Abstract
This article argues that #MeToo posts are transgressive and can be understood as a case of confessional discourse that has the potential to empower women around the world rather than inspiring shame. Due to its public nature, #MeToo also challenges existing frameworks for understanding sexual relationships in the United States. This critical discourse analysis of the response to the #MeToo movement over 9 months (2017–2018) on the Reddit community AskReddit surfaced fears about how the movement is redefining normal sexual behavior. By inventorying the knowledge claims produced across four question and answer comment threads, important shifts in subject positions and discursive frames show that under the guise of inclusive rhetoric and expert discourse, many Reddit respondents fear their past behavior will be reconstituted as abusive. Rape myths also appeared in the discourse as a backlash against the #MeToo movement.
Introduction
#MeToo: a short phrase that masks its power to open eyes, start conversations, and make normal sexual strategies suddenly feel uncomfortable. On October 15, 2017, actress Alyssa Milano shared a post asking anyone who had been sexually harassed or assaulted to write “me too” in a reply to her post. While Milano did not invent the #MeToo discourse, following the very public accusations against Harvey Weinstein, Milano’s call to share your #MeToo moment went viral, reaching over 85 countries with nearly 2 million tweets and 12 million posts, comments, and reactions on Facebook (CBS/AP, 2017; Park, 2017). The #MeToo hashtag created an exigency for hundreds of thousands of individuals, both men and women, to share their harrowing narratives. As they shared stories of harassment, assault, and abuse that happened in both social and professional spheres, they participated in a set of discursive practices to reveal their pain, condemn the perpetrators, and call out the institutions of silence which have allowed sexual aggression and exploitation to flourish in the entertainment industry and other domains around the world.
While an analysis of the discursive practices of individuals who participated in #MeToo in early October would be invaluable, in this article, I tackle responses to the #MeToo movement as understood through a series of question and comment posts (threads) on the popular pseudoanonymous website Reddit. The website hosts community-driven content that includes links, photos, and videos and is described by its creators as “the front page of the internet.” Each user on Reddit has a persistent username, but since that username can be anything, the user is not concerned with any real-world ramifications resulting from their post (Santana, 2014). The freedom from consequences provides the Redditor (a Reddit user) a wider range of expression that can reveal more honest and hostile discourse than what is shared publicly on other social media platforms or in person.
According to Mitchell, Barthiel, Stocking, and Holcomb (2016), the largest segment using Reddit for news is men in their 20s and 30s accessing the site from the United States. In an extensive ethnographic study of Reddit, Massanari (2017) describes Reddit’s “toxic technocultures” where women face “an ongoing backlash” about “their use of technology and participation in public life” (p. 330). Using #GamerGate and the #Fappening, two cases of organized hostility toward women in 2014, Massanari (2017) shows a geek masculinity on Reddit that has a “fraught relationship to issues of gender and race” because it values a “cyberlibertarian ethos” that idealizes a rational and autonomous persona (p. 332). Massanari (2017) concludes that many Redditors espouse views that “women should be shamed and deserve lower standard of privacy because of their sexual activities” (p. 341). Three years later, when #MeToo emerged across social media sites, it raised questions about the ability of #MeToo disclosures to alter existing perspectives around gender and sexual relationships. With Redditors being primarily young, White male’s posting anonymously, a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of AskReddit can contribute to our understanding of the #MeToo movement’s potential to make long-lasting societal changes in the United States.
