Triggering #MeToo, All Over Again
It is because of the survivors that I’ve come to accept that #MeToo is something that will never let me rest.
There are many untold yet harrowing stories that could be shared next to the four year-old phenomenon that is #MeToo. Millions upon millions involve everything from unwanted one-off sexual advances that go too far all the way to brutal and violent rape that is suffered in patterns of repeated abuse.
To those who have already come forward utilizing the hashtag launched on this day in October of 2017, and the many more who will in the future fill a need for solidarity through a movement which allows victims to both stand and be counted, but one that also enables them to find comfort in those who have likewise suffered the indignities, violence, and destruction that sexual predation has visited upon their lives, #MeToo has been a turning point in a historically one-sided equation; that which involves the ongoing realities of sexual aggression, perpetrators insulated from consequences, and victims who too often suffer the damage that has been inflicted upon them in silence.
For the many committed voices who advocate for justice behind the hashtag, there will likely be challenging information presented in this piece. And my own relationship to #MeToo, should it ever become widely known by the public, will no doubt be repackaged and presented in ways that are intended to derail and undermine the progress the movement has already made.
It’s important to keep in mind that, in these hyper-politicized times, the facts I’m sharing here will be used by those who want nothing more than for the world to be finished with #MeToo, and for the attention and consequences now associated with revelations of sexual misconduct everywhere, but especially as it exists in the workplace, and as it happens in some of the most powerful industries and workplaces on earth, to vanish from the public consciousness.
My #MeToo story begins with a simple chronology.
Four days after the New York Times revealed one of Hollywood’s worst-kept secrets, that of serial predatory sexual behavior towards actresses and models and staffers by the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, an op-ed was published in the paper titled, “Harvey Weinstein and the Silence of the Men.” The article was written by the actress Lena Dunham.
I wrote the following in a reader’s comment to Ms. Dunham’s piece that was posted to the Times’ website on October 10, 2017.
“Here’s what really needs to happen now. Every woman who has ever been presented with a career/sex quid pro quo in the entertainment industry should come forward and simply say, “Me, too.””
Five days later, actress and activist Alyssa Milano, in a now historic tweet, repeated my idea, amplifying it with her celebrity while calling for a Me Too response from victims of sexual misconduct.
Almost immediately, however, yet another aspect to the emerging #MeToo story presented itself when Ms. Milano stated the following day, again in a tweet, that she had, “Just been made aware of an earlier #MeToo movement.”
What followed was nothing short of a media blitz as a long list of publications around the world ran with the story of Tarana Burke, an activist and organizer long working in areas related to sexual assault and its victims, repeating almost verbatim the news that it was Ms. Burke who’d actually created the #MeToo movement roughly a decade earlier.
All of these nearly identical articles, so similar that they seemed to have been taken straight off the wire and published everywhere from Al Jazeera to the Washington Post, contained the same fundamental flaw: they all ignored completely the fact that Ms. Milano was on record stating that she’d not known of Ms. Burke or her prior use of “Me Too” when she’d made her initial tweet.
I too had never heard of Ms. Burke or any prior “me too” effort in response to sexual misconduct or as it could relate to any other social or political purpose when I made my comment to the Dunham piece. An archive search of the New York Times shows that neither Ms. Burke nor her “me too” idea had ever been mentioned in the Times prior to October 2017 and only began to appear in the newspaper in the days after Ms. Milano’s tweet.
If neither Ms. Milano nor I had ever heard of Ms. Burke or her coining of the phrase when we made our calls for a “me too” response from victims of sexual misconduct then clearly her prior use of “me too” had no role in the authoring or triggering of the ongoing #MeToo phenomenon.
Repeatedly over the course of the last four years, in ways that were united both in the basic message they put forth and in their complete and utter ineffectiveness, I’ve tried to get this simple chronology and the ramifications it represents for #MeToo in front of the public by way of those who concern themselves with such details about current events, members of the working press at all levels. I’ve failed at every turn.
My wish for the last four years is that everyone involved with #MeToo, but especially the journalists working the story from within the news industry, would, above all other considerations, be of the mindset that the truth and true facts about a story of this magnitude should be tracked down to their granular detail and revealed to the public. I’d hoped that if someone’s job or career was based on researching and running down facts in order to establish and share with the public exactly what happened in any particular news story, that those whose jobs it is to do those things in the case of #MeToo would, at some point, ultimately get around to doing their jobs.
