Tanushree Ghosh's book tries to decipher is #MeToo is a step up for feminism?

Harvinder Khetal

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In her book ‘Beyond #MeToo: Ushering Women’s Era or Just Noise?’, Tanushree Ghosh has systematically put together the research material she has tediously collated around the #MeToo movement. Case studies, survivor accounts and opinions have been organically weaved in a bid to converge on and decipher the second part of the book’s title, that is, whether #MeToo led to the advent of a women’s epoch or if it was just some noise. Being a women’s rights activist, a woman working in a US-based company, a mother to a daughter and a daughter of a working mother, Tanushree brings on the table her experiences and understanding of the complicated man-woman equations in both the Indian and US ecosystems.

Her conclusion that “no movement can give us a legacy, only constant efforts can” does not come as a surprise. As also the fact that they, including social activism and legal frameworks, continue to remain works in progression. For, it would be naïve to attribute a single phenomenon in the continuum of time, no matter how impactful, to be so powerful as to beget either a new age; neither can it be dismissed as hollow clatter. While some events do spur groundbreaking changes, they are all but a step up the ladder of the preceding relentless actions.

Tanushree digs into history, tracing landmark events that have shaped feminism and given a blow to deeply embedded patriarchal tendencies the world over. A commendable attempt has been made to establish the close connect of this issue with the financial independence and socio-economic empowerment of women. Equally effective has been the role of stronger laws designed to bridge the gender disparities.

In the Indian context, the case of Vishakha and Others vs the State of Rajasthan (1997) that led to the Supreme Court formulating Vishakha Guidelines regarding sexual harassment at the workplace finds special mention. The guidelines were later superseded by the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act of 2013 after the nationwide outrage against the 2012 Nirbhaya gangrape. The case of Bhanwari Devi who legally took on her upper caste rapists in 1992 has also steered the women’s progress in India.

Thus, before MeToo, India had already had major overhauls in gender safety and laws following such movements of its own over the past couple of decades. And this fact could have been responsible for India’s early fatigue with MeToo, she deduces, saying: “India, on the other hand, was getting ravaged with one gender incident after another which was showing the nation that its gender problem was left festering under surface, slowly corroding the nation’s veins. Because basking in legal victory, India had forgotten that the society hadn’t been convinced.”

Comparatively, the US had gender fatigue — and moved its focus to broader inclusion with race to the forefront — in 2020, nearly three years after the #MeToo movement took birth in 2017 and shook the world as it took the scalps of some big names in work arenas. Unlike the earlier social causes that were spawned in the physical setting and gained traction slowly, #MeToo, being in the virtual sphere, spread rapidly. Hundreds of women from across the globe and across professions were encouraged to bare their stories of sexual abuse.

As a result, in the West, “MeToo had had CEOs ousted, empires toppled, candidates defeated, institutions sued….Conversations in the USA were shifting to broader gender equality, discourses (e.g., pay and discrimination), leaving harassment behind.”

Of course, fatigue prevails over #MeToo today. But that’s only till the next watershed moment propels the feminist crusade forward, beyond the present goalpost. It should, hopefully, happen soon, for the gender gap is still yawningly wide.