The #MeToo campaign has been powerful, long overdue and immensely important. It has heightened awareness of the ways in which women are subjected to sexual assault, harassment and abuse; and, as also evidenced by Laura Bates's Everyday Sexism Project, for a lot of women this takes place on a daily basis. So what do we do with this cumulative knowledge? And what have we learned? It would seem that we have been reminded of the sheer power of women speaking up collectively. This collective voice, in all of its diverse forms, does have the capacity to reshape the landscape. We have also seen that some women are being believed. But how do we ensure that all women have the opportunity to give voice to their experiences, and moreover, not be subjected to them in the first place? To ask these questions is to ask about the nature of power and the way in which it is structured, maintained and evolves within our society. To ask questions about the way in which power works is to ask political questions. To ask political questions is to ask who benefits from the power relationship? Who wins and loses?

What the #MeToo movement, and its forerunner MeToo exposes are the ways in which women lose out in a system which is structured around particular kind of masculine interests (those of white, heterosexual, middle/upper-class men with a sense of entitlement) and their preservation. These men (as discussed in the introduction) stand to benefit in our current Western and capitalist structures. As will be noted in the following chapter this is nothing new. And if these structures of power are nothing new, then what #MeToo and the issues it brings to the table will highlight are the ways in which these masculinized power structures have evolved to maintain this type of domination (which also disadvantages men who do not fit the ‘mould’).

To inform this discussion, this chapter reflects on the emergence of the MeToo movement and the #MeToo campaign as bringing to light the wider phenomenon of sexism that is part of the society that we live in, and which manifests itself in a range of differing ways.