So, I hate to be the guy, but Wagner does specifically try to divorce MeToo from this, but it does seem a rather direct line from MeToo to the thing she complains of, no? Just because MeToo may have been with pure and correct intentions, people often take away different things from social movements.

Puritanism has long been embedded in American society. I live in Singapore now, and people abroad seem to think that sexual openness is sort of an American thing compared to both the trad chinese as well as muslim malay cultures here. But, the reality that I think even a lot of Americans don't realise is that hollywood and openness around sex is fundamentally a reaction to american puritanism which was always a foundation part of America's DNA. Hell, the 60's counterculture was specifically a reaction against WASP conservatism which has roots in puritanism. My opinion honestly is once you understand that fact, a lot of things about American culture make a lot more sense. For example, while MeToo arose to address real harms and exploitation, a lot of Americans reached for the tools they knew best from their puritan roots: a new set of morals to measure others against by and public shaming. Ever escalating morality precepts to follow (lack of consent in actual sex somehow being a precursor to the episode in the article, some fleeting and private sexual stimuli being seen as a violation). This sort of pattern that grasps onto the old puritan culture seems to feed a lot of how American cultural trends evolve. See anti-racism as another example: open bigotry is the precursor to only certain races can cook certain foods, and so on.

My point is Americans unfortunately did not learn the underlying lesson about consent that Wagner perhaps wanted out of MeToo, but they did find a new set of puritan morals and a new culture of shaming to enact on others for social capital. I feel like once you sort of believe this idea of the puritanism germ, a lot of what happens to these movements for real change make a lot of sense. It also explains why a lot of movements or reactions against puritanism might change their target (not god or religion) but reproduce the methods and culture of puritanism.

And saying all this, I'm not sure it was avoidable. I am also NOT saying this is MeToo's fault or that MeToo shouldn't have happened, of course not. But, MeToo was the initiation for this. What Wagner describes is clearly an intensification and a fundamentalist form of the consent discourse that underpinned the discussions back in 2015 or whatever. I don't really like the unwillingness to engage with that fact.