ORLANDO, FL — It may have been inevitable when we all began speaking in the currency of hashtags and catchy phrases. But a fellow named Pieter Hanson — by every account an upstanding young man who respects women and excels in his various endeavors — found his 15 minutes of fame for #HimToo, a movement he doesn’t embrace. At all. No matter what his mom says.
Mom got a little Twitter happy, starting a family row with the post that featured a photograph of Hanson posing in his Navy uniform. “This is MY son,” she began. “He graduated #1 in boot camp. He was awarded the USO award. He was #1 in A school. He is a gentleman who respects women.”
It’s all good, right? Sure. But then she dropped the bomb.
Hanson told The Washington Post he was initially too fired up to talk with his mother about what in the world possessed her to attach the #HimToo hashtag to a social media post that claimed — falsely, Hanson says — he “won’t go on solo dates due to the current climate of false sexual accusations by radical feminists with an axe to grind.”
“I VOTE,” the tweet concluded. “#HimToo.”
The Friday post gained traction amid a contentious confirmation process for Brett Kavanaugh, the newest associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Kavanaugh angrily defended himself against decades-old allegations of sexual assault, painting himself as a victim whose life had been ruined and, unwittingly or not, reframing #MeToo as a witch hunt against the men of America under the general umbrella of #HimToo.
It’s a real thing, and was before the Kavanaugh hearings and before President Trump declared it a “scary time” for men in America that and said men are now “guilty until proven innocent.”
No way is that him, says Hanson, whose phone started blowing up with messages about the post while he was taking an exam last Friday.
He is a staunch supporter of #MeToo — the antecedent of #HimToo that brought forth a brigade of women who said they’d been sexually harassed, assaulted and held back because of their gender.
“It doesn’t represent me at all,” Hanson, a 32-year-old Navy veteran studying entrepreneurship at the University of Central Florida, told The Post. “I love my mom to death, but boy . . . I’m still trying to wrap my head around all this.”
He also created his own Twitter account with an appropriate handle — @Thatwasmymom — to set the record straight.
“Sometimes the people we love do things that hurt us without realizing it,” he tweeted. “Let’s turn this around. I respect and #BelieveWomen. …”
Hanson’s mom removed the tweet and deactivated her account after Hanson’s brother, Jon, and his grandmother intervened. And she has been properly shamed on Twitter in dozens of “my son” tweets spoofing hers. Here’s one of them:
And, don’t worry, Hanson told NBC he has no intention of disowning his mother — something she was worried about — and they’ve worked the whole thing out.
Photo via Shutterstock
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