[CONTENT WARNING: Graphic discussion of sexual assault]
Forgive the repetition, but it’s worth hammering home.
So if you’re arguing #MeToo is a moral panic, you’re forced to argue that sexual assault isn’t as common as most people think, or isn’t as bad, or (in the extreme) nonexistent.
That’s the task before Carol Tavris. It won’t be easy, but she’s also a trained psychologist with decades of experience, so she should be up to it. Let’s walk over her arguments.
Other People Say It’s A Moral Panic
She mentions three specific people who agree with the moral panic label: JoAnn Wypijewski, Claire Berlinski, and Leonore Tiefer. The first two are journalists with no scientific background that I can find. Tiefer does have a psychology PhD and specialized in clinical psychology, though, so she’s on par with Tavris. None of these people carry credentials in the study of abuse. None offer citations to the literature. Tiefer engages in the same binary thinking and sweeping generalizations as Tavris, in fact. As quoted by the latter:
There’s a rush to judgment. A conflation of all offenses. An underlying truth about the lasting effects of shame. Little room for complexity. Some bastards getting their long overdue due. Lots of lawyers looking for cases and money. Lots of institutions needing to cover their asses for money/legal reasons. Opportunists galore with axes to grind.
To her credit, Tiefer’s contribution sounds like private correspondence, not really intended to defend her views in the public sphere. But that means it also does little to bolster Tavris’ case.
Berlinski’s contribution may include citations, but it’s behind a paywall. A short version exists at USA Today, but it’s without any citations and offers no new arguments beyond Tavris’ own. Other people who have read the piece are not impressed and declare it to be sexual assault apologetics.
But Maybe It’s Not a Panic?
What, exactly, are the goals here? The answer is clear in the case of hotel housekeepers, fast-food workers, and immigrant women who are routinely subjected to disgusting sexual harassment and who rarely have recourse to protect themselves from the powerful men who feel entitled to abuse them; in the case of women who enter formerly male-only occupations (tech, science, the military), where hostile harassment and rape are weapons to convey “you don’t belong here; get out.” The answer is always clear when the goal is to bring down some bad guys and protect the powerless.
“Bad guys.” Tavris asks us to think in shades of gray, yet she posits the existence of “bad guys” who are obviously guilty and deserve to be taken down.
This is also self-sabotage, as creates the possibility that some of the entries in #MeToo may be due to “bad guys.” If a substantial number are, then it isn’t a moral panic to share stories of sexual assault. Carol Tavris never attempts an accounting; she takes it on faith that “bad guys” are the exception than the rule on the #MeToo hashtag. I did a quick search, and by my accounting stories like these seemed to dominate:
This is revoltingly minimising @NewshubNZ. He crept up behind her to ASSAULT HER. Get it right
To me, the “bad guys” are the norm. But I’d welcome an attempt by Tavris to catalogue which of these are due to “bad guys” and which are not. Looking at a thousand Tweets should be sufficient to estimate the proportion of “bad guys” with a 3.1% margin of error, and it shouldn’t take more than a lazy weekend.
What About The Non-Victims?
… in the current intoxicating rush to accuse and bring down sexually coercive, abusive men, what cells are we overlooking?
The men and women who do not conform to the stereotype; the women who are not victims and the men who are. In the legitimate exhilaration of hearing women’s stories being believed and accepted at last, what voices are missing?
When we talk about murder victims, we do not diminish the voices of the living. The goal of the #MeToo hashtag is to make people more aware of how often women are abused, with a focus on the workplace, because these stories are rarely circulated in public. This is a public education campaign, little different from those used to combat STIs or driving under the influence. Tavris bills herself as a “lecturer … devoted to educating the public about psychological science,” yet I see no sign she’s worried about the missing voices of non-psychological science.
