#MeToo, no disclaimer needed

Last night, a phenomenon unfolded on Facebook and Twitter, as one woman after another changed her status to "Me Too" or #MeToo, announcing publicly that she had at one time been sexually harassed or assaulted. I posted my own "Me Too" around 8:00 pm, and watched as friend after friend followed suit. Dave Bonta called it "a harrowing evening." Yes, but I was not as surprised as some of the few men to comment have been. Neither were the other women. Why? Because we've all known, or at least suspected, how endemic this is, and how difficult and futile it has been to speak out about it in our own lives. Even so, as I saw the status updates from women I've known and cared about, online or in person, my primary emotion was sorrow. I could handle the fact that it had happened to me, not once but several times. But seeing that it had also happened to so many dear female friends made me weep. "It's practically all of us," I wrote to a friend in Nova Scotia. "I am so sorry. Me too," I wrote to many others, and many wrote the same to me.

It has been painful, but freeing, to see this groundswell of courage and solidarity. If the revelations about Harvey Weinstein and the American Groper-in-Chief have contributed to women's solidarity on this issue, that is at least one good thing.

Then came the predictable push-backs: that we need to point out that most men are good, or that really the hash tag should be "all of us" because many men have been abused too, or that feminism has caused a lot of anger which has been directed at men and is a form of harassment.

One writer who thinks hard about these things said she was uncomfortable because "this puts the onus of speaking out / creating change on the women who've experienced harassment or assault instead of on the men who did the harassing or assaulting."

On the first points, yes, of course most men are not perpetrators. I've always had good men in my life who have loved and treated me gently. But we don't need to say that right now, and we don't need to apologize or add disclaimers: this is not about them. Why can't we hear people speaking out about a specific abuse or oppression and simply put ourselves aside for a moment and empathize with the victim and what she is saying, at significant cost to herself, and the effect it has had on her life?" Black Lives do Matter. Indigenous Lives Matter. Women's Lives Matter. Each of these should be a very simple concept. It is not about "Your Life Matters" or "All Lives Matter;" it is about acknowledging racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia and other abuses for what they are, and sitting with that, and with those who have suffered. Period. I don't expect black or indigenous people to offer me a disclaimer, nor should they. I will write a post about empathy in the future, it's something I've been wanting to do.

But for now, I want to address just the last point. As for being uncomfortable with placing women in the position of speaking out, I think we don't need to worry. Women have already shown how strong and resilient we are; we have survived millennia of being treated as property, used, harassed, and assaulted -- and then shamed and blamed. We have endured unequal opportunity, unequal pay, unequal education, glass ceilings -- and verbal abuse for being strong, smart, accomplished, and capable. We have borne children, kept food on the table and home life together while also working jobs; we've nursed the sick and dying, and cared for the elderly and the weak in the face of wars and famines and refugee crises. I think we can handle speaking out, and furthermore, we have to seize this moment and do so.

It is a delusion to expect the people, whether male or female, who hold, benefit from, and use sexual power to be the ones to correct the system: that has never worked in the history of the world. What works is when sufficient numbers of an oppressed or victimized group finally have enough courage to speak out about what has happened to them, and to stand up together for openness, transparency, and change.

In this moment of revelation, courage, and solidarity among ordinary women -- like me, and like your own sister, wife, mother, daughter, colleagues and friends --  there are just a few appropriate responses for men and women alike: "I am so sorry that happened to you. I applaud your courage. We need to do better as we raise our children." Down the road, we need to change a great deal about our society, but it starts with telling the truth about what has happened to us so that the magnitude of the problem can be revealed.

Comments

[Donna Riley]

Thank you, Beth. One reaction I've seen this morning has saddened me, and that's conversations on FB about whether women who "were lucky" (i.e, presumably that means not raped) are entitled to post it. Why do we need to determine degrees of entitlement to that status? I was "lucky", but the fear and caution generated by those early experienced have shaped my life in ways that would never occur to men. Women won't go hiking alone, or travel, or even go walking in their neighbourhood at night... I don't know that the world will be any different for my granddaughter than it was for me or my daughter, but if we don't shine a light on this, for sure it won't.

[kurt]

Thank you for this.

