What Eventually Me Too Was and Is

In late 2017 several women shared on social media descriptions of sexual assaults they had undergone. Others wrote just a chilling pair of words that were to become a hashtag: me too. Many others joined and wrote the words, and tens of thousands expressed solidarity. For the first three weeks, there was a general uncertainty about the nature of the spontaneous outburst of feelings and thoughts – including among women who wrote “me too.” But as the weeks passed it became increasingly clear that there were three Me-Too, not one.

For a particular faction within feminism, which was extremely small at the time, Me Too was from the very beginning a tool for implementing perceptions that re-define womanhood, manhood, sexuality – humanity

The people on whom these women wrote “me too” were mostly from the entertainment industry, and so in its first few months Me Too was for most people, “sexual intrigues of celebrities.” At the same time, for journalists and for the socially-involved viewer of news broadcasts, Me Too was an effort to expose influential figures who used their power to hide their sexual violence and silence their victims (and as it will turn out, even to silence law enforcement officials and journalists investigating their acts). Thus, in the feminism I will call here “classical feminism” and among those who believe in humanism, including myself, there was hope that this spontaneous reaction that started around celebrities would also reach anonymous violent people, like a manager of a hotel dining room, a head of a department in a governmental agency, a partner in a firm, who violently attacked ordinary women and used their power to hide their actions, evade punishment, and continue harming other women. For classical feminism and for me as a humanist, Me Too was never about celebrities, but about providing courage to those who undergone acts defined in the law as offenses, removing from them the shame and fear, and exerting public pressure to make the legal systems punish the culprits and deter others. However, in addition to these two meanings of Me Too, as “scandals”, and as supporting law enforcement, a third meaning has evolved, from the very first days of the new hashtag. This was a completely different understanding of what kind of vessel Me Too is, and what it needs to achieve. Shortly after, this third sense would become what we all associate today with the words “me too.”

For a particular faction within feminism, which was extremely small at the time, Me Too was from the very beginning a tool for implementing perceptions that re-define womanhood, manhood, sexuality – humanity – and not in a way that drives humanity toward a humanistic vision. For them, Me Too was not primarily about providing support and encouraging law enforcement, but, a means of overt violence and intimidation for re-education, of all men and all women, as to what is a woman and what is a man, and what are the relations between them and their meaning – that is, what is a human. Re-education for the purpose of creating a person who conforms with the beliefs of the group that I will refer to here as “the Gender Church”.

Since this faction was operating in the absence of any substantial internal or external critique, in the two-to-three decades that preceded Me Too it underwent two changes: It became increasingly extremist, but at the same time also more and more dominant in the mainstream.

For years, this faction of feminism has cultivated views that were constantly drifting away from any founded thinking on humanity and human sexuality. Its origins date back to the 1960s and 1970s, and several decades ago the faction developed a set of beliefs: that there are no two sexes in humanity (in the sense that men and women actually have sex-specific qualities that arise from their innate sex); that the characteristics of the sexes were invented by men as a form of oppression toward women (thus in this narrative men never existed until non-existing men invented men and women); that heterosexuality is likewise an artificial fabrication and a dictation by the male sex to the female sex which needs to stop; that all violence in human society comes only from men; and that hence, all women are victims and masculinity (perceived as a malicious invention of men) must be rewritten or erased. Half a century ago, this group was a small and negligible minority. However, the rest of feminism almost never criticized it. Perhaps feminism never objected in order to avoid internal controversy, and perhaps many were tempted by the feeling that the faction promoted, of freedom to be violent without accountability, because all violence will always be justified as moral since the responsibility will be placed on men, because they are depicted in the faction’s beliefs as the only source of any human suffering. Many may have been lured by a sense of freedom to hate (as expressed in books such as “I hate men”), because any hatred will be presented as nothing but a rational response to pure evil (accordingly, a sense of supremacy will ensue).

Since this faction was operating in the absence of any substantial internal or external critique, in the two-to-three decades that preceded Me Too it underwent two changes: It became increasingly extremist, but at the same time, also more and more dominant in the mainstream. Women adhering to concepts of this small core became influential thanks to constant advances into centers of power, in the media, in literature, and in academia, as well as in large feminist organizations and governmental departments. This was done under the guise of classical feminism, whereas, ideologically and emotionally, the ideas they advocated for had nothing in common with any humanist conception of human equality for all, that is, equality regardless of any classification. It was only because of Me Too that I became familiar with this faction’s beliefs, and learned that their premise is no different than assumptions on which George Orwell wrote the novel 1984: that humans can and should be artificially and violently engineered to produce a different humanity, as if human beings were a product and not free individuals; and that human society is a production line for dictated emotions and opinions according to a simplistic and rigid set of ideas, rather than an ocean of contradictions, conflicts and living and breathing insurmountable dilemmas that cannot be solved with a strike of an axe.