There’s some evidence this public awareness campaign is working, too. According to a poll taken by NBC and the Wall Street Journal in October, 77% of men are “now more likely to speak out if they see a woman treated unfairly.” Isn’t the potential benefit sufficient reason to leave aside the voices of “women who thoroughly enjoyed their years of sexual freedom and experimentation,” “women who enjoy being groupies,” and “men who would not dream of having sex with a woman who is blotto drunk?”
Yes, of the five groups Tavris thinks are being left out of a conversation about the sexual harassment of women, none involve harassment. “Shy men and boys who have felt pressured or even coerced by women” does cover sexual assault, but that’s about male victims and again off-topic. Who would pay attention to an HPV awareness campaign that prominently featured people who don’t have HPV and aren’t worried about catching it? And yet, that’s precisely what Tavris wants for #MeToo.
They Brought It On Themselves
For the vast majority of women in their personal and professional lives, where the complexities of sexuality abound, surely another goal is to become more assertive and clear about their wishes. If women seek true sexual equality, they have to do some hard thinking about their own behavior. As Laura Kipnis observes in Unwanted Advances, when did “empowerment” for women come to mean filing an assault claim months after a drunken night rather than developing the ability to say to the guy, “take your fucking hand off my knee”?
No really, Tavris is stating that a substantial number of women on the #MeToo hashtag are guilty of not being assertive or sure enough of their own intentions. She may even do it twice, via one of those five categories:
The voices of women who had some awful encounters, or boring ones, or regrettably stupid ones, but would never blame, let alone sue, their partners on the grounds that they were at least 50% of the people in the bed.
What are the grounds for these women not blaming their partners: because they participated in the act, or their partners? If you invite me over to help you bake, and I screw up the muffins we’re making together, you should be quite entitled to blame me. Blaming yourself for my mistake doesn’t make sense unless you had good grounds to think I’d screw up, but if that was the case why did you invite me over in the first place? It only makes sense to absolve me from blame if the screw-up was accidental; the dog tripped me when carrying the baking tin, someone swapped the baking powder for sugar, and so on. Sex is not accidental, though, it’s an activity that two or more people willingly participate in. So what are the grounds to absolve blame? This sentence is tough to parse, but Tavris may be arguing women should withhold blame for “awful encounters” with their partners, even if said partners are responsible, which counts as victim blaming.
Either way, it stinks to hell of minimization. Let’s have another look at some “awful encounters” from #MeToo, shall we?
In my first job right out of college in a very male dominated field I was in a meeting with a group that was debating a project scope and as things got heated and the differences of opinion became vast. I finally spoke up, quite loudly, only to be told to “hush”. As you can imagine that didn’t go over well with me and I demanded to be listened to. The team leader stopped the entire meeting to announce that “cupcake” was upset. He then proceeded to tell me to come sit on his lap and tell me what had me so bothered. Everyone thought this was incredibly funny, except me. I stayed in that job for another very long and miserable year. Things never got better.
Here’s someone who followed Tavris’ advice, yet her assertiveness was openly mocked by her co-workers. Should she have gone further and quit, possibly tanking her career right at the start? Should she have gone immediately to HR, only to risk them laughing at her situation too, and/or reprisals from her co-workers for attempting to report their behavior?
At 19, I was interning for a woman. Her assistant was a married man in his early thirties with 3 young children [named Adam]. I had very little “need” to interact with him directly outside of “hey, did Tamara leave the files with you…you get the drift. He paid a lot of attention to me, at the time, it made me uneasy but I chalked it up to him just trying to be nice. Shortly after starting, this married father started appearing at the same places I hung out…the volleyball courts at our beach where high school and college aged kids hung out, the bike trail where my friends and I would rollerblade, the ice cream shop where young adults would meet up at night. […]
… I went out to my jeep at 4:30AM to head downstate for a family reunion. When I got to the van, it had been ransacked. The sweet notes my boyfriend had left on my windshield when parked at our school or neighboring workplaces, that had been stashed in my glove box and center console were torn to shreds and scattered throughout my jeep. I had gotten home the night before at midnight, so sometime between then, and 4:30 someone had done this. I was shaking, but got on the road planning to talk to my brother. I “knew” it was Adam, but didn’t know what to do about it. I came home later that week from the reunion trip to an answering machine full of messages from my old boss. Adam had been arrested over the weekend after breaking into a random woman’s bedroom and sexually assaulting her. Her male roommate woke up to her screaming and pinned Adam while she called the police. There is no doubt in my mind that the attack was meant for me. None.
