Six years ago, in October 2017, the New Yorker and the New York Times broke dramatic stories concerning sexual harassment by the movie producer Harvey Weinstein. In 2022 the film She Said retold that story from the perspective of the two female Times reporters, while Weinstein, already serving twenty-three years for sexual assault in New York, was convicted of rape in San Francisco. Within these temporal and geographic parentheses, the #MeToo movement has expanded to seek justice from many other less famous men, and to reinvigorate harassment codes all over the nation. Claims that it was merely a celebrity-driven social media sensation that fizzled once high-profile perpetrators like Kevin Spacey, Jeffrey Epstein, and Prince Andrew had been punished, disposed of, or publicly shamed, are not borne out by the statistics. On the fifth anniversary of the #MeToo Movement, the Pew Research Center reported that 49 percent of Americans supported it,...
#MeToo Revisited
elizabeth butler cullingford holds the Jane Weinert Blumberg Chair in English Literature and is a member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers at the University of Texas at Austin. Her books include Yeats, Ireland, and Fascism (1981), Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (1993), and Ireland’s Others: Ethnicity and Gender in Irish Literature and Popular Culture (2001). Her new book, provisionally titled The Only Child: Myths, Metaphors, and Misogyny, is an interdisciplinary feminist/environmentalist project analyzing literary depictions of the only child in the contexts provided by religion, folklore, history, demography, and sociology.
Elizabeth Butler Cullingford; #MeToo Revisited. English Language Notes 1 October 2023; 61 (2): 148–151. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-10782154
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