Maggie O’Brien

This paper analyses the recent viral #MeToo and #ShoutYourAbortion campaigns and argues that examining them illuminates our thinking about privacy and standing.The paper argues that one of the aims of these campaigns was to debunk the view that women did not have standing with respect to matters concerning sexual harassment and reproductive care. The myths the campaigns sought to discredit – myths about sexual harassment and assault and abortion – involve victim-blaming, and one thing we do when we victim-blame is deny that the victim had standing. This paper also argues that women proved they had standing through these campaigns by revealing what was private. This is, I argue, a way of ‘exploding’ the private sphere as MacKinnon famously put it. By looking to these campaigns, we can see that their strategy relied on the value of privacy.

The charge of hypocrisy is a peculiar kind of accusation: it is damning and ubiquitous; it is used to deny the hypocrite standing to speak; and it is levelled against a great variety of conduct. Much of the philosophical literature on hypocrisy is aimed at explaining why hypocrisy is wrongful and worthy of censure. We focus instead on the use of the accusation of hypocrisy and argue for a revisionary claim. People think that hypocrisy in politics is bad and that calling it out is good. Our novel claim is that even if hypocrisy in politics is bad (and that is a big if), calling it out is worse. We give a feminist case as to why accusations of hypocrisy are problematic. We also go further and claim that hypocrisy is a ubiquitous and perhaps even a necessary and beneficial part of political debate in liberal democracies. We also consider and reject candour as a possible alternative solution to hypocrisy in public debate. We argue that requiring people to be candid is not necessarily a good solution because it will often require one to divulge what is private when there are good reasons not to do so.