Elizabeth Day

‘I hesitated, then I typed #Metoo’

‘Trying it on’ was the phrase, as if sexual aggression were simply a new look or hairstyle

It has been a depressing week for women. Another one. The #metoo campaign on social media, whereby women shared their stories of sexual harassment, caught my attention for the sheer weight of responses.

Well, I thought confidently, I’ve never been a victim of sexual harassment. I’m one of the lucky ones. But then I started reading strangers’ stories – of lewd bosses making unwanted advances; of groping on public transport; of feeling threatened by men catcalling in the street – and I realised that I’d experienced all of that. Obviously I had. Wasn’t that part and parcel of being a woman?

It’s an age thing, I think. I’m 38 and part of the sandwich generation of feminists. We consider ourselves lucky to be standing on the shoulders of the pioneering women who fought the big legal battles against gender discrimination: for suffrage, for equal pay (ha!) and for workplace recognition.

But we’ve also had to accept existing in an imperfectly sexist world. We’ve been raised with the societal assumption that “boys will be boys”, that a bit of inappropriate behaviour on their part is par for the course. “Trying it on” was the phrase, as if sexual aggression were simply a matter of experimenting with a new look or hairstyle.

Scrolling through the #metoo stories, I re-examined my past.

There was the man who unzipped his trousers, pulled down his underpants and started masturbating against my leg on a crammed underground train in Mexico City. It was Mexico City, I thought at the time. It was rush hour. I was invading a predominantly male space. What did I expect? Over the years, it became little more than a humorous anecdote. Later, there were always the male colleagues who wanted more than friendship, but I never felt threatened. If anything, I felt guilty about saying no and worried about the ramifications of denting their ego. There was the well-known TV personality who told me across a table precisely what he wanted to do with my nipples and later lunged at me in a lift. Yes, I felt uncomfortable, but I immediately analysed my own behaviour and wondered if I’d unwittingly encouraged it.

There was the ex who, in the heat of an argument, pushed me up against a wall, put his hands around my neck and raised his hand as if to hit me. Yes, it was frightening. But if anything,

I felt shame that I might have provoked him. I only told one person – a much older woman, who assured me this was normal. And in any case, I told myself, he didn’t actually hit me, did he?

So, I never thought I’d been sexually harassed. But when I compared my experiences to those being shared on social media by the new generation of women who are speaking out, I realised I had. It was an issue of categorisation. In the end, I typed #metoo into Twitter.

I wasn’t the only one who underwent this shift in attitude. The majority of my friends of similar age felt the same. The language used to be different, even if the actions were the same. We needed younger women to tell us it was wrong; to give us the framework by which to define it.

There’s no doubt the crisis in male sexual aggression needs addressing. But I also think there’s a crisis in womanhood that stems from a fundamental lack of self-worth. I’ve lost count of the number of accomplished female friends who do not believe in themselves on some profound level.

Where does this come from? I think it’s to do with women believing they are born with a sell-by date. If, like me, you are in your late 30s or older, the chances are you were raised in a culture where motherhood was pre-eminent and the male gaze had defined the world for centuries. There were only certain roles we were deemed suitable for – wife, mother, sexpot or spinster aunt with a gaggle of godchildren. Although times are changing, there is still a feeling that if you don’t belong to one of those categories, you are somehow strange; an unfathomable outlier.

It’s not just my age group. Teenage girls are growing up in an age of constant comparison, scrolling through Instagram and feeling somehow not enough. There is an epidemic of selfharm in our schools: a British Medical Journal study last week found a 68per cent increase in self-harm among 13- to 16-yearold girls between 2011 and 2014.

We tackle this by telling girls not that they are pretty, but they are strong. We don’t compliment them on their clothes, but on their minds. We raise them to believe they do not have to get married or have children to be complete. We teach them that being female is not synonymous with shame. And when it comes to sexual assault, we call it by its proper name.