What this #metoobin shit shows us is that men still feel entirely entitled to 1) force women and femmes into nonconsensual sexual situations, and, 2) not only trivialize our attempts to reclaim our dignity after sexual assault, but appropriate them mockingly in defense of abusers

The whole thing is this self-righteous reactionary narrative around Toobin suggesting that the pendulum has shifted and now men are the victims.

But the popularity hashtag itself just shows how limited the gains really were.

The fact is, #metoo was about Black women's experiences with sexual trauma, it got appropriated by white Hollywood millionaires to address their very specific situation.

We already saw with the Tara Reade situation just how conditional "believe women" really was, even among women, even when the woman in question was white.

Those of us who have done sexual misconduct accountability organizing since before #metoo became a hashtag du jour largely appreciated the visibility for our issue, but also understood that it was a useful moment, not a cure.

The fact is, that moment started to fade the moment liberal women started shifting back to discourses around which women deserved to be heard and believed.

The way supposedly feminist white women handled the Tara Reade situation showed just how thin their commitment really was.

Meanwhile, the white dudes who always want to find ways to set themselves up as victims have been stewing in their resentment, and the "liberal"-flavored ones have been biding their time "problematizing" supposed cancel culture waiting for their moment to whine explicitly.

That's how you get a moment like this, where dude writers from mainstream liberal publications are complaining about how unempathetic it is to object to a guy masturbating in front of his coworkers in a work meeting.

The popularity of #metoo began with the appropriation of a Black woman's Black-specific campaign around sexual misconduct accountability, and ended when another woman's story about sexual misconduct proved politically inconvenient for a white dude's candidacy.

When we build movements fighting one kind of oppression to the exclusion of others, we build expiration dates into our own work.

When we decide to center or re-center a movement around people with a specific privilege (whiteness, in this case), we are already beginning to carve out a preference for serving privilege.

We get comfortable compromising our movement in service of privileged categories.