Theorizing #MeToo as Confessional Discourse
Discourse theory decenters the speaker to understand how language helps us order our lives; Lazar (2014) describes this as a focus on “social practices that are reflected in as well as constituted by discourse” (p. 184). Utterances, rather than being studied as single authored texts, are understood as negotiated meaning from a wide range of available discursive materials, but not all materials are equally accessible. A critical approach maintains that there are underlying ideological structures that shape the ways we know how to speak. Lazar writes that “gender ideology is hegemonic in that it often does not appear as dominance at all, but as consensual and acceptable to most in a community” (p. 186). The ways that members of society talk about sexual assault and harassment are structured by underlying ideology. Everyone, even women who have been victims of rape, repeat these discourses. Wood and Rennie (1994) found this when interviewing eight women who had experienced a rape (even if they did not use that term directly). Wood and Rennie describe an “interpretive repertoire” that the women used to produce their identity and name what happened (p. 134). Under different accounts, different possibilities for understanding the situation, describing persons involved, and passing judgment emerged. Wood and Rennie found that women pulled from legal frames when disclosing to the police and medical discourse when approaching a doctor if they used the term rape. On the other hand, if the situation was described as a “date” or if the women knew their attacker, what happened had to be “worked out and negotiated in interactions with other people” (Wood & Rennie, 1994, p. 135).
Our shared understanding of rape is driven by “rape myths” used to describe and understand the situation once there is a disclosure. Benedict’s (1992) book Virgin or Vamp documents the many “rape myths” that the press uses to describe rape throughout the 20th century, with some myths going all the way back to Biblical depictions. Benedict’s (1992) list of rape myths include rape is simply sex with no harm to the victim, and the assailant could not help himself, is perverted, or of a lower class or non-White. Victims are also blamed for either deserving or enticing the attack, being promiscuous, or placing themselves in danger; as a result, they are often depicted as “sullied” (Benedict, 1992, p. 17). In 2002, Ardovini-Brooker and Caringella-MacDonald reported that “progress against rape myths has been minimal” in news coverage from 1980 to 1996 (p. 17). The final myth—that women use false accusations to manipulate men or exact revenge—appears frequently in the AskReddit comments analyzed below. Rape myths can still be seen today in the discourse used to construct identities and evaluate #MeToo statements. But why are these myths being used in exchanges on Reddit?
It may be a result of the unique nature of #MeToo disclosures. According to Mills (1997), different discourses form discourse coalitions that enable some actions while foreclosing other actions (p. 78). For example, the 2014 #NotAllMen and #YesAllWomen are examples of discourse coalitions with different political aims. #NotAllMen focuses on the perception of individual men as good or bad actors, while #YesAllWomen highlights the systemic harassment of all women. It is difficult to discuss systemic abuse when a man says he is not a perpetrator; the discourse disciplines the conversation by framing it as an individual rather than cultural problem. Individuals select from various discursive materials available to them via epistemic cultures (how we know what we know; Cetina, 2009) and moral models (how we pass judgment; D’Andrade, 1995).
The #MeToo movement is multifaceted and difficult to situate because it evokes many different moral models that are not necessarily conscious yet are used to pass judgment. In discussing sexually aggressive behavior, sexual harassment, and sexual assault, different evaluative models are deployed, whether those models focus on feminine performance, male chivalry, generational differences, party culture, and so forth. As an example, evaluative models are apparent in discourse when someone asks a sexual harassment victim why they did not leave the room, what Wood and Rennie (1994) describe as a question of control. The questioner is relying on their own experience (subject position) to evaluate right and wrong action; if the victim of sexual harassment was physically able to leave the room and did not, the question produces a model that holds the victim responsible for their treatment because it disciplines the situation. As a result, coercive financial and cultural power is diminished in light of a model that places mobility as the way to evaluate a #MeToo post.
The disclosure of victim status has traditionally been shameful and a form of confession; as Mills (1997) explains, “confession has proved useful for feminist theorists who have analysed . . . the relation between confessing and submitting to a relation of power” (p. 81). Mills demonstrates that in the past, confessing any sexual act, even where it was not a consensual act, required absolution in the eyes of religious institutions, society, and the family. I argue that the #MeToo posts are transgressive and can be understood as a form of confession that attempts to empower rather than produce shame. Mills wrote that “confession within particular politicised contexts may be empowering, setting stories of ‘failure’ and ‘self-blame’ into contexts where those same ‘failings’ can be seen to be structural problems with Western culture’s demands on women” (p. 83). The #MeToo posts attempt to shift the blame away from the individual to the society that made sexual harassment, assault, and rape both possible and permissible.