[Vivian]

Hi Beth, here are more thoughts. First, the Facebook faces: So any friend's posts whizzing by, and one has the choice of the WOW face (disingenuous) the LIKE thumb up (unfortunately, ambiguous), the Heart, and the Weepy face (or even the Angry face, which I'm not seeing many of on this topic....?) As I wrote on my own FB "METOO" yesterday after getting a couple of weepy faces... this is not a pity party. It is a political act. I did throw a lot of hearts around yesterday, hearts for courage and for sharing courage. Remarkable, isn't it, how memories of different degrees of bad behaviour keep coming to mind? This whole episode (the Hollywood thing, the FB phenomenon) seems to unlock a room where we kept all sorts of things safely out of mind. Leaving aside a number of times I had been "moved on" by men who did or didn't know me/ thankfully, not raped/ I also recalled this morning the only time I ever worked in Washington... a single afternoon, at a book launch... a US senator came up to me and wanted a free copy of our book. We only had five on hand and I'd been told to hang on to them. So I said no. "Young Lady Do You Know Who I Am?" That's the attitude. It doesn't count as abuse but if left a certain feeling that I Had Been Put In My Place just for trying to do my job. It was 1969. At the time, I just grokked his name tag, processed that fact instantaneously, looked up at him (and I am tall) and smiled. "Why, you're My Senator." I can't even remember whether I gave him the book or not. I just remember feeling I had never really understood privilege until then.

[Beth]

Kurt, thank you. I've been surprised how few of my male friends have acknowledged these disclosures at all, and I appreciate very much that you did.

Donna, and Vivian both: First, I agree completely about the conversations about who has a "right" to post that they've been harassed or abused -- please, do we really need to debate the degrees of these experiences? I have never been raped, thank God, but I have been subjected to a whole range of behaviors, some of which came very close to that. Still, I have also never been a woman in an office who is oogled or ridiculed or commented upon every single day for months or years: I'm very aware how humiliating that would be, and it's "only" words. Words that could affect a woman for the rest of her life.

I feel fortunate that in Montreal I don't feel afraid. I walk alone in the parks and streets of my neighborhood at all hours, and really don't worry about my safety -- in the U.S. it would be insane to do this; even in my small rural town in Vermont, I was very careful, didn't go out alone at night, carried pepper spray in the woods, had a big dog for a while, checked my back car seat, worried about parking garages...all the things you mentioned. We are very lucky to live in a place where the level of violent crime against women is so low, and I think it begs the question, "why?" Yes, most of the violent crime is domestic, and that is just as problematic as anywhere, but the incidence is less, and I think it is because people are less stressed, have greater access to basic services and basic needs, and do not live in such a consumerist, competitive, capitalistic society as the U.S. which tends to make men and women alike feel belittled and inadequate.

Vivian, we've all been reliving ugly traumas in the past couple of days, things that we had locked away in a closet. I think the sharing is healthy and necessary, but it hurts too. What FB button is appropriate? I've been both sad and angry, and filled with love for all my friends who have admitted #MeToo.

[Mardel]

Thank you. It is about all of us really, and the world we want to live in. If we don't acknowledge the problem and stand together, the future will be no better.

[Duchesse]

I read this after posting my own Me Too on my blog.

I am not in agreement with waiting for perpetrators of harassment or assault to take the lead, because the acts women are describing is the opposite of courageous, responsible, and conscious behaviour, the kind of life stance those who did it did not display at the time. Are we to think, Oh, totally changed now?

I would l•like• to hear persons who have confronted and regret past behaviour talk about that as well, but I will not wait for them. I have heard some persons who have committed various crimes and then undergone a spiritual transformation describe their process of change, it is compelling.

It is not a cliché to say I am sorry this happened to you, nor was it when you said it to me.

[Roderick Robinson]

It's a minefield for sympathetic men and a somewhat different minefield for women. But I must comment because I can bring one useful thing to this discussion: my advanced age (I'm eighty two).

For I can also say "Me too." On one far from rare occasion at school (a fee-paying school which sent many of its alumni to Oxbridge) the geography master had me out front of the class, compared my size of shoe with his, and then lashed me across the bum with a cane for having larger feet than his. Corporal punishment was allowed in that school as it was in other British schools in the late forties but one might at least have expected that such beatings would be confined to acts of discipline. This had nothing to do with discipline (two other overweight boys were caned for "being fat"). As far as my powers of observation and analysis have any credibility these beatings were a ploy on the part of that teacher to gain popularity with the other boys in the class.

All of whom laughed appreciatively at the spectacle.

But this isn't the point I want to make. There was nothing secret about these beatings. Not the slightest hint of censure. That particular master went on to become headmaster somewhere else (something which surprises me to this day). What would these days have warranted a jail sentence, was educational routine then.

I have no idea whether these beatings were a form of sexual abuse but they were most definitely abuse. Scroll forward and one of the depressing aspects about this subject is the length of time that can elapse between the crime and the first faltering steps towards some form of investigation. Decades in some instances. Some younger liberal-minded people must shake their heads, thankful that time has ruled out such barbarism; I agree. But as we know the past is a different country and they do things differently there. Public beatings are one of the things they do differently. In Britain they hanged a man for what would now be labelled "learning difficulties".

Recently I wrote a post condemning sentimentality, in particular the Myth of the Golden Age. Ah yes, a simpler, more innocent time when there were no smartphones. Perniciously the past is sometimes regarded as a period of greater freedom. My geography master would no doubt have agreed. I also agree that what I've just written helps not a jot.