THE YEAR OF THE #METOO MOVEMENT

A wave of voices makes ‘The Silence Breakers’ Time magazine’s Person of the Year,

WASHINGTON— In the span of a single day, a long-building tidal wave made political and cultural landfall, with pent-up disgust over sexual abuse against women bursting onto an iconic cover of Time magazine, washing over Capitol Hill and potentially wiping away a once-promising political career.

After solid eons, the patriarchy had a rocky few hours Wednesday.

It began with Time naming as its Person of the Year, “The Silence Breakers,” a group of women so vast as to be innumerable — the famous, not-so-famous and downright powerless who this year raised their voices against sexual mistreatment. The day ended with Democrats exploding the career of a formerly bright star: One after another, a group of lawmakers, most of them women, called on their colleague Al Franken to resign from the Senate and he has scheduled a career announcement Thursday.

That sets the stage for political standoffs ahead — with an Alabama senate race involving an accused child-molester and a president whose election was cited by Time magazine as the blow that broke open this cultural geyser.

Time’s story points to the election of Donald Trump, despite numerous groping allegations and despite the video of him bragging about doing it, for inspiring a sense of outrage reflected in the massive women’s march on the first day of his presidency. Trump was the last Time Person of the Year.

This year’s cover featured an anonymous field worker, a Mexican-born woman who picks strawberries; another anonymous woman, a hospital employee, showing just her elbow in the frame; movie star Ashley Judd, lobbyist Adama Iwu, singer Taylor Swift and engineer Susan Fowler. “The women and men who have broken their silence span all races, all income classes, all occupations and virtually all corners of the globe. They might labour in California fields, or behind the front desk at New York City’s regal Plaza Hotel, or in the European Parliament. They’re part of a movement that has no formal name,” the cover story said. “But now they have a voice.” The piece tells the story of celebrities like Judd, who sounded the alarm years ago about alleged predator Harvey Weinstein. It describes actress Alyssa Milano tweeting an old slogan, coined years ago by social activist Tarana Burke, “#MeToo,” going to bed, waking up to see 30,000 messages about women sharing abuse stories and bursting into tears.

Swift talks about her lawsuit against a DJ who groped her. She wonders what abuses must be endured by less-powerful people than her.

This is a recurring theme in the article — that millions of women experience this and can’t afford to speak out.