Available via license: CC BY-NC 4.0
Content may be subject to copyright.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549420985840
European Journal of Cultural Studies
1 –21
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1367549420985840
journals.sagepub.com/home/ecs
european journal o f
‘Ruined’ lives: Mediated
white male victimhood
Sarah Banet-Weiser
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Abstract
When the hashtag #metoo began to circulate in digital and social media, it challenged
a familiar interpretation of those who are raped or sexually harassed as victims,
positioning women as embodied agents. Yet, almost exactly a year after the #metoo
movement shot to visible prominence, a different, though eerily similar, story began
to circulate on the same multi-media platforms as #metoo: a story about white male
victimhood. Powerful men in positions of privilege (almost always white) began to
take up the mantle of victimhood as their own, often claiming to be victims of false
accusations of sexual harassment and assault by women. Through the analysis of five
public statements by highly visible, powerful men who have been accused of sexual
violence, I argue that the discourse of victimhood is appropriated not by those who
have historically suffered but by those in positions of patriarchal power. Almost all
of the statements contain some sentiment about how the accusation (occasionally
acknowledging the actual violence) ‘ruined their life’, and all of the statements
analyzed here center the author, the accused white man, as the key subject in peril and
the authors position themselves as truth-tellers about the incidents. These statements
underscore certain shifts in the public perception of sexual violence; the very success
of the #metoo movement in shifting the narrative has meant that men have had to
defend themselves more explicitly in public. In order to wrestle back a hegemonic
gender stability, these men take on the mantle of victimhood themselves.
Keywords
Male victimhood, networked misogyny, postrace, public statements, sexual violence
Corresponding author:
Sarah Banet-Weiser, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street,
London WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: s.banet-weiser@lse.ac.uk
985840ECS0010.1177/1367549420985840European Journal of Cultural StudiesBanet-Weiser
research-article2020
SI: The Victimhood
2 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)
In 2016, when Stanford University student Brock Turner was found guilty of sexually
assaulting an unconscious woman, his father wrote a letter to the judge presiding over his
son’s trial, pleading for him to not be sent to jail. In part, Dan Turner’s letter said,
These verdicts have broken and shattered him and our family in so many ways. His life will
never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to
pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life. The fact that he now has to register
as a sexual offender for the rest of his life forever alters where he can live, visit, work, and how
he will be able to interact with people and organizations. (Xu, 2016)
Turner was sentenced to 6 months of prison, and was released after 3 months for ‘good
behavior’. His case was decided a little over a year before the social movement #metoo
gained spectacular visibility, when thousands of women around the world took to media
platforms to tell their stories of sexual violence (Boyle, 2020; Mason-Deese, 2018;
Phipps, 2019, 2020, and others).
Indeed, among the effects of #metoo, one important factor is the way in which the
public act of women coming forward (in highly mediated forms, from public perfor-
mances to tweets) as embodied agents works to confront the perceived passive vulnera-
bility of victimhood. But as the Turner example demonstrates, stories about white male
victimhood became highly visible, even before the #metoo movement shot to visible
prominence. Powerful and (almost always) white men in positions of privilege took up
the mantle of victimhood as their own in earnest, often claiming to be victims of false
accusations of sexual harassment and assault by women.1 While people in positions of
privilege have historically claimed to be aggrieved or injured by those who threaten their
dominance, we have witnessed a significant shift in the contemporary moment, where
individual men publicly and assertively claim to be victims, an identity category that, as
Alyson Cole has argued, has often been used as a derogatory identification by groups in
power, as in ‘victim feminism’ or ‘victimology’ (see Cole, 2006, also Banet-Weiser,
2018).
How do we make sense of these different stories of victimhood – a global media
movement for sexual harassment and assault survivors, and narratives of white male
victimhood – that circulated on mainstream and social media only a few years apart?
One way is by examining the public statements made by accused white men in the midst
of investigations which purport to offer the ‘truth’ of events. These public statements
circulated and achieved heightened visibility in both mainstream media sites and on
social media, and are deliberate strategies to create a familiar binary of ‘he said/she
said’. In this article, I examine highly visible public statements made by five white men
(most in extreme positions of privilege) after they were accused of sexual harassment
and assault: the aforementioned Stanford University student Brock Turner; Hollywood
producer Harvey Weinstein; NBC network news anchor Matt Lauer; US Supreme Court
nominee Brett Kavanaugh; and Fox News media commentator Bill O’Reilly. The state-
ments range from letters written by the accused about their accusers and then posted on
mainstream and social media (Turner, Weinstein, Lauer, O’Reilly), to statements read
by the accused in public (Kavanaugh), to statements made through lawyers (Weinstein),
to public statements made about the accused by their relatives and colleagues (Turner,
Banet-Weiser 3
Kavanaugh). These statements find a heightened purchase in a national and global con-
text where, in 2017, US president Donald Trump said to the mainstream media (in the
context of the Kavanaugh hearings),
My whole life I’ve heard, ‘you’re innocent until proven guilty’, but now you’re guilty until
proven innocent. That’s a very, very difficult standard . . . It’s a very scary time for young men
in America when you can be guilty of something that you may not be guilty of. (Diamond, 2018)
The #himtoo movement, which also emerged in the Kavanaugh hearings, created public
service announcements such as, ‘Mothers of sons should be scared. It is terrifying that at
any time, any girl can make up any story about any boy that can neither be proved or
disproved, and ruin any boy’s life’ (Ellis, 2018).
Through such highly visible discourse, which circulated on social media as well as in
the mainstream media, the stage is well set for individual men to make public statements
about their innocence. It is this broader national discourse, then, that has provided the
justification for individual denials; claims to victimhood cannot be wholly secured by the
accused statements, but rather are buttressed by the discourse of powerful others (such as
the then President of the United States) that render a kind of authoritative judgment. And,
while there are key differences in the language of the statements I examine here, they
typically fall on an affective continuum ranging from ‘she misunderstood’, to ‘I’m sorry
she feels this way’ to ‘I categorically deny all accusations’. Almost all contain some sen-
timent about how the accusation (occasionally acknowledging the actual violence)
‘ruined their life’. Without exception, all of the statements analyzed here center the
author, the accused white man, as the key subject in peril and the authors position them-
selves as truth-tellers about the incidents. In some ways, these statements underscore
certain shifts in the public perception of sexual violence; the very success of the #metoo
movement in shifting the narrative has meant that men have had to defend themselves
more explicitly in public. In order to wrestle back a hegemonic gender stability, these
men take on the mantle of victimhood themselves. Indeed, the very fact that high profile
men feel compelled to defend themselves suggests that women’s accounts of sexual vio-
lence have become more legible through the #metoo movement.
Thus, a further question here is the following: How can we think about these two dif-
ferent methods of publicly coming forward, one that secures a productive vulnerability
as in the #metoo movement, and the other a forced public statement by accused men
(forced by precisely the women who come forward), but that nonetheless attempts to
secure power relations and privilege? In the following pages, I argue that this specific
moment is not necessarily new (although it has taken on novel forms), but relies upon a
series of historical conjunctures: the political logics of neoliberalism, networked misog-
yny, and the post-racial moment. These historical conjunctures are not independent from
each other but rather rely on shared logics, such as those political theorist Wendy Brown
describes as ‘conjoin[ing] moral righteousness with nearly celebratory amoral and
uncivil conduct . . . endors[ing] authority while featuring unprecedented public social
disinhibition and aggression’ (Brown, 2019). As a way to parse out these dynamics, I use
the public statements and letters from the accused men and argue that the statements are
symptoms of this conjuncture and help to illuminate some of the shifting practices of
4 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)
white male subjectivity in this historical moment. But first, we need to consider what
comprises the genre of the public statement.
