'Rosalind Smith’s essay, ‘Cultures of Complaint: Protest and Redress in the Age of #Metoo,’ begins and ends with a reflexion on gendered genres of complaint. In contrast to the early modern female complaint that upheld the romantic and marital mores it lamented, the complaint emblematic of the ‘#metoo’ and ‘#timesup’ movements seeks redress: it demands at least reparations for some wrongdoing, be it through legal process or not, and in certain cases the rectification of the structural or institutional inequality that enables sexual harassment. And yet, as Smith notes, feminist efforts to make the complaint a catalyst for political change are thwarted by the kind of defence of men accused of sexual harassment at play in Laura Kipnis’ Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (2017) and one of its predecessors, Helen Garner’s The First Stone: Some Questions about Sex and Power (1995). These books, the former from the United States and the latter from Australia, cast specific men accused of sexual harassment as the legitimate complainants, wronged by the system tasked to investigate and rule on their alleged wrongdoing. Whereas the early modern complaint, relayed by a male narrator, made the female complainant a target of empathy but maintained the patriarchal status quo, Kipnis and Garner’s ventriloquising of the male complaint makes men targets of empathy to protect the patriarchal status quo.' (Introduction)
