#Me, too. So what?

By Jason Lim

In 2014, close to 300 girls in the town of Chibok in Nigeria were kidnapped by Boko Haram, an extremist Islamic terrorist organization based in northeastern Nigeria. A social media campaign, “#BringOurGirlsBack” went viral across the world, with global celebrities including then-first lady Michelle Obama personally chiming in to raise awareness of the horrific crime and to name and shame the Nigerian government to do something to rescue the girls. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Over the years, some girls came back home, but many are still unaccounted for.

Starting in winter of 2016 and through early 2017, millions of South Korean citizens braved the freezing cold to demonstrate against the sitting president for incompetence, corruption, and influence peddling. Much of the initial outrage was fanned through social media, resulting in an organic, self-amplifying mobilization. Huge protests involving over a million people in central Seoul and multiple presenters were organized through social media platforms weekend after weekend until the president was finally impeached and new elections called. This was a historic demonstration of people power in the social media age.

And there are other cases such as Black Lives Matter, the 99% Movement, BoycottUnited, OscarsSoWhite, etc. It goes without saying that all these cases are wholly different in terms of actors and circumstances. However, it does lead to the inevitable question about social media’s effectiveness as a tool for activism.

The recent New York Time’s story on the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long sexual harassment and assaults on women ― including world stars such as Angelia Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow ― struck a huge nerve. On October 15, actress Alyssa Milano posted on her twitter, “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.” What followed was an overwhelming response on all social media platforms from women (and some men) posting, “Me, too,” followed with narrative accounts of their experiences with the Harvey Weinstein’s of the world across all industries.

As an awareness-raising campaign, this was a huge success. Both men and women have a much deeper appreciation of the extent of the universality of the sexual indignities that women suffer. Just consider that most of the posters were English-speaking women in First World countries with easy access to social media, and you can start gauging the truly overwhelming scope of the problem across the world.

However, at this point, we have to pause and start asking, “So what?”

I don’t mean this in a disparaging way, but as a way of asking what comes after outrage and awareness? How do they translate automatically into something concrete that actually changes how men behave towards women in certain situations? How do you get the South Korean experience rather than the Nigerian one?

Or is the effectiveness of social media activism really dependent on the desired end-state? In South Korea, there was the specific goal of impeachment ―the demonstrations provided the visible and inescapable pressure on politicians and the media to ensure that the elite wouldn’t dare subvert due process from being carried out transparently. In Nigeria, the desired end-state would have involved a kinetic effort against an elusive enemy firmly entrenched within the larger, global narrative of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism ― as the Global War Against Terror has shown, there isn’t a neat solution that you can point your finger to in such conflicts.

The Weinstein issue is even more complex than that. As former Vice-President Joe Biden commented, “Sexual assault is not about sex. It is about power. It’s about the abuse of power. And it’s about deeply how embedded attitudes in our culture that, for a thousand years of shame the victims, allowed the perpetrators to escape the consequences of their actions.”

Brit Marling, writing in The Atlantic, agrees, “The things that happen in hotel rooms and boardrooms all over the world (and in every industry) between women seeking employment or trying to keep employment and men holding the power to grant it or take it away exist in a gray zone where words like “consent” cannot fully capture the complexity of the encounter. Because consent is a function of power. You have to have a modicum of power to give it.”

In that sense, the Weinstein case is about men choosing to capitalize on the ingrained, systemic imbalance of power between men and women to cater to their own sense of importance by forcing women into arbitrary sexual situations ― and being allowed or even enabled by the system. In other words, like all things in the world, it’s a combination of social context and individual behavioral choices.

Faced with such a challenge, a natural corollary to the “So what?” question is “How do we make the ‘what’ happen?” And since the “what” is essentially “change” in some form or another, then how do we make “change” happen?

Granted, not all “Me, too” needs a “So what?” Group outrage can be cathartic and therapeutic by itself without leading to anything except to collective sharing. But “So what?” is essential if that initial energy would lead to actual change, especially one that involves going against the ingrained system.

Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006.