Dragon lady -
Many of us were startled to open The New York Times last week and find ourselves accused of
hijacking and weaponizing the phrase “believe all women.”
According to journalist Susan Faludi, the phrase always has been “believe women,” and never has been associated with a demand for automatic and unquestioned belief that those who allege sexual assault are telling the truth.
The “believe all women” line, in Faludi’s telling, is a false narrative perpetuated by what she calls the right wing.
Apparently, the problems long pointed out with the premise of believing all women were, well, problems we—the “right wing”—created as a trap for an otherwise unblemished and unproblematic movement.
This was particularly shocking to me. I remember the arguments for literally believing all women without question to be so strong that I
wrote an article addressing them. Bari Weiss, who hardly could be called a right-winger, also understood this
as a primary message of the movement, and was so concerned about its consequences that she publicly pushed back against it.
Could our memories have been so wrong? Could we have misunderstood the basic premise of an entire social movement? Could it be that we trolled ourselves into knocking down a straw man?
No. We’re being gaslighted. And we have the receipts to prove it.
To give credit to Faludi, some feminist voices have warned that #BelieveWomen ought not to mean more than simply taking women seriously instead of immediately dismissing accusations.
But to suggest that the broader #MeToo movement did not ever meaningfully encompass a demand to believe all women, in all accusations? Now that’s just pure revisionism.