The Raw Power of #MeToo
it feels to go through the world as a woman, the mental calculations involved in parking a car downtown or riding an elevator at night or taking a walk in the woods.
“It’s dangerous for a woman to camp alone,” I finally said at the table that night. “There are women who do it, but I’m not that brave.”
My children grew up with stories of their father’s adventures. They did not grow up with stories of mine. I didn’t tell them the story of the 16-year- old family “friend” who babysat while his parents and mine went out to dinner the year I was 11, how he followed me around the apartment, tugging on my blouse and telling me I should take it off, pulling at the elastic waistband of my pants and telling me I should take them off, how I finally locked myself in my bedroom and didn’t come out until my parents got home.
I didn’t tell my children the story of walking with my friend to the town hardware store when we were 14. I didn’t tell them that my friend used her babysitting money to buy a screwdriver and a deadbolt lock to keep her older brother out of her room at night.
I didn’t tell my children the story of my first job, the job I started the week I turned 16, and how the manager kept making excuses to go back to the storeroom whenever I was at the fry station, how he would squeeze his corpulent frame between the counter and me, dragging his sweaty crotch across my rear end on each trip.
I didn’t tell my children about the time in graduate school when I had to call the police because there was a man crouching in the bushes next to my front steps, or about the former professor who told me that my impending marriage put an end to the “longest-running act of foreplay” he had ever engaged in. What I had thought of as an interest in my career he had thought of as an unrealized act of seduction.
There is nothing unusual about these stories. They are the ho-hum, everyday experiences of virtually every woman I know, and such stories rarely get told. And maybe that’s why the avalanche of stories on Twitter and Facebook recently has been so powerful. It started on October 5, when The New York Times first broke the story of accusations of sexual harassment against the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, but it became a juggernaut 10 days later, when the actress Alyssa Milano tweeted, “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.” Within minutes the hashtag #MeToo was all over Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The numbers keep ticking up as women tell the stories of men who used their power to overwhelm or coerce them.
I don’t know any woman who is surprised by these stories, or by the sheer, vast numbers of them. But men are. Some — by one account 300,000 of them — are writing to point out that they have been harassed, too, because of course the abuse of power isn’t gender- or orientation-specific. Others have started their own hashtag: #IHearYou. These are men who have not consistently heard these stories before because for too long women have not considered them stories worth telling. Or because too often such stories are not believed.
It’s an irony worth pointing out that the novel I was telling my children about at dinner that night was “Room” by Emma Donoghue, the story of a woman who was kidnapped from her college campus and kept as a sex slave in a backyard shed. Even reading that beautiful, heartbreaking book, it had not occurred to me to tell my children the story of all the times I wanted to go camping or hiking or traveling myself but didn’t dare because I couldn’t find anyone to go with me.
We have bigger things in this country to worry about, and the #MeToo movement is bound to fade again, the way it did after the Bill Cosby allegations and the accusations against Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly. In fact, the first Me Too movement was begun 10 years ago by the African-American activist Tarana Burke.
This kind of activism inevitably moves out of the news cycle when the possibility of thermonuclear war, global warming, refugees in mortal danger, women’s ability to make decisions about their own bodies, and millions of uninsured citizens become more pressing concerns. But it’s worth noting that most of those urgent dangers can be directly attributed to a man who boasted of being able to violate women at will, and face no consequences at all.