The Me Too campaign was evolving simultaneously in two arenas: in the media, and on social media. In this second arena, especially of the left (as I witnessed, as an active leftist), the small but aggressive core had reached a rather dominant presence long before Me Too. In fact, no one on the left wanted to confront it. The feminist core used to spread aggressive views and boycotts, which were generally ignored not because of indifference, but out of fear. What people on the left feared was that the faction’s method, described below, would be directed against them. For years, the habit on most parts of the left was to ignore storms arising from this feminist core and to remain silent. The fear behind the silence was so strong that even three months after Me Too had started, not a single man in the ideological left in the social media environment of my country, had reacted in any way or form to Me Too (I was the first leftist that I’m aware of who addressed the issue on social media, and my reaction was unequivocal support. As I mentioned, when Me Too first started I regarded it from the point of view of humanism – providing courage and support to women who were assaulted so the law would be implemented. At the time, Me Too was still a process in the making).

When Me Too began, the violent core was ready in social media, for taking over Me Too in order to use it as a tool for spreading its perceptions. The method was simple – by then the faction had been using it for years

Right from the first two-to-three weeks since the phrase “me too” was written as a hashtag, the faction immediately recognized, in various parts of the world, the opportunity to expand the same methods it had been directing against the ideological left, onto the mainstream. The idea of using Me Too to spread the faction’s perceptions was outspoken. It was written in posts that appeared in the last weeks of 2017. I remember a post by a feminist poetess calling on women to “Use Me Too to reach 100% harassed!” and another asking, “Is it happening? It began?” referring to a revolution in which this Gender Church will spread its ideas to the whole of society and turn from a minority to a hegemony (this is not a personal interpretation of her words; a few months later I had a long e-mail correspondence with her, in which I learned about the intention behind her words. On a personal note, I have struggled against racism and racists all my life, but only in that conversation had I experienced for the first time what it feels like to meet your racist. To converse with someone who hates an entire part of humanity based on an arbitrary quality, that you happen to have. Her hatred for men was expressed in the same language used by racists and was overt, and breathtaking).

When Me Too had started, the violent core was ready with its regular practices in social media for taking over Me Too to use it as a tool. The method was simple – by then, the faction had been using it on the left for years. It conssists of directing verbal violence against any man or woman who dare to oppose their terms and assumptions, through hundreds of people flocking to fill his or her Facebook profile with insults, along with statements in their own profiles that any professional ties with him or her are discontinued, followed by publicly addressing through social media the employer, colleagues and friends, demanding of them to declare that any contact with that person is aborted, with the threat, that if they won’t publish such a declaration, it will be taken as evidence that they share those ideas that caused the attack, making them just as guilty, meaning they will receive the same treatment. Thus remaining silent, became an offense. This will turn out to be a crucial part of the method and what enabled it to be extremely effective. The faction’s mode of action which was used for years against people on the left, was now expanded to all of society.

Since remaining silent was declared complicity (in whatever the faction defined as a crime, which included expressions, opinions and feelings, even a like), every person feared that if he or she would not join the attacks, this will be taken as complicity causing the attacks to be directed against them, and this fear pushed many to join the boycotts and condemnations even if not agreeing with the given reason. This anxiety increased the number of participants in any given attack to thousands, then to tens of thousands, and finally to hundreds of thousands, by the power of fear, of each person of being singled out for boycotting if remaining silent (let alone if daring to object to an attack).

With the growth of the masses, the crowd became more threatening and had more presence in the social media life of more people. More and more people were afraid to express positions other than those of the extremist core. More and more people expressed sympathy with these ideas – at first, only out of fear, but later, out of eagerness to receive the praise of the masses. The masses were hungry for approval, to feel that their actions are correct and moral, and would thus make any random person who endorses them a hero, and a famous one, and this glory became yet another motivation to sympathize with the concepts of that core.

The result was that masses of women and men have adopted the belief that all women are continuously sexually harassed in public and personal environments, ignorant of the consistent research data showing that seven percent of women were harassed and assaulted.