The very public nature of the #MeToo posts is also highly subversive, moving the confession from the diary and private conversations to a public and persistent online space. Pennington and Birthisel (2016) used framing theory to understand the media coverage of the Steubenville High School rape case. They found that “technology was presented as something to be feared: it can document your misdeeds, it can allow deleted or private indiscretions and crimes to be unearthed as evidence against you” (Pennington & Birthisel, 2016, p. 2445). An added dimension that complicates the #MeToo movement is its mediation and persistence on social media.
In posting #MeToo, the individual is negotiating their own position rather than being subject to the demands of historically dominant discourses around sexual relationships and workplace dynamics. As a result, the #MeToo discourses are in direct conflict with other discourses “which will force [the dominant discourses] to change in structure and content and which will make available to women and to men spaces wherein they can resist and construct their own sense of self” (Mills, 1997, p. 94). By studying the reception of the #MeToo posts on AskReddit, I approach the discourses in their “conflictual relations” (Mills, 1997, p. 99). As Massanari (2017) pointed out, Reddit has been a core of antifeminist and misogynistic activism. Because the #MeToo posts challenge older notions of responsibility for rape and sexual assault, the discourse produced on AskReddit can help us better understand what new discursive formations are emerging and how those invested in change can best respond to makes spaces of resistance possible. In the remainder of this article, I lay out my method, discuss my findings, and conclude by addressing the most common apprehensions to the #MeToo discourse.
Method
Following Fairclough’s (2001) analytical framework for CDA, in my first step, I chose to “focus upon a social problem which has a semiotic aspect” (p. 125). Fairclough proposes that an order of discourse is not “a closed or rigid system, but rather an open system, which is put at risk by what happens in actual interactions” (p. 124). While there are other discussions about #MeToo happening in other spaces on- and offline, the AskReddit threads were selected for analysis because they deal directly with #MeToo posts as social actions with pseudoanonymous speakers who can position and represent themselves in flexible ways. As my literature review shows, discourses about gender and sexual relations have been a continuing social problem. Interactions concerning who is allowed to speak, what they are empowered to say, and how they are permitted to act reveal underlying power relations (Wodak, 2001).
The four threads (an original post followed by other users commenting in reply) were pulled for analysis from AskReddit—a subreddit with 18 million subscribers dedicated to asking and answering questions of common interest; the AskReddit wiki explains that “the focus of this subreddit is to ask and answer questions that elicit thought-provoking discussions” (AskReddit, 2018). AskReddit has developed a reputation as a place for reasonable individuals to share ideas based on a combination of personal experience and expert testimony. The people communicating in this forum therefore create discourse that addresses the specific question raised while they inhabit the role of a reasonable, commonsense speaker. The AskReddit moderation policies specifically ban using the forum as a soap box to push a specific agenda (Rule 5) or to seek professional advice on medical or legal issues (Rule 6).
The four threads studied are from October 2017, January 2018, March 2018, and July 2018 (AsignFromWithin, 2018; Bigganya, 2017; CorgiSmuggler, 2018; DolorestheExplorer, 2018). The first occurred 2 days after the viral surge in #MeToo posts across Twitter, Facebook, and other social media networks. The October 2017 thread contained 75 parent comments (the direct response to the original post) and 158 children comments (responses to another user). In January 2018, a new post asked “What are your views on the #metoo movement?” and drew 200 comments, with 26 unique parent comments and 175 responses. The final two threads from March 2018 and July 2018 were much briefer with only 16 and 13 parent comments, respectively. The final two threads were also tagged “serious” by the original poster, indicating a shift in tone. Previously, those asking the AskReddit community about #MeToo assumed that others would treat the issue seriously; 6 months in, the original posters think that the question requires a serious tag. The concern about jokes and memes might indicate a more stable discursive structure open to satirization.