Here’s someone who followed Tavris’ advice. She kept Adam at a distance, and only by a stroke of luck avoided a sexual assault. What additional steps could she have taken to avoid this? Tavris gives no advice for men to follow, presumably because she doesn’t think they need to change their attitudes.
I was independent and hard-headed and learned early on how to “carry myself” when walking alone, how to hold my car keys between my fingers when walking to and from my car, how to be hyper-vigilant at all times in public as well as at social gatherings. I’m an old Hippie “Peace Freak” but I learned how to attempt to stop or disable an attacker by jamming my fingers into their eyes or strike their throat or the bottom of their nose to push into their brain if necessary. I have been sexually assaulted a few times, the first at age 8 by a pedophile. As a teenager, I talked my way out of two rapes by acting batshit crazy (surprisingly effective). I wasn’t so lucky two other times. My younger son’s father forced himself on me just one week after giving birth. I’ve dealt with symptoms of PTSD most of my life – and all of these experiences have had a negative effect on my relationships with men throughout my life, despite my best efforts.
Here’s someone who’s followed Tavris’ advice, yet experienced multiple rapes and has suffered the consequences all her life. At minimum, Tavris’ advice is insufficient to prevent sexual harassment or assault. But these women’s stories point to a general truth: it’s tougher to defend than attack. Even the most skilled martial artist can be felled by a car. Even the most wary individual can wind up trusting the wrong person and let their guard down. It’s far more effective to put your effort into teaching men consent and bystander intervention[1] than teaching women to hold their car keys as weapons.
But there’s a sinister edge to Tavris’ argument, specifically the “filing an assault claim months after a drunken night” bit. It’s quite common for people to experience a traumatic experience to engage in some level of denial. In 1988, Mary Koss and her co-authors found that of 489 women who experienced the legal definition of rape for that US state, only 55% of those raped by a stranger called their experience “rape,” while a mere 23% of those raped by an acquaintance used the same term; 50% of the latter group instead said that the incident was a “miscommunication.”[2] Yet despite their differing views of the same act, both groups experienced the same levels of depression, anxiety, relationship issues, and sexual satisfaction after the incidents. These denials can last weeks, years, or even a lifetime.
“We numb it out, or we pretend it didn’t happen, or we say nothing about it because we fear we won’t be believed,” [Claudette Boulanger] said. “Sometimes it’s hard for us to believe that happened. A lot of times we want it to go away, we want to normalize it.” […]
The trauma from an assault can be lifelong, which is why some women cope without acknowledging it, according to Boulanger. “Why would anybody want to deal with the feelings that would be coming up if you really accepted the fact that you had just been assaulted? That’s the rest of your life you’re going to be dealing with that,” she said. “So if for ten minutes or two years or a day you pretend this didn’t happen to cope, that makes sense to me.”
Ariana Barer, a coordinator with the Vancouver-based Women Against Violence Against Women Rape Crisis Centre, said women should be supported and believed regardless of their behaviour after an assault. “There are many, many ways that people respond, and all of them are legitimate,” Barer said. “Women respond to sexualized violence differently, and have the right to choose their own path to healing and justice.”
Carol Tavris, in sum, doesn’t understand how trauma can work. She’s perpetuating a myth about sexual assault which discourages people from speaking up once they break past denial and realize the truth. She’s making it harder to seek justice.
They’re In It For The Money
What do we learn when we follow the money? When schools and companies feel they must expel or fire someone without due process, solely on hearsay and unfounded allegation because they are terrified of lawsuits, how is justice aided, how is it impeded?