In such an atmosphere, the feminist claim “all women were harassed” was circulated on Facebook and on other social media. Here we need to keep in mind that the information a person is exposed to on social media is biased in several ways. If a person has 2,000 Facebook friends, 1,000 of whom women, and within several days 70 of these women publish reports on harassment, the reasonable person is not in a position to consider that this is 7% of the women on his friends list. For that person, the timeline seems flooded with reports, causing a subjective impression that absolutely – all women were abused. The statement “all women were harassed” was thus conveyed with an exclamation mark, and in discussions about harassment, naturally, there are many deep and justified exclamation marks. However, on social media, the higher the number of exclamation marks, the harder skepticism becomes because disagreement would no longer be about information, but about emotions. Informational-emotional claims (or “informotional claims”) of this type, such as “all women”, can propagate wrapped in a mantle of intense emotion that makes any doubt impossible, and since no doubt ever appears, they become truth. The result was that masses of women and men have adopted the belief that all women are continuously sexually harassed in public and personal environments, ignorant of the consistent research data showing that seven percent of women were harassed and assaulted. A social imperative was forming to accept the message, “all women.” The very examination of the data was, and still is, considered reprehensible. The political left on social media, which includes a little bit of everything – radical left, artists, some media, activists from various fields, and some moderate left – was carried away by the new belief, “all women”, “100% of women”.

In late 2017, many women publicly objected to the “all women” belief. In response, during 2018 an escalating discourse ensued, where in order to reach their goal of “100% harassed”, the faction and its new recruits continuously attempted to lower the bar for defining a behavior as sexual harassment while women and men alike expressed objections, causing the faction to search for new ways of defining male interactions with women as sexual harassment. This back-and-forth caused the faction to first define any sadness or hard feelings in the relations between the sexes (not calling the day after, having an argument, having an affair), as sexual harassment, and as done only by men to women. When facing objections and still not reaching 100%, the hardliners resorted to regarding any type of subtle negative interaction between the sexes (such as interrupting a sentence) as sexual harassment. After this was rejected on the grounds of not being at all sexual, the faction re-framed the latter as “toxic masculinity”, thereby compromising with regrad to the attempt to define it as sexual, in order to still keep whatever was to be included under the title “toxic” as something done only by men to women, and thus from the faction’s perspective “to gain yards” toward “100%” – “all women”.

However, along 2018 there were still some feminists who are not part of the left’s social media subculture. And throughout the takeover by the extremist faction, such feminists attempted to bring Me Too back to a trajectory of focusing on actual assaults instead of forcing redefining humanity. The result was that the faction and its new recruits turned the masses against them. Margaret Atwood, author of the early 1980s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, who was regarded by feminists in the past as a feminist icon, was forced to close all her social media accounts after women incited hundreds of thousands against her because of her opposition to their concepts. Signers of The Letter of the 100 in France, among whom figures familiar to feminists, who opposed the vision of the faction, were attacked. Their attempt to “get Me Too back on track” had failed (a few months later even the person who coined a “me too” hashtag prior to October 2017, Tarana Burke, would exclaim at a conference, “Part of the challenge that we have right now is everybody trying to couch everything under me too”).

An entire generation of women who constituted classical feminism in various countries was confronted on social media with hundreds of thousands of women and a few men, who were weaponized against any opposition by the power of fear – fear of them facing the incited crowed. Almost all of these women did not stand their ground. They adopted the faction’s beliefs. During the second half of 2018, the use of the extremist core of social media to produce out of Me Too a mechanism for disseminating its perceptions – a use which was spontaneous and not premeditated yet as effective as social media can be – was crowned with total success within feminism. By the end of that year, feminism in the classical sense no longer existed. The beliefs of the extremists have become the ideology of all of feminism. Since then, save for very few dissidents, this is feminism.

During 2018, the major media platforms that previously represented the voice of liberalism were also converted. Consequently, overt bias, misinformation, disinformation, omissions, censorship, and eventually incitement and hate speech, became a moral mission on these platforms around the world

By the first half of 2018 the core could already use the power it accumulated in social media to break out into traditional media. When Me Too started, newspapers like the Guardian and the New York Times, and similar liberal left-leaning newspapers in other countries, were in a state of anxiety. What editors feared was becoming obsolete. Social media posed an existential threat to them – the New York Times had just started charging fees from readers in an attempt to compensate for loss of advertisers. In a chase after social media to remain relevant, to survive, established newspapers and magazines began repeating ideas the extremist core was spreading in social media to draw audiences. This was presented as coming from some moral, ideological revelation, but these newspapers probably had a more cynical hope, of gaining some of the likes and shares that the faction had been producing for itself, while turning a blind eye on the overt fact that these likes and support are gained through fear and by using intimidation and threat.

After a short while, such newspapers and magazines were themselves under the explicit threat from the extremist core, whenever they published anything that doesn’t conform with the entire set of convictions, that its boycotting methods will be directed against them. This threat came when most of their readers were from the left, that is, the threat was to turn their remaining audience against them. As someone who published in similar outlets in my country, my impression was that editors were afraid of seeing their newspapers being annihilated financially should they refuse to join the parade.