After selecting my corpus for analysis, I next copied all the comments into a spreadsheet with a corresponding parent and child code. Fairclough (2001) describes the second step in a CDA as a focus on semiosis, or the signification and meaning produced by the discourse. To uncover the meaning produced within the discourse, I read the comments for their overt knowledge claims, specifically attending to the way the Redditors each oriented (positioned) themselves to the #MeToo disclosures to offer an opinion on the movement. I borrow the overt/covert conceptual distinction from anthropologists who discuss overt and covert knowledge in field research (Jorgensen, 2015). Overt knowledge claims are clear to anyone reading the thread and deal with the surface meaning, whereas covert knowledge resonates on a more subtle level that conditions the interaction in ways often unseen by the interlocutors.
In Table 1, the knowledge claims are reported with an illustrative example, the number of times the claim occurred in the thread, and the sum total votes for each claim over the four AskReddit threads. All comments begin with a single point before other Redditors upvoted or downvoted the comment. While some knowledge claims were made with great frequency, they had a low or even negative vote total which showed that the utterance was received poorly by the community. The reception made visible in the responses and voting behavior indicates, as Gee (1999) described it, if the discourse has been “pulled off” by the speaker (p. 18). Where the parent comment is recognizable as part of the larger discourse yet unique to the aspects of the situation, it can both transform and reify the positions and framing of the dominant mindset. While quantitative aspects are not a traditional part of CDA, Tornberg and Tornberg (2016) used topic modeling and CDA on a 105-million word corpus pulled from a Swedish Internet forum with promising results. By using topic modeling (a statistical technique), the authors were able to show the relative magnitude of dominant representations and discursive constructions of Islam and Muslims. My use of Reddit vote totals also work as a complimentary approach that supplements the CDA effort.
Inventory of Knowledge Claims From r/AskReddit Threads About #MeToo in 2017–2018.
With the overt knowledge claims established, I next approached the corpus seeking the subtle meanings embedded in the discourse through the comments relation to other comments (Tirado & Galvez, 2007). Fairclough (2001) writes that “interdiscursive analysis” concentrates on how “particular types of interaction articulate together” (p. 126). For this step, I read the AskReddit threads looking at where the Redditors made their claims. The where of utterances (responding to others) more than the what (argument that stands alone) of the AskReddit knowledge claim reveals the shifting discourse and models for how we perceive sexual relations. To show the value of this method, take an interaction recently shared by author Jones (2017) about women receiving compliments from men; “Piss a man off today: Tell him you agree with his compliment of you.” In the resulting Twitter conversation, many women shared the same conversational pattern: First, a man compliments the woman on their physical appearance. If the woman agrees with the man without saying thank you or denying the compliment, the man then takes the compliment back and often insults the woman in the process. If the statements are taken as standalone utterances, this exchange would be bizarre. However, by understanding the utterances in relation to one another as the interlocutors position themselves, it becomes clear that the man is giving the original compliment to indebt the woman to him. When this does not happen, his power and control over the exchange is shaken which results in him lashing out at the woman. A critical eye to when claims are made is included as part of my analysis below to surface these types of insights.
The final step for CDA is attending to silences. Foucault (1978) describes repression as “a sentence to disappear, but also as an injunction to silence, and affirmation of nonexistence, and, by implication, an admission that there was nothing to say about such things, nothing to see, and nothing to know” (p. 4). In studying the #MeToo movement, it is important to understand what remains unsaid as much as what is said, and several noticeable silences are considered in the Discussion section.
Findings
In Table 1, the first stage of the CDA is shown with the knowledge claim and a textual example of it in use. In the right-hand column, the time period for when the knowledge claims were made is shown with the number of times the claim occurred and the vote totals for that claim type across each of the four threads.
