![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
#MeToo
In the wake of the widespread acknowledgment that Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein sexually harassed a number of young women (and the publicization of the various attempts to silence these women), this weekend a whole host of female-gendered people on Facebook and Twitter posted status updates and tweeted with the hashtag #MeToo, which was meant to signify that they have also experienced sexual harassment from a male colleague or supervisor.
As much as it pains me to see that so many of my friends have been harassed, I'm happy that people are speaking up about this. This is a good step in the right direction, but the problem is that it only reinforces the accepted narrative of sexual harassment without critically addressing it.
Namely, no one is particularly surprised if a man in a position of power sexually harasses or assaults a woman. "Men are trash," the narrative goes, which is not particularly fair to (what I would assume is) the majority of men who are neither powerful nor particularly misogynistic, nor to the women who were harassed presumably because they were not constantly defending themselves against the sort of behavior that they should have expected from men. Saying "ME TOO" with no context only reiterates the narrative of men as aggressors and women as victims.
What I would therefore like to accompany #MeToo is a loud assertion that women who do report serious incidences of sexual harassment will be listened to and supported instead of alienated and dismissed. This is not a nice or happy thing to say, but I feel that, for every crapsack man who engages in overt harassment, there are a dozen women surrounding him who would rather be shitty to another woman than risk offending him.
I have a number of #MeToo stories, but one of the most upsetting involves me being ostracized by my peer group for publicly calling out a man who had been sexually harassing me and several other women in our cohort for more than half a year. None of the women in the group benefited from protecting him (quite the opposite, in fact), but the misogynistic assumption that "if a woman complains about a man then she just wants attention" was so strong that it persisted even in the face of clear and obvious evidence of sexual assault – and even in a group that primarily consisted of women who, to add insult to injury, WERE GETTING GRADUATE DEGREES IN SOCIAL WORK AND GENDER STUDIES. (For the record, it was a straight white cisgender man who eventually ended up shutting this asshole down, which was an A+ exercise of straight white cisgender male privilege.)
This is just a personal anecdote, but I think it illustrates a less accepted but still important aspect of sexual harassment, which is that it's often not a secret. It's not that people don't know that a certain man is being gross and hurting women, but rather that they silence any woman who tries to say or do something about it. "Men are trash" is all too often canceled out by "but women are crazy." Meanwhile, the harassment itself often serves to create power imbalances within female peer groups by reinforcing stereotypes of female physical and emotional weakness that many women (understandably) don't want to be associated with.
#MeToo is a good start, then, but I'd really like to see it transform into a call that demands a response: "I SUPPORT YOU."
ETA: OKAY GOOD, WE ARE HAVING THIS CONVERSATION NOW. The relevant hashtag is #IBelieveYou, but I still don't think that's enough. As I wrote earlier, everyone already knows that this sort of thing happens all the time, and "believing" that a woman is telling the truth has never been enough to make it stop happening, unfortunately.
As much as it pains me to see that so many of my friends have been harassed, I'm happy that people are speaking up about this. This is a good step in the right direction, but the problem is that it only reinforces the accepted narrative of sexual harassment without critically addressing it.
Namely, no one is particularly surprised if a man in a position of power sexually harasses or assaults a woman. "Men are trash," the narrative goes, which is not particularly fair to (what I would assume is) the majority of men who are neither powerful nor particularly misogynistic, nor to the women who were harassed presumably because they were not constantly defending themselves against the sort of behavior that they should have expected from men. Saying "ME TOO" with no context only reiterates the narrative of men as aggressors and women as victims.
What I would therefore like to accompany #MeToo is a loud assertion that women who do report serious incidences of sexual harassment will be listened to and supported instead of alienated and dismissed. This is not a nice or happy thing to say, but I feel that, for every crapsack man who engages in overt harassment, there are a dozen women surrounding him who would rather be shitty to another woman than risk offending him.
I have a number of #MeToo stories, but one of the most upsetting involves me being ostracized by my peer group for publicly calling out a man who had been sexually harassing me and several other women in our cohort for more than half a year. None of the women in the group benefited from protecting him (quite the opposite, in fact), but the misogynistic assumption that "if a woman complains about a man then she just wants attention" was so strong that it persisted even in the face of clear and obvious evidence of sexual assault – and even in a group that primarily consisted of women who, to add insult to injury, WERE GETTING GRADUATE DEGREES IN SOCIAL WORK AND GENDER STUDIES. (For the record, it was a straight white cisgender man who eventually ended up shutting this asshole down, which was an A+ exercise of straight white cisgender male privilege.)
This is just a personal anecdote, but I think it illustrates a less accepted but still important aspect of sexual harassment, which is that it's often not a secret. It's not that people don't know that a certain man is being gross and hurting women, but rather that they silence any woman who tries to say or do something about it. "Men are trash" is all too often canceled out by "but women are crazy." Meanwhile, the harassment itself often serves to create power imbalances within female peer groups by reinforcing stereotypes of female physical and emotional weakness that many women (understandably) don't want to be associated with.
#MeToo is a good start, then, but I'd really like to see it transform into a call that demands a response: "I SUPPORT YOU."
ETA: OKAY GOOD, WE ARE HAVING THIS CONVERSATION NOW. The relevant hashtag is #IBelieveYou, but I still don't think that's enough. As I wrote earlier, everyone already knows that this sort of thing happens all the time, and "believing" that a woman is telling the truth has never been enough to make it stop happening, unfortunately.