The SaltWire Network reached out to several women to ask them to share their opinions on the first anniversary of the #MeToo movement going viral. Click on the links below for other articles.
Bill Cosby’s Sept. 25 sentencing of three to 10 years in state prison for aggravated indecent assault has been dubbed the first #MeToo punishment. But please, let’s not pretend it’s a watershed.
The 81-year-old’s re-branding from avuncular Jell-O-seller to sexually violent predator (no mere tossed-out hyperbole anymore, but an honest-to-goodness legal designation), was the right thing. A nod to good order.
But Cosby’s sentence is to the #MeToo movement, as former U.S. president George W. Bush’s mission accomplished address from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln was to the Iraq War. Bush spoke in front of his colourful Mission Accomplished banner in 2003; the war would rage for at least another eight years, arguably more.
Nevertheless, I clung to Cosby’s sentence during the #MeToo massacre two days later as Christine Blasey Ford testified in front of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee about her sexual assault at the hands of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Blasey Ford was stoic; Kavanaugh veered between jokey and angry. Every woman I talked to about it felt sick all day. So many of us are Blasey Ford. We watched her up there, shaky, and it reminded us all where we stand in our world — tentatively declaring #MeToo, frequently getting back #YeahRight.
Blasey Ford was credibility incarnate, and still she wasn’t quite heard.
The world has, conversely, heard much of late from former CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi and comedian Louis C.K.
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Ghomeshi was acquitted in 2016 of sexual assault charges involving six women. He also signed a peace bond with one victim in exchange for admitting misconduct. He earned a plum essay in the New York Review of Books in September. C.K., who admitted in 2017 to uninvited masturbation in front of several women, performed a surprise set at the Comedy Cellar in Manhattan in August, receiving a standing ovation for arriving on stage, even before the jokes. No joke.
To re-elevate these men to their celebrity status — to shower on them in the fame, money and power they enjoyed before — is an erasure of what they have been accused of and what they admit doing. It’s a further silencing of their victims, and of other women who have been victims.
But look, forget celebrity: our #MeToo energy is better spent remembering that the vast majority of sexual aggressors are not Supreme Court nominees, famous comedians and actors, or marquee national radio hosts.
I can testify to a lifetime of street harassment and strangers rubbing up against my breasts at crowded concerts. One time, I had to distract my daughter from a man who began to masturbate a few feet away from us on a darkened path. It was not Louis C.K.
My #MeToo stories involve no movie stars, no prospective chief justices, no A-list journalists. Off the top of my head? One’s a teacher, another an electrician, another a heating contractor. Their actions range from inappropriate touching, to slamming me against a wall and once down an embankment, to attempted rape.
And those are just three of the men I am still in touch with. You read right — in touch with (well, one’s dead, but I attended the funeral). Sometimes women shut out the men who assault them. Sometimes they don’t, or won’t, or can’t.
And no, I didn’t report these assaults. The reasons, in order: I was drinking. I was embarrassed and blamed myself. I was 16 and was convinced no one would believe me.
It is these everyday men, in everyday places and situations, doing what they must believe are everyday things to the women in their lives, who must learn differently. These men represent the bulk of the problem.
But as they look to the culture around them, to the C.K.s and Ghomeshis and Kavanaughs, they see out-sized criticism of their female accusers, half-apologies and easy redemption.
One glint of hope came Friday afternoon when two women, survivors, confronted Republican Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator. Flake, trapped, said little as the women challenged him to defend his commitment to confirm Kavanaugh’s nomination. Not long after, Flake reversed his decision, saying he would not support the nominee without an FBI investigation.
Kavanaugh may yet sit as a Supreme Court Justice. Ghomeshi may work again in media. C.K. no doubt will. And the #MeToo movement? It’s only just begun.
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