Early Responses: Emotion and Definitions
The first 16 knowledge claims documented in the above inventory only appear once in response to #MeToo. These October 2017 utterances struggle with the raw emotion of the #MeToo posts, including expressions of sheer sadness, individual’s explaining why they chose not to post, and Redditors explaining that #MeToo revealed the extent of the problem to them. The October 2017 thread also contained the ideas that #MeToo generates fake sympathy, that no one is owed a #MeToo story, and that harassment is more common than the #MeToo posts reveal. There are also several ideas here that speculate about the future: Will the #MeToo posts encourage others to speak out, will men confess to their past misbehavior, or will individuals intervene in the future if they see a #MeToo moment unfolding? Three Redditors worry about how they will prepare their children. The sole mention of race over the 9-month period also appears in the October thread once, with a Redditor pointing out that #MeToo was created for minority women. Ardovini-Brooker and Caringella-MacDonald (2002) wrote that “the media tend to ignore the victimization of women of color” (p. 4). The conversation on AskReddit perpetuates the silencing of minority women by not engaging with race at all (i.e., Foucault’s [1978] affirmation of nonexistence).
A series of knowledge claims appear throughout the AskReddit threads that struggled to define a serious situation compared with something merely awkward or aggravating. While some users posted that they do not believe street harassment (e.g., catcalling) or unwanted compliments are a big deal, others pointed out that there is a great deal of individual interpretation: Some women will appreciate sexually aggressive, verbal behavior, but others will be uncomfortable or anxious. The core tension in defining a “serious” #MeToo situation is the competition between two evaluative models.
Adapting Wood and Rennie’s (1994) discussion of blame and responsibility, the AskReddit thread reveals the belief in a standard code of conduct that is contradicted by some Redditor’s claims that are grounded in an interpersonal communication model. Under the first evaluative model, the discourse posits that there ought to be consistent rules of engagement to structure interactions (such as “men can’t read minds”). The standard code of conduct model is allied with the legal definition for sexual harassment (hostile environment and quid pro quo); as a result, this way of judging the severity of a #MeToo post will eliminate interactions that do not rise to the level of a provable legal offense, and those found in violation of the standard code of conduct lose their humanity as grotesque rapists or serial harassers.
The second evaluative model, on the other hand, calls forth individuals in specific settings to use their communication skills and judgment to avoid harming others (“consent is not that hard”). Under the interpersonal framework, more #MeToo moments are accepted as legitimate expressions, and as a result, more individuals can be found responsible for bad behavior. Someone using the standard code of conduct model will fear being found responsible under the second model because the consequences in their mind are so severe. There is a gap between being found guilty or responsible, with the guilty facing much harsher repercussions and the responsible person learning and improving through reflection.
Fear of Consequences
In the initial AskReddit thread, two rape myths (Benedict, 1992) appear yet receive a negative vote score: Women are attention seeking (–65) and women are making false accusations (–33). By January 2018, however, the fear of consequences is illustrated in the claims that there are many #MeToo false accusations (+53) and that women are attention seeking (+25). In one exchange, a Redditor asked what another individual would recommend as a way to achieve justice. In response, the user wrote “I’m not too proud to say ‘I don’t know’” what would help victims or those wrongfully accused. The user then outlines a story: Meanwhile, some college kid has his whole life ruined because some drunk sorority chick hooked up with him and when she awoke sober the next morning, she realized he wasn’t the Adonis the beer goggles made him out to be, and she’d NEVER sleep with a slob like that, so he must have raped her! (Bigganya, 2017)
The next issue centers on whether the #MeToo movement is for women or both genders. In October, 10 posts argued that the movement should focus on women as victim, but by January that number had fallen to 7 posts. In contrast, in October, January, and March, numerous Redditors focused on the abuse men face with a total vote score of 142 compared with the meager 18 for those arguing #MeToo is a women’s movement. To caveat, when men share their #MeToo moments, it is a powerful act where they overcome the masculine protector role that would cause them to remain silent in the face of their victimization. That said, in the AskReddit threads, the discourse about including men is used for a different effect. While the utterance may be offered with good intentions, the discourse itself tends to discipline the situation by minimizing and silencing. A stark example of this can be seen in the exchange below from the October 17, 2017 AskReddit thread: Original Comment: I would be amazed to find a woman who hadn’t been touched or at least verbally harassed. I don’t think anyone is lying. I’m fact, there are probably many people like me that have been physically sexually assaulted and aren’t posting “me too” because we don’t want to be known. So I’d argue that more women than you see posting are actually effected [sic], not less. Response: “You could say the same for men but they’re not posting.”
