#metoo

Suppose you’re a writer with a self-destructive proclivity for sticking your neck out. Would you sign a book contract that would be cancelled in the instance of ‘sustained, widespread public condemnation of the author’? Even cautious, congenial writers are working in an era when a bland, self-evident physiological assertion like ‘women don’t have penises’ attracts a school of frenzied piranhas. So journalists would be fools to sign a document voided if, in a magazine’s ‘sole judgment’, they were the subject of ‘public disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals’. These are the ‘morality clauses’ arising in standard publishing contracts in the wake of #MeToo.

In celebration of its 110th birthday, I downloaded a Mills & Boon — The Greek Tycoon’s Blackmailed Mistress — and plan this coming weekend to settle down for an evening in the company of Dr Ella Smithson and Aristandros Xenakis, ‘an arrestingly handsome man… the epitome of lithe, masculine grace teamed with the high-voltage buzz of raw sexual energy’. I’m fond of Mills & Boon. In the mid-1980s, they provided me with the sex education my otherwise excellent mother must have thought school would sort out. I stole them from my older cousins’ bookshelves, hid them under my jumper and ran home to read them behind the sofa, agog at what grown-ups got up to.

It's over a year since the #MeToo scandal of sexual harassment broke. It has shaken up our culture and relationships in so many ways over the past 12 months. It isn't going away, either, as the allegations about Sir Philip Green this week have shown. But it has now reached a point where it could either improve or severely damage the way in which serious allegations are dealt with justly. The whole movement has been extremely messy. This was inevitable, given the number of people, mostly women, who have had to put up with being ignored or belittled when they complain even about serious sexual assault, let alone more subtle harassment.

Eight years ago, in the course of doing some research into literacy teaching in London, I visited many primary schools. One thing that struck me — and I didn’t of course mention it in the pamphlet I wrote on the subject — was how many primary school teachers were severely obese. One isn’t supposed even to notice it. But it’s been worrying me ever since. Obesity inevitably involves lower energy levels, less mobility, reduced staying power — all weaknesses which, however talented a teacher may be, are likely to impair his or her ability to cope with young children. What’s more, teachers are role models. I feel great sympathy for obese people, but I would be troubled if my young child were being taught by a seriously obese teacher.

‘There are two sides to every story’ is an aphorism you don’t hear often lately. Ask anyone amidst a family row: most stories have more than two sides. But in the take-no-prisoners world of #MeToo, there’s only one side. All women are victims and all women are truthful. Any man who’s had a shadow of doubt cast on his sexual behaviour since his first wet dream at 12 is deserving of permanent social and professional banishment and is forever forbidden from saying a word in his own defence. As the editor-in-chief of the respected New York Review of Books found out. Ostensibly Ian Buruma resigned, but resignation over your own dead body sounds awfully like ‘sacked’ to me. His fatal error, according to the usual Twits?

In recent days, Lionel Shriver has been in trouble. Her criticism of the publishing industry’s diversity drive has led to her marked as a racist and even dropped from a literary judging panel. She argued that ethnic quotas harm rather than help diversity - is she wrong? As Robert Mueller’s investigation continues, several dodgy links to Britain have surfaced that could bring down Trump. And last, in the age of MeToo, is sex becoming sexier? Find out at this week's Spectator Podcast. Do quotas help or hinder racial equality? That’s the big question we’ve been asking at the Spectator recently. Since we published Lionel Shriver’s critique of Penguin Random House’s diversity drive, she has been labelled a racist and even dropped from a literary panels.

Quite a long time, five seconds, when you count it. And ever since Netflix reportedly warned its employees not to stare at a colleague for longer than that, the paradoxical effect is, inevitably, to make you stare and count. The company’s new guideline is, of course, all part of corporate America’s response to the #MeToo scandal and if the Netflix directive is anything to go by, it’s going to result in the human race dying out in the US, because no one will be able to make a pass at anyone else, ever. It’s not that the individual prohibitions are onerous or particularly unreasonable; it’s that the collective effect can only be to make men – because it’s not aimed at women, is it?

The film awards season is over and Cannes has been handed back to wealthy holiday-makers, yet the #MeToo movement shows no signs of slowing down. Morgan Freeman is the most recent addition to the ignominious list of film producers, directors and actors who have had accusations of sexual harassment made against them since #MeToo took off in October last year. Allegations against the 80 year-old Freeman, star of The Shawshank Redemption, emerged last week on the day before Harvey Weinstein handed himself into police in New York on charges of rape. The charges against Weinstein are serious; he should stand trial and, if found guilty, face a lengthy prison sentence.