The public statement, confession, and the private
Although, of course, they have a long history, public statements of apology or denial
have become a staple in the age of celebrity and social media (Kampf, 2009). When a
person who is highly visible in public life is accused of wrongdoing, it seems inevitable
that some kind of statement addressing the act will follow, to be circulated across media
platforms. Without a doubt, these public statements are part of the public relations and
publicity machines that strategically chronicle the lives of the wealthy and powerful as a
way to generate ever-more visibility. Yet, aside from functioning as public relations
mechanisms, there are clear elements that comprise the genre of the public statements I
examine here: they are part of public discourse (manifest in the media economy in which
they are expressed and circulated); they are formulated within legal discourse (where
inevitably the statements are informed by lawyers and often expressed through legal
channels); and both of these discourses are embedded within a specific masculinist
domestic context (where the author’s defense often summons his obligatory protection of
not only his own reputation but his family). These elements – the public, legal, and the
domestic – have long been key components of hegemonic masculinity, and as such, the
statements I examine here draw on already existing forms of gendered authority.
These statements are public in that they circulate on multiple media platforms, on
what could be called a networked public (boyd, 2010). The publicness of the statements,
however, is not only about the media contexts on which they circulate, but also about the
normative publicness of the masculine subject. Here, it is useful to analyze contemporary
public statements of apology or denial within a Foucauldian frame of truth and confes-
sion. In his work on discourse and truth, Foucault writes that he is interested not in truth
as an epistemological concept, but rather ‘with the problem of the truth-teller, or of truth-
telling as an activity: . . . who is able to tell the truth, about what, with what conse-
quences, and with what relations of power . . . ’ (Foucault, 2001). The subject, according
to Foucault, is constituted through the injunction to tell the truth, and the subsequent
telling the truth about oneself to another (through confession).
While this notion of the logic of the confession is useful, it also focuses on a Western
subject, where the truth-teller is assumed to be capable of ‘telling the truth’. Indeed, as
many scholars have persuasively argued, those who can claim to be a truth-teller are
often those in positions of power, including racial, economic, gendered, and colonialist
power (Chouliaraki, 2013; Fanon, 2008; Lorenzini and Tazzioli, 2017). For example, as
Lorenzini and Tazzioli (2017) point out in the context of refugees and asylum seekers
who position themselves as victims, ‘Asylum seekers are usually seen as suspect subjects
who have to demonstrate that they really are in need of protection; yet, at the same time,
they are considered as subjects incapable of telling the truth’. Similarly, within the con-
text of an accusation of rape or sexual assault, if a woman is involved she is invariably
cast as a ‘suspect subject’, a subject who historically has been socially constituted not
only as someone who lies but indeed as someone who is a liar at her core, as many femi-
nist scholars have theorized (Brownmiller, 2013; Federici, 2004; Hill Collins, 2008;
Banet-Weiser 5
Smith, 1998, among others). As lawyer Susan Estrich has argued, ‘the myth of the lying
woman is the most powerful myth in the tradition of rape law’ (cited in Cannold, 2011).
Thus, in the public statements by men who have been accused, this myth of the lying
woman is a constant specter, not only framing every word but also justifying every
denial. Indeed, part of what was so powerful about the initial momentum of the #metoo
movement is that it was a context in which the ‘myth of the lying woman’ was itself
denied, where stories told by women were believed, if even for a moment.
But of course, the moment had particular ramifications. The cascade of stories of
women being sexually harassed, assaulted, and raped that circulated on social media not
only bolstered and mobilized women to go public with their stories, it also bolstered and
mobilized powerful men who became fearful about the potential loss of their entitlement,
which in the current moment translates into occupying the position of victim (Phipps,
2020, see also Banet-Weiser, 2018). This mobilization functions to sustain the reputa-
tional and privileged status of the men accused; the ‘confession’ here is not one of guilt,
but one of acting according to established norms and standards of white masculinity –
acting in expected ways. That is, the defensive posture by many powerful men who are
accused of sexual harassment implies a deeply sedimented level of entitlement of their
masculine privilege. As philosopher Kate Manne (2017) has pointed out, the moral nar-
ratives that frame privileged male victimhood will ‘tend to further privilege those already
unjustly privileged over others. And this may come at the expense of unfairly impugning,
blaming, shaming, further endangering, and erasing the less privileged among their vic-
tims’ (pp. 200–201).
As I will argue, the public statements I analyze here are not asking for forgiveness
(although some do contain a kind of ‘apology’) but rather are attempts to shore up domi-
nant dynamics of power – even as they render power differences between the accused and
the accuser completely invisible, whether that be because the woman is unconscious, in the
case of Turner, or a low-level co-worker in the case of Lauer and O’Reilly, or a woman
dependent on the blessing of Weinstein in order to not be blacklisted from the film indus-
try.2 Indeed, this is why the Foucauldian framework is useful, as the authors of these public
statements unequivocally use the language of ‘truth’ to authoritatively say what happened,
thus re-establishing those authors as commanding truth-tellers. Because of the context in
which these statements are articulated, their subject positions as the bearers of the truth are
secured. And if they are the truth-tellers, they can occupy the position of being victims and
reclaim privilege when their reputations, ‘good names’, and careers are threatened.
The public statements are also positioned within legal discourse; even when they are not
explicitly articulated through lawyers, they all are clearly vetted through lawyers and rely
on dominant legal assumptions about truth, evidence, and guilt. As such, they function as a
particular kind of testimony, as Leigh Gilmore (2017) has argued; the authors position
themselves as ‘targets’ of manipulative women or they ‘categorically deny’ the accusa-
tions, or they argue that the accusations are a defamation of character and reputation. The
statements then function as both testimony and judgment, as both defendant and jury.
These public statements thus rely on an already established logic about the certainty
of the law, and are positioned in different ways than the testimonies that comprise the
#metoo movement. The law, as scholars such as Kimberle Crenshaw, Patricia Williams,
Gilmore, and others have noted, ‘disproportionately affects the vulnerable’ (Crenshaw,
6 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)
1989; Gilmore, 2017; Williams, 1992). #metoo testimonies predominantly circulate in
what feminist scholar Carrie Rentschler calls ‘feminist protocols’, those mechanisms
outside the law and the state, often circulated on social media, and thus have a valence
that is already understood as less than legitimate (Rentschler, 2014). Aside from circulat-
ing on social media, #metoo testimonies also encompass accountability processes, whis-
per networks, and deliberately anti-carceral mechanisms. These different testimonies
move across publics, and even if #metoo offered a rupture in the discourse of ‘the myth
of the lying woman’, their force as testimony is juxtaposed against a normative, and
masculine, discourse of legal authority; indeed, ‘testimonial truth is indexed not to facts
but to power’ (Gilmore, 2017). Accused men intervene in this ‘testimonial network’ with
their own claims to victimhood, and they perform a reversal of blame through their pub-
lic statements, placing blame on the women (or even the culture) who apparently encour-
aged, indeed even compelled, them to sexually harass and assault. In this way, these
public statements function as a ritual that returns the ‘sanctioned status quo of structural
oppression’ (Pearl, 2020).