By January 2018, the #MeToo movement was hitting its stride with a public record of dozens of famous men who faced both economic and legal repercussions for their behavior (North, 2018). With the long list of accused, new fears appeared in the discourse that #MeToo had become a “witch hunt.” One example illustrates the power of this discourse well: “I’m worried about the erosion of due process and presumption of innocence. A person accused of something with no proof should not be named and shamed and have their life ruined.” The Redditor is conflating economic and social consequences with legal judgment; they are attempting to discipline those who share their #MeToo posts without extensive proof. By using legal terms (“erosion of due process” and “presumption of innocence”), the victim is told not to name the person who they know violated them without extensive evidence. The use of legal terms brings that discursive frame to bear, highlighting a lack of documentary evidence over compassion for the person sharing #MeToo. Not all cases of this claim are unsympathetic to the victim. One Redditor wrote, “I think prosecuting people in the court of public opinion is a really sketchy thing. But there are also a whole lot of fucking scumbags in the world and that needs to stop.”
The discourse in the March 2018 thread continues this framework, with many Redditors calling on victims to go to the police, with one user asking “then why we made courts and law then? to bypass them?” In a similar conversational pair, two users confronted each other over the treatment of victims by the justice system (implying a justification for using public opinion rather than legal judgment). One person argued, “I’m not saying don’t take people to court. I’m saying don’t abuse the victims while you do it.” The confrontational discourse indicates a distrust on many sides for the two systems being used to mete out justice. On one hand, the courts are perceived as unfair to victims for being too rigid with evidentiary standards and too slow to pass judgment; on the other, the economic consequences from a poor public relations image are seen as unbalanced and unfair. Two users had an extended exchange discussing the merits of boycotting accused entertainers. They eventually found a neutral discursive frame of personal choice to support whoever they want in a free market, but the underlying issue of justice for the victim or clearing the accused was not handled.
The only extended conversation in the July thread was a discussion of the harsh punishment for being accused. The exchanges, stretching out from the parent comment to six children comments, featured a cascade of “I agree” statements that “the movement needs to focus on guys who are true scum. Not just every guy who ever was a asshole on a date or made a rude comment.” The community is seeking a mechanism to evaluate the severity of bad behavior and treat it with an appropriate response, yet the Redditor’s search for new tools to evaluate behavior is grounded in fear of consequences rather than taking responsibility for their actions.
A series of other new knowledge claims appeared in the January 2018 thread that bolster a discourse coalition to diminish the authority of #MeToo. Seven comments spoke about the hypocrisy of women who were either silent in the past or applauded powerful men who were accused of sexual harassment and other bad behavior. The Redditors “name names” here, calling out Scarlett Johansson for working in three Woody Allen films, the many celebrities who worked with Harvey Weinstein, and Meryl Streep for giving a standing ovation to Roman Polanski. Two comments go further by implying that the women participated in the #MeToo moments to strategically advance their own careers by “playing into the part of using sexual advances to get what they want.” These claims appear 7 times with 22 upvotes, indicating a strong reception within the AskReddit community. By showing these historic silences in the past by #TimesUp stars, these discourses unequivocally diminish the authority of other #MeToo posts because the movement is criticized as moralizing for personal gain.
Subject Positions
The roles and subject positions depicted in the response to #MeToo discourse are also changing. The “best” (highest voted) comment on the October 2017 thread received 84 upvotes, and it contained a 551-word story that describes a situation from “back in college.” The male subject received a text message from a female friend thanking him for “not taking advantage of her, and for not letting the other guy do so” after she got “really drunk at a party at my apartment.” The male subject repeatedly claims no memory of the event, but “some guy” had entered the room and suggested raping the friend; he promptly kicked him out of the apartment. The rest of the comment is a reflection on how “desperate the situation must have felt for her,” a personal challenge to take “a very serious look at the way I conduct myself, both around women, and in conversations with other men about women,” and a call for “every single person who reads this to do the same.”
