Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussions of rape and sexual assault.

The #MeToo Movement is a social awareness campaign that aims to bring light to widespread sexual assault and rape culture. Individual victims of sexual assault and/or abuse publicize their own experiences using the hashtag #MeToo on social media platforms such as X (formerly, Twitter) to highlight the enormity of the problem and to express solidarity with one another. #MeToo was founded by Tarana Burke, an activist from New York, who survived rape and sexual assault as a minor. Burke used the phrase “me too” on Myspace to promote “empowerment through empathy” amongst women of color who had experienced sexual violence. In 2014, Burke asserted that “‘me too’ is a movement to, among other things, radicalize the notion of mass healing. As a community, we create a lot of space for fighting and pushing back, but not enough for connecting and healing” (Guerra, Cristela. “Where’d the #MeToo initiative really come from? Activist Tarana Burke, long before hashtags.” The Boston Globe, 17 Oct. 2017).

#MeToo was launched into the realm of international notoriety in 2017 when actor Alyssa Milano responded to several allegations of sexual abuse that had been made against film producer Harvey Weinstein, including by Italian model Ambra Gutierrez and American actor Rose McGowan. In October of that year, two groundbreaking articles published by The New York Times and The New Yorker revealed three decades' worth of sexual abuse allegations and court settlements involving Weinstein as the perpetrator. The following month, a group of Weinstein’s victims published a list of over 100 instances in which Weinstein had allegedly engaged in sexual abuse. On Twitter, Milano made a post encouraging other victims of sexual violence to respond with the hashtag #MeToo. In November 2017, CNN reported that 2.3 million posts had been published on Twitter using the hashtag and that they had received a total of 77 million interactions—reposts, reactions, and comments (Fox, Kara. “#MeToo’s Global Moment: The Anatomy of a Viral Campaign.” CNN, 9 Nov. 2017).

Dederer began her work on Monsters at the height of the #MeToo movement—a context she references frequently throughout the book. “I often think about the strange fact that it was Harvey Weinstein who brought us into this new era,” she writes,

It’s not like we were short on reasons to have a collective rage-fest: the Cosby trial, as I mentioned, had been going on for some time; we’d also had stories about Bertolucci, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, and of course the seemingly never-ending Trump accusations (37).

The alignment between her subject matter and the concerns of the movement, she insists, is coincidental in timing, but serendipitous. At a time when the popular discourse was focused on how best to hold public figures (many of them artists) accountable for predatory behavior, Dederer’s attempt to tackle predators of the art world was particularly relevant. Not all of the “monsters” she addresses in Monsters are sexual predators, and so the book diverges from #MeToo in its scope of condemnation, but the spirit of the movement certainly informs the spirit of the book.