Finally, these public statements not only rely on, but resecure, a historical, social, and
cultural masculine domestic context. In these statements, we see an iteration of the gen-
dered public/private divide, but as many scholars have shown, the public/private division
is not one that remains in one place, but rather moves across borders of identity and
power (Berlant, 2008; Gilmore, 2017; Williams, 1992, and others). Again, the statements
are public, reinforcing that truth ‘belongs’ to the public sphere which is controlled by
men. Yet, they also articulate a personal ‘truth’ of the masculine self as a domestic pro-
tector (most often explicitly of the family). As I will discuss later, both Lauer and
O’Reilly specifically reference their identities as fathers and their role in protecting their
family in their statements. Like all of these statements, this draws on the notion of tradi-
tional morality, where male dominance is part and parcel of the landscape. These state-
ments are, in other words, strategically personal. However, the women who accuse them
struggle to appropriate public space through their accusations, which makes their claims
both difficult and more vulnerable to challenge. The public statements by the accused
precisely work as this challenge, bringing into play a version of the private sphere, where
the women’s own ulterior motives – selfishness, financial greed, shame for their own
benefit, and publicity – are contrasted with the reputation and ‘character’ of the men they
accuse. The women who accuse do make the personal political by publicly accusing
men. Yet, because they represent the ‘private’ or the space of apparent intimacy, when
they come forward with accusations, they do not remain in the shadows; rather the
women who accuse these men transgress and seek to interrupt the public, masculine
sphere, demonstrating in the process their seeming self-interest and inherent non-trust-
worthiness. As we will see, this transgression forms the central logic of the denials prof-
fered in the public statements by the men accused.
Neoliberal freedoms
When Stanford University student Brock Turner was found guilty of raping an uncon-
scious woman in 2016, he put forward a public statement that quickly circulated in digital
media (Levin and Wong, 2016). Blaming alcohol consumption for his behavior, he said,
Banet-Weiser 7
I’ve been shattered by the party culture and risk taking behavior that I briefly experienced in
my four months at school. I’ve lost my chance to swim in the Olympics. I’ve lost my ability
to obtain a Stanford degree. I’ve lost employment opportunity, my reputation and most of all,
my life.
His statement, like all of the others, centers his losses – sports success, future employ-
ment, reputation, and his ‘life’ – as the key tragedy of this event. In this move, he posi-
tions himself as more the victim than the woman he assaulted (although she would make
her own powerful statement later). The transitivity of the statement also positions him as
a passive victim of even his own actions; he uses passive verbs, saying that he is shat-
tered by behavior he experienced during college, rather than that he partook in. He
reserves active language for statements about his victimization: ‘I’ve lost . . . ’. In the
case of powerful men who are accused of sexual violence, victimhood is a claim made
within an ideology of privilege, and as a specific blockage of capacities – the things that
Turner ‘lost’ (see Littler, 2017). And, ideologies of victimhood change their valence,
force, and direction depending on the historical and political-economic contexts in which
they take hold. In this section, I offer a brief view of some of these contexts as a way to
understand the seeming ease with which powerful white men claim victimhood in the
contemporary moment.
There is an enormous body of scholarship that theorizes neoliberalism, from a range
of vantage points – its voracious appetite for ever-new markets, economic precarity, loss
of social structures and networks of care, relentless individualism (see Brown, 2019;
Duggan, 2012; Harvey, 2007; Rottenberg, 2018 and others). Here, I focus on aspects of
neoliberalism that have encouraged and enabled a shift in how we understand victim-
hood; more specifically, I focus on the political logics of neoliberalism that authorize
privileged white men – precisely those who benefit the most from neoliberal capitalism
– to claim that they are victims of those who benefit the least: women and people of
color. Political theorist Wendy Brown’s The Ruins of Neoliberalism is especially useful
here, as this work focuses
on how neoliberal formulations of freedom animate and legitimate the hard Right and how the
Right mobilizes a discourse of freedom for its sometimes violent exclusions and assaults, for
resecuring white, male, and Christian hegemony, and not only for building the power of
capital. (Brown, 2019: 2)
Her argument that neoliberalism and traditional morality (i.e. white male privilege and
the traditional sexual division of labor) have a certain affinity frames the cases of the
privileged white men discussed in this article. As Brown, Lisa Duggan, Catherine
Rottenberg, Daniel HoSang and Joseph Lowndes and others have pointed out, the polit-
ical-economic discourse of neoliberalism has appropriated the rhetoric of the Civil
Rights, liberal feminism, and other social movements that usher in a shifted definition of
‘freedom’, decidedly against the downward redistribution justice of anti-capitalist move-
ments, fomenting instead a form of distributive justice ‘where capitalism reigns supreme
and the market identifies who should get what’ (Duggan, 2012: 107; HoSang and
Lowndes, 2019; Rottenberg, 2018).
8 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)
In Turner’s public statement about his losses, the losses and trauma of the woman he
raped are not mentioned at all. Again, Turner claims himself to be a victim – of party
‘culture’ and the apparent ‘risk taking behavior’ that emerges from this culture (rather
than from him) – and wants to secure his privilege. And indeed, the judge who presided
over his case made his decision based on the apparent inevitability of this privilege: sen-
tencing him to only 6 months in prison after his guilty verdict and the prosecution’s rec-
ommendation of 6 years, the judge (Aaron Persky) said, ‘A prison sentence would have
a severe impact on him . . . I think he will not be a danger to others’. As discussed earlier,
Turner’s father, in a court statement, argued that imprisonment was not the right punish-
ment for his son, who he said had already paid ‘a steep price . . . for 20 minutes of action’
(Xu, 2016).3 Using the rhetoric of the loss of entitlement, Turner, his father, and the judge
worked to shore up the privileges of class and race. In other words, the severity of
Turner’s ‘punishment’ is measured against his naturalized status and entitlements, rather
than against the suffering of the woman he harmed or some other standard of justice.
These neoliberal definitions of privilege have a history, of course. The current mani-
festation of victimhood is entangled in a history of neoliberalism and anti-identity poli-
tics. As Duggan and others have argued, neoliberalism in the United States in the late
1990s saw a ‘multicultural’ diversity embraced, a narrow, nonredistributive form of
‘equality’ politics, where a particular version of ‘difference’ was repurposed for a new
era, and those who benefited from progressive policies and social welfare were seen as
exploiting and capitalizing on their ‘difference’, and claiming a spurious ‘victimhood’
(Cole, 2006; Duggan, 2012).
The meritocratic rhetoric that fits so well within neoliberal logics is one that does not
challenge structural inequalities due to racism or patriarchy, but instead embraces a pal-
atable form of individualist anti-racism and feminism that redefines what a ‘victim’ is
(Orgad, 2009). This is an important foundation for the contemporary era; since the neo-
liberal context does not challenge the structural logics of inequities, it becomes possible
for those in positions of privilege to use the same rhetoric of discrimination and equality
and apply it to themselves. In the contemporary moment, this context also operates on
what Ruth Wodak (2015) has called ‘the politics of fear’, where, in her words,
we observe a normalization of nationalistic, xenophobic, racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric, which
primarily works with ‘fear’: fear of change, of globalization, of loss of welfare, of climate
change, of changing gender roles; in principle, almost anything can be constructed as a threat
to ‘Us’, an imagined homogeneous people inside a well-protected territory. (p. 5)
Partly due to this discourse of fear, there is a readiness for white male privilege to reas-
sert itself in a variety of ways. Yet, while it is important to consider how the politics of
fear frame the contemporary Western context (indeed, Donald Trump exploits and capi-
talizes on these politics of fear, as many have documented), it is also important to under-
stand this context not only through affective registers but also through structural politics
of racism and sexism. The underlying context of networked misogyny, especially the
central focus on the idea that most rape allegations are false, strategically intended to
‘ruin the lives’ of men, is a crucial factor in defending the ‘truth’ of public statements by
men who are accused.