The comment blends different narrative tropes that allow us to read different models from the discourse. A male savior rescues a thankful (if imperfect) damsel in distress from a gross rapist who is finally removed from the space. The male subject shows empathy for the female friend’s position and reflects on his own behavior in the situation. The narrative follows traditional models for gendered behavior and makes the perpetrator, “some guy,” unknown and atypical even as the subject writes “they aren’t all neck-beards and predators.” At the same time, the comment calls forth the desired reflection about sexual relations without the specter of consequences or punishment. After all, the male subject is the savior in his story, accruing to him the power to call for self-reflection from others in this manifestation of discourse.
The popularity of the comment, especially when compared with other narratives told from the victim and perpetrator perspective, affirms the community’s desire for discourse that avoids the guilt, shame, anger, and resentment that arise from other subject positions entangled in the #MeToo discourse. The responses “<3 < 3 <3 < 3 so grateful for the way you are considering this situation” and “as a fellow man . . . I would like to thank you for upholding what it really means to be a true ‘man’” reveal the parent comments heteroglossic (double-voiced) nature (Bakhtin,1935/2004). The discourse speaks to a wide range of people while sharing the core message that change is needed.
Discussion
After the public cascade of #MeToo posts across social media channels in October 2017, there have been calls to change sexual relations in our society. The focus is on those in positions of power (whether physical, financial, and social) who take advantage of those in lower positions. Whether the coercion comes in the form of sexually aggressive language, groping, harassment, assault, or rape, the message is now clear: It happened to #MeToo, but not anymore. With this powerful new discourse now circulating, there have been challenges. While this study revealed nothing as grotesque as Massanari (2017) observed through ethnographic study of #GamerGate or the fappening, which included doxing (sharing someone else’s private or identifying information) and harassment of women organized through Reddit, the AskReddit discourse does contain claims that indicate a hostility toward women using #MeToo.
The initial statements shown on AskReddit were more emotional and open, but by January 2018, examples of Benedict’s (1992) rape myths were both present and highly rated. The claim that many #MeToo posts were done for attention or were false accusations consumed the threads. The AskReddit community was exhibiting backlash similar to what Ardovini-Brooker and Caringella-MacDonald (2002) observed as a result of the 1970 rape reforms that included a broader range of behaviors under the definition of rape. With #MeToo, a wider range of experiences were made public, and it forced the male Redditor to consider his past actions in light of the new call. While two Redditors openly did so in the October 2017 thread, the vast majority used calls of witch hunts, hypocrisy, and male victims to deflect from the discomfort of facing their past. This deflection is consistent with what Wood and Rennie (1994) observed: An attacker “may be uncertain about how to name his actions” (p. 132) and, therefore, he will have “strategies used to make sense of his actions and construct his identity to involve excuses and justifications” (p. 143).
Despite the early promise of the October 2017 AskReddit thread, by July 2018, AskReddit revealed the beginning of ambivalence. For the first time, you see a high occurrence of claims that #MeToo is a good movement. These statements are framing the moment or movement as over, complete, and, whether intentional or not, as no longer necessary. The substantive conversation about #MeToo has nearly disappeared within the AskReddit community by early 2019, showing the book ending function of the July 2018 discourse. In the month of May 2019, six Redditors posted questions that somehow related to #MeToo. Three posts asked about unnamed perpetrators (Arod979, 2019; KLJohnnes, 2019; Thecrookedbookworm, 2019), two posts asked about how to navigate the workplace and social life as a man after #MeToo (ChaseNJohns, 2019; Hydron11, 2019), and one post speculated about how a fictional character would be perceived in light of #MeToo (TrollsTheKing, 2019). These 6 threads averaged approximately 11 comments each: for example, minimal perceptible traction within the AskReddit community of 23 million subscribed members (AskReddit, 2018).
