Another one bites the dust. Daniel Korski, favourite to be selected as Tory candidate for London mayor, has withdrawn from the race after an allegation of groping. He denies it, while his accuser, Daisy Goodwin, a screenwriter and producer, says other women have contacted her with some “very interesting stories” about him. #MeToo appears to have struck again.
Men in apparently unassailable positions of power have been toppled in a quite extraordinary sequence of scandals. Masters of the universe everywhere must be trembling at what might emerge about all they have done, taking it for granted that women at work were there to be touched, or subject to “banter”, all with an unspoken shadow of threats to careers.
Junior women have taken great risks to unmask bosses who can command their future. Those women usually experience a torrent of online and mainstream abuse for their bravery, with vicious accusations from “you brought it on yourself” to “gold-digger”. I look on, deeply impressed at their courage, as each new feminist wave pushes forward frontiers beyond what my generation dared.
With friends of my age, we look back on what we should never have tolerated when I started out, in the fabled revolutionary year of 1968. We were the original snowflakes, who wouldn’t have contemplated going to an editor with tales of molesting or harassment. Such tales would probably have been greeted with astonished incomprehension, probably even ridicule. Sisterly solidarity was confined to warning one another, not urging each other to publicly complain.
Yet plainly some women still think this behaviour is more or less OK, or even normal. Writing in the Mail about the Korski case, Sarah Vine claimed that a fellow guest once manhandled her breasts at a No 10 party, “reaching out, grabbing them in both hands and sort of jiggling them around with a vigorous enthusiasm that, I must confess, rather took me and everyone else by surprise”. Her response? “I wasn’t particularly upset – after all, he did it in full view of everyone, so it wasn’t threatening or sinister. But it did rather take the wind out of my sails. In the end, I decided to file it under ‘someone having a bit of fun at my expense’.”
On Korski, she was forgiving: “If Korski did what Goodwin alleges, then he made a stupid mistake. But should that be the end of him? Unless concrete evidence emerges of more incidents in a similar vein, no. There is not yet, nor do I hope there will ever be, a law against flirting, larking around – or simply just being a damn fool.” (You might wonder if she’d be so forgiving of a Labour politician.) More to the point, that “boys will be boys” attitude has run its course. Behind every unwanted grope is a men-in-charge worldview that lets every little boy or girl know their rightful place.
#MeToo has been a bold surge forward. As with any campaign, it’s vital that we trumpet the successes, even while acknowledging the Himalayas still left to climb. It kicked off with Harvey Weinstein, emperor of Miramax, receiving a 23-year sentence for rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse he committed, unchecked, over a period of 30 years (he received an additional 16-year sentence this February). After all those years of silence, 80 women, many of whom had been gagged by non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), came forward with accusations after the remarkable bravery of his PA, Zelda Perkins.
Later came the fall of Jeffrey Epstein. This month’s remarkable Icarus is Crispin Odey, a hedge funder holding $4.4bn in assets, after a dogged investigation unearthed stories from 13 women in an “abusive workplace”. The accusations against Odey, a big-time Brexit funder, were shockingly graphic. His fund collapsed in days as investors fled. The fund’s executive committee had tried before to rein him in; he fired them.
And who would expect a handful of brave junior women could cause the mighty CBI to all but implode under accusations of sexual harassment? Initial reporting led to a cascade of more than a dozen women coming forward with accounts, including rape. What finally brought Boris Johnson down was his cavalier promotion of Chris Pincher, ignoring the warnings of sexual misconduct against him. Other sectors, including the media, have also been shaken by such cases. “Pestminster” scandals continue to multiply, as MP David Warburton resigns after being suspended over allegations of sexual harassment.
These are only a few examples of the #MeToo earthquake that has set thousands of senior men shaking in their big boots. This widespread fear is the campaign’s deep success, the sign of a culture that is beginning to shift. Finally, the abuse of women, whether sexist banter or violent rape, is threatening the great citadels of power.
Upon departing the Commons, Warburton, who denies harassment, acidly claimed that #MeToo had “swung too far”. The backlash is of course ferocious, as ever. When I spoke to Jess Phillips, Labour MP and women’s rights campaigner, she was coming out of a meeting with Weinstein’s denouncer, Perkins. They had discussed the campaign against the NDAs that gagged Perkins for 25 years, and still silence abused women. So far, one province in Canada has banned them, and Ireland is heading the same way. The freedom of speech bill here has a Labour amendment barring universities from using NDAs to silence victims. But she says, of parliament: “People will still be elected next time who think they can get away with abusing this power imbalance in the workplace.”
Are we nearly there yet? Some things are getting worse, says Laura Bates, whose Everyday Sexism site has collected a quarter of a million stories of abuse and harassment. She lists its successes, from cultural influence to “catharsis, hope and solidarity for hundreds of thousands of survivors”. Yet she recounts little sign of schools tackling sexual assaults.
About two-thirds of girls in the UK have reported experiencing unwanted sexual attention, including touching, in public places and thousands of cases of sexual assault have recently been reported in schools. Yet teachers are still not given adequate training about how to counter the extreme brand of Andrew Tate-influenced misogyny that spreads online, and sex education is under attack from the right. Meanwhile in workplaces the women who are most defenceless are those on zero-hour and precarious contracts.
There is an Everest to climb still, but what happens at the top ricochets all the way down to the school classroom. Toppling the mightiest abusers matters. The feminist revolution is barely half made. But we should celebrate each ratchet upwards by every new wave of women.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
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