Feminism and the cult of imaginary violence

(Comment published in New York Times online, reply to: “When #MeToo goes to far,” by Bret Stephens, December 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/opinion/metoo-damon-too-far.html?comments:)

We need the kind of discrimination which differentiates between greater and lesser forms of inappropriate sexual conduct, as much as between the real and the imaginary. And which is less blind about how power works.

When I was a college student at Berkeley in the 80s, claims to combat miscreant attempts at inappropriate gender domination were being made right and left. The university's bureaucracy was by this time overwhelmingly female. I found myself faced with what in retrospect looks like a normative femininity, where men are suspect unless they are highly compliant. Consider: A man and a woman argue. He's a student, she's a petty official. She has power in this situation, he has none. The argument does not go his way. She then notices that he seems to be "angry." Now what can he do? He's already lost. It takes very little for her to feel entitled to accuse him of what I will call "imaginary rape." That is a form of violence that is imputed by the hermeneutic creativity people learn at universities, and it amounts to the accusation that he has violated her because she is uncomfortable. The truth is that this is not a gender problem but one of class and power, of bureaucratic domination and its alibis. Abuse of power uses the means it has.

This is a country that cannot decide if it wants to be democratic or not, and so this is decided at the level of everyday interactions in fields of unequal social power.