The critical approach allows us to further look at some of the unstated claims that are precluded by the existing discourse. The lack of a discussion about race is a noticeable silence, with only one Redditor mentioning minority women without any response from others. There was also no mention of technology. Based on Pennington and Birthisel’s (2016) work on the Steubenville rape case, the technology of social media and digital recordings became a source of fear that was used by the media to frame the story. In the AskReddit responses to #MeToo, the technology was not mentioned, perhaps because the disclosures were not happening in the AskReddit thread itself. The AskReddit community had a sense of distance between this online space and the online spaces where #MeToo disclosures occur. The distance did allow for interesting narratives to emerge such as the male friend as a savior. The new standard, where a male friend intervenes to rescue the damsel in distress, has limitations as a moral model that could be useful for evaluating #MeToo moments. Mills (1997) described a few narrow cases where confessional discourse was empowering for women, but in the case of AskReddit’s response to the #MeToo movement, there is not a great deal of change to the dominant discourses. The goal remains to “make available to women and to men spaces wherein they can resist and construct their own sense of self” (Mills, 1997, p. 94). The concern with a male friend as savior is that it does not address the male aggressor or account for woman’s own control or lack thereof in many #MeToo situations.
While AskReddit threads offer a trove of interactions for CDA, there are limitations due to the structure of the corpus and available methods. As Mautner (2005) puts it, online forums are an excellent resource for studying social processes and problems. That said, social media is massive, and millions of people spoke about #MeToo across numerous platforms in different communities and in various languages. My project is granular in comparison with the work done by Tornberg and Tornberg (2016) on discourses about Muslims on a Swedish Internet forum. Future research might look at online discourses for an extended period of time and pull interactions from other social media platforms, such as Twitter, to surface intertextual discourses and social practices across platforms and communities.
Another limitation concerns the “multiplicity of voices that can make themselves heard” in the “ephemeral” environment of online forums (Mautner, 2005, pp. 816–817). With the pseudoanonymous environment, Reddit users could be trolling (intentionally saying controversial things to get a reaction), a rhetorical purpose that complicates a discourse analysis. AskReddit is also moderated by teams of volunteers and administered by employees who have control over blocking Redditors, removing comments, and stickying posts (locking content at the top of threads). Both trolls and the Reddit governance activity can distort the integrity of the AskReddit discourse as genuine interactions about a social problem. Despite these limitations, studies of online interactions about social movements using CDA frameworks are a valuable tool.
Conclusion
By studying the response to #MeToo on AskReddit, I have shown where conflicts are emerging surrounding subject positions, who has the authority to speak, and who decides the consequences for past action. While there are calls for more inclusion in the movement, the strongest discursive frames maintain an ideal female victim (repentant), male savior, and the grotesque and rare male rapist (Wood & Rennie, 1994). Where these roles are visible in the described situation, the community generally endorses the utterance. It is where the individuals deviate from the easy subject positions that other claims are made to discipline the situation; as the roles shift or expand, there are counter claims made in response to make the discourse comfortable again. Surprisingly, the knowledge claim that men are victims too and often by female perpetrators is not made on AskReddit for the purpose of inclusivity in the movement or to support widespread change. Those claims are made strategically as a mechanism to dispel the power of the #MeToo movement as an empowering confession that calls to account the structures of a society that has silenced vulnerable people, allowed their bodies to become transactional objects, and conditioned perpetrators to expect and get away with sexual abuse.
By taking the emerging knowledge claims at face value, those who seek change using the #MeToo movement run the risk of inadvertently supporting the dominant cultural model by accepting its discursive frames rather than negotiating a new shared model for addressing sexual harassment and assault. The provocation moving forward is how we provide discursive frames that address the apprehensions about the #MeToo movement and push for change before conversations about #MeToo disappear from online interactions and public discourses.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.