Among the Akan-language speaking people of Ghana, we have a maxim that runs as follows: “Anytime that you point the accusing index-finger at another person / somebody else, your remaining three fingers point squarely at you,” that is, the accuser him-/herself. This maxim or its original author or philosophical observer ought to also have added that “The thumb is often seen tamping down the three accusing fingers as well,” perhaps emphasizing the obviously greater guilt of the accuser. Anyway, about a year, or so, ago when the platoon of Hollywood women actors – these days women are also called “actors,” as increasingly the word “actress” has come to be envisaged to pejoratively connote something sexually demeaning – launched the #MeToo Movement/Campaign with an unprecedented vengeance, I told my students that judging by the sinister-looking manner in which things were going, there was bound to be a vehement backlash down the pike, in the offing, against some of these self-righteously indignant-posing female accusers, particularly some of those women who had come out virulently accusing the Hollywood mogul and film director Mr. Harvey Weinstein of rape and sexual harassment in a manner that made it seem as if nearly all the alleged victims were angels or passively innocent in their participation in these patent acts of criminal depravity.
I made my observation far less because I believed that Mr. Weinstein was, somehow, innocent of the legion charges brought against him by the alleged victims than the quite obviously logical fact that Mr. Weinstein’s accuser-victims were so insistently self-righteous about the entire issue or episode and their involvement in the same that the critically thinking observer began to be observed to be beginning to critically or seriously question whether these human-adult alleged women victims had absolutely no responsibility, whatsoever, to wisely and fiercely protecting themselves against such acts of indescribable humiliation and downright depravity. I had began to wonder in this cognitive direction because it was beginning to seem quite clear to me that the career choice or choices clearly made by many of these women, who now proclaimed and projected themselves to be hopelessly passive and vulnerable as they claimed to be was, for the most part, at least as far as I could make out from my complete outsider’s perspective, not one that had been forcibly thrust on these women who had already constituted themselves into a steamrolling juggernaut of a movement called the #MeToo Campaign.
I suppose my “reactionary” thought or thinking process which, in retrospect, appeared to be male-centered or “phallocentric,” as the term is more commonly used in academic circles, in retrospect, also appeared to be male-chauvinistically defensive and had cropped up almost vengefully in my thoughts because in the recent past I had myself been brought up on purely trumped up charges of sexual harassment, where I presently work and have been working for more than two decades now. To be certain, the most outrageous of these sexual-harassment charges brought against me regarded Ghana’s longest-reigning First Lady, to wit, Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, whom the wife of the first African-American President of my college who, by the way, I had never met and was never to ever meet, nevertheless, had accused me of having sexually harassed Mrs. Agyeman-Rawlings primarily because of a news commentary column that I had written and published about the latter, largely having to do with Mrs. Agyeman-Rawlings’ widely alleged shady dealings with some Chinese business moguls who, according to the news reports on which my column had been based, might have been helped to literally to take the Ghanaian taxpayer to the cleaners.
You see, Dear Reader, we are talking about a woman who colluded and collaborated with her revolution-mongering junta-leader husband to cause the summary liquidation of several former Ghanaian military rulers by firing squad, some of these victims, for taking out the piddling housing loan sum of some GHȻ 50,000 (Approximately $ 25,000 USD). In my article, in whose introductory paragraph I had prefixed a caveat, to the effect that I had been compelled to use intemperate language that I would ordinarily not have used, but for the imperative necessity of setting the records straight, I had simply alluded to what I metaphorically termed as the “gold-gilt lacy undies” of the former First Lady. I was also charged with being guilty of something called “Ageism,” as in “Sexism.” The real architect of these charges, I would shortly demand and be told was an aide of Mrs. Rawlings’ by the name of Ms. Rosemary Forson. The charges would be later withdrawn by the Affirmative Action Officer of my college, at the instance of the extant President of my college. I would later learn, upon enquiry, that the “power couple” at my college had struck a fast friendship with the bloody old couple in Ghana in the wake of which they had promised their criminally vindictive friends of their intention to teach me an indelible lesson in respect and professional integrity.
I am writing this column in reaction or response to a news report that I read a couple of days ago in the American (or US) Edition of the British-owned Guardian newspaper captioned “Asia Argento Accused of Paying Off Actor Who Says She Sexually Assaulted Him Aged 17” (8/20/18). In the afore-referenced news story, Ms. Asia Argento, now 42, an Italian-born Hollywood-based actor whose father, we also learn, is a renowned movie director, stands accused of having sexually assaulted her much younger former movie costar by the name of Jimmy Bennett (or James Bennett), when the latter was just 17 years old and the former was only five years old.
*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs
The views expressed by this author remain solely their own and are not to be taken as the view of the Editorial Board of www.africanewsanalysis.com, www.zongonews.com and ZongoNews Radio & TV