Understanding the #MeToo Movement

It’s been exactly a year since a simple hashtag took the whole world by storm. After the

testimonies about the sexual harassments by Harvey Weinstein broke out, the hashtag #MeToo

racked up half a million tweets in a span of 24 hours in October, 2017. The birth of the hashtag in

Twitter was like a milestone in the fourth-wave feminism, a resurgence of feminism associated

with social media. It showed women how this platform can be used for a powerful consciousness-

raising feminist campaign along with other social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook,

where the hashtag quickly caught on. I believe this moment carried echoes of the original women’s

movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The explicit purpose of the earlier movement was to influence women that their

unhappiness was not a product of their secluded emotions and experiences but of a shared structure

of repression. For those former feminists, the shock of familiarity in different women’s testimonies

converted what felt like a personal pathology into a political purpose. Helene Cixous in her widely

read essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ wished that women would write so that other women would

realize they are not isolated in their thoughts and would relate to these writings (941). A strong

element of that dynamic was present in the #MeToo. With Weinstein getting fired, women realized

their voices mattered and had the power to bring a change, catalyzing the movement. As a result,

thousands of women took to twitter, to speak out about their personal experiences of sexual abuse

in order to tell their stories in solidarity with their sisters all over the world.

For decades women have been taught to be ashamed of sexual abuse and voicing it out

loud would jeopardize the women’s honor. Women have been turned away from their bodies,

shamefully taught to ignore them, to strike them with sexual modesty and as a result been made
victims to the Patriarchy (947). The #MeToo movement showed women that it is okay to seek

justice for being wronged and it’s never the woman’s fault. Only by writing one’s self can one’s

body be heard, by not letting anyone hold them back or stopping them (941). And women did just

that; they took their virtual pens to talk about their abusers, the predators that oppressed them to

free themselves by not shying away from the details, thus dissipating the masculine discourse.

Feminine writing or Écriture feminine represents the body as a path towards thought, a

thought that would encourage the female voice to flourish their suppressed self and question the

base of male-centric thoughts. According to Cixous, the female body is a vital tool to resist

masculine thoughts and thus, a methodical oppression of women (943). Interestingly, in this

particular social media movement, women literally used their bodies to pen their thoughts- to tell

stories of how their bodies were violated without their consent. Where Cixous encouraged women

to embrace their sexuality by expressing it for themselves (943), women of the #MeToo movement

reclaimed ownership of their own bodies and its leverage back from their offenders. The systematic

repression caused by sexual abuse has been shattered because women decided to write.

Cixous deconstructs the patriarchal language that stratifies women into inferior positions,

calling for a new genre of writing that marks the feminine equal to the masculine, thus, forestalling

a likelihood of change in the social structure through feminine writing. The #MeToo Movement

flips the very characteristics of this form of writing by being straightforward, unambiguous and

consistent-but still maintaining the rudimentary essence of the Écriture feminine, while using the

body of women and their sexuality to create a revolution.

Reference
Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory An Anthology. John Wiley & Sons,

Incorporated, 2017.