As I scroll my timelines and see the sheer
magnitude of #MeToo posts, I am shocked and saddened – even women who don’t
usually participate in the online feminist conversation are posting the hash
tag, some with harrowing stories, others just a simple declaration, still
others with a laundry list of humiliations endured over a lifetime.
But there is no need for my shock. I know. We know. We whisper. We talk about who
to avoid in our social circles, whether that’s the Hollywood scene, the arts
and cultural scene in Toronto, the anarchist movement in Halifax, our student
council, the management team at work – we all know, and we all know we’re not
alone.
But we’re made to feel as though we are. We
individually take note of who not to be alone with. Silently pity those who
fail to heed or were not warned sufficiently, those who think they are above
being treated that way only to be proven sorely mistaken. We cast our eyes away
with the thought, ‘Thank god it wasn’t me.’ Don’t care to finish, but it comes
automatically: ‘This time.’ We talk about and we know and we catalogue more
open secrets than we care to acknowledge – and we fail to hold the men in our
lives to account.
I’m not mad at women. I’m mad that this is
the only recourse we have – trading on our pain, when oftentimes we’ve already
laid it bare to those men and women who claim to love us, only to be asked, “Are
you sure?” and told “It’s not that
bad. At least you weren’t really
assaulted,” because we were assaulted by a boyfriend, a friend, an
acquaintance, a boss or a colleague, not some unknown monster lurking in the
shadows of the night. Sure, we were smart enough not to traverse that back
alley. But not quite smart enough to not send mixed signals, to not smile, to
not want a career or education or something better.
Why is it so hard for these men we love and
cherish to realize these are real assaults, too? Because they sound too much
like something they have done? Mistakes they have made, miscommunications they
have experienced with their own girlfriends, wives, and colleagues? Is that why
even some women in our lives can’t possibly recognize what their lover,
husband, father, brother has done or been accused of doing is harassment,
abuse, assault, rape? Our collective imagination tells us only the boogeymen do
such horrendous things, when stats and facts tell us it’s actually the men who
live in our own homes.
My husband, my brother, my father, that guy
I went to high school with who seemed cool and nice – How many #MeToo’s do they
own? It’s far time we shift away from revelations – and focus on asking the men
in our lives to step up and own the #MeToo’s that belong to them. Demanding the
men in our lives to step up and acknowledge that what they maybe-if-we’re-being-generous
thought was a game – life is defined by the battle of the sexes, is it not? –
was actually a trauma inflicted upon someone else, for their own pitiful gain.
It is only a collective of individuals that
can change this tide. Institutions and social circles cannot roust these
attitudes alone – colleges, Hollywood, sports associations, political parties –
do not exist in a vacuum. The answer is in how we raise our children, how we
place value on people as though they’re commodities, how we teach girls to not
make a scene, how we teach boys they’re entitled to a girl’s time and attention
and body. And it’s so much more. Until we start demolishing our ideas about men
vs. women and rebuild our ideas of what a person – what each and every person – is from the ground up, the
majority of women (if not all) will have a reason to say #MeToo.