Kevin Spacey: rehabilitated in court, the investigation against Till Lindemann: closed. Can we put these #MeToo cases to rest? No, our author thinks.
It was a bad year for the #MeToo movement. At least if you measure their success by how many Men she was dragged to court and convicted. One of the most prominent cases ended in July: in 2017, several young men accused Kevin Spacey of touching, harassing or even raping them against their will. In the criminal trial in London A jury now found him not guilty on all counts.
In the German #MeToo scandal of the year, in which several Women accused Rammstein singer Till Lindemann of abuse of powerit took less than two months after the first allegations before the public prosecutor announced: The investigation is stopped. Women who spoke out in the media did not want to speak to the public prosecutor.
A bad year. You could say.
It’s now been six years since the allegations against film mogul Harvey Weinstein the #MeToo movement emerged. Only the bright names have remained in the public eye: that of Weinstein, who was sentenced to almost 40 years in prison because he was proven to have raped several women. Or the director Dieter Wedel, who was accused of a lot, but in the end nothing was proven because he died before the trial took place. Many now see #MeToo as a matter for the courts. Then it is often said: If crimes were committed, the investigation will clarify it.
Till Lindemann’s after-show parties
#MeToo began as a digital confession by thousands and then hundreds of thousands of women that they had been sexually harassed. It was about bosses who took advantage of their power. To colleagues who are lewd at night News wrote. About job interviews that took place in hotel rooms and, yes, it was also about coercion and rape and people who knew about it but didn’t want to know about it. The core of #MeToo is not a matter of law, but rather a question of morality.
Harvey Weinstein met actresses who were considered for his films in his hotel room in a bathrobe. He is allowed to do that. Till Lindemann is said to have specifically surrounded himself with young women at his after-show parties. He is allowed to do that. Men are allowed to hire women because they like looking at their breasts. None of this is a case for a court, but for our values.
If you want to learn more about morality, you can come along Hanno Sauer speak. The philosopher teaches ethics as a professor at Utrecht University and has written a bestseller on these questions. 400 pages about the “invention of good and evil”. For him, it is “intellectual cowardice” when people base their attitude exclusively on legal norms. So if you rest on the fact that the courts will sort it out – and if they don’t have anything to settle, you think it’s settled.
Morality asks: Is everything that is permitted also right?
The law is the highest authority in our society. But it is by no means the only one. “Not everything that is forbidden is immoral,” says Hanno Sauer. “And not everything that is immoral is forbidden.” Morality often affects precisely those areas of life that are rightly left untouched by the state: You are allowed to cheat on your partner. You can say the N-word. The law says: Everything that is not forbidden is permitted. Morality asks: Is everything that is permitted also right?
For a society to function, it needs shared values. And these are not formed by court rulings, but by public debates about whether weapons can be supplied, whether basic child support should be introduced and the upper limit for recipients of parental allowance reduced, or how to deal with it when the majority of women are laughed at, watched over and harassed by the majority of men.
The cases extend far beyond the famous men themselves. The law allows an adult man to have consensual sex with a 15-year-old. But we as a society are allowed to develop an attitude towards it, apart from the law. How do I feel about an older man sleeping with a teenager? What would I think if the man was my buddy? Or the girl my daughter?
Do we as a society find jokes about knock-out and rape funny? Are these the men we want to see on TV?
Sexual crimes are difficult to prove
The retreat into the law is essentially a moral fatigue. An under-complex compass whose north star is discontinued investigations. People no longer ask whether someone is still an asshole, even if they have done absolutely nothing legally wrong.
Before sexual criminal law was fundamentally changed in 1969, it consisted of nothing but laws that, if broken, were “against morality.” It was forbidden to have sex before marriage. It was forbidden to cheat on your spouse. Morality determined the laws. It’s good that things are different today. A modern society no longer needs to punish such things, but rather trust in itself as a valuable authority. Researchers know that social sanctions work much better than fines.
Our values are so important in a debate like #MeToo because existing law often doesn’t make any progress, even when it comes to crimes. Sexual crimes are extremely difficult to prove because they usually happen between two people without witnesses and in the end there is neither a body nor stolen jewelry to be found with the robber. In most cases, the question of whether sex was consensual or not will be a matter of testimony against testimony. Nothing can be changed about that. “Our legal system rightly has extremely high standards,” says moral expert Hanno Sauer. “But I can find that a case has been dismissed correctly and still be sure that the man is a monster.” And you can do that too.
How do we as a society deal with victims?
It is a good year for #MeToo when social change is achieved, not when as many men as possible are in court. If we as a society don’t find it harmless that men have sex with girls and also call them “mature for their age”. Or that no one shrugs their shoulders even though the boss has nothing but offensive comments for their colleagues. It’s not forbidden. Not to say that this is a case for the investigators, but rather as individuals and together to develop an attitude as to whether such behavior is consistent with our values.
But what about false accusations, some people might want to say. It is true that a society could never carry out such comprehensive evidence collection as investigators and courts. But for things that aren’t punishable anyway, it usually doesn’t need to be done. It’s all there. Lindemann’s brutal porn, very young women in Row Zero his knockout fantasy. Anyone can watch it. Dozens of reports from victims and witnesses. Well researched and prepared. And before you always reflexively accuse women of base reasons such as greed, vanity or revenge, you can also look for moral depravity in men. The fact that women in 2023 do not dare to repeat their potentially criminal experiences to a public prosecutor’s office is also due to how we as a society deal morally with victims.