Such external pressure joined internal pressure, from women who belonged to the aggressive core for decades and were working in the media (like the Guardian’s Judy Bindel, whose statements that all men should be put in concentration camps and that heterosexuality should become extinct are often quoted today), now strengthened by the faction’s new recruits within media outlets, of women who traded their “classical” feminism with the faction’s when all of feminism was converted. The result was that in order to survive professionally in those platforms, a journalist or an editor had to conform – out of immense fear and under constant threat – to the full set of convictions. With time, the combined external and internal forces became within journalism an intimidating power and the new beliefs became the only ones allowed there. Any editor or reporter raising objections, would face the wrath of the millions incited to enforce the new truisms, joined by his intimidated colleagues, and risk losing everything – and until this very day, they abide, fearfully, and quietly.

The contradictory misconceptions we became accustomed to hearing… …all belonged until Me Too to only a handful of eccentric and aggressive women in a few countries

By this process, during 2018, the major media platforms that previously represented the voice of liberalism were also converted. Consequently, overt bias, misinformation, disinformation, omissions, censorship, and eventually incitement and hate speech, became a moral mission on these platforms around the world, transforming them from journalism to propaganda instruments. These methods were now to be applied along with actions on social media, this time intentionally, to redefine what perceptions should be regarded as normative and indisputable – those of that Gender Church. This caused wider sections of the left to begin adopting the perceptions of the extremist faction. However, presumably, most of these supporters were in a state of painful personal conflict, and operated out of fear while attempting to silence their reason and conscience (and often enough, their own feelings, and their own human value).

Rapid dissemination of extremist ideas of an incredibly small group through intimidation and disinformation, is a social media phenomenon. It happened in other areas. This is what made unfounded perceptions become mainstream in recent years in the public debate that ended with the Brexit in England; in the debate around the referendum in Columbia on the agreement with FARC that was to end three decades of war and was aborted; in the shift of most Israelis within months to the anti-Palestinian views of the once-marginal racist group “Kahana” (the equivalent of the alt-right in the US); in the spread of the faith in Q in the right in the US; in the spread of ISIS. These are all cases where the special qualities of social media have been exploited by a handful of several hundreds or at most thousands of eccentric and aggressive individuals, to quickly turn an esoteric and violent position into the position of millions. This becomes possible in social media because these networks rely on acknowledgment and disregard, and thus inadvertently become an environment which has the power to generate conditioning of human beings (as a Skinner box), through positive and negative reinforcement – the positive being social regard, the negative disregard and social violence, both constituting powerful psychological driving forces.

The examples given above are cases where individuals were driven to adopt ideas because of these properties of the social media environment. In the same way, all the contradictory misconceptions we became accustomed to hearing – that there are no two innate sexes in humanity with an innate sexuality between them but rather all of manhood and womanhood are merely “stereotypes” and “cultural roles”, but, women are inherently supreme and men inferior, but, sexism (racism against a sex) can’t exist in women, and, all and only men are collectively responsible for all of human suffering past and present, all women live in fear, one abusive sex, one abused sex – all belonged until Me Too to only a handful of eccentric and aggressive women in a few countries. With the power of social media to spread violent beliefs through personal delivery of intimidation, these became the perceptions of millions of girls and women who define themselves as feminists, that all of feminism promotes, and that the entire liberal world now endorses and institutionalizes.

By the end of 2018, there was no longer any trace of a public campaign which goal is implementing the law in cases of sexual assaults. Classical feminists no longer existed as such. Me Too was no longer three things, only one, definitive and unequivocal: a tool for spreading beliefs and assumptions about femininity, masculinity, sexuality, and humanity, coming from the most detached faction of feminism, for a re-education program by intimidation of the West and then, as far the motivation and vision go – all of humanity. This is not a critic’s accusation against what quickly became of Me Too, but the overt statement of feminist women who promote these perceptions. If any woman still wanted to write “me too,” she knew it would mean immediate enlistment to a fanatical ideology.

