#MeToo started with Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, R. Kelly. Big names who did very bad things. Masturbating in plants, desk buttons that locked doors, women being held against their will, rape.
But now we’re on to chasing down every woman a famous man has slept with to get a couple of them to say they had a bad time.
A piece in Business Insider last week accused Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy of just that. Two women accuse Portnoy of sex they didn’t enjoy. If the era of #MeToo was kicked off with Portnoy instead of Weinstein, it would have been a complete bust. #MeToo caught fire because the accusations against these famous men were so major. The accusations against Portnoy are not.
Portnoy has taken the accusations very seriously and has aggressively responded. We haven’t seen any of the previously accused men put up a fight like this.
In a freewheeling hour-long press conference, Portnoy spent an hour breaking down the details of the case against him. He vehemently denies the accusations and has produced text messages from the girls following the encounters as well as showing an absurd police report where a mom of one of the girls vaguely accuses Portnoy of inviting 18-year-old girls to his house.
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Portnoy feels he’s been accused of rape, even though the word “rape” is not used. One of the girls in the Business Insider piece claims she said no and he didn’t stop, though she did not get up and leave. In his press conference, Portnoy said “If at any point a girl tells you to stop and you don’t, it’s rape.”
But that accusation is not made in the piece. “They will not accuse me of anything…they never accuse me of anything,” Portnoy says.
He’s right. No actual accusation is made. It’s all leading conjecture. Portnoy categorically denies any of the girls ever said “no.”
Outlets that picked up the Business Insider story referred to the allegations as “sexual misconduct” but even taken at their face it’s unclear any “misconduct” occurred. The women didn’t leave, though they could have, and they didn’t stop the interaction.
The Portnoy accusations are reminiscent of the ones against comedian Aziz Ansari, a story widely acknowledged by most people to be the moment the #MeToo movement officially went too far. Ansari was accused of a bad hook-up, as well as offering the wrong wine, by a girl who stayed in his apartment and didn’t leave when she was no longer having fun. But Ansari is a “feminist” while Portnoy is a guy’s guy and so defenses of the latter aren’t coming as fast and furiously as they did for the former.
Mina Kimes, an NFL analyst at ESPN, tweeted the story and said “too many people don’t understand the concept of consent.” But nothing says “I consent” more than not trying to remove yourself from the situation.
It simply gives men way too much power over women to say that they must be responsible for us remaining in the dalliance after we’re no longer having a good time. Women have agency and these women could have used that agency to get up and walk out the door. We do understand the power of consent. These women used that power to say yes.
