Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
It takes a lot anymore for a little headline blurb coming across my computer screen to really catch my eye and give me pause. It takes even more for me to click on the link convinced it’s a type-o, because, surely Margaret Atwood isn’t facing a feminist backlash on social media.
Turns out the 78-year-old author of The Handmaid’s Tale, among many other works is, in fact, taking a savaging on social media platforms over a piece she wrote for The Globe and Mail on January 13 that questioned the #MeToo movement’s tendency to want to circumvent due process when it comes to men accused of sexual misconduct. Her line of reasoning was related to an open letter she had signed onto in November of 2016 questioning the way the University of British Colombia handled an employee who was accused of sexual misconduct and fired, and then later acquitted of the charges. As her position on that matter already made her unpopular with the more radical arm of modern feminism, her latest piece in The Globe and Mail touched off a storm of condemnation.
The really annoying thing to me is that, being Margaret Atwood, she laid out her bulletproof case so brilliantly and eloquently that one would have to be either insane or blinded by their own agenda to find fault with it. Yet, plenty of women found plenty to gripe about. A surprising amount of it had an ageist bent to it, implying that she doesn’t value the views of younger women.
At its heart, Atwood’s opinion piece is a warning against eschewing due-process and justice for the immediate gratification of destroying someone accused of an act that is particularly loathsome. She characterized the #MeToo movement as a reaction to a broken justice system, but warned that it can’t replace it.
“All too frequently, women and other sexual-abuse complainants couldn’t get a fair hearing through institutions – including corporate structures – so they used a new tool: the internet. Stars fell from the skies. This has been very effective, and has been seen as a massive wake-up call. But what next? The legal system can be fixed, or our society could dispose of it. Institutions, corporations and workplaces can houseclean, or they can expect more stars to fall, and also a lot of asteroids.
If the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place? Who will be the new power brokers? It won’t be the Bad Feminists like me. We are acceptable neither to Right nor to Left. In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity,” Atwood wrote.
There is nothing to object to in here, not logically. It doesn’t help anyone, not feminism, not the #MeToo movement, not victims of sexual abuse and not the criminal justice system to have young women who claim to have womankind’s best interests at heart to hysterically let their emotions overtake their capacity for reason and thereby demand punishment for the accused without having first determined his guilt or innocence by any legal metric. In no other instance is circumventing due process deemed acceptable. For “feminists” to demand it in the case of those merely accused of sexual abuse betrays all notions of justice and of feminism itself. Yeah, to some, that all sounded pretty shitty coming from me, so:
“My fundamental position is that women are human beings, with the full range of saintly and demonic behaviours this entails, including criminal ones. They’re not angels, incapable of wrongdoing. If they were, we wouldn’t need a legal system.
Nor do I believe that women are children, incapable of agency or of making moral decisions. If they were, we’re back to the 19th century, and women should not own property, have credit cards, have access to higher education, control their own reproduction or vote. There are powerful groups in North America pushing this agenda, but they are not usually considered feminists.
Furthermore, I believe that in order to have civil and human rights for women there have to be civil and human rights, period, including the right to fundamental justice, just as for women to have the vote, there has to be a vote. Do Good Feminists believe that only women should have such rights? Surely not. That would be to flip the coin on the old state of affairs in which only men had such rights,” Atwood wrote.
There are countless ways to adjust the legal system to have it better serve victims of sexual abuse. Hell knows prioritizing the processing of rape kits over making drug arrests (with their attendant, lucrative asset forfeiture seizures) alone would create a criminal justice system that served everyone, not just women, better. There are countless other ways of improving the system, none of those include scrapping due process and making a mere accusation sufficient grounds for punishments to ensue – as was Atwood’s entire point. To suggest otherwise is simply unhelpful.
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