Life in the Me Too Society

Eliminating sexual communication. The first step taken by feminism to reach its goal of “100% of women” is familiar to all – constant lowering of the bar for harassment. Two decades ago feminism had already started defining a spontaneous kiss occurring due to a one-sided sense of closeness in a misunderstanding of the situation, which was followed by the realization that the advancement wasn’t welcomed and with no further attempts, as sexual assault. In Me Too, the bar dropped further, as one newspaper quoted from feminist debates, to “flirting,” “multiple employee affairs,” “inappropriate conversation,” “weird lunch dates.” Initiating sex and having it out of mutual attraction and strong desire, and certainly with consent, when the woman concludes the day after that she should not have done this for any reason, was defined as sexual assault and rape, and men were required to be sensitive at a level that would allow them to understand better than the woman herself how she is going to feel in the future about events that haven’t happened yet. It was explained to men that if second thoughts did arise in a woman at some point in her life – after a day or after two decades – they will be considered guilty and defined as sexual predators retroactively (that is, it was not only mind-reading that was required of “good men,” but time travel to the future and back). While ignoring the fact that in married couples, men don’t always particularly want to have sex and sometimes do it out of care for their wives, because this is simply part of a mutual and loving relationship, sex between a married couple when the woman didn’t particularly desire the sex and did it only out of care for her husband was defined as rape.

As part of the same aspiration to achieve the rhetorics of “100% of women were harassed!” the definition of sexual harassment was extended to the very verbal invitation to do anything romantic or sexual, regardless of context and manner, if the recipient did not want the invitation, until saying the word “hello” was perceived as sexual harassment. Completely normative behaviors that are an integral and legitimate part of the language of sexual communication and that both sexes engage in (or at least used to), and even regular communication, were defined as sexual harassment.  Today in the Me Too society, men and women find it impossible to communicate and are detached and lonely.

Defining humans as poison. Criticized for treating non-sexual everyday behavior as sexual harassment when attempting to reach “100% of women”, the Me Too vortex responded by spreading the term “toxic masculinity”, which was intended as an attempt to re-label ordinary human behavior done by both sexes, as a type of violence when done by men, after a concentrated effort lasting several months in early 2018 to call it male sexual harassment had failed.

This response of the core even created a new kind of phrenology theory (phrenology was a fashionable racist theory of the late 19th century that associated personality traits and intelligence with the head and body structure, particularly of different races). The feminist phrenology of the third millennium identified “toxic masculinity” as related to a small penis and stated that those who have a large penis have instead a Big Dick Energy, or BDE. If you think these terms come from some posts published in the deepest sewers of Facebook, you are wrong. Headlines that explain with academic seriousness that “toxic masculinity” happens to those who do not have “BDE” because of an insufficiently large penis, were published in such places as the Guardian, the Independent and Vox and these articles were translated into once-liberal newspapers all over the world (one cannot even begin to imagine what would have happened if the best liberal and high-brow press was to explain to its readers in didactic patience that women with large breasts have a list of characteristics that create a pleasant personality called Big Tits Energy or BTE, while small breasts are the cause of “toxic femininity”).

It’s hard to believe, but in the Me Too society there is a real need to pause and point out the feminist sexism in these ideas. But Oxford Dictionary declared “toxic” the word of the year for 2018. In the Me Too society we all live in, it is normative and customary to treat human beings as poison, in the mainstream press of what was once the liberal media.

A ban on understanding. During 2018, the inclusion of more and more human behaviors in the definition of sexual harassment by continuously lowering the bar, had of course succeeded in increasing the “percentage of sexually harassed women,” but the result was still very far from 100%. In 2018, social media messages by feminists with a humanist approach expressing solidarity with sexually assaulted women, still opened from time to time with the words, “Though I’ve never been sexually harassed…” The existence of women who declare that they were never harassed, has pushed the Me Too vortex to further elaborate the definitions of harassment to get closer to 100%. The new method that emerged was to define any sadness in a relationship as sexual harassment and abuse by the male sex. The new definitions now included not calling the day after, infidelity, disappearing after a first date, being inconsiderate and just bad sex. This was done while completely ignoring the fact that all of these things happen just as frequently to men from women, and affect men as well and in exactly the same ways (not as “sexual harassment,” but as a selfish and sometimes cruel behavior of a girl or a woman). These new definitions made it possible to get the percentage closer to 100% and expand the indictment – but it had another impact.

