Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Jess Hill, Black Inc./Quarterly Essay, $24.99.
Australians have been living for a while in the era of #MeToo. In 2021, we saw rage and revelation, as this group powered an insurgency against sexism and sexual violence. From once isolated survivors to political staffers, women everywhere were refusing to keep men’s secrets.
In this detailed, informative essay, Jess Hill traces the conditions that gave birth to #MeToo and tells the stories of women who – often at great personal cost – found themselves at the centre of this movement. Hill exposes the networks of backlash against them – in government, media, schools and in our national psyche. This is a powerful essay about shame, secrecy and, most of all, a revolutionary movement for accountability.
Hill, an investigative journalist, points out: “Political spin has no power against the rage unleashed by #MeToo. At its heart, this is an accountability movement, one that dares to ask men the ugly question: what will it take for your kind to stop coercing, harassing, raping, and killing women? Of power, it demands: what will it take for you to stop protecting the men who perpetrate this?”
“The cultural revolution of #MeToo is not just about sexual violence. It is taking aim at patriarchy’s most sacred compact: the keeping of men’s secrets.”
“The radical potential of #MeToo is not just in shifting norms, which can so easily regress. It’s in taking this moment of normative change and making it stick: with policy, legislation, regulation and governance. It’s in refusing to accept the crumbs that governments offer women.”
Quarterly Essay #84 reiterates that it’s the power of saying ‘No More’. “The power of refusing to play along. #MeToo may not have taken the scalps of our most powerful, as it did in the United States. But that does not mean it has failed. In fact, as we’ll see, the impact of #MeToo in Australia has been seismic.”
