Introducing Jian Ghomeshi, New York Review of Books contributor. My loss, no doubt, but I had never heard of Ghomeshi until last week, when the literary magazine published his mournful confessional essay Reflections From a Hashtag. But he might yet come to be widely known as an inspiration to opponents of #MeToo.

The piece, dwelling on public disgrace related to recorded sexual misdemeanours, appears a year after the allegations that gave rise to the #MeToo tide of disclosures and as a principal attraction in an issue whose cover line is “The Fall of Men”. Since the magazine’s newly departed editor, Ian Buruma, expressed disquiet about “a general climate of denunciation” brought about, he suggests, by #MeToo, it seems fair to conclude that the magazine indeed intended, under his leadership, to portray the moment when women collectively spoke out about male harassment as yet another misfortune for his long-suffering sex.
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From the start, the very proliferation of such reports, protesting any molestation short of rape, simply confirmed to participants in the #MeToo backlash that it’s all hype, hysteria, the work of anti-flirting man-haters. According to this narrative, Buruma’s departure, like the recent stories about Brett Kavanaugh, can only be further evidence of a #MeToo-created “climate of denunciation” (to borrow the former’s elegant synonym for witch-hunt), as opposed to indicating how much more there is yet, after a whole year, to learn.