Abstract
In late 2017, the cascade of personal storytelling about the sexual misconduct people experienced in their workplaces, schools, and communities felt simultaneously shocking and utterly mundane. Many people, especially women, read the revelations of their friends, family members, and acquaintances on social media or the reported stories in the news media and recognized their own experiences. The scale of sexual misconduct was suddenly in sharp focus, forcing a reconsideration of what had seemed an inevitable part of both public and private life. A million individual trees were newly recognized as a forest; but why didn't we see it before?
In their new book Defining Sexual Misconduct: Power, Media, and #MeToo, Stacey Hannem and Christopher Schneider provide a fascinating overview of how the forest emerged through the conceptual construction of sexual misconduct through different media practices. They carefully analyze reporting of sexual scandals throughout the 1980s and 1990s, tracing the ways these events were communicated to the public. By focusing on the development of the “sexual misconduct” frame, the authors show how the public was primed to understand, and speak out about, their own everyday experiences of harassment. Misconduct, rather than legal terms like rape or sexual harassment, is an important rhetorical shift because it pushed the boundaries of what we are allowed to consider a problem, legitimizing outrage at behavior that doesn't meet the bar for legal repercussions. In a fascinating twist, however, the authors demonstrate how the public outrage about sexual misconduct during the MeToo movement resulted in renewed attention to the criminal actions of several men, like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, whose abusive behavior over decades had amounted to open secret. A clear outcome of the MeToo movement is to force a reconsideration by police and prosecutors of what counts as criminal abuse.
The book offers many important insights into the consequences of the MeToo movement's origin in media. For example, media coverage of misconduct that had not already been deemed criminal created a new avenue for victims to reclaim power in the situation, but victims often faced a double‐edged sword. Naming what happened to them and having it recognized as victimization is not justice exactly, but it at least offers the possibility of public accountability for offenses. At the same time, telling their stories to the media didn't give them full control over how they were communicated to the public. Reporters and editors make choices in how to tell stories and what to leave out, and victims were often criticized or dismissed for the ways their stories were presented. The authors also evaluate which kinds of misconduct stories are likely to be covered and under what conditions. Not all victims are created equal; because of the media logics at play, higher‐status victims were more likely to have their stories told.
The authors also analyze how social media logics shaped the MeToo movement. Social media logic generally refers to the ways information is pushed through social media platforms to prioritize some kinds of posts and styles over others. Black-box algorithms for platforms like Facebook and Twitter promoted some stories and frames because they increased engagement, and thus profit. But the ways information is being processed are never fully visible to us. We are left with analyzing the outcomes that we can see—whose stories were widely circulated and which frames gained traction—and guessing at who was left out.
This book is a fascinating read and sets the stage for future research into the mechanics of how media practices and logics intersect with the social movements that depend on them. Particularly with reported stories in the news media, the authors provide convincing evidence of how sexual misconduct language shifted over time. It is beyond the scope of this book, but I wanted to know more about the newsroom discussions between editors and reporters in choosing how to present the stories. How, in other words, did they settle on “misconduct” as the preferred descriptor? This matters because it communicates important information about how boundaries get drawn and redrawn, who has power in renegotiating the boundary, and what risks stakeholders see in shifting the coverage away from criminality to more commonplace abusive behavior.
I also wanted to know more about how the kinds of media covered in the book—news media, social media, and entertainment media—interact with each other. For example, news reporting on sexual misconduct was critical in helping the public identify and share their own experiences on social media. The public outpouring on social media platforms was covered by news media, which then put new pressure on the producers of entertainment media (television, movies, and podcasts, among others) to purge the worst offenders from their own payrolls and also to produce content that would speak to the burgeoning MeToo movement. In reacting to each other, each kind of media enhances and further defines the movement by shaping the kinds of stories that are told and how they are interpreted by the public, by creators, and by journalists.
Defining Sexual Misconduct will be useful to many scholars and teachers. For gender, sexuality, and communication scholars, this analysis offers a view into how public sentiment about sexual misconduct shifted over time and how it was redefined in the social media era. For social movement scholars, the book provides insight into how social media logic shapes social movements and frames. This book should also prove useful in the classroom. Younger students are likely to be less aware of how differently the public understands sexual misconduct now compared to the recent past, and the book provides a useful explanation of how technology shifts intersect with changing culture to produce new social movements.
Because the analysis is based on high‐profile misconduct cases from the 1980s through the late 2010s, there is ample supplementary evidence that instructors could pair with the book. Showing students television news coverage of sexual misconduct over time (the Tailhook harassment scandal, the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, and Bill Clinton's impeachment, for example), along with the reported pieces that sparked the MeToo Movement in 2017, should spur useful classroom discussions about how media logics, competition, and economics shape whose story is told and how.