As ‘Me too’ chorus grows, what’s next?
Many now are wrestling with how to turn hashtag into real-life change
Stephanie Chen’s fingers shook as they hovered over her keyboard. All she had to type was five letters and a hashtag. Normally, it would take less than a second. But adding her voice to the growing chorus of Facebook posts sharing stories of sexual harassment and assault in the wake of allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein felt weightier than her usual post.
As she typed, her heart raced, and her courage grew. What began as several letters and a hashtag morphed to 612 words sharing five incidents of sexual harassment she’s experienced over the course of her 33 years.
“Some of these stories, I honestly haven’t even thought about in years,” she said later. “And I think that’s what you do with
traumatic events: You repress them.”
She eventually clicked the little blue “Post” button. And just like that, she was one of more than 10 million women — and certainly thousands of men — sharing their stories in a new wave of consciousness-raising. The flood of #MeToo posts began on Sunday afternoon after actress Alyssa Milano took to Twitter, writing, “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet,” providing a wide swath of women an easily accessible avenue to show just how pervasive sexual harassment is.
The sudden and widespread attention given to the hashtag has sparked a newfound sense of urgency in demanding action to stem the prevalence of harassment and assault against women in the workplace and in their personal lives. And women across the globe now are wrestling with how to turn a hashtag in danger of becoming a pop-culture platitude into a significant moment in a larger movement.
“The ‘Me too’ on Facebook and Twitter is sort of confirmation that everybody has been harassed. Basically all women have been harassed at some point in their lives,” said Elizabeth Gregory, director of the women’s, gender and sexuality studies program at the University of Houston. “It’s not necessarily assault, though certainly there’s that, too. But there are different levels of just feeling like you have to be on your guard.”
While many expressed shock at the sheer volume of stories, statistics show there are millions of others who haven’t chimed in with theirs. In 2015, one in three women surveyed by Cosmopolitan said they’ve been sexually harassed at work, and the National Sexual Violence Resource Center reports that one in five women and one in 71 men will be raped at some point in their lives.
While Milano brought #MeToo to the mainstream this weekend, it’s been lingering around the edges of social media for close to a decade now, initially conceived by feminist activist Tarana Burke with the same goal in mind. Still, Gregory was not surprised the tipping point for bringing “Me too” into the mainstream centered on an issue born from Hollywood.
“The dynamics in Hollywood are so weird, because it’s a whole system about selling women’s bodies, and it’s all about narratives of violence, and stories about men being powerful and getting whatever they want,” she said. “So in order to really make change, you’re going to have to make a bigger structural change, and maybe put some women into more positions where they’re deciding what stories get told.”
But that goes beyond Hollywood.
‘Proud’ but ‘heartbroken’
“I was proud of how many women stepped forward and were willing to say, ‘Me too,’ but I’m also a little heartbroken, because my God, we still have this many stories,” said Denise Hamilton, founder of Watch HerWork, a Houston organization that aims to empower women in the workplace.
“How is this possible?” Hamilton continued. She framed it as a question, but she’s pretty sure that, like Gregory, she knows the answer: A lack of women in leadership roles across industries, which often can lead to a culture of acceptance.
“It’s not just Hollywood, or tech,” she said. “It’s about power, and the fact that we have a culture in this country that values the high-performer. If you’re a high-performer, you get a blank check for bad behavior, and that’s a consistent theme across industries.” Even in academia. Ten years ago, as a senior at the University of Houston, Ashley Duret linked up with a professor who had an open space in his molecular biotechnology lab. She spent the summer volunteering there hoping to learn fundamentals and earn recommendations that could secure her a spot as a graduate student.
As an undergrad volunteer, she was partnered with a graduate student who served as her unofficial supervisor.
“After a couple weeks, he just started making rude sexual innuendos and comments,” said Duret, who is now 33 and works in the Texas Medical Center. “I just laughed it off.”
She was used to that. She was 22 — blond and cute — sick of feeling like people wrote her off for her appearance.
“I’d rather you underestimate me and have me prove you wrong. But that doesn’t mean treat me like a piece of meat,” she said. “It was really important to me to prove — even to myself — that I was more than a blond girl from Texas.”
But that got harder as the innuendos increased in frequency. Then, one day, Duret said the graduate student slapped her butt when she bent over to adjust something on her microscope.
She went to her adviser, who she said gave the graduate student a verbal warning. And while Duret knew it would have been better to have paperwork completed, she didn’t want to make a big fuss — especially when she needed her professor’s recommendation to get into graduate school. She put the incident behind her. But a few months later, she went up to the roof of the research building to take a breather.
“All of a sudden, I turned around and he was there,” she said. The graduate student stood between her and the exit.
“He grabbed my shoulders and full-on open-mouth kissed me.”
He wouldn’t let her go, so she kicked him, scurried around him and ran downstairs. Then she filed paperwork to switch labs.
“I didn’t want this to be the thing that was dictating my life choices, so I said I was choosing the new lab because of the science,” she said. But she knew that wasn’t the whole truth. And she knows she isn’t alone. A 2014 survey found that 72 percent of scientists had directly observed or been told about inappropriate sexual remarks at work.
She finished her doctorate in four years and has had a successful career. But she’s never forgotten this pivotal moment.
So she wrote “Me Too” on her Facebook wall this week. It felt empowering, but it also left her asking: What’s next?
‘This is a power issue’
Duret’s not the only one struggling with how to transcend this social media moment.
“I’m not sure how that happens,” said Hamilton of WatchHerWork. “I know that the noise matters. Raising the alarm matters. I know that as brave as it is to say ‘Me Too,’ we have to couple that with some action. And unfortunately the action is not ours.”
Not as long as men are the primary leaders in American society — which they are, given the fact that only 21 percent of U.S. Senate seats belong to women, and women account for only 6 percent of CEOs among Fortune 500 companies.
“This is not a female issue. This is a power issue,” Hamilton said. “And I think we’re just at the end of the beginning. We need to tie a rope and hold on. Sociological change takes time, and what we need to do is ask people to change who the leader is.”
There are also smaller steps along the way, said Gregory from the University of Houston.
“Just saying, ‘Yes, me too,’ is one step. It creates a chorus,” she said. “But then the chorus has to come together and say, ‘What about you?’ Those of you who think this is OK, or treated this as OK, how are you going to make it not OK?”
That’s the idea that floated through Chen’s mind as her fingers hovered over the keyboard Monday night, preparing to tell her social network that she too was a “Me Too” woman.
She started with unwanted comments from a teacher in high school and wound through incidents she never reported, because she either “didn’t want to be rude” or felt someone would take it as “no big deal.” Finally, she wrote about an incident from this summer. She was pumping gas near her Houston townhouse when she spotted a jogger across the street.
“I saw him look at me,” she said.
She watched the jogger cross the street to where she stood. He came up behind her, so close she could feel him, and attempted to pump her gas while asking personal questions.
She froze. Raised both hands, palms facing forward. Backed away.
“You’re making me uncomfortable, and you need to back away,” she told him.
It was the first time she’d said something in a situation like this. The first time she’d taken control.
And to her surprise, he backed away. He was slow at first, but soon he returned to a jog. And then he was gone.
“I said something that time,” she said.
And she’s saying something now, with her “Me Too” post and promises not to be silent in the future.
“That’s the difference,” she said.
And that gives her hope.
“The ‘Me too’ on Facebook and Twitter is sort of confirmation that everybody has been harassed. Basically all women have been harassed at some point in their lives.” Elizabeth Gregory, director of the women’s, gender and sexuality studies program at UH