#MeToo is over if we don't listen to victims like Amber Heard

The backlash to the #MeToo movement was always coming. We know this because a backlash has followed every single step forward feminists have ever made. This backlash was always going to be big, too.

- Martha Gill

Not only did #MeToo threaten a status quo that props up powerful men, it threatened these men personally, and – as it seemed to some – with reckless caprice. “ If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this,” a White House lawyer said after Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations against Brett Kavanaugh were made public, “then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.”

It wasn't just men who were worried. The idea that systems that previously treated only women, minorities and lower-class men unfairly might be capable of doing the same to high-status men was unsettling to everyone.

After all, when a man is treated badly it lands with a double sense of burning injustice. Women's stories of woe are so common that they can leave us comparatively unfazed. We feel bad, but we already know women are treated unfairly. It is priced in. "[Women's stories were] all the same story, which is not to say it wasn't important. But it was boring," writes Taffy BrodesserAkner in her novel Fleishman Is in Trouble. "The first time I interviewed a man, I understood we were talking about something more like the soul." When something bad happens to a powerful man, it has not happened to a statistic. It has happened to a human soul.