The dark side of #MeToo. By Janet Albrechtsen.

This past week, some women have been reminiscing about Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech 10 years ago. … Some have contributed to a book of essays called Not Now, Not Ever, released last week and edited by Gillard. They ask what have we learned? Not enough, most conclude. …

Their feminism is for women who don’t ask different, and obvious, questions about the women’s movement, and later about #MeToo. They stick to the simple, predictable path. …

I have discovered over the past few years that when you show even a little curiosity about the wave of #MeToo stories, the allegations, the Twitter storms, and media witch-hunts, especially when you delve a little deeper into the careers and lives wrecked, you soon hear from a host of people, not just men, who have suffered, deeply and personally, in the bleak, brutally unquestioning landscape of the #MeToo movement.

People who have, for different reasons, discovered the machinery that has evolved to deal with #MeToo in workplaces, by professional tribunals, and in the media is often too blunt for people to navigate fairly or safely.

I was wrong to assume that curiosity is a baseline professional trait in journalism. Instead, it is an optional extra for many of our high-profile journalists, especially at the national broadcaster. The ABC’s Louise Milligan recently complained in a podcast chat that journalists often don’t consider other perspectives. Was this a spoof? She ignored large swathes of relevant information when pursuing rape allegations against Christian Porter. That serious failure, the subject of a lengthy complaint, has been fobbed off by the ABC. Curiosity was famously missing from her lamentably wrong allegations about Andrew Laming “upskirting”. Need one mention George Pell? …

Sure, some men need to be held to account.

There is another side though. Mostly hidden from us, happening frequently in workplaces across the country. Grown men who have had consensual relationships with grown women share with me details of their liaison, dates, dinners, emails, playful, loving texts that two people share when the relationship works. Yes, that includes nude photos, sex stuff that two consenting adults share. Thanks, iPhone.

The men also share with me the utter trainwreck of their lives when the relationship ends, and their former lover decides to make a complaint at their workplace. I am empathetic, not necessarily sympathetic. Some of these men made dumb decisions. Having a relationship with a junior worker is especially fraught after #MeToo. How lucky I am to have been that junior worker 30 years, a marriage and three children ago, when consenting adults were trusted to navigate their private lives. Work is where many people meet, date, break up, marry. …

Fairness has given way to mob mentality and bureaucracy:

After #MeToo, there is a troubling pattern: women lodging a workplace complaint after a private, consensual relationship ends. And when that happens, the grey and messy nuances that make us human are discarded. In the frequent battle between “she says she was harassed/coerced” versus “he says it didn’t happen/she consented” women often have the upper hand in the #MeToo machinery of the professional workplace, and in a media cycle some women use.

Amber Heard was able to put her side, and Johnny Depp too, in a court, indeed several courts, where rules have been tailored over centuries to provide a fair trial. The overwhelming impression, once both sides had their say in courtrooms, was of an unholy mess — with both sides behaving badly on occasion.

But most people don’t get to tell their side against a background of the presumption of innocence, reasonable doubt and evidentiary rules aimed at producing high-calibre evidence. Without this legal scaffolding, there is an assumption that once an allegation is made, there must be consequences.

I hear about them: a specialist doctor suspended, even though the woman who complained to the medical board about him later admitted in court that she lied; another man, an academic, his life is in tatters, his former partner can’t seem to let go of their mucked-up relationship; a union leader who lost his job because he had two consensual relationships with two adult women at different times who appeared to relish their relationship with him — until they didn’t and he was sacked.

Lives are being wrecked because it is so damn easy to free-ride on the #MeToo movement to seek revenge over a failed relationship, or to pursue some other agenda.

Lawyers contact me too, telling me that once a public witch-hunt gets going, the mob mentality undermines not just the law, but the best intentions of the #MeToo movement to address sexual harassment, assault and rape. …

No light touch possible:

Young women contact me too, telling me about the sexual comments they endure from men in their workplace. These women want to be heard, they want to tell someone this behaviour is not OK. But not every woman wants to wreck a man’s life with a formal complaint. Not every woman wants to be a headline in a newspaper or appear on Four Corners either.

But there is no longer any sensible, fair forum for adults to react in normal ways — telling a man this is not OK, telling his superior to pull the bloke into line. And then can we all just move on.

Such is the madness around this issue, once a complaint has been made, a complainant can lose control of his or her story. #MeToo has shown this is particularly problematic for women who make a complaint. People around her, in politics, in the media, may use her story for their own reasons. She ends up being abused in different ways. And when the heavy machinery of workplace sexual harassment kicks in, notes must be taken, investigations undertaken, reports must be made up, boards must be told and penalties imposed.

We have moved from no proper machinery to deal with sexual harassment and abuse in the workplace to the full career-wrecking catastrophe.

Social media is unfair, but the legal system is too slow, heavy-handed, and expensive. A quiet word, delivered in person and not recorded (so it cannot be broadcast) sometimes works.

hat-tip Stephen Neil