On 5 October 2017, the New York Times ran with the headline ‘Harvey Weinstein paid off sexual harassment accusers for decades’. On 15 October 2017, actress Alyssa Milano tweeted, ‘If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write “me too” as a reply to this tweet’. By the following day, #MeToo had been tweeted more than 500,000 times. Women were speaking out publicly about the abuse and harassment that they had been subjected to – and they were being believed. When #MeToo first began to appear in media conversations and news headlines it was harrowing to hear those stories. But there was also a sense of optimism. Could we be seeing the end of this kind of behaviour towards women? We were reminded how brave those women were for speaking out. Perpetrators were being fired, Harvey Weinstein was being accused of sexual misconduct, and it seemed that we may have been on the cusp of a fundamental cultural shift, where to harass, assault and abuse women was no longer part of what was considered, by some, to be acceptable.

However, two years after this, there are questions as to what #MeToo has achieved. An article published in The Guardian in 2019 quoted Zelda Perkins, a former assistant of Harvey Weinstein, as saying: ‘People are beginning to speak and the water is stirring, but I don't think that the changes are as big as people would have hoped in the two-year period. When you think about how shocking all the information that we have received – and are still receiving – is, unfortunately people have already been slightly inured to it’.

This book explores the points raised in this quotation. #MeToo caught the public imagination and garnered much media attention about the abuse, assault and harassment of women, in a way that had previously been relatively marginal. But what we also know is that what these women were speaking about was nothing new. Literature in general and feminist writing in particular is full of examples of women speaking about a range of abuses that they have been subjected to. So my starting point involves perhaps more fundamental questions: will anything really change as a result of #MeToo? What is it that is stopping the sort of change people had initially hoped for?