Remember, moral panics look plausible on the surface and can be partly based in fact. Most people in the panic think they are acting ethically, so they don’t need money or power as a motivation. To return to the Satanic Panic, “therapists, social workers, and police officers unintentionally forced children to fabricate tales of brutal abuse.” Moral panics in general require collaboration between too many actors for one of them to sneak a profit. You have to go to witch trials to find extensive evidence for a profit motive, and even then the accused’s goods were sometimes seized by the state instead of handed over to the accuser.
To Tavris, then, #MeToo isn’t a typical moral panic like the War on Drugs, but in the same class as the most extreme panics known to humanity. Her calls for moderation and understanding only apply to other people, apparently.
There’s also no evidence of an uptick in police reports, which you’d expect if people were trying to cash in.
Toronto police spokesperson Mark Pugash said the service has no plans to establish a special hotline for sex-assault complaints. He added that there hasn’t been an increase in reporting since the Weinstein allegations surfaced.
For both [Farrah] Khan and [Deb] Singh, a special police hotline would only go so far, as many survivors don’t want to press charges given how tough it can be to tell their story in a courtroom. “Survivors aren’t going to the police, so putting resources into creating that hotline would be a waste of time,” said Singh. Instead, the two activists are calling for increased funding from all levels of government to help providers offer more sexual violence services.
I can’t find a single scrap of evidence for greed within #MeToo, yet Tavris believes it is so widespread she can assert it without evidence.
Abuse Exists in a Hierarchy
Thus, when the Guardian (Dec. 17, 2017) reported Matt Damon’s remarks that there was “a difference between patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation. Both of those behaviours need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated,” Minnie Driver blasted him: it’s not for men to make distinctions; “there is no hierarchy of abuse”; men should just shut up for once. “If good men like Matt Damon are thinking like that then we’re in a lot of fucking trouble,” she said. “We need good intelligent men to say this is all bad across the board, condemn it all and start again.”
No hierarchy of abuse? Really?
This isn’t really an argument, for starters. “Abuse is a hierarchy” and “this discussion of sexual harassment and assault is not a moral panic” do not contradict each other. And like Tavris did with R. V. Butler, she again misrepresents Minnie Driver’s words:
“I felt that what Matt Damon was saying was an Orwellian idea, we are all equal except that some us are more equal than others,” she said. “Put abuse in there … that all abuse is equal but some is worse.” She added: “There is no hierarchy of abuse – that if a woman is raped [it] is much worse than if woman has a penis exposed to her that she didn’t want or ask for … you cannot tell those women that one is supposed to feel worse than the other.
“And it certainly can’t be prescribed by a man. The idea of tone deafness is the idea there [is] no equivalency. How about: it’s all fucking wrong and it’s all bad, and until you start seeing it under one umbrella it’s not your job to compartmentalise or judge what is worse and what is not. Let women do the speaking up right now. The time right now is for men just to listen and not have an opinion about it for once.”
But let’s indulge Tavris: who has a better understanding of the scientific literature on abuse and sexual assault, someone with a psychology PhD and a fellowship, or an actor with no scientific training?
Most surveys on the “dark side” of postsecondary school courtship conceptualize abuse in narrow terms. A review of the literature shows that most researchers use operational definitions that include both or only one of the following behaviors: physical assault and unwanted sexual attention. Psychological or emotional mistreatment (e.g. public humiliation, put-downs) is typically given short shrift and thus a substantial number of fear-inducing events are ignored (Schwartz & DeKeseredy, 1991; Smith, 1994).
Some researchers use narrow definitions because they contend that “lumping all forms of malevolence and harm-doing together may muddy the water so much that it might be impossible to determine what causes abuse” (Gelles & Cornell, 1985, p. 23). Others do not examine psychological victimization because they regard it as “soft-core” abuse and argue that researchers who combine “what is debatably abusive with what every agrees to be seriously abusive… stand to trivialize the latter” (Fox, 1993, p. 322). There are also those who define psychological assaults as “early warning signs” of physical and sexual attacks rather than being abusive in and of themselves (e.g. Kelly, 1994).