When the discussion was extended from abuse of power by celebrities to other issues in the relations between the sexes, millions of men and women hoped that a moment they have been waiting for all of their lives, has arrived – the beginning of a conversation both longed for, about all the situations causing heartbreak and pain, where they will tell each other about what they had gone through, and not in order to incriminate each other, but out of their passion for each other, to get closer. After all, every person was injured by the sex he and she are attracted to (attraction, inherently entails vulnerability) and carries the scars, the pain. But the aspiration to harvest all of these important issues solely for reaching “100% harassed” by treating them as acts “only men do to women”, has created a feminist ban on men telling their part. The very sharing of their stories and the very hurt feelings they felt (from sexual or emotional exploitation or abuse, lack of consideration, betrayal of trust, self-centered behavior), were called by feminism and the marching crowd, “misogyny.” Understanding men and listening to them on any matter concerning the relations between the sexes was forbidden. They had to be silenced, less the new feminist charges that were now defined as sexual abuse to reach the desired “100% of women abused” would be balanced, and won’t be added to the indictment. Men were told that there are experiences for which there is a human imperative to listen to, and at the same time told that it is forbidden to listen to the very same experiences, if they belong to men. Facing this brute violation of the very decree stipulated, men stopped listening. From that point onward, men could not know about things women were saying through feminism; women could not know about the similar things that were silenced in men by feminism. Through this double-standard of feminist action motivated by an aspiration to expand an indictment and reach “100%”, understanding and listening became de facto impossible. 

Each sex developed a sense that the other is indifferent to its needs and feelings, “sides” were formed, and on each side, there was a growing sense of accusation. This situation has put both sexes in a position of hatred, instead of what they wished for – getting closer. Almost every man and woman are living in this period in severe feelings of losing the possibility of dreaming, of love. Without a dream, in the Me Too society they walk around with feelings of doom.

Legitimizing violence. The outbreak of hard feelings in both sexes is no surprise considering what drives the type of actions and attitudes that flood a Me Too society. While feminism has always emphasized the forms of male aggression, which are physical violence and direct confrontation, it has completely erased the fact that there are parallel forms of expression of aggression in women, and the classical finding in psychology that women have the same levels of aggression as men (aggression being an internal urge, that can manifest externally is various ways). The only reason male expressions of aggression are not readily found in women, is that the two sexes have different and separate aggression languages (most probably, formed differently in the course of evolution to enable the existence of sexuality – to exclude each sex from the internal aggressive competition of the other sex, enabling them to come close). The language of female aggression is social rather than physical, and indirect instead of direct. It is based on turning society against the victim. It consists of gossip, spreading rumors, injuring a reputation, and boycotts. As studies consistently find, women use gossip aggressively and competitively, more than men do. Particularly violent women can bring about the expelling of the other side out of every place in human society – work, family, friends – and cause the victim to question humanity’s willingness to see him or her as belonging, to doubt the chances of finding a place in the human world, which may lead in extreme cases to suicide. It is targeted, premeditated violence, and is easily recognizable by the female environment.

It is crucial to add an extended side note here: women are well aware of this type of violence, because they have been experiencing it all their lives, since this violence is mostly directed by women against other women. Male violence is directed mostly at men, female violence is directed mostly at women, as consistently reported in studies. One review from 2014 on cyber-bullying on Facebook that ends in suicide, reported that this usually involves assault by women, and almost always, the victim is a woman. A small study with several hundreds of students found that the majority of victims of social bullying were girls, with a separate review finding that most social violence is perpetrated by girls (studies that examine bullying in general find no difference between the sexes, however these studies do not distinguish between female and male-type aggressive behavior. All studies that address the forms of behavior find that activating society against the victim is done mostly by girls and toward girls, while most physical bullying by boys). One study by female researchers with female college students found that more than 75% experienced social violence in the three years preceding the study, such as, “talking behind the back,” “spreading rumors,” and “ignoring.” Only 6% reported not having encountered any kind of social violence, with 71% reporting that they themselves had perpetrated social violence during this period. A broad body of research developed during the 1990s describes the development of female competitive violence throughout life, from the age of three until adolescence, when the intra-female social violence is specifically aimed at disrupting relationships with the opposite sex, and then onward through college and finally in the work environment, where rather unsurprisingly for a language of intra-sexual competition, most of this violence is directed at female colleagues of a similar rank. One researcher, a woman, summed it up with the words, “The fact that girls are not only capable of using aggression to purposefully harm another, but do so on a regular basis, may be a startling revelation to those who believe that in general, girls are not aggressive”.

The type of actions seen across Me Too has a name. Provoking ostracism and isolation, steering society against a target, rumors, crippling a reputation – this is the language of female aggression. Only this time, it was technologically amplified through social media and expanded from its historical scope of a circle of acquaintances to millions of people, and consequently to every possible human contact that a targeted person may have. What Me Too actually came to be is a supernova of violence, of the female type. Because of the feminist success in completely erasing the once well-known distinction between male and female styles of violence, society could not perceive that the mode of action of the faction is severe violence, which enabled legitimizing it. Showing full awareness of the injury to innocent people and then justifying it, became a habit, and the habit has gone viral. The female-type targeted attacks were directed at every man or woman expressing disagreement, meaning that most of the victims have never sexually assaulted anyone. However, finding convoluted arguments for the necessity and morality of a storm of uninhibited violence, became the trend, to the point of newspapers that were once democratic publishing lengthy articles proposing the establishment of state-operated popular tribunals. Blinded to the origins and nature of the attacks – the same violent human nature that revealed itself previously in history – the once-liberal West legitimized the assaults, openly and proudly endorsing them and institutionalizing cruelty on the way.

