Dear Men, It's Time for #YouToo to Take a Stand
You already knew what was happening, didn’t you? You — the men — you knew. There are too many stories, too many women, too many facts for you to possibly believe that this is all made up. Every year, you are the ones that require us — the victims — to resurface all these deeply buried stories and lay them out in the sunshine so that you can dismiss them, or find fault in them, or, worst of all, pretend not to see them at all. You didn’t need 500,000 tweets or 12 million Facebook posts shouting “me too” because you already knew.
It might not be every single woman, maybe not your girlfriend, or mother, or daughter. I believe the women who say they have never been assaulted, never had a pair of unwanted hands grasping at their bodies without their permission. I am not lucky enough to be one of them. But it was easy enough for me to look at the deluge of posts on my Facebook feed Monday morning, type five letters into the status bar, and click update. Me too.
Ever since actress Alyssa Milano used those words in an Instagram post on Sunday, the ranks of the Me Too Army have only grown. Originally launched almost a decade ago by the activist Tarana Burke in support of women of color who had suffered sexual abuse, the phrase has taken on a life of its own. Women not only posted “#MeToo,” they told stories about exactly when and where their bodily autonomy had been ignored, how they were made to feel about it, and what this movement meant to them. The day after Milano’s post, Molly Ringwald — another former child actress — wrote an article for the New Yorker detailing (among other things) how she was forced to wear a dog collar during an audition. Gymnast McKayla Maroney, who won an Olympic gold medal as a member of team America in 2012, joined a campaign against a USA Gymnastics team doctor alleging that he had molested her for years. Dozens of other celebrities added their voices to the chorus, including Reese Witherspoon, America Ferrera, Jennifer Lawrence, Gabrielle Union, and more and more and more.
I did OK for a few days. I read these stories. There are many Harveys, they all said. And boy, is that true. I wrote a story of my own. But women around me were collapsing. These stories are important and powerful and necessary, but they are also traumatizing.
Read more: https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/10/20/dear-men-its-time-for-youtoo-to-take-a-stand/