Banet-Weiser 9
Networked misogyny and the culture of ‘false rape
allegations’
Today, nearly two years after I was fired by NBC, old stories are being recycled, titillating
details are being added, and a dangerous and defamatory new allegation is being made. All are
being spread as part of a promotional effort to sell a book. It’s outrageous. So, after not speaking
out to protect my children, it is now with their full support I say ‘enough’.
In a new book, it is alleged that an extramarital, but consensual, sexual encounter I have
previously admitted having, was in fact an assault. It is categorically false, ignores the facts,
and defies common sense.
Matt Lauer, October 8, 2019 (Khatchatourian, 2019)
Neoliberal culture has not only ushered in a general sense of the privileged taking
up the mantle of victimhood. As much as a universal whiteness is an unmarked stand-
ard within this context, a polarized and divisive gender politics find a home within the
ravages of neoliberalism. Scholars have recently pointed out that the current decade is
one in which a networked misogyny has taken hold, described as ‘a basic anti-female
violent expression that circulates to wide audiences on popular media platforms’
(Banet-Weiser and Miltner, 2015; Marwick and Lewis, 2015; see Chouliaraki, 2013);
the logics and affordances of media platforms allow for an amplification of what
Manne (2017) has described as ‘the system that operates within a patriarchal social
order to police and enforce women’s subordination and to uphold male dominance’.
The emergence and heightened visibility of networked misogyny, often centered
around a space in online culture called the ‘manosphere’, offer yet another plane in the
conjunctural logic of contemporary white male victimhood (Ging, 2017; Jane, 2016;
Marwick and Lewis, 2015).
While there are many facets to networked misogyny, here I would like to focus on a
central issue for many contemporary Men’s Rights Organizations (MROs): false accusa-
tions of rape. In November 2017, the well-known television anchor for the US morning
news show Today, Matt Lauer, was fired after a sexual misconduct investigation involv-
ing at least three female co-workers who accused Lauer of sexually harassing and
assaulting them. In 2019, journalist Ronan Farrow in his book Catch and Kill, which
detailed his investigations into Harvey Weinstein and others, alleged that Lauer raped a
young co-worker, Brooke Nevils in 2014 (Farrow, 2019). Although Lauer owned up to
some of the allegations in the initial investigations, he insisted that all acts were consen-
sual, and he categorically denied raping Nevils.
The notion that rape accusations are false, put forward by vindictive or spurned
women as a way to deflect personal responsibility, or as an ‘outrageous’ claim intended
for profit (such as selling a book), is not a new phenomenon within misogynistic struc-
tures: the idea that women fabricate rape as a way to deal with rejection has long been a
trope of misogyny, emerging with great visibility in the 1980s and 1990s with what
Christina Hoff Sommers and Katie Roiphe deemed ‘victim feminism’ in the context of
college date rape awareness (Roiphe, 1994; Hoff Sommers, 1995). As Alyson Cole
(2020, this volume) has argued, victimhood as a derogatory affiliation
10 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)
can be traced to the 1980s, when a new and cynical conception of ‘victim’ was used to dismantle
the welfare state and challenge multiculturalism, identity politics and progressive policies such
as affirmative action. Other disdainful victim idioms surfaced in tandem . . . and ‘victim’ itself
became a term of derision deployed to condemn the character of sufferers irrespective of their
condition and to chastise them for enfeebling and effeminizing the nation.
Victimhood in the era of social media and online vigilantism, specifically the claim that
women capriciously occupy this subject position through routinely and falsely accusing
men of rape, has been a newly important justification for white privileged men claiming
victimhood. In turn, this has helped to mobilize what Manne (2017) calls ‘himpathy’, an
affective and moral stance regarding how female accusers have ‘ruined’ the lives of men
they have accused, which have been taken up with relish by men’s rights organization,
online misogyny, and in courtrooms.
The idea that feminists are enmeshed in what anti-feminist communities call ‘victi-
mology’ and what conservative communities routinely call liberal ‘snowflakes’ has
become a key element of networked misogyny, which Lise Gotell and Emily Dutton
(2016) argue bolsters claims that ‘a feminist-inspired political correctness has taken
hold, producing an ideological ban on victim-blaming that prevents reasonable advice
about behaviours that increase the risk of rape’. Not surprisingly, there is a total lack of
reflexivity within networked misogyny, where an ‘ideological ban on victim-blaming’
has ironically encouraged men who are accused to occupy themselves the subject posi-
tion of victim; apparently when powerful men like television personalities Matt Lauer
and Bill O’Reilly claim their brand of victimhood, it does not threaten to ‘enfeeble or
effeminize a nation’ (Cole, 2020).
Indeed, quite the opposite. Consider another part of Lauer’s public statement:
Anyone who knows me will tell you I am a very private person. I had no desire to write this,
but I had no choice. The details I have written about here open deep wounds for my family. But
they also lead to the truth. For two years, the women with whom I had extramarital relationships
have abandoned shared responsibility, and instead, shielded themselves from blame behind
false allegations. They have avoided having to look a boyfriend, husband, or a child in the eye
and say, ‘I cheated’. They have done enormous damage in the process. And I will no longer
provide them the shelter of my silence. (Khatchatourian, 2019)
Lauer proclaims that he had ‘no choice’ to go public, because his words will ‘lead to
the truth’, and apparently demonstrate that the allegations against him (again, by several
women) are ‘false’. These allegations have done ‘enormous damage’ to Lauer, who for
his entire career has traded in on his identity as an authentic, ‘nice’ guy – and he clearly
feels he is certainly not the monster the women who accused him claim he is. In this
moment, authenticity means both more and less: Lauer presents himself as a nice guy, a
move which for him exonerates him from committing sexual violence. His performance
of authenticity is reinforced through his confession: he confesses to infidelity but not to
non-consensual sex. Indeed, his statement is in some ways a discourse of a kind of dis-
empowerment – he speaks of being forced to talk against his will, of having no choice, of
‘sheltering’ others through his own suffering. Here, there is a role reversal which ties in
directly with and mimics feminist discourses: being forced against your will, abandoning
Banet-Weiser 11
shared responsibilities, being ‘silenced’ in the service of power, having the responsibility
to speak out. Through this statement, Lauer is actually performing the #metoo speech
genre. In so doing, he turns the accusation against him to one against his accusers for
‘abandoning shared responsibility’.
This move is a familiar one in sexual assault and rape cases, where consent is fre-
quently posed as a slippery slope, apparently a matter of interpretation, and often relies
on a social construction of women as inherently untrustworthy: no means yes, she came
on to me, she asked for it. Of course, authenticity also means less in this context: the fact
that there are extreme power differences between the powerful star of a network and
young co-workers, and how these power differences will frame every interaction between
Lauer and his less powerful co-workers, renders a claim of ‘authenticity’ of the encoun-
ters suspect at best.