How did society become so blind to violence and cruelty? It seems that as early as three decades prior to October 2017 when me-too forms, feminism has began a transition into a new conception of oppression of women, with a matching revised concept of liberation. After equality had been reached in the West by the 1990s, feminism’s continuous search for women’s oppression in a Western world that by then had none, eventually brought it toward the 2000s to the very limitations imposed on every person by society to keep it humane, and, wishing to see oppression, it began perceiving this, as women’s oppression. Thus, the very imperatives that constitute the concept of being humane, which apply universally to every person and pose limitations that keep societies alive, gradually began to be perceived in feminism as a specific oppression against women. Accordingly, liberation gradually started to be liberation from something completely different from what 1970s feminists regarded as oppressive such as stereotypes. Feminism-sympathizers marched into Me Too waving a banner from which the very concept of being humane, had already been marked off, as a liberation of women of everything, in particular the humanistic principles, and consequently as liberation in women of everything, including every level of arbitrary violence. Since 2018, I remember reading in large, revered, previously-humanistic newspapers, detailed articles on why society should show understanding and acceptance to women who murder their toddlers; a call to acknowledge the greatness of a book from the 1960s often described as the feminist Mein Kampf where the writer called to the murdering of all men and committed murder – of the artist Andy Warhol who fought complications after the assault until dying of them several years later; and an article providing advice to women on how to coerce a man who refuses penetration by a sex toy to comply, that is, rape instructions – all in the best, once-liberal printed media (if you are a feminist you may have lost so much of your humanity that you need explicit guidance to imagining articles in the mainstream media explaining why society should accept men who murder women and how men should coerce penetration, to realize what was just written here).

A Me Too society thus became a storm of violence that departures from the human commitment to the fundamental humane imperatives that apply to every person – justice, equality, self-restraint of violent impulses.

A perpetual vortex of fear. From the first months of Me Too, there was a rapid transitioning from supporting victims, to attacking attackers on behalf of victims. The definition of “attacker” continuously expanded until almost every person, man or woman, could be defined as such if they didn’t agree with any assertion of the groups included in this “gender church”. It must be realized that the belief that guides the followers of this new faith is that “everything is culture,” and from this they conclude that every expression by every person, in a post, a newspaper, a song, a book, a film, even in a personal conversation – being “part of culture” – is the physical cause of rape, sexual violence and any form of violence. Consequently every innocent expression and certainly disagreement with an assertion of this group or its actions is considered by the followers what causes sexual assaults, and makes a woman or a man “attackers.” Once classified as such, measures must be taken as appropriate for attackers, and this is always justified because it is always “protection of victims.”

The result is that hundreds of thousands of people if not millions have been and are personally attacked because of a statement or criticism, in the same way that actual criminals have been attacked by the masses. Many women and men live in an atmosphere of fear. Some have developed mental disorders because of the Me Too climate. Those who spread the atmosphere of terror express satisfaction with the fear: “Very good, they should be afraid” and statements to that effect, are common, coming out of the belief that spreading fear is moral and necessary because it prevents expressions, that in this mysticism are what causes rape and murder in human society.

The political right justly called this an elimination of free speech and a dictatorship of political correctness, but this may be missing the severity of the phenomenon. Followers of this rising faith may be most accurately described as religious individuals, who sincerely believe in the mysticism of their faith that “language creates reality,” “imagery creates reality,” “everything is culture.” According to this faith, or “gender church”, human beings are defined deterministically by the cultural influences around them, and because everything is culture, everything from a poem through a novel is a “cultural influence” and as such a factor that may cause crime if not regulated. For the followers, a woman who criticized Me Too or any of their agendas really does share direct responsibility for crimes against women, causally and physically. This may be described as cultural determinism, parallel in its rigidity to the genetic determinism of theories such as the racist perception from the early 20^th century of eugenics. The followers of this emerging religion are immersed in an alternative reality in which every literal expression is a direct physical cause of crimes, through culture. Therefore, in this faith, stopping expressions is stopping crimes.

