The most controversial campaign of our time.

I really wanted to begin this blog with a post about my graduation, which seemed like a natural first post in a blog, which starting point it is, but then this news paper article of the first Me too related court case of Finland showed up this morning. Shortly, a well-known singer is accusing three women of defamation, after losing two TV-show appearances due to the women's social media accusations that he has sexually harassed them.

I didn't want to refer to 'Me too' in the title of this post, because I don't recognize myself of being sexually harassed or assaulted in any situation, although, I have ended up to situations that could count for being sexually harassed. The reasons, why I want to comment the Me too campaign are simply that I  have had countless discussions of the campaign with my friends and other close ones, both men and women, and I think the campaign was and is definitely needed, however, it has generated unwanted and nasty by-products with, sometimes, severe consequences. This is an argument that I have also heard a lot from others.

If we look back to the news paper article, this singer has taken responsibility of his actions, admitted that he has perhaps been to aggressive when trying to find company in situations where the interest has been one-sided, and apologized, since the first comment he published after the accusations. He has also admitted that alcohol has often played a role in these situations. After this he has been in the middle of a social media storm in which he has been called horrendous things, such as a rapist and as a result lost job opportunities. My question however is, should he be blamed of sexual harassment or is there something else underneath the surface? And if he should be blamed of these accusations, then what?

In the discussions of the Me too campaign that I have had on theme has always surfaced; the bar or drinking culture. In the society we live in, it seems to be normalized that when we go to a bar we a) get hammered, and b) seek for someone to have sex with. This is of course not always the case, and many people going to a bar go there for other reasons, but in the society the bars have become 'sexual hunting grounds' for singles, where it is acceptable to get so hammered that one has no understanding or memory of their actions. In bar-like settings, the social rules have been twisted and behavior, and gestures that are considered unacceptable elsewhere are part of the 'normal' (god I hate the word normal!) social interaction. I'm not saying this to downgrade the experiences and feelings of those women and men, that have been sexually harassed, but I do think that if someone was to be blamed of the sexual harassment taking place in the nightlife it is the society, not specific individuals behaving in accordance with the 'social norms' that nowadays are thankfully turning more and more into an 'urban legend'. Although people still expect them to be reality, since society does not change over night, and it'll take a while that everyone will forget the idea of bars being outside of the normal social norms.

This is only one of the examples, where the Me too campaign has generated an unfortunate by-product as a playing field for hunting down individuals. I'm not saying that the individuals behaving in unacceptable ways should not be punished in any way. However, I do think that in cases like these, in which the individual acknowledges their actions and apologizes for behaving in an unacceptable way, in a setting and situation in which the unacceptable behavior is more or less expected by the wider society, we should end the witch hunt and focus on the real problem; the societal misconceptions and the changing of them. This kind of witch hunt of sexually active individuals with imperfect skills of social interaction is not beneficial to anyone, and will most likely make people scared of approaching strangers that they find attractive.

Another thing I want to criticize the Me too campaign of is that, when someone decides to raise accusations of another individual us spectators, and especially media seem to be fast to judge the accused party as a sexual predator without a question raised. However, the campaign, like any other campaign, can be misused, and the so-called victim can have several motivations to throw an egg on one's face. These motivations can vary from revenge to greed and cleansing one's own reputation after a regretful one-night stand. I'm sure we have all read cases in which someone has been accused or even sentenced of rape and it's been later discovered that the rape never happened and the accusations were raised to fulfill some other purpose. Well, Me too -campaign can also be used in this way, only the threshold to accuse someone is lower and the attention the accusation gets is greater, and can therefore ruin someone's life.

Like I mentioned in the beginning of this post. I believe that Me too campaign has an important message and purpose, since sexual harassment is a large problem, and its victims often hide away and stay quiet. However, I believe that we should be critical of the accusations made towards individuals. The campaign is twofold, and can turn against itself if it becomes a witch hunt, instead of serving the purpose of raising awareness and perhaps changing the society. The power of social media is well-established, and we can say that it tells something about the importance of the Me too campaign as a phenomena that the Eurovision Song Contest winner of 2018 was inspired by the message of the campaign, after all this contests has "hundred million followers" that get to vote their favorite. However, 'I'm not your toy, stupid boy'-like phrases are also dangerous. Not all the victims are women, and women are not brainless beings incapable of making their own decisions. However when we use language like this and turn the campaign into a hunt of sexual predators that often targets men, there's a danger that we create a monster that assumes every man to be somehow in blame of incidents that are actually often a result of the societal code of interaction.