This strategy is even more pronounced with conservative television anchor Bill O’Reilly,
who was fired from the Fox News network in 2017 after multiple accusations of sexually
harassing co-workers. Relying on the tried and true formula of women who manipulate men
for money, O’Reilly’s public statement after his firing was the following:
Just like other prominent and controversial people, I’m vulnerable to lawsuits from individuals
who want me to pay them to avoid negative publicity. In my more than 20 years at Fox News
Channel, no one has ever filed a complaint about me with the Human Resources Department,
even on the anonymous hotline.
But most importantly, I’m a father who cares deeply for my children and who would do
anything to avoid hurting them in any way. And so I have put to rest any controversies to spare
my children.
The worst part of my job is being a target for those who would harm me and my employer, the
Fox News Channel. Those of us in the arena are constantly at risk, as are our families and
children. My primary efforts will continue to be to put forth an honest TV program and to
protect those close to me. (Steel, 2018)
O’Reilly unambiguously claims himself to be a ‘target’ and ‘constantly at risk’
because of his public visibility as a ‘prominent and controversial’ figure, denying all
allegations by shifting the blame to his accusers who are apparently motivated by
money. O’Reilly, like other conservative media pundits in recent years, constructs
his subjectivity as authentic, someone who, like Trump, ‘tells it like it is’. And, simi-
lar to Lauer, for O’Reilly evading responsibility is rearticulated as an act of domestic
protection – he is protecting those close to him, neatly constructing his subjectivity
as selfless, rather than selfish.
To return to the ways in which networked misogyny mobilizes around ‘false rape
accusations’, we need to understand Lauer’s and O’Reilly’s responses as capitalizing on
the current ethos. At least in the United States, the notion that women routinely make
false rape accusations as a way to benefit themselves (absolve them of a regretful deci-
sion, attract the attention of another man, narcissism – the list of justifications supplied
by the manosphere is long) has had a heightened visibility since at least 2014, when
12 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)
MROs began to shift their attention from fathers and divorcees (where the focus was on
paternity and custody rights, as well as domestic violence against men) to young men
and rape culture. Again, this context relies on a familiar understanding of the public and
private; the manosphere has increasingly occupied the public sphere, with apparent
rationality and the ‘truth’, where women are associated with issues of the private sphere,
consumed by a lack of personal responsibility, narcissism, and petty revenge.
Like so much of media culture, MROs often focus on specific individuals and their
crimes as emblematic of an entire demographic or culture. In the early-21st century,
stories about individual cases on college campuses circulated widely in the media, giving
a sense to various publics that false accusations of rape were far more common than
actual rapes.4 In this move, college campuses were highlighted as a place where young
men’s lives were ‘ruined’ because of the apparently rampant problem of women falsely
accusing them of rape. Thus, despite the widely known gap in the numbers of women
who have been raped and those of women who falsely accuse men of rape, the few
women who have admitted to fabricating a rape become so highly visible in the media so
that the issue of false accusations becomes over-exaggerated and even normalized.5
MROs have embraced false rape accusations as one of their major causes; Paul Elam, the
founder of what is often considered the flagship website of the Men’s Rights Movement,
A Voice for Men, stated in 2014 about college rape culture: ‘We have a problem with
feminists hyper-inflating rape statistics, creating a kind of hysteria on campus over a
problem that needs due attention from law enforcement’ (Matchar, 2014). Another Men’s
Rights website, The Other McCain, stated that
campus ‘rape culture’ [is] hysteria ginned up by the Obama administration and its feminist
allies. A major factor in that hysteria was the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights
(OCR) using Title IX to threaten universities for allegedly failing to punish sexual assault. This
witch-hunt frenzy resulted in male students being falsely accused of rape and denied their due-
process rights in campus kangaroo-court disciplinary proceedings. (McCain, 2017)
The rhetoric of ‘hysteria’, ‘witch-hunts’, and ‘kangaroo-court’ underlies much of the
anti-rape culture discourse, often focusing on the apparent fallacy of ‘date rape’.6 As is
now well-known, Trump has liberally used the concept of the ‘witch-hunt’ to apply to
himself, with the mainstream media as the frequent culprit, though he has also claimed
to be a victim of a witch-hunt in the context of the various women who have accused him
of sexual harassment and assault. And, in a more subtle way, the discourse of hysteria
and witch-hunts justifies the claims in the statements of Lauer and O’Reilly, where the
latter complains of being ‘vulnerable to lawsuits from individuals who want me to pay
them to avoid negative publicity’, and Lauer claiming that the accusations are borne
from women who ‘have avoided having to look a boyfriend, husband, or a child in the
eye and say, “I cheated” . . . They have done enormous damage in the process’.
Aside from deflecting blame away from themselves through the use of such terms,
this language also trades in on an MRO-inspired narrative of ‘social justice warriors’ and
identity politics, where women and people of color ostensibly occupy the mantle of vic-
timhood based on a fabricated oppression. This move does a kind of double duty: on one
hand, MROs claim false accusations are a widespread problem in US culture, basing this
claim on a very few individual women who captured media attention. On the other hand,
Banet-Weiser 13
they create an individualistic narrative about social justice warriors, thus also deflecting
blame away from structural capitalism or patriarchy. Indeed, just like the individualism
of the men accused detracts attention from structural issues, focusing on individual
women, making them national media stories, makes the same move.
The artificial furor over false accusations does not remain as widely circulated media
stories, however, but finds its way into US federal policy. US Education Secretary Betsy
De Vos, appointed by Trump in the first months of his administration, almost immedi-
ately revamped clauses in Title XI, the bill that addresses gender discrimination on US
college campuses, including sexual assault (Green and Stolberg, 2017; Kingkade, 2017).
The new De Vos version of Title XI allows for a much more lenient policy toward
accused students, with advocates claiming that Title XI did not protect persecuted male
students; the acting director of Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, Candice
Jackson, has said that campuses have mishandled assault cases, and men who have been
accused have, in a familiar phrasing, had ‘their lives ruined’. She claimed that
the accusations – 90 percent of them – fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk’, ‘we broke
up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided
that our last sleeping together was not quite right’. (Green and Stolberg, 2017)
Changes in US federal policy about sexual assault rely on the neoliberal definition of
‘freedom’ discussed earlier, a freedom of choice in an apparently unlimited and unfet-
tered field of choices, where structural limitations such as deeply sedimented gender
discriminations are not understood to distort this field in any way. Neoliberal definitions
of freedom are also racially based; the privileges of whiteness, along with the privileges
of hegemonic masculinity, do not play any part in the outrage expressed in the public
statements of the men accused. To the contrary, whiteness is rarely mentioned except as
a new category of victimhood; as conservative media pundit Piers Morgan claimed when
asked why men need an International Men’s Day, ‘Yes, we do need a day, we are now the
most downtrodden group of men in the world. Especially white, middle class men like
me. Endangered species’ (Soteriou, 2019).
Whiteness and neoliberal post-racism
The statements made during the Brett Kavanaugh Senate hearings (by Trump,
Kavanaugh, and others) couch the privileges of white masculinity within the rhetoric
of fear and loss of entitlement. As is well known by now (and is detailed by others in
this volume), Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in
high school, and this became the subject of a Senate hearing because Kavanaugh was
a US Supreme Court nominee. In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee,
Kavanaugh tearfully said he would persevere in the hearings (New York Times, 2017).