These viewpoints do not reflect the brutal reality of many women’s lives. For example, Kirkwood (1993) found that some of her respondents were drawn into a web of long-term terror through a barrage of psychologically abusive events that many Canadians are likely to term minor, and in some cases of severe psychological abuse, survivors may not ever be physically harmed. Moreover, a growing number of qualitative studies show that emotional or verbal abuse can be equally or more injurious than physical and sexual victimization (Fitzpatrick & Halliday, 1992; Gamache, 1991; MacLeod, 1987; Walker, 1979).
Rather than reproduce definitions that either ignore many females’ subjective experiences or create a “hierarchy of abuse based on seriousness” (Kelly, 1987), DeKeseredy and Kelly (1993a, 1993b) used a broad definition that views any intentional physical, sexual, or psychological assault on a female dating partner as abuse. Their definition coincides with many women’s real-life experiences and minimizes the problem of underreporting by uncovering high levels of of injurious acts (DeKeseredy, 1994a; Smith, 1994). However, it should be noted in passing that for descriptive or theoretical purposes, it is occasionally best to conduct separate analyses of abuse types.[3]
By the turn of the century, the scientific literature on sexual assault had mostly rejected the notion of a “hierarchy of abuse” among victims, as there was no evidence it existed. There’s also no sign of a hierarchy within abusers.
The different categories of nonphysical abuse appear, according to their different risk markers, to be unique categories rather than part of a continuum or hierarchy of abuse. The different risk markers lend support to the previous factor findings with the Maltreatment Inventory that verbal abuse and controlling behavior may be distinct categories of nonphysical or psychological abuse (Tolman, 1999).[4]
Nonetheless, hierarchies of abuse do exist, just not in the form you’d expect.
Evidence presented in this study of the judgements made by staff prior to determining a response to abuse is supported by other literature: e.g. attempts to quantify ‘levels of severity’ or ‘risk of significant harm’ when making judgements (Brown & Stein 1998, Council of Europe 2002). However, by focusing on types of abuse perceived as the ‘most severe’ (e.g. sexual or physical abuse), nurses can seek to distance themselves (and their profession) from these acts. […]
The thresholds at which people decide to take action are often not in line with the broad definition of abuse that should be actioned via the adult protection system. The issue of thresholds illustrates individual differences amongst practitioners. Some staff held a strong ‘abuse is abuse’ standpoint that equates to zero tolerance. Others distinguished physical and sexual abuse (and in some cases financial) from other abuse forms in terms of level of severity and associated level of necessary response. This informal allocation into a ‘hierarchy of abuse’ clearly has implications for a consistent response to protection from abuse.
Policy developers and academics (and also practitioners) have been guilty of giving preference to certain forms of abuse in terms of attention and resources. For example, the existence of the sexual abuse of people with intellectual disabilities was being discussed in the literature during the 1980s and 1990s, years before other abuse forms were discussed (Brown & Craft 1989, Carmody 1991, McCormack 1991).
Further evidence of this abuse hierarchy is indicated by the recent work of Strand et al. (2004), in terms of certain abuse types being more likely to be reported. Acts of physical violence were reported more frequently than other abuse forms. Similarly, Macfarlane (1994) discusses how the acknowledgement of sexual abuse has not equated to a more widespread consideration of the ‘subtle abuse’ forms that disabled people suffer on a day-to-day basis.[5]
This is the strongest argument for zero-tolerance programs: people tend to invent hierarchies of abuse in order to minimize or excuse abuse. Whether consciously or not, abusers then shift their behavior to duck under the bar and escape consequence, and bystanders do the same to rescue themselves from helping the victim. It’s no wonder modern abuse programs tend to reject hierarchies (emphasis in original).
