#MeToo: Need for Power and Morality
The #MeToo campaign mobilized millions of women around the world to draw attention to the pervasiveness of sexual harassment. The #MeToo campaign against sexual harassment went viral globally. The campaign was successful in terms of awareness-raising, bringing about actual charges against perpetrators of sexual assaults, and support for victims to come forward with their personal stories. Nevertheless, #MeToo was also heavily criticized, suggesting that the campaign hampers due process, might increase false accusations, fails to distinguish between rape and harassment, and collectively blames all men and victimizes all women.
One thing in common for both supporters and opponents is that they evaluated #MeToo through a gendered perspective on sexual harassment, embracing or criticizing the fact that, within this campaign, women appeared as collective victims of sexual harassment, implying that men were the collective perpetrators.
Members of victim groups feel weak and disrespected, and therefore experience a need for empowerment: they wish to enjoy a better status and have more influence in society. In contrast, members of perpetrator groups experience a threat to their ingroup’s moral reputation and are motivated to restore their positive moral identity. This motivation can manifest in two distinct forms: perpetrators may experience essence shame due to the violation of moral values, and consequently wish their ingroup to acknowledge its culpability and behave more morally. Alternatively, they may experience image shame, which signifies the defensive need for restoring their ingroup’s moral reputation, without changing its moral conduct (e.g., by having outgroup members acknowledge that they do receive the fair treatment).
In the particular context of gender relations, in response to information about group-based inequality and societal discrimination against women, women reported a higher need for power (e.g., wish that their ingroup would have more influence in society) compared to men. However, women’s and men’s power needs also depended on their motivation to justify the gender system, such that system justification predicted a lower need for power among women and a higher need for power among men. In terms of the need to restore the ingroup’s moral essence, compared to women, men reported more moral shame and wish that their ingroup would act more morally toward the outgroup.
System justification was negatively related to men’s wish to restore their ingroup’s moral essence (e.g., men who were high on system justification reported less moral shame), yet it was unrelated to women’s need for moral essence. Also, system justification was positively related to men’s wish to defend their ingroup’s moral reputation (e.g., men who were high on system justification wished women to acknowledge that they receive fair treatment from men), yet it was unrelated to women’s need to defend their moral reputation. Besides the potential threat to their moral identity, the societal debate about gender inequality might threaten men’s status. Studies have shown that social movements of advantaged groups (e.g., conservative movements or men’s rights movements) often demand the restoration of their rights because they experience threats to their status and feel victimized.
The #MeToo campaign was a case of collective action mobilizing women to raise awareness about the phenomenon of sexual harassment and change the status quo of existing social arrangements. However, not all women, and certainly not all men, are ready to change the status quo. The perception of the social system as legitimate satisfies basic epistemic, existential, and relational needs.
Therefore, people are motivated “to defend, justify, and bolster aspects of the status quo including existing social, economic, and political institutions and arrangements”, even if their own ingroup suffers from these arrangements. The tendency to justify existing social arrangements may be particularly strong in the context of gender relations (as compared to other contexts of intergroup relations, such as the relations between different racial, religious, or ethnic groups). Moreover, the relations between men and women are characterized by high interdependence in a social, economic, and emotional sense due to reproductive needs, and the cultural histories of human societies creating socio-economic interdependence.
Consequently, both women and men are motivated to maintain harmonious relations and avoid open conflict. This motivation is an obstacle to social change because when intergroup relations are characterized by a desire for harmony, people make efforts to maintain social cohesion while hindering the motivation to expose group-based inequality and engage in collective action for changing it. This process has been observed in various contexts, including one of the #MeToo campaigns.
While it may be difficult for women to perceive their own disadvantages within gender relations due to the motivation to justify the system, it may be even harder for men to recognize these inequalities and get involved as allies. Naturally, men have fewer chances to get the first-hand experience of gender-based inequalities in general and sexual harassment in particular. Moreover, as members of the advantaged group, they are less likely to recognize their own privileges both because advantaged group members are generally motivated to uphold the status quo and disregard information challenging their social status and because criticism of unearned privileges may appear as a threat to their moral standing. Men’s engagement in the struggle against sexual harassment is therefore dependent on their moral convictions and efforts to improve their own moral reputation — both of which are hindered by men’s tendency to justify the existing system.
Gender inequality in education, employment, financial status, political representation, the prevalence of sexual harassment and rape, and the perception of violence against women greatly vary across countries. Apart from historical, cultural, and economic reasons, gender inequality is maintained by attitudes supporting it.
Sexual harassment and rape disrupt the harmony ideal between men and women and can draw attention to these inequalities while gender system justification prevents the recognition of transgressions by men and the gendered characteristic of rape. The paradoxical connection between gender equality and reported rape (i.e., higher reported rape in more equal countries) underlines that in countries with greater inequalities, women are less likely to report rape because of more hostile attitudes to rape victims. For example, within Europe, reported rape is lowest in Hungary and Greece, the two lowest-ranking countries in terms of gender inequality, and highest in Sweden which is the highest-ranking country.
Consequently, people living in countries with more unequal gender relations tend to be more accepting of the gender status quo, consider rape and sexual harassment as a less significant problem, and therefore less likely to see the connection between sexual harassment and the gender status quo. We can assume that the global #MeToo campaign which aimed to address precisely the prevalence of sexual harassment and its connection to gender relations would be differently received in countries with different degrees of gender equality.
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