His statement reads in part:
Eleven days ago, Dr. Ford publicly accused me of committing a serious wrong more than 36
years ago when we were both in high school. I denied the allegation immediately, unequivocally,
and categorically. The next day, I told this Committee that I wanted to testify as soon as possible,
under oath, to clear my name.
14 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)
Over the past few days, other false and uncorroborated accusations have been aired. There has
been a frenzy to come up with something – anything, no matter how far-fetched or odious – that
will block a vote on my nomination. These are last-minute smears, pure and simple. They
debase our public discourse. And the consequences extend beyond any one nomination. Such
grotesque and obvious character assassination – if allowed to succeed – will dissuade competent
and good people of all political persuasions from serving our country. I will not be intimidated
into withdrawing from this process. This effort to destroy my good name will not drive me out.
Kavanaugh’s use of ‘good people’, obviously referencing himself, relies on a neolib-
eral rhetoric that is deliberately vague and overly ambitious, what Daniel HoSang has
called ‘political whiteness’, ‘a complex inner landscape involving attachments to the self
(often the wounded self) and to power (often in the form of the state)’ (HoSang, cited in
Phipps, 2020). This ‘inner landscape’ positions neoliberalism as an anti-racist freedom,
one in which accusations against a ‘good person’ is easily explained away as frenzied
‘smears’ that ‘debase our public discourse’. This ‘public discourse’ is not actually so
public in this case; it is clearly dedicated to Kavanaugh’s reputation management and
‘clearing’ his own name. So who is the ‘our’ in ‘our public discourse’ here? What public
discourse is Kavanaugh referring to? Clearly, it is one that is bounded by ‘freedoms’ –
but these are neoliberal freedoms, where particular subject positions are ‘free’ where
others are seen as unfairly capitalizing on difference.
Kavanaugh’s statement also calls into play what Sara Ahmed has called an ‘orienta-
tion’ of whiteness, where the ‘world of whiteness coheres as a world’ (Ahmed, 2007). This
orientation relies precisely on the idea that culture is somehow unshaped by racial dynam-
ics, and is ‘objective’. In the cases I examine here, political whiteness is coupled with the
unmarked, ‘objectivity’ of masculinity that has framed US politics historically, as Brown,
HoSang, and others have noted; in other words, the (primarily) white women who accused
Kavanaugh and the others do not have the same kind of access to defending whiteness as
objective (although, as Alison Phipps points out, white women in general have relied on
precisely this kind of whiteness, Phipps, 2020). Therefore, Kavanaugh’s passionate
defense of public discourse and the ‘competent and good people’ who serve the United
States is framed as if the privilege of whiteness and masculinity not only shapes what kind
of public discourse is understood as legitimate but also comprises ‘competent and good
people’. Again, this is what Ahmed (2007) calls the orientation of whiteness, where
‘whiteness could be described as an ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bod-
ies in specific directions, affecting how they “take up” space’ (p. 150). White powerful
men often feel entitled to take up space, precisely because it is understood to be theirs in
the first place; whiteness orientates white male bodies in the direction of objectivity, of
that of the unmarked, toward a specific definition of ‘freedom’. While Ahmed importantly
focuses on the orientation of bodies, I also see the orientation of whiteness as relying on,
and reproducing, a discursive orientation; the ‘world of whiteness coheres in a world’
through and within speech, represented in public statements.
Thus, whiteness is positioned within neoliberal culture as entitled to a particular kind
of freedom, one that ironically does not register racial politics at all. The context of neo-
liberalism has, among other things, ushered in the ‘post-racial’ moment in the United
States (whose most visible expression was the election of the first Black president). As
Banet-Weiser 15
Sumi Cho argues, the logic of the post-racial insists that ‘the state need not engage in
race- based decision making or adopt race- based remedies’ (cited in HoSang and
Lowndes, 2018). This 21st century post-racism has its roots in the mid- to late-20th cen-
tury social movements, where anti-racist organizations insisted on pointing out that not
only is race an element in social action, it is a key contingency of capitalism itself. Both
acknowledging and challenging this racial capitalism was understood by radical activists
in the 1960s and 1970s as the way to achieve an anti-racist and redistributive society
(Ferguson, 2019; Robinson, 2019).
Yet, as many scholars have shown, the radical anti-capitalist and anti-racist move-
ments of the 20th century gave way to the idea (now manifest in post-racial discourses)
that capitalism could forge a ‘color-blind’ society, one that does not ‘see’ race as a factor
in achievement or failure (Mukherjee et al., 2019, and others). Within this frame, if a
non-white person performed ‘victimhood’ it was not because of structural racism, but
rather because of their own doing. In other words, the responsibility for their victimiza-
tion was indexed to an individual rather than to a structural force. Perhaps most impor-
tantly, if Black or Brown people were victims of the economic ravages of neoliberalism,
structural racism or institutional sexism, it was a personal issue, not a national one,
where myths about belonging and rights are preserved for white communities. When
white communities, however, also suffer from the ravages of neoliberal economic poli-
cies and practices, this suffering is frequently articulated as ‘lost pride of place in America
or the West’ (Brown 2020). This loss of ‘pride of place’ is not only about whiteness but
also historical constructions of masculinity, and does considerable work in the public
statements of men accused of sexual harassment – Turner’s stated loss of opportunities
that he ‘earned’ through his own talents and hard work, Kavanaugh’s claim that the accu-
sations amounted to ‘coordinated character assassination’, Lauer’s and O’Reilly’s claims
that the accusations were motivated by manipulative women who were seeking to dam-
age their reputations. And, while the accused men analyzed here are in positions of cul-
tural, racial, and economic privilege, the sentiment of loss that these men express
implicitly capitalizes on the loss that has come to be associated with (indeed, almost the
trademark of) the US white working class men ‘left behind’, whose loss and pain Trump
promised to revenge and remedy. In other words, these powerful elite men claim victim-
hood partly through appropriating the discourse of loss and mourning of the disenfran-
chised, emasculated working class ‘forgotten men’ of the United States.
Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, who has been accused by 111 women of sexual
assault (and has been arrested and convicted for two of the assaults at the time of writ-
ing), wrote a different public statement than Lauer, O’Reilly, and Kavanaugh, all of
whom denied any wrongdoing. Weinstein does actually apologize for ‘his behavior’,
though he makes no mention of the fact that his lawyers were busy suing some of the
women who accused Weinstein for defamation at the time he was expressing his remorse
in a public statement (New York Times, 2017). Weinstein does, however, like Brock
Turner, blame culture, rather than himself, for his actions. He laments that he ‘came of
age in the 60’s and 70’s, when all the rules about behavior were different. That was the
culture then’. As many have pointed out, while the rules of some behavior may have been
different in the 1960s and 1970s, sexual assault was decidedly not an accepted norm of
the time. Weinstein is clearly lamenting a loss of entitlement, where perhaps his own
16 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)
violent behavior was rarely questioned. He also, like the others, made a point of acknowl-
edging that he was not a bad guy, especially when it came to women, using his apparent
commitment to women in the industry as validation for this:
One year ago, I began organizing a $5 million foundation to give scholarships to women
directors at USC. While this might seem coincidental, it has been in the works for a year. It will
be named after my mom and I won’t disappoint her. (New York Times, 2017)
Not surprisingly, the only specific women that Weinstein explicitly denied assaulting
were actors Lupita N’yongo and Salma Hayek, both women of color. As Hayak has
stated, ‘We are the easiest to get discredited . . . It is a well-known fact. So he went back,
attacking the two women of color, in hopes that if he could discredit us’ (Oldham, 2018).