There is no hierarchy of abuse. There is no grading of what was better or what was worse.All abuse is bad whether it happened once or whether it happened a thousand times – it can leave you feeling equally bad and in need of support. […] We all have a tendency to say that what happened to us was “insignificant” when compared to the experiences of others. But let’s not go there because diminishing our own experience of abuse really only serves to play into the hands of abusers.
To finally answer the earlier question: an actress with no scientific training knows more about the scientific literature on abuse than Carol Tavris!
And Now, The Worst Part
I’m a computer scientist. I hold one degree and multiple certificates or diplomas on the subject, which I earned over many, many years of study and practical experience. If I tell you that most sorting algorithms can be sped up by terminating before the data is fully sorted and instead finishing with an insertion sort, or that it isn’t always wise to maximize the number of processor cores in use on a graphics processor, you’ve got good reason to trust my advice. I could be lying about both, but it’s not in my best interest to: it makes you less likely to believe the words of other people with the same level of training, and reduces the value of my years of effort.
Via similar reasoning, it’s also a bad idea for me to pontificate about Windows hardware drivers or JTAG debuggers. Both also involve computers, so by default a non-expert would consider me an authority on those subjects, but the field of computer science is vast and my training never covered those areas. It would be very unethical for me to exploit your ignorance, and say anything about those subjects beyond “not my area of expertise, sorry.”
Had that article about #MeToo carried Claire Berlinski’s name, there’s very little chance I would have spent 7,000+ words dissecting it. The arguments it puts forward are a dime a dozen. The people holding those views do not claim to have put years of study into the subject, however, so they cannot claim to be experts and that limits the damage such articles can do.
As I keep banging on about, though, Carol Tavris holds a psychology PhD from the University of Michigan. She was a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. She has written several books on the subject, and been given multiple awards. According to her bio,
She has spoken to students, psychologists, mediators, lawyers, judges, physicians, business executives, and general audiences on, among other topics, self-justification; science and pseudoscience in psychology; gender and sexuality; critical thinking; and anger. In the legal arena, Dr. Tavris has given many addresses and workshops to attorneys and judges on the difference between testimony based on good psychological science and that based on pseudoscience and subjective clinical opinion.
When Tavris says there’s a hierarchy of abuse, or that victims are making things up to benefit themselves, or that victims brought their woes upon themselves, people believe her. Check out the comment section of her article:
I wish I could promulgate this article everywhere.
Such an important piece and yes to all that you said.
Thank you for your wise comments on a very difficult subject.
Thank you Carol Tavris. A breath of fresh air to clear out the absolutes and make room for the more accurate but less beguiling gray areas.
Very good, reasoned article.
A nugget of clarity… bringing back a rational balance-scale. It should “go viral” to rein in the chaotic [extremists]…
And yet this computer scientist, who’s only spent a few months studying this area, can tell Tavris is ignorant of the science and spreading myths about sexual assault and harassment. This is a gross ethical violation on her part, whether her psychology training gave her the relevant knowledge or not, and it tarnishes the reputation of other psychologists.
Holy FUCK, Carol Tavris. How could you write this article?! How could you do this to other women?
[1] Coker, Ann L., et al. “Evaluation of Green Dot: An active bystander intervention to reduce sexual violence on college campuses.” Violence against women 17.6 (2011): 777-796.
[2] Koss, Mary P., et al. “Stranger and acquaintance rape: Are there differences in the victim’s experience?.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 12.1 (1988): 1-24.
[3] DeKeseredy, Walter S. “Enhancing the quality of survey data on woman abuse: Examples from a national Canadian study.” Violence Against Women 1.2 (1995): 158-173.
[4] Gondolf, Edward W., D. Alex Heckert, and Chad M. Kimmel. “Nonphysical abuse among batterer program participants.” Journal of Family Violence 17.4 (2002): 293-314.
[5] Jenkins, Robert, Rachel Davies, and Ruth Northway. “Zero Tolerance of Abuse of People with Intellectual Disabilities: Implications for Nursing.” Journal of Clinical Nursing 17, no. 22 (November 1, 2008): 3041–49. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2702.2007.02158.x.