It's quite tragic. But it's also good to figure out with great care where exactly the backlash is coming from and why it is coming, because if you get that wrong you can't even tell how to make progress rather than drive regression--and you also might misjudge how much and even whether there is opposition.

Firstly, the worst change for women's rights probably had nothing to do with #MeToo at all. It's almost entirely politics. The Democrats had several opportunities to attempt to enshrine Roe vs Wade as national legislation, but instead chose to attempt more expansive rights that they knew Republicans wouldn't go along with, so as to make Republicans look bad. Politically, this is a good strategy: reproductive rights roughly on par with Roe vs Wade are overall popular among Americans. However, the Supreme Court doesn't just follow political opinion. The right wing has been trying to change things through the court forever and they finally managed to get enough right-wing justices on the court to re-examine what was always, honestly, a pretty shaky decision legally (even RBG argued that it was not the right way to justify abortion rights). And then it was too late, game over--rights gone, just like that. Not protected by the people who decided that the rights of a developing ball of cells were more important than the rights of women. But also not protected by the people who decided that playing the politics of the rights of women was more important than women themselves. It's quite awful. But it's not really to do with #MeToo or a backlash of any sort--the wheels were set in motion on that one decades ago, and it just happened to play out now.

Secondly, my impression is that the largest share of the actual backlash had nothing to do with #MeToo at all, but rather the company that #MeToo was willing to keep. The loudest portion of the progressive wing was loudest about #MeToo, but also about a variety of other issues, pronouncing extremely harsh judgment often if all one did was fail to judge others as harshly as they did. Furthermore, they gleefully adopted a variety of insulting-sounding terminologies while maintaining that if anyone felt insulted, they were too ignorant to understand what it really meant (i.e. double down on being insulting). The same people who insist that "blacklist" mustn't be used because of the negative connotation have no problem with blaming the ills of everything on the "patriarchy" despite the obvious connotation from "patri" that all men are to blame. (It's not like this is the only option. Riane Eisler used "dominator culture" instead, but the intuitively-offensive-to-men "patriarchy" won out.) Judging people harshly is an incredibly effective way to elicit backlash. And, yes, there is a lot of backlash against everything associated with this perspective, including #MeToo because it's identifiably part of the cluster.

This is almost irrespective of how good or bad any of the ideas are. If someone is correct but self-righteously nasty about it, you'll get a lot of people reflexively reacting to the self-righteous nastiness without taking the time to address the truth of the matter. However, there is no obligation to be self-righteously nasty--it's simply succumbing to one set of human failings while judging others for theirs.

There's also backlash directly against #MeToo. Some of that is avoidable, some not.

But the fraction of people (men, mostly) who actually think that sexual abuse or mistreatment of women or that silencing women's voices is a fine thing is small compared to the fraction who wish it would stop. The question is how to tap into that broad positive desire in an actionable way. "Stay agreeable" doesn't get it done. But the opposite, "be disagreeable," also doesn't get it done. "Build widespread resolve" is the only way.