The #MeToo Movement Will Die. Sadly.

Here is a prediction: The #MeToo movement will die out, unfortunately.

Here are my reasons:

1. At this moment, it is evident that what men thought were stray incidents which involved "other men" actually are the norm by "every man". What was thought at the beginning to be "some women" is soon becoming evident as "every woman". No man seems to be innocent and no woman not a victim of this in some form at some time in their lives. All of us are involved. Yes, all. You, me, our friends, our brothers and fathers, our sisters and mothers, our uncles, aunts, and cousins, our bosses and colleagues, our employers and employees, our personal lives, our professional activities. Everything and everyone is either a perpetrator or a victim. Each and every one.

Why does that matter? Because while something that is shocking and unusual goads and energises us into action, the same things when they become part of our everyday lives and no one is excluded from it, become invisible and not worth the trouble. It grabs our attention, raises our consciousness and forces us to act only if it is a problem limited to an area small enough for us to act in. When it becomes all-encompassing and universal, it is just everyday life. There is no urgency to address it. And it either solves itself just by the actions of a few courageous, innovative individuals, or by an external power that forces us to solve it, or fades away. Either way, we the normal everyday folks stop caring about it. For example, when the first few soldiers came back in coffins in say, WWII, we were horrified and energised to act. But as more and more died, which included your relatives, friends, neighbours, and literally everyone in your community, it just became part of the normal lives. It may not be desirable but reality seldom is. We all have, as a species, an emotional threshold beyond which we become immune and desensitised, regardless of the pain. We are soon reaching that point where there will be no innocent bystanders. And then, our senses will be blunted, despite how sensitive we think ourselves to be. Once everyone is "nanga" in the "hamaam" there is no one to point to and laugh at or to explain the importance of wearing clothing. Nakedness just becomes a reality we live with.

2. The movement is being weaponised...by everyone. Of course, the weaponisation of this movement by the women, not just the victimised ones, is towards achieving more awareness, creating barriers for the next person to perpetrate any such horrors on another human less powerful than them, and to raise our collective consciousness to such incidents, should we be either witness or party to any in the future. But there are others who are weaponising it too. People wanting to settle personal scores, or as political tools, as business strategy, or even as plain old vengeance. Soon, the trolls will step in, the waters will get muddy, and those outside the immediate vicinity of the specific incident being publicised will not know who to believe, undermining the entire movement, at the cost of the real victims. Of course, the perpetrators would only be too happy, while the law will be confused to the point of paralysis. No one will be able to tell the difference between real and fake once the Spartacus moment happens, and everyone rises to claim they are the victims. And that will be the death knell to all hopes we have harboured from this.

Now, for some clarifications, because despite a lengthy post, internet (and specifically social media) communications tend to be tailor-made for missing nuances, tone, context, facial expressions, and other signals one emanates in a face-to-face discussion:

1. This analysis of mine should not mean that I want this to happen. I would very much like the movement not to fail. That, of course, is my hope. But when analysed against reality, I am cynical (though optimistically hopeful that I am wrong). Many other ills like marital rape, sati, slavery, and war crimes have been universal in societies, which took them for granted so much that a similar logic of collective emotional fatigue and normalisation would have applied...before the society girded its loins and decided that they must do something about it. Today, we live in a better world than yesterday only because we as a society keep pressing forward and the moral zeitgeist keeps progressing, despite all the above issues.

2. I am sure there are women who haven't had the horrors of gender power-play molestations visited on them yet, as I am sure there are men who wouldn't even dream of imposing themselves on any other human, of whichever gender. But these are few and far between, and getting fewer and further every day.

3. This does not mean we should lay down and let things happen as they are. Fight we must. We must be courageous enough to expose the perpetrators, to own up to our crimes, to apologise, to learn, and to feel no fear or shame in accepting that we were molested. We must continue, even when acknowledging that we'd probably fail. For that is what life is, and I understand that if every winner had stopped at every obstacle, given up at every inconvenience, and gotten discouraged at every turn with the slightest of a reality check, we'd have no winners at all! So, yes. We need to fight the good fight. But we need to be aware of how it is likely to end, and not let that get us down. Because even if the smallest possible step ahead is achieved through such sacrifices on part of the courageous victims who are coming out fearlessly today, this society can have a brighter future, and our children can grow up in a better world.