In the Me Too society, ideas such as inner free will, inner conscientiousness decision, and inner urges — three phenomena in the individual that are not decided deterministically by cultural influence around a person but in a person— are not included in the new theory about humans. The religion of this gender church is an anti-humanist faith first of all in that it is a faith of despair of the human spirit, as it sees in every expression and behavior in the cultural environment a deterministic factor with direct causal power to create crimes, because it does not believe in humans and in human beings’ ability to be conscientious in the face of an expression or imagery. The cultural determinism has two severe implications. The first is very familiar. Since the followers are incapable of regarding an individual as someone who acts autonomously out of internal motives, that is – as an entity which is not swaying as a marionette from the strings of culture – they also don’t take into account that even a person surrounded by an ideal culture engineered and cleansed by this gender church to perfection, may act violently out of an inner violent impulse. They therefore oppose with extraordinary force teaching individuals to avoid dangerous situations. Instead, they call this “victim blaming” and expect that culture would use its omnipotent deterministic strings to achieve absolute control over the imagined, fully-culturally-determined human being, with the demand that all harm will be prevented using the enchanted cultural strings. Since in reality there are no such omnipotent cultural strings, prohibiting to teach to be careful leaves a generation exposed to risk. The second implication, which is at least as dangerous and probably much more, is that since women and men still have violent urges planted by evolution in their limbic systems, which could never be eliminated, the group will always continue seeing around it some level of violence, but it will always attribute it to “culture” because in their cultural determinism “everything is culture”, the upshot being that this faith will always conclude that it has not cleaned culture well enough, and will always increase the violent cleansing we are witnessing. Thus for as long as this “gender church” maintains its power we will witness a perpetual aggravation in the spreading of fear – in a me-too society there can be no saturation point to the escalation.

Mutual blaming. Women had difficult time understanding that such an atmosphere, of sweeping threats and bashing with legitimized hate speech as in treating humans as poison, emerging throughout Me Too (and accompanied by a surge of suicides), would put men in a complete paralysis in any communication with them. They began publishing angry posts that blame men – this time for the “stupid men’s inability to understand the difference between a compliment and harassment”. In response to reports of men’s fear of working with women, articles in the press, again, reprimanded men, this time for lack of understanding, without any of these female writers putting themselves mentally under the same conditions that men are put under to wonder if they would have been able to respond differently. It was and is very difficult for women to take into account that life in the Me Too society looks very different from the eyes of a boy and a man. Part of this stems from the fact that feminist sexism has created at least two generations of women and girls who believe in the inexhaustible resilience of men and are unable to view a man as anything but a wooden object to which any battering can be done without him being affected; hence, the women of the Me Too era were not able to even guess, how hurt men are. After the paralysis continued and intensified, each sex reached a feeling of blaming, toward the other sex, for all the hard feelings that arose, and for the loneliness. Thus new layers of bitterness were formed, with each layer pushing the sexes further apart.

Overall, the Me Too society constitutes a system of oppression that affects men and women every day, hour by hour. The system includes the silencing of men regarding experiences of harm from women to create the asymmetrical picture of an abusive sex and an abused sex; the silencing prevents men of being able to be attentive to women, and instead of understanding, hostility is created – the conversation between men and women which they both longed for is blocked; in portraying the male sex as responsible for every possible negative aspect of life, women are portrayed as incompetent and receive the humiliating feeling of helpless childish beings lacking any autonomous judgment; the language of sexuality is presented as a language of violence, and in an attempt not to be violent, men and women stop using it, until they are left unable to communicate with each other about sex and love; to increase the number of charges on the indictment against the male sex, women are under social instruction to translate experiences which were positive or insignificant, into an experience of assault, and acquire feelings of injury and frustration which can reach agonizing levels; and because of the presentation of all men as dangerous or as accomplices of dangerous men, women learn to live in a sense of fear, and men in a sense of alarm of every action they make, fearing it will injure a woman; both develop a strong feeling of longing, for each other, of missing each other; however, the re-education to regard the language of sexuality as a language of violence and to interpret its signals and gestures as expressing “hate”, creates an almost complete disconnect while in the background what remains is mutual blaming for the loneliness that a person feels; and finally, the re-education is devoted to teaching to internalize how a traumatized person perceives reality and to experience human life through the language of trauma, and a whole culture of a traumatic perception of reality is created – a Trauma Culture – in which we all live, it surrounds us all the time, from the moment we open our eyes until we go to bed, on the street, at work. In a society living in a traumatic perception, as in a traumatic individual, there is no possibility of dreams, hope, happiness. In order to try and reach its new goals, feminism took actions which propagated a sense of existential frightened sadness to every person – woman and man. It must be said clearly: This is severe psychological violence against both sexes. No, you are not the only one walking around with this feeling of hot glue rolling at the bottom of your stomach, no, you are not the only one who feels the strange sense of doom. Me too.

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