The Epistemic Significance of #MeToo

The Epistemic Significance of #MeToo

Abstract

Introduction ^[1]

Part 1:Representation, Marginalization,and #MeToo

Certain aspects of marginalized social identities are ours from birth, and others come to us later in life, sometimes by choice and at other times unbidden, but in all cases, marginalized identities receive representational short shrift. They are largely absent from our scholarly canons and history books and have been relegated to the fringes of mainstream media and popular culture, at least until recently.^[5]That is hardly surprising, since part of what it means to be marginalized is to lack the power and influence to tell one’s own story, to be denied a voice and a platform to use it, and to risk serious threats to one’s health, safety, livelihood, and community when one does.^[6]

When it comes to testimony about sexual violence and sexual harassment, there are also very real, if less tangible, costs to one’s sense of self, since when marginalized individuals do go public with these sorts of stories, against all obstacles, they are often not properly heard. Their testimony is routinely filtered through distorting prejudice and dismissed as lacking credibility, epitomizing the central case of what Miranda Fricker (2007) has called testimonial injustice; these individuals are wronged in their capacities as knowers in virtue of a prejudice against them, qua social type(Fricker 2007, 45). The deflated credibility they receive as tellers results in an intrinsic epistemic injustice, insofar as they are degraded in their very humanity, qua knowers.^[7] The routine diminishment faced by marginalized tellers is part and parcel of the humiliation of patriarchy; of being a woman, of being not white, of being queer, trans, or disabled. But remarkably, since October2017, while simultaneously suffering various social and political harms as a result of a US administration led by a dangerous president, who himself has been accused of sexual misconduct by no fewer than 22 women,^[8] we have seen an increase in stories about sexual harassment and sexual violence. This started with the toppling of one of America’s most powerful men, the Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, following a New York Times story by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey that detailed Weinstein’s decades of predatory sexual behavior;^[9] and so began the international movement known as #MeToo.^[10]With over 19 million tweets in the first year alone,^[11]we have since seen the downfall of one after another of some of America’s most powerful men, including Louis C.K., Bill O’Reilly, Kevin Spacey, Al Franken, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer—men who, as Soraya Chemaly points out, “had for decades chosen, framed, investigated, written about, and produced our culture’s stories about politics, gender, and violence”(Chemaly 2018, 141–142).That some of the very men who had been controlling national narratives about gender-based violence were simultaneously guilty of perpetuating the problem induced a serious reckoning.^[12] “The anger window was open,” as Rebecca Traister put it, referring to the collective mood following Weinstein’s downfall, and in the short time since then we have witnessed a global surge of rage, what Traister has aptly described as a“‘70s-style, organic, mass radical rage, exploding in unpredictable directions” (2018, 141, 143).^[13]

1.1 The Isolation of Survivors (Uptick #1)

I know from personal experience how important it can be for survivors of sexual violence and sexual harassment to have the opportunity to hear other people’s stories and to see similar kinds of traumatic experiences represented by others. This can help us make sense of our own experience by contextualizing it thereby reframing these phenomena not as personal problems—something that happened to me, for instance, because of what I was wearing, who I was with, or how much I had to drink—but rather as widespread sociological phenomena. Not only can this help survivors combat the corrosive shame that is part of the aftermath of sexual violence and harassment, but more to the point here, it can help us better understand what we have been through by viewing it through a broad social and political frame of reference. In order to illustrate the epistemic value survivors gain by hearing #MeToo stories, I will start by telling one of my own. This is a story about something that happened to me when I was a graduate student in philosophy, over twenty years ago. It is an experience that is a bit hard for me to remember, not because my memory is failing me, but because it is painful to recall. This is not a story about sexual harassment in the discipline of philosophy(although I have my fair share of those stories as well).^[14]Rather,itisa story about how I was doing, back in 1996,having just moved away from home to do my PhD in philosophy. This was a difficult time in my life, and not just because of the various pressures one faces when moving to a new city and entering a new university and new program, although none of that was easy. But I had other problems. Six years earlier, when I was twenty-two years old I was raped. I had been travelling at the time, having just arrived in Paris to meet an ex-boyfriend. We had been invited to stay as houseguests at the apartment of his friend and mentor, along with another house guest, a thirty-year-old Frenchman, whom I had met for the first time just that day. He seemed friendly enough, and a few hours later, when I was alone with him in the apartment, he kindly made me dinner,  and then afterward, pressing a long sharp knife against my neck, proceeded to rape me.^[15] It was a violent sexual assault, and I was lucky to have come out of it alive, but the experience left me destabilized. In the aftermath, I found myself reeling, awash with shame, so much so that I could not bear to have others know what had happened to me. And so, like many women in similar kinds of situations, I decided to keep it a secret, telling no one outside of my family and two closest friends. I buried the trauma of the experience deep within, hoping that would make it disappear, but unfortunately the body does not process trauma that way, or at least, not properly.^[16]Instead, it weighed me down like an anchor. I struggled with crushing anxiety, cycling through recurring panic attacks, sleep deprivation, and troubled relationships with men—each a classic symptom of PTSD, although I did not know that at the time.^[17]One of the few places I was able to find relief from my wearing inner life was as a student in the world of thinking that philosophy offers. When immersed in my studies, I could almost ignore the debilitating consequences of being raped. Over the years, I became adept at covering up any perceptible signs of distress, but by the time I started my PhD, the energy required to sustain this double life was almost too much for me, and my anxiety worsened.

