Joyce Fegan: #MeToo is the real victim of cancel culture

The comedy special he won for included “jokes” about the sexual misconduct revelations made against him. At one point in his now Grammy-winning special, he referred to “slaves singing in the field” as a way to describe the behaviour of some victims of sexual assault.

All his so-called joking aside, in 2017, when he finally admitted to his sexual misconduct, he published an apology.

“These stories are true. At the time, I said to myself that what I did was OK because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first, which is also true. But what I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your dick isn’t a question. It’s a predicament for them,” he said.

The apology also included how he had “disabled” these women from speaking, while admitting how he has enjoyed a “long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want”. He said he was off to take a “long time to listen”.

Less than a year later, in September 2018, New York’s Comedy Cellar, the “grand daddy” of comedy clubs and a venue that’s notoriously difficult to land a slot in, gave him their stage for a comeback show. He got a standing ovation.

By April 2020, he had published a comedy special — the one that would go on to win a 2022 Grammy.

Five years after the MeToo movement went viral, have there been any gains and losses, and for whom?

In 2021, Bill Cosby was freed after he had his 2018 sexual assault convictions overturned. And the world endured an entire term under Donald Trump, a man who was elected to the White House, after publicly boasting about sexual assault when a recording of him “joking” about how he could “grab ‘em by the pussy” was made public.

Meanwhile in Ireland, in 2022, a victim of gang rape was asked in court by a senior counsel why she had not tried to escape from the car where she was attacked, and which transported her to a remote location where she was raped several times.

A teenager at the time of her multiple attacks, she answered: “I didn’t know what would happen if I started demanding to get out of the car.”

“There was one of me and five of them. It is very intimidating,” she told the experienced barrister. She had also spoken about feeling “inanimate” at times during the attacks — that extremely common and automatic response of shutting down or playing dead, because it’s safer than fighting back.

Meanwhile, in China of 2022, a journalist who helped women to report cases of sexual harassment, and who became a key figure in the country’s MeToo movement as a result, now languishes in prison for her so-called crime — that of peacefully advocating for the welfare of others.

Sophie Huang Xueqin is officially being detained under the charge of “inciting subversion of state power”. Detained since September 2021, her lawyers have not been able to see her, nor review her case files.

In 2022, what’s worse — being a victim of sexual assault or being accused of it?

While the MeToo movement has its critics — in that justice should be left to the courts, not the court of social media, because public accusations prejudice a fair trial — you wonder if the movement was ever a real threat like those who cried “cancel culture” said it was.

The whole reason MeToo became a movement is because victims of sexual assault are systemically silenced, either telling no one of their ordeal, never mind an official authority. If someone drove into you, it’s unlikely you’d silently take the incident home with you. If someone burgled your home, it’s improbable that you’d just change the locks and tell no one.

“You’re looking for attention,” “you’ll ruin their good name”, “it’s your word against theirs”, and “why are you only saying this now all these years later?” are just some of the stock phrases our society preserves for survivors of sexual assault in our attempt to silence them and protect perpetrators.

You can see why MeToo grew legs, when victims were left with nowhere else to go. But let’s blame them for that too. We accused those who spoke out in support of MeToo of participating in cancel culture — of banishing people to the badlands forevermore.

Whereas in reality, it is more often than not victims of sexual assault who live in silence, winning neither Grammys nor a seat in the Oval Office.

The concept of cancel culture, an attempt to hold someone in power accountable for their words or actions, is in reality a smokescreen to distract from systemic abuse.

If you look at the justice system in Ireland when it comes to crimes of a sexual nature, you’ll see how little these crimes are reported, never mind tried in court.

A total of 65% of survivors do not report the crime to a formal authority — that’s according to the 2020 statistics from Rape Crisis Network Ireland. If you’re under 13, 70% of survivors do not report.

And of the small number of these crimes reported, just 14% of them ever go to trial, according to the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, who provide direct support to survivors. So we are talking fractions of fractions, when it comes to the prosecuting of sexual crimes in Ireland in 2022.

Clearly, a lot needs to change in our country, and in the world, to increase the accountability of offenders and bring about justice for survivors.

It turns out we needn’t worry so much about “cancel culture” and its so-called victims, and instead be concerned about the prevalence of sexual crimes, and our under-reporting and under-prosecuting of them.