It was sad that Charles Waterstreet was pressured to pull out of the special edition of Q&A because the #MeToo movement needed men’s voices as well as women’s, the columnist Janet Albrechtsen said on the ABC program.
The Sydney barrister withdrew at the last minute from Thursday’s episode not because of any protest about his inclusion but because the NSW Bar Association told him it would be “neither appropriate or prudent” to sit on a panel about sexual harassment and assault.
“When we start excluding voices – as happened here tonight with Charles Waterstreet – I think that’s really sad,” the Australian’s columnist said.
#QandA #metoo Josh Bornstein is right: most women can’t complain about harassment: they may lose their job
— Julian Burnside (@JulianBurnside) February 15, 2018
Albrechtsen said that while the passion of the #MeToo social movement was to be applauded it had to be kept in check and not turned into a trial-by-Twitter.
“My concern has been pretty much when it first happened there was a very quick hardening of orthodoxy,” she said.
“I mean, for goodness sake, Hollywood has been silent for years about this and all of a sudden they were all saying the same thing and if you diverged from that in the slightest way you were hounded down: if you were a female, as a traitor to the movement, and if you were a bloke like Matt Damon who put his poor head up last year and spoke about a spectrum of behaviour.”
A great thing about #metoo is it exposed the power of women speaking up.Just speaking.We don’t need to report to police to speak our truth.
— Lou (@MsLou27) February 15, 2018
Catherine Lumby, a gender studies professor at Macquarie University, agreed that the movement should not turn into trial by Twitter but said social media was a positive force because it allowed women to speak out “with a collective voice” when in the past women “told their stories in single file”.
An employment lawyer, Josh Bernstein, said the women he represented who had been victims of sexual harassment in the workplace were broken physically and mentally when they came to see him.
The courts process was so traumatising for women and they rarely got justice, he said, so he welcomed the #MeToo movement for putting the spotlight firmly on the problem.
“I think #metoo – looked at properly – is a protest movement led by some who are whistleblowers working with investigative journalists calling for major change,” he said.
I’m exhausted by this. There’s only one solution to #metoo. Crush the patriarchy. #qanda
— Jenna Price (@JennaPrice) February 15, 2018
Bornstein said there would always be a backlash when people were advocating social change and you were never going to take everyone along with you.
Discussing the line between flirting and harassment, Albrechtsen said it was difficult for men to “read women’s minds”.
The frontwoman with the Preatures, Isabella Manfredi, said in some cases there were no shades of grey, just right and wrong: “drugging and raping 50-plus women is wrong”.
.@JoshBBornstein outlines the process of a typical journey in many harassment cases #QandA pic.twitter.com/RYShqXFKc0
— ABC Q&A (@QandA) February 15, 2018
Last year Manfredi shared her experiences of sexual harassment in the music industry, including being groped by executives and invited to bathe with the head of a music label in New York.
The ABC was criticised for inviting Waterstreet to be part of the panel, who has denied allegations he sexually harassed a 21-year old paralegal at his Sydney chambers, and was disappointed when he pulled out.