It was in this context that I enrolled in my first year of classes, in order to fulfill the coursework component of my degree. One of the classes on offer was being taught by a distinguished professor. It was a popular class, drawing students from various cohorts, and I signed up for it. I will never forget the first day of that class. There must have been 20–25 students crammed into a room that was meant to hold fewer than that. It was set up with long tables around the perimeter, forming a rectangle. When I arrived, the professor was sitting at the front of the room, which by then was already half full. I had to make my way around the crowded outer edges in order to find an empty seat in the back corner, about as far away from the doorway as you could get, which was the start of my problems that day. As soon as I sat down, I was in trouble. I immediately felt trapped, just as I had been, six years earlier, in that apartment in Paris. Once again, I had failed to anticipate what was coming next, and the triggering feelings heaved through me. As the remaining students filed in, I became unable to catch a deep breath. My heart was pounding as I found myself in the familiar grip of a panic attack. I remember squeezing my hands together under the table, hoping that I wouldn’t faint, hoping that this one would pass quickly, but then the professor began to talk. He announced that we would be starting class by going around the room and introducing ourselves. At that, the feeling of being trapped intensified, and the room unspooled before me. I did not pass out, but when the introductions finally reached me, I was not able to speak. I choked out my name, my quivering voice betraying the panic within, bringing every surprised eye in the room to rest on me.

Solidarity Stories and Representation

When I think about that experience now, what is most striking to me is not how mortified I had been, or how everyone in the room looked at me with a mix of pity and horror, but how truly alone I felt at the time. I was not unaware of the existence of other rape survivors, but personally, I did not know a single one. It is hard to overstate how important it would have been for me, back then, to have had easy access to a multitude of stories by other survivors, by other women who had had experiences like mine; to have been able to feel that kind of solidarity, and to have been able to see my experience represented at a time when I was too vulnerable to make myself visible in the same way. That would have been integral in helping me understand this dramatic and uninvited change to my life, to my very identity; it would have saved me years of confusion, isolation, and shame.

When I further reflect about that in the context of my relative privilege at the time—specifically, of being a doctoral student at a reputable university, of being cis, white, heterosexual, able bodied, and middle class, and thus checking off all the boxes which guaranteed that at least I did not look out of place(however shattered I was feeling)—I cannot help but think about the legions of women, and men too, with far fewer entitlements, who have experienced sexual harassment and sexual assault and who, for one reason or another, had been isolated and suffering in silence until #MeToo.The injustice of it all is highlighted when we consider the routine silencing and lack of visibility of people on the margins. As we have seen over the past few years, representation—even in 280 characters or less—can be life-altering, and particularly so for members of groups who have been systematically disadvantaged. Although a hashtag will not heal you, seeing yourself in someone else’s story can be deeply impactful.^[18]Not only can it help us make sense of our own experience by framing it in a broader social and political context, but having the chance to see someone come out the other side can be profound; it can set you on a path that you had never before imagined possible.^[19]

1.2 Motivated IgnoranceandEpistemic Friction(Uptick #2)

The epistemic value survivors gain by seeing their realities represented is one significant consequence of#MeToo stories, but that value extends beyond individual survivors. Storytellers have a singular power to effect broad social and cultural change through their testimony, which can make unpleasant truths about sexual assault and sexual harassment tangible in a way that theorizing can miss. Not everyone has an equal opportunity to make her voice heard, but those who do open up a space in the social imaginary and thereby provide uniquely persuasive kind of evidence in support of nonnormative identities. Stories thus provide epistemic friction, to borrow a phrase from José Medina(2013).They offer alternative representations that mitigate against the widespread resistance among dominantly situated knowers to acknowledge, in this case, the realities of sexual violence and sexual harassment against women. I call this resistance “male ignorance, “for it is a phenomenon that bears a distinct resemblance to what Charles Mills calls “white ignorance, “which is a motivated ignorance that maintains the status quo and allows for privileged groups to perpetuate dominant but false narratives about black people, thus enabling, as Mills (2007, 13) puts it, “a self-representation in which differential white privilege, and the need to correct for it, does not exist.”Likewise, in the case of male ignorance, the refusal to recognize and accept the truth about sexual violence and sexual harassment against women—and this includes all women: cis, trans, genderqueer, and gender nonconforming—whether brazen and willful or lazy and indifferent, provides concrete benefits for men. In cases of male ignorance and white ignorance there is an absence of knowledge, or better yet, an absence of true belief, which is not epistemically neutral but is instead motivated, and thus represents a cognitive failure, as I discuss below.