Weinstein’s statements, like the others, describe a loss of entitlement of white masculine
privilege, a loss that is easily translated into victimhood.
Conclusion: ruined lives
‘My family and my name have been totally and permanently destroyed’. Brett Kavanaugh
‘I’ve lost employment opportunity, my reputation and most of all, my life’. Brock Turner
‘Those of us in the arena are constantly at risk, as are our families and children’. Bill O’Reilly
‘They have done enormous damage in the process’. Matt Lauer
‘ . . . he never gets to be Harvey Weinstein ever again’. Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer, Donna
Rotunno (Stolworthy, 2019)
As I have demonstrated in this article, there are a number of conjunctures at play in
the contemporary moment that authorizes a shift in subjectivity for privileged white men,
from a position of derisively accusing women and people of color of ‘playing the victim’
to the position of claiming aggrieved victimhood themselves. The #metoo movement
challenges historical narratives about rape culture, and specifically, questions a familiar
interpretation of those who are raped as victims, as well as confronts the vulnerability of
rape survivors. Indeed, one of the important social and cultural changes emerging from
the #metoo movement is that, by making accusations visible and widely circulated, men
who are accused of sexual harassment and assault have to now address these accusations.
This challenge, however, is met with another: the historical conjuncture of neoliberal
culture, networked misogyny, and post-racial politics enables the men who are accused
of sexual violence to draw on already existing forms of authority and claim themselves
to be victims. These forms of authority form the logics of their public statements, where
discourses of the public, the legal, and the domestic shore up hegemonic masculinity.
Through reading the public statements of highly visible and powerful men who are
accused of sexual violence as symptoms of this conjuncture, we can illuminate shifting
practices of white male subjectivity in this historical moment.
Banet-Weiser 17
And while there are a range of reasons for white privileged men to feel a loss of enti-
tlement in the current context, it is women, especially when accusing these men of sexual
violence, who become the central vector in this victimhood; women who transgress the
boundaries kept so vigilantly by powerful men become the perpetrators, the ones respon-
sible for ‘ruining’ their lives, their good names, their reputations. One of the key suc-
cesses of the #metoo movement has been that men who are accused of sexual assault
now have to address these accusations, but the differences in the publicness of women
coming forward with accounts of sexual harassment and assault and the publicness of
accused men’s claim of victimhood need to be acknowledged. The claims made by pow-
erful men who are accused are often amplified and authorized through official, govern-
mental channels, in ways women’s reports of sexual violence are not. Because of deeply
sedimented social constructions of gender, the credibility and the epistemological verac-
ity of women’s reports – and the challenges to their believability – situate and authorize
them as public statements differently than the statements powerful white men make
about being victimized by being accused of sexual violence.
The hyperbolic claims of ruination by the accused men – made in the midst of, for
example, an incredibly lenient sentence after being found guilty (Turner), or after a con-
firmation to arguably the most powerful political position in the United States (Kavanaugh),
or Lauer and O’Reilly being fired from their jobs but not charged with any kind of crime
– are crucially important to the logic of contemporary victimhood. The idea that lives have
been ruined works as an attempt to mask or downplay the material and social status of all
of these men, who are all overwhelmingly successful in all definitions of the concept.
This, in turn, lends legitimacy to their claims of victimhood by obliterating a key counter-
argument before it has even been deployed: The evidence one sees of a ‘good life’ of the
men accused is framed as just the trace of a good life destroyed. This is what the public
statements tell us about white male victimhood: this subject position shores up hegemonic
masculinity by drawing on the authority of discourses about masculine protection and a
legal system that was designed to privilege them above all others.
The public statements issued by powerful men who are accused of sexual violence are
not, it should be clear, equivalent to the women who come forward with stories of sexual
violence that have been the core of the #metoo movement. The statements by the accused
are made only after accusations have gone ‘public’, that is, only after women have trans-
gressed the boundaries of a public sphere that historically and presently privileges white
men over all others. It is within this context that claims that men’s lives have been
‘ruined’ by the women who accuse them find purchase; it is the logic of neoliberalism,
networked misogyny, and post-racial discourse that not only authorizes but encourages
white male victimhood. To be clear, #metoo has forced a visibility to the normalization
and ubiquity of sexual harassment and assault across all industries and contexts, and it is
because of this crucial visibility that powerful men who are accused attempt to defend
themselves, and in the process secure white masculine hegemony.
Acknowledgements
The author is immensely grateful to Jack Bratich, Kat Higgins, Catherine Rottenberg, Shani Orgad,
Lilie Chouliaraki and the two anonymous reviewers for their incredibly helpful comments and
suggestions on this article.
18 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this
article.
Notes
1. While there have been famous men of color accused of sexual assault, most notably Bill
Cosby and comedian Aziz Ansari, the majority of the highly visible cases have been white
men.
2. An interesting perspective about public forgiveness is what Sharrona Pearl calls ‘racialized
forgiveness’. Writing about violence (especially police violence) in Black communities in the
United States, Pearl analyzes media interviews with the families (mainly Black women) of
these victims, focusing on the various ways in which Black women are expected to ‘forgive’
those who murdered their loved ones. As she argues, ‘racialized forgiveness requests are
designed to benefit the perpetrators rather than the victims and their families, framing the
shooters as individual exceptions to the state system that they represent’. This works, argues
Pearl, to delegitimize Black rage and anger, and is a ritual that has as its goal ‘to return to the
sanctioned status quo of structural oppression’. While Pearl is discussing specific cases of
racialized violence, similar dynamics frame the cases of sexual violence I examine here.
3. After the verdict, many called attention to the disparity between the white Stanford student
athlete and a Black Vanderbilt student athlete, also accused of rape, who received a maximum
sentence.
4. For example, see Duke University’s LaCrosse team scandal, a case at the University of
Virginia exposed as fabricated by Rolling Stone magazine, or the case of Nikki Yovini at
Sacred Heart University who admitted to lying about being gang-raped at a party, among
others.
5. According to the National Sexual Violence Research Centre (2012), studies show a lower
extreme of 2.1 percent and an upper extreme of 7.1 percent of false reporting. https://www.
nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/Publications_NSVRC_Overview_False-Reporting.pdf
6. And, it is interesting that ‘witch hunt’ references a specific historical phenomenon in which
women were harmed and murdered on the basis of being suspect, unbelievable, untrustwor-
thy, and uncompliant with patriarchal expectations. Discursively, it taps into an anxiety about
truth, believability and authenticity that is deeply gendered.
References
Ahmed S (2007) A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist Theory 8(2): 149–168.
Banet-Weiser S (2018) Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Banet-Weiser S and Miltner KM (2015) # MasculinitySoFragile: Culture, structure, and networked
misogyny. Feminist Media Studies 16(1): 171–174.
Berlant L (2008) The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American
Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
boyd d (2010) Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implica-
tions. In: Papacharissi Z (ed.) Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social
Network Sites. New York: Routledge, pp. 39–58.
Boyle K (2020) #metoo, Weinstein and Feminism. London: Palgrave.
Brown W (2019) In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Banet-Weiser 19
Brownmiller S (ed.) (2013) Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York: Open Road
Media.
