After sexual assault allegations against author Neil Gaiman resurfaced in January, “Red Scare” host Anna Khachiyan wrote: “Are we really still doing this? #MeToo was rejected at the ballot box!” In the wake of almost a decade of anti-anti-rape sentiment — much of which calcified in the hyper-discursive, ideologically slippery podcast and social media sectors — Khachiyan’s refried Paglia-isms hardly shock. What alarmed me was an accelerating sense that I could no longer intelligibly refute such claims. Before the 2024 election, Donald Trump was found liable in two suits brought by E. Jean Carroll, though a jury found him culpable not of rape in the first but of sexual abuse. (He was also found guilty of defaming Carroll’s character.) Carroll was awarded a staggering $88.3 million damages in all; still, a little over a year after the second trial, the former president was once again the president-elect. As of this writing, both his personal lawyers and the DOJ are appealing the judgments. That in a legal sense he was understood now to be a sexual assailant was seemingly immaterial to a majority of voters, who either didn’t buy the verdict or else believed Carroll and didn’t care.

The public’s moral lethargy had clear precedent. A month before the 2016 election, the leak of the Access Hollywood tapes — in which Trump bragged to Billy Bush on a hot mic that stars “can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy” — moved the needle on Trump’s campaign but didn’t damage him enough to disqualify or destroy it. In her memoir, Christine Blasey Ford described a similar indifference to her testimony during Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 confirmation proceedings. It “didn’t feel like I hadn’t been heard,” she wrote. “It felt like I had been believed” and “the response was a proverbial shrug.” Trump himself described Blasey Ford’s testimony as “very compelling,” saying, “she looks like a very fine woman to me.” Compelling testimony, though, again turned out to be ineffectual in diverting the ascension of an (alleged) sexual assailant to a seat of immense power. Kavanaugh will likely rule on the jurisdictional parameters of women’s bodily autonomy for decades to come. 

It’s a familiar refrain by now: women’s trauma may be witnessed — their account might even be believed! — but no transformation comes. The wheels of patriarchal violence keep on turning. This, of course, is the guiding sentiment of a heartless, but ultimately banal, assertion like Khachiyan’s: rape happens, sure, but it’s a political non-starter, inevitable, and — worst of all — boring. I’ve written elsewhere about #MeToo’s easy assimilation into the status quo, its narrative foregrounding of unignorable monsters like Harvey Weinstein, and the way establishment media — answering, as we know, to quantifiable economies of digitized attention — prioritized glamorous horror stories of celebrity and uber-wealth over those reflecting the more workaday, structural machinations of rape culture. Whose voice counts? Whose dignity matters? Do we fight for the sexually exploited and undocumented worker as dynamically and publicly as we do the A-list actress we’ve already formed a parasocial connection to? (Then again, the case of Amber Heard destabilized even that version of the story.) 

The movement’s broadly confessional mode proved a mixed blessing. On one hand, a deluge of recursive utterances exposed the endemicity of sexual violence; on the other, such storytelling tended to list toward the individual, which is to say it tacitly reified an accepted vision of rape as a private and anomalous experience of rupture. Despite our best intentions, the testimonial “I” can come to supplant a coalitional “we.” Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that attestations of sexual violence have been largely minimized in the American political climate to the “merely” discursive — just “locker room banter,” to invoke Trump’s notorious retort on the subject of his self-proclaimed pussy-grabbing. For the president, this was a characteristically bold rhetorical move. He rebranded the systemic weaponization of bodily harm by men against women into nothing more than background chatter, materially true at times but ultimately anodyne.

Thus it is easy to dismiss the usefulness of such stories in our present predicament, especially since Trump and his cronies are extraordinarily dexterous in blowtorching and reupholstering narratives and media cycles. When earlier this year I was on the interview circuit for my second book, a rape memoir, camouflaging my escalating demoralization often felt impossible. While Kamala Harris was hardly my candidate — her administration’s facilitation of Israel’s genocide in Gaza was itself disqualifying — I never imagined my hopeful little trauma plot could rise above so sexually dystopian a horizon. How many rapists, I asked one of my interlocutors, can they fucking fit in a single White House? It was difficult at times to remember I hadn’t written the book to seek vengeance or even justice for myself; I’d written it in the hope of making even a single other person feel less alone.

As the French writer Neige Sinno recently reminded me, “to say storytelling is not action, too, is a strategy” deployed by those in power, by those who rape us, to keep us silent. We live now in an age of conspiracism and insincerity: two bedrocks of the paranoiac ecosystem that anointed Trump, and that he’s spent ten years reconsolidating. These ways of seeing are profoundly antithetical to disclosures of vulnerability about intimate violence, for what is more sincere than acknowledging our sensitivity to harm, than accepting that our ineluctable beholdenness to others is a fundamental condition of being human? But to be again shamed or intimidated into silence by our abusers and their enablers serves only to ensure their continuing dominion over our violations and the dogged expansiveness of our irreducible lives, our shared histories.

At the time of this writing, Harvey Weinstein’s third-degree rape charge is awaiting retrial, Johnny Depp has been cast in the new Terry Gilliam film, and Jonathan Majors is on a comeback tour. We’re in a frightening moment: cultural dismissals of #MeToo are of course inseverable from coordinated assaults on contraception and abortion, on anti-AIDS activism, on transition-related health care, and on the rights of sex workers and other laborers. When I ride the subway and see every face glued to a screen, it’s hard to imagine drumming up meaningful collective combat. Instagram infographics and TikTok explainers will not save us. Consciousness-raising remains indispensable, but in a political moment founded on minority rule, changing minds and votes can’t be our only recourse. Our bodies are on the line; we’re going to have to use them.