It's Way Past Time For Men To Do Better (#metoo)

Originally published November 21, 2017

I wrote the below a few weeks ago, when the women assaulted by Harvey Weinstein were just coming forward, and when the #metoo movement felt sort of raw. Now that a steadily rising number of women (and a few men as well) have come forward, and powerful men revealed to be creeps are tumbling like dominos, I have gotten a bit numb to it all. I am not surprised. The fact that harassment, sexual objectification, and misogyny is a pervasive cancer that reaches every industry is not shocking; it makes sense with how society treats women in general. The only thing that surprises me is that for once, people seem to care.

This is an important cultural moment. It is a moment of empowerment, especially for women. But it is also a moment of reckoning, especially for men, who all benefit from the patriarchy and the dehumanization of women that comes from it. I wanted to share my initial reaction, because it still gets to the heart of the issue. 

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I feel a lot of ways about #metoo. 

While I acknowledge that it's useful, it enrages me that men don't already know the extent of the problem with sexual harassment and assault; women have been telling them about it forever. It bothers me that the onus to talk about it is on women, and not on men, the people who have created the problem in the first place. It feels like another way that society asks women to be responsible for their own assault and harassment, as if it is a thing that women create, not something that is done to them by men. I hate that it is jarring and triggering to survivors of assault. 

Yes, I know, that men experience harassment as well. I am speaking of the larger, undeniable pattern. That doesn't negate anyone's experience, and it is further evidence that the patriarchy hurts us all. 

I felt uncomfortable #metooing myself, because my first thought was that I'm generally fine--the harassment I've encountered in my life seems so minor it hardly seems worth mentioning. 

Inappropriate encounters with grown men when I was a child where I escaped shaken but unscathed. An email when I turned 18 from a fifty-year-old man saying he could "tell me how hot I was, now that I was legal." Cat-calling and leers by men on the street, and that one guy who I was pretty sure was following me as I shopped in my neighborhood. But then I realized that this is exactly why I should post, and what the #metoo is attempting to speak to. As a society we have so normalized this behavior, and it is so commonplace to all women, that the extent of it gets lost. But, of course, it sucks that it happens, and it sucks to have to talk about it. I don't consider anything that has ever happened to me to be that traumatic, and yet, I don't want to say any more about it. 

Men, if you are upset by reading all of these stories from the women you know, please talk to each other about it, and call each other out when you see shitty, misogynistic behavior. Listening to women, treating women with respect, and changing rape culture is your job.