How politics might sour the #MeToo movement

What remained of Clinton’s sex scandals was less an increased awareness of sexual harassment than increased polarization among Americans who held conflicting views of the significance of his sexual behavior, depending on their political commitments. By the end of the 1990s, Americans were well aware that they were divided by two warring understandings of sexual morality that were profoundly politicized. One side had staked its claim on public propriety and traditional virtue, wedded to a desire to oppose a president who supported abortion rights and LGBT rights, at least moderately more than his conservative counterparts. The other side, averse to moral crusading on sexual matters, valued sexual freedom and drew a line between private behavior and public concern, wedded to support for a president and his feminist spouse who favored liberal causes. These were not consistently pure philosophies—there were hypocrisies, contradictions and blind spots on both sides—but they offered genuine differences in overall priorities and worldviews. The broader war over Clinton, including but by no means limited to sexual harassment, revealed and continued to shape that divergence of worldviews extending to a whole range of gendered issues as they impinged on the political realm.