Just as white ignorance is perpetuated by racist individuals and also deeply embedded in our institutions and norms, such that biases are enacted even by those who aren’t straightforwardly racist (Mills 2007, 21), so too male ignorance is individualistic and structural, blatant and implicit. And in the same way that white ignorance results in concrete material, social, and institutional benefits for white people in the form of jobs, wealth, opportunities, housing, upward mobility, freedom of movement, freedom from incarceration, and freedom from the expectation of incarceration,^[20] there are likewise material, social, and institutional benefits for men—and, it is worth emphasizing, in particular white, cis, straight men—that result from male ignorance. These men have the advantage of being viewed as inherently credible; they have the criminal justice system, with the presumption of innocence on their side; they have the freedom to remain unaware of the short-and long-term impact of trauma; and they have the benefit of receiving sympathy—or better yet, him pathy^[21]—when they are accused, even convicted, of serious and criminal wrongdoing, as we have seen repeatedly in high-profile cases over the years.^[22]

Motivated Ignorance: The New View

As Mills argues, incases of motivated ignorance, these benefits provide an incentivized reason for people in positions of relative privilege to ignore facts that illuminate that privilege(2007, 31), and the same can be said when it comes to male ignorance. In both cases, the facts in question can be easily known. They do not make up the dominant narratives, but neither are they hidden, hard to find, or obscure. Indeed, people have to work at remaining ignorant of patent social realities about racial injustice and sexual violence and sexual harassment against women, and their relative privilege gives them a reason to do so, which is what makes these cases of ignorance motivated.^[23]

Ignorance is often referred to as a kind of non knowing, which it is, but the distinguishing feature of motivated ignorance is a lack of true beliefs, as opposed to, say, true beliefs that fall short of knowledge because they lack justification, or sufficient justification.^[24]As such, motivated cases line up with what Rik Peels calls the New View of ignorance.^[25]On this account, we can say that a subject is ignorant that p in three kinds of cases:

1. Disbelieving Ignorance: S considers that p but rejects p as false, even though p is true;
2. Suspending Ignorance: S considers that p but suspends judgment about p, even though p is true; or
3. Deep Ignorance: S does not even consider that p, in the first place, and hence neither believes, suspends judgment, nor disbelieves that p, even though p is true(Le Morvan and Peels 2016, 26).

Male Ignorance: Not Having to Know

Part 2:The High Cost of Survivor Stories

2.1 Testimony: Costs and Credibility

And yet, the importance of these stories to hearers, to society at large, and potentially to the teller herself compels us to consider the normative implications of this kind of testimony. On standard philosophical accounts of testimony, a teller’s word is assessed on the basis of two factors: her sincerity and her competence, which combine to determine her overall trustworthiness, or credibility.^[43]In the case of first-person testimonials like #MeToo, where individuals are recounting an aspect of their own lives, the question of competence usually takes a back seat to the question of sincerity. That is, the issue is not typically “how did you come to know that?” but rather, “why should we believe you?” This question about the veracity of testimony is a central one in contemporary debates and is typically framed as a question about the hearer, that is, whether the hearer has a presumptive right to believe, absent any positive evidence about the reliability of the teller.^[44] But in cases where there is evidence about the reliability of the teller, this question is normatively idle. In these cases, the evidence determines the reliability. So why is it that in standard cases of testimony about sexual violence or sexual harassment, the evidence is presented as split, framed as a “he said/she said ”scenario? It could be because these crimes often occur behind closed doors, which means there is seldom any eye-witness testimony. But we need to ask why eye-witness testimony is privileged in these cases, since if we broaden our gaze, we can see a mountain of other evidence—specifically, the evidence of the high costs of the teller’s testimony. For even if we know no other facts about her, as is often the case in #MeToo testimonials, we know that simply in virtue of telling her story, and thus coming up against the juggernaut of patriarchy, she has placed herself directly in harm’s way. And this fact bears directly on the question of what hearer sought to believe.

2.2 Practical Rationality

The connection between truth-telling and risk-taking is underwritten by the notion of practical rationality. Rationality is one of those philosophical concepts that can be unwieldy, but here I rely on a straightforward meaning of the term that, in practical matters, dictates that individuals actin ways that maximize their goals(Wedgwood 2014).^[45]This characterization will suffice to generate a number of inferential moves, for if these tellers aim to survive and prosper, and to be treated with dignity and respect by their social groups, then on pain of rationality they would not give testimony that jeopardizes those goals—not unless they had a very good reason to do so, such as wanting the truth of what happened to them to be heard and believed. To suppose otherwise would be to attribute to this particular class of tellers a kind of cognitive dysfunction typically reserved for individuals who suffer from serious mental illness, drug-induced altered states, or some form of extreme irrationality.