Anyone familiar with the history of the Soviet Union will be suspicious when some political groups begin to claim moral superiority over others. Such claims always evoke the propagandistic juxtaposition of the “decaying West” and the “flawless” Homo Sovieticus. The #MeToo movement’s insistence on the fundamental infallibility of the victims of sexual harassment, combined with truculent claims to the higher moral ground, seem reminiscent of Soviet rhetorical extremes of rectitude and wickedness. To establish their moral purity conclusively and unambiguously, like their Eastern Bloc counterparts, the members of the #MeToo movement cultivate their own distinct aesthetic. Such reliance on branding makes perfect sense within our society of the spectacle, but the particular aesthetic selected by #MeToo seems less than cogent. For the movement’s visuals of choice derive ultimately from religious Puritanism—one of history’s archetypical patriarchies.

It is not especially original to compare #MeToo to the Puritans. In a warning against the movement’s extremist tendencies, the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood drew a persuasive analogy between the recent moralistic purges and the Salem witch trials, during which naive young women were induced to level scrutiny-free accusations that were accepted as truth. This comparison stresses the current movement’s treacherous nature. But aside from its myopic reliance on personal testimony and reflexive prosecution, #MeToo also evokes seventeenth-century Massachusetts in its peculiar preference for Puritan iconography. Like their seventeenth-century forebears, these self-appointed guardians of sexual morality assert their power by donning severe clothing that signals their repudiation of the traditional trappings