Cannold L (2011) Sexual assault and the myth of the lying victim. ABC News, 5 July. Available at:
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/sexual-assault-and-the-myth-of-the-lying-victim/10101332
Chouliaraki L (2013) The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Humanitarianism. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Cole A (2006) The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror. Palo
Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Cole A (2020, this volume) (Re)Made in America: Survivorship after the Shoah. European Journal
of Cultural Studies. DOI: 10.1177/1367549420985855
Crenshaw K (1989) Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique
of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago
Legal Forum 1989: 8.
Diamond J (2018) Trump says it’s ‘a very scary time for young men in America’. CNN News,
2 October. Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/02/politics/trump-scary-time-for-
young-men-metoo/index.html
Duggan L (2012) The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on
Democracy. New York: Beacon Press.
Ellis EG (2018) How #HimToo became the anti #MeToo of the Kavanaugh hearings. Wired, 27
September. Available at: https://www.wired.com/story/brett-kavanaugh-hearings-himtoo-
metoo-christine-blasey-ford/
Fanon F (2008) Black Skin, White Mask (rev. edn). New York: Grove Press.
Farrow R (2019) Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators. New York:
Little, Brown & Company.
Federici S (2004) Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New
York: Autonomedia.
Ferguson R (2019) On the postracial question. In: Mukherjee R, Banet-Weiser S and Gray H (eds)
Racism Post-Race. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 72–85.
Foucault M (2001) Fearless Speech. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotexte.
Gilmore L (2017) Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Ging D (2017) Alphas, betas, and incels: Theorizing the masculinities of the manosphere. Men and
Masculinities 22(4): 638–657.
Gotell L and Dutton E (2016) Sexual violence in the ‘Manosphere’: Antifeminist men’s rights dis-
courses on rape. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 5(2): 65–80.
Green EL and Stolberg SG (2017) Campus rape policies get a new look as the accused get devos’
ear. New York Times, 12 July. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/us/politics/
campus-rape-betsy-devos-title-iv-education-trump-candice-jackson.html
Harvey D (2007) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hill Collins P (2008) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of
Empowerment. New York: Routledge.
Hoff Sommers C (1995) Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women. New York:
Simon & Schuster.
Hosang DM and Lowndes JE (2019) Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-wing
Politics of Precarity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Jane E (2016) Misogyny Online: A Short (And Brutish) History. London: Sage.
Kampf Z (2009) Public (non-) apologies: The discourse of minimizing responsibility. Journal of
Pragmatics 41(11): 2257–2270.
20 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)
Khatchatourian M (2019) Matt Lauer Denies ‘false and salacious’ rape allegation, says affair was
‘consensual’. Variety, 9 October. Available at: https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/matt-lauer-
rape-denial-letter-1203364695/
Kingkade T (2017) Title IX changes are coming. Can the warring sides find common ground?
Buzzfeed News, 22 September. Available at: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tylerk-
ingkade/title-ix-changes-are-coming-can-the-sides-find-common-ground#.auENQ8kdQ2
Levin S and Wong JC (2016) Brock Turner’s statement blames sexual assault on Stanford ‘party
culture’. The Guardian, 7 June. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/
jun/07/brock-turner-statement-stanford-rape-case-campus-culture
Littler J (2017) Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility. London: Routledge.
Lorenzini D and Tazzioli M (2017) Confessional subjects and conducts of non-truth: Foucault,
Fanon, and the making of the subject. Theory, Culture & Society 35(1), 71–90.
Manne K (2017) Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marwick A and Lewis R (2015) Media manipulation and disinformation online. Data &
Society. Available at: https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/DataAndSociety_MediaManipulation
AndDisinformationOnline.pdf
Mason-Deese L (2018) From #MeToo to #WeStrike: A politics in feminine. Where Freedom
Starts: Sex Power Violence #Metoo. Verso Books. Available at: https://www.versobooks.
com/blogs/3666-from-metoo-to-westrike-a-politics-in-feminine
Matchar E (2014) ‘Men’s Rights’ activists are trying to redefine the meaning of rape. New
Republic, 26 February. Available at: https://newrepublic.com/article/116768/latest-target-
mens-rights-movement-definition-rape
McCain RS (2017) Feminism’s excuse factory: Nikki Yovino, Title IX and false rape accusa-
tions. The Other Mccain, 17 July. Available at: http://theothermccain.com/2017/07/17/nikki-
yovino-false-rape-accusation-campus-title-ix/
Mendes K, Ringrose J and Keller J (2019) Digital Feminist Activism: Girls and Women Fight Back
against Rape Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mukherjee R, Banet-Weiser S, Gray H, et al. (2019) Racism Postrace. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
National Sexual Violence Research Centre (2012). Available at: https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/
default/files/Publications_NSVRC_Overview_False-Reporting.pdf
New York Times (2017) Statement from Harvey Weinstein. New York Times, 5 October.
Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/05/us/statement-from-harvey-
weinstein.html?src=twr%5C
Oldham S (2018) Salma Hayek says Harvey Weinstein only responded to her and Lupita Nyong’o’s
harassment claims because women of color are easier to discredit. Variety, 13 May. Available
at: https://variety.com/2018/film/news/salma-hayek-says-harvey-weinstein-only-responded-
to-her-and-lupita-nyongos-harassment-claims-because-women-of-color-are-easier-to-dis-
credit-1202808828/
Orgad S (2009) The survivor in contemporary culture and public discourse: A genealogy. The
Communication Review 12(2): 132–161.
Pearl S (2020) Staying angry: Black women’s resistance to racialized forgiveness in U.S. Police
shootings. Women’s Studies in Communication 43(3): 271–291.
Phipps A (2019) ‘Every woman knows a Weinstein’: Political whiteness and white woundedness
in #MeToo and public feminisms around sexual violence. Feminist Formations 31(2): 1–25.
Phipps A (2020) Me Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Rentschler C (2014) Rape culture and the feminist politics of social media. Girlhood Studies 7(1):
65–82.
Banet-Weiser 21
Robinson C (2019) On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance (Ed.
H. L. T. Quan). Pluto Press.
Roiphe K (1994) The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism. Boston, MA: Back Bay Books.
Rottenberg C (2018) The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith V (1998) Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings. New York: Routledge.
Soteriou S (2019) Piers Morgan claims men are an ‘endangered species’ in Good Morning Britain
studio as he accuses show of sexism. The Sun, 10 June. Available at: https://www.thesun.
co.uk/tvandshowbiz/9258642/piers-morgan-men-endangered-good-morning-britain-sexism/
Steel E (2018) How Bill O’Reilly silenced his accusers. New York Times, 4 April. Available at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/business/media/how-bill-oreilly-silenced-his-accusers.
html
Stolworthy J (2019) Harvey Weinstein’s ‘whole life has been ruined’ regardless of trial outcome,
says attorney. Independent, 18 September. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-
entertainment/films/news/harvey-weinstein-attorney-donna-rotunno-sexual-assault-rape-
trial-metoo-a9109871.html
Williams P (1992) Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Wodak R (2015) The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. New York:
Sage.
Xu V (2016) The full letter read by Brock Turner’s father at his sentencing hearing. The Stanford
Daily, 8 June. Available at: https://www.stanforddaily.com/2016/06/08/the-full-letter-read-
by-brock-turners-father-at-his-sentencing-hearing/
Biographical note
Sarah Banet-Weiser is a professor and head of Department in the Department of Media and
Communications at the London School of Economics. She is the author of The Most Beautiful Girl
in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (1999), Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and
Consumer Citizenship (2007), Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture
(2012), and Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (2018).
