#metoo fatigue?
So last Tuesday morning I published this piece on The Pool. It’s about my experience with upskirting, a topic under much discussion in the UK this week since a Tory MP derailed the discussion of a private members’ bill aimed at making it a crime. It’s not a particularly unusual subject for me to write about - although my fiction is mainly comedy, I write more serious lifestyle and women’s pieces for The Pool. I mention this because it was striking to me how little engagement this piece seemed to get, compared to other stories I’ve written there. Obviously, this could be because the piece sucks, though in my experience when you write something shit on the internet people don’t tend to feel a need to hold back from telling you so. I don’t have access to The Pool’s stats, but from my own on Twitter, the tweet I posted has got 867 views to date, but only nine people actually clicked through to read the article. Of those, four retweeted, so I have to assume there’s nothing wrong with the piece per se. Meanwhile The Pool’s own tweets and post on their Facebook page have had very few responses or comments. Usually when they put one of my posts up I’m fielding comments all day. Before this all starts sounding very Woe Is Me, I’m not too personally bothered about being ignored, but I can’t help but wonder, Carrie Bradshaw style, whether this is a sign that people are getting bored of #metoo? Does it feel like a trend that has had its day, and now can we stop reading endless articles about people describing getting sexually assaulted and move on to something that feels more fresh? If so, that’s a dangerous shift, because the actual sexual assaulting of women remains as popular as ever, and bar a few high profile men getting their arses handed to them, I don’t see that much has changed. The Pussy Grabber In Chief is still leader of what we used to think was the free world. Johnny Depp remains the face of Sauvage, the scent to wear if you want to smell like the shape of an iPhone imprinted into Amber Heard’s face. This is not something that we are ready to move on from. The challenge, then, for writers and publications, is how do we keep this conversation going without alienating the people we need to reach?
