, while acknowledging that her sexual contact with Walliams was consensual, elaborates at length: “OK, it’s legal… but the context of who you’re having sex with — if that person is double your age, if that person has known you from a young age and promised you things and is in a much bigger position of power than you, both in age, in work, in finance, in stature and size, like, everything, I really don’t think that’s OK.” By leaning rhetorically on such anguished, but somewhat hard-to-parse, attempts to theorize the non-criminal moral transgressions of men like Walliams, activists operating within MeToo’s moral paradigm attempt to let themselves off the hook: allowing the standard that he is supposed to have flouted to remain morally lively but conveniently impressionistic. Added to which, every last lurid detail then becomes admissible as evidence in the chaotic moral case being constructed.

But the collateral damage of this approach is to foist the same newly moralized standards onto the wider public, too. There, the movement’s effect has often been to pathologize benign behaviors, sowing doubts about the propriety of relationships between colleagues, “age gaps”, “power imbalances”, and quotidian kinds of romantic indiscretion.

Many people sense that the standards MeToo has conventionally employed in taking down the powerful sit uneasily with life as they know it to be. The famous injunction to “believe all women”, for example, was a clearly socially irresponsible piece of public anti-epistemology (what are you supposed to do when, as sometimes happens, two women disagree with each other?).

In placing so much evidential weight on retrospective reassessments of past sexual episodes, many onlookers are also left with the uneasy sense that MeToo’s baroque morality can make the ethical status of physical encounters virtually impossible to read in the moment they are occurring. The philosopher Bernard Williams famously coined the term “moral luck” to describe a feature of actions whose justificatory status depends essentially on future contingencies the decision-maker is not in a position to assess at the moment of action. (Should Anna Karenina run off with Count Vronsky?, Williams asks, to illustrate his concept: the decision would be retroactively justified should their romance eventually flourish, catastrophically unjustified otherwise.) On MeToo’s background logic, it can seem that many powerful men, and by extension men in general, are subject to a radically pervasive kind of “sexual luck”: their every sexual overture and action held hostage to later becoming a catastrophic moral error, depending on the contingent twists in how the recipient comes to think of its “appropriateness” years down the line.

Suggested reading

Why nobody stopped Russell Brand

By Poppy Sowerby

Though exquisitely sensitive to the nuances and power differentials of “problematic” sexual encounters with famous men, MeToo remains strangely deaf to the subtly malign effects its own ideology has on wider sexual culture. The movement’s proponents are an odd mixture of cynicism and naivety. Cynicism — for example, in constantly dialing up the moralistic mood music to 11, pitching all manner of sins in the same hysterical key. The movement’s politics, on the other hand, are often naïvely obtuse. With each new scandal, the media finds another opportunity to declare a fresh crisis, reasoning that every country, profession and industry is eligible for its own bespoke “MeToo moment”. On occasion, sympathetic commentators allow themselves to wonder in amnesiac fashion whether this time may at last prove to be the decisive cultural reckoning — the moment that, somehow, finally straightens out whatever crooked feature of certain human beings’ natures inclines them towards such transgressions. In the end, the implicit hope that one last push in the direction of regulation or censorious vigilance will finally give force to a rule against rule-breaking is an obvious chimera.

MeToo has, to its undoubted credit, exposed a fair number of utter villains. But a movement that so unforgivingly holds others accountable for their every transgression cannot exempt itself from questions about its own methods. Its worst excesses see it increasingly lump together bona-fide criminality with behavior that veers closer to the simply debauched, emotionally cruel or merely awkward. It then relies on the graver cases to moralize the weaker ones by brute association. While leaning heavily on flexibly impressionistic assessments, it pretends its rigoristic judgments are the outputs of a confidently worked-out theory of sexual morality, one fit to be approved and adopted by all. Such pretenses do the wider world an inadvertent wrong — and more than an impressionistic one.