The MeToo movement no longer holds the authority which it did in 2017. Why is this? Surely rape and sexual assault are perennially horrifying to most people in the civilized West. I believe that there have been too many accusations of “fuzzy rape,” both in the media and on the ground, for the movement to retain its grip on the zeitgeist.

By “fuzzy rape” I mean sex that wasn’t coercive, but which made the female party feel violated. Fuzzy rape describes a clash of perspectives: that of the woman who feels wronged, often only after the fact, and that of the man who may have been pushy, but had no intention of raping a woman. That is, fuzzy rape does not describe actual rape. ...

A glaring but unspoken paradox in the MeToo movement is that most of the attention is given to fuzzy rape cases while less glamorous stories, like those of women in Muslim communities (both here and abroad) who are coerced into marriage, groomed from a young age to be with much older men, or forced to work in brothels, are ignored. These sexual violations take place behind closed doors, and the violated women have no power to speak out; but there is too much evidence of women’s sexual exploitation at the hands of Islamic culture for feminists to justifiably turn away. ...

I have written about the feminist aversion to discussing how Islam violates women’s dignity and rights. This is made doubly ironic in the light of the outrage prompted by accounts of fuzzy rape. If the alleged crime of Aziz Ansari was enough to whip up a MeToo frenzy, surely cases of utterly unequivocal rape, which accompany the suppression of female agency in much of the Muslim world, should cause world-ending outrage. But they don’t. They don’t fit the narrative that sexism is bound up in white male privilege. ...

Finally, in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks it became apparent that horrific sexual violence was used as a tool against Israeli girls and women. Women were not only gang raped but had sharp objects shoved in to them, or shot between the legs. None of this seems to have merited any attention from the MeToo crowd.

This tells me that, at its heart, MeToo is not about liberating women from the confines of sexual patriarchy. ...