Cultures of Complaint: Protest and Redress in the Age of #Metoo

Unwanted Advances presents a treatise against American tertiary students' misuse of Title IX legislation: a provision within the 1972 Education Amendment, which protects people from discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs or activities that receive Federal funded assistance. Unwanted Advances aligns with, and pre-empts, reactions against the #metoo movement such as that led by Catherine Deneuve in France, part of a collective of 100 women who protested in a public letter against the 'puritanism' of #metoo, its inability to distinguish between sexual violence and 'a clumsy come-on,' and its infantilising of women as subjects who need state protection (Worldcrunch 1). Institutional power is not seen to correlate with erotic power relations; many analyses have commented on Garner's description of the student's physical appearance as femme fatale, vividly associating female youth and beauty with power that is both alluring and dangerous: 'a woman in the full glory of her youth, as joyful as a goddess, elated by her own careless authority and power' (58). The complaint described in this book is one of male disempowerment, abandonment and loss at the hands of multiple inimical forces: the infantilised woman who seeks institutional protection against acts of sexual harassment, her shadowy feminist supporters, institutions themselves obsessed with limiting exposure to risk, and a society where individual freedom is under threat.