But my own truth is that I simply can’t control what other people say or do. I have no say so at all in anyone else’s relationship to the truth or to the facts. And, although I sometimes have, before the experience of the last four years, I’ve been loath to tell professionals in any field how to do their jobs. I have found, much to my exasperation, that I can’t move editors and reporters to do anything at all, even those things we the informed consumers of news and information would expect to be first among the most basic functions of the press: the collecting of facts and the sharing of those facts with the public.
I was born in what seemed to mark the beginning of a time when young people had a shared desire to change the world. But it was also a more personal hope that burned deep inside us as individuals. Of course, eventually, openly harboring the personal ambition of changing the world would become an object of ridicule to those who didn’t share such aspirations. Some of us, however, deep inside, would never quite let go of the dream that the world could be changed and that we might play a part in that happening.
Tarana Burke is considerably younger than I am. But having read what she’s written and taking a reading of her as a person, as best as I can from a distance, I’ve been inclined to believe that she too had always dreamed of changing the world. She is doing that now. Ms. Burke may not have had anything to do with starting the current #MeToo phenomenon, but more than any other person on this planet, it was and still is her job to continue to work to change the world by way of the movement she is now so permanently attached to.
I certainly have many harsh criticisms of both Ms. Burke and Ms. Milano. But I’m not a woman. And I don’t consider myself to have ever been the victim of sexual misconduct. And ultimately, no matter who or what is seen as having triggered #MeToo, the movement will always by default belong to women and victims of sexual misconduct and not to men like me who have suffered no such thing. #MeToo is, however, a conversation that men must be allowed to participate in. Men can contribute to and criticize its direction and focus but, ultimately, it is women who must decide how and when to deploy the power of the movement. I hope they always choose wisely.
No one, however, gets to choose a historical narrative that best suits their political purposes. And no matter how well-meaning we may be and no matter how many others we might enlist to spread our message, we don’t get to create a false version of history simply because it is most convenient to our own needs. Ms. Burke may now be #MeToo’s most recognizable representative, but the truth is she had absolutely nothing to do with creating the movement that has dominated so many news cycles over the last four years.
I’m not a celebrity. I don’t have access to the kind of team that supports and amplifies a celebrity’s message. And I’m not an activist. So I had no network that I could call upon to raise voices on my behalf. I’m also not a professional journalist. So I don’t have a newsroom full of colleagues and seasoned editors to brainstorm strategies with or to rely on their long years of experience in guiding my efforts to get my own version of events into the public record.
What I did, and did repeatedly, was attempt to contact the New York Times, where the Weinstein allegations first broke and where Lena Dunham’s trolling of men in the entertainment industry inspired me to suggest “Me, too.” But every effort I made to make contact with the Times or their reporters was either inadvertently overlooked or, I’m afraid, deliberately ignored, and I have found this in particular to be one of the most difficult aspects of my experience over the last four years.
That this most venerable newspaper of record, which I have long revered, would intentionally decide to ignore completely the person who they know suggested the #MeToo movement on their own website is something I’m still having a hard time processing. Being ghosted by the Times contributed greatly to compounding the sometimes crippling shock I experienced while trying to fully comprehend how something I’d suggested sitting at my kitchen table could have gone from my keyboard to a celebrity’s Twitter feed and from there to having such a world-wide impact.
I can’t explain the abdication of journalistic responsibility by the Times or its failure to even attempt to establish for the public the true facts surrounding the origins of #MeToo. Moreover, I’ll never understand the industry wide failures that saw publication after publication presenting a false #MeToo origin story that, to this day, represents the only known history of the triggering of what has become one of the most consequential social justice movements since the American Civil Rights upheavals of the 1960s.
While the effect of the Times not responding to my efforts to reach out to both the newspaper and its reporters was personally devastating, combined with my own limited range in getting my version of events out and in front of the public, the end result was that my voice and my perspective on all things having to do with #MeToo was silenced throughout the past four years.
Most certainly, had anyone been listening to me, I would not, for a minute, have taken the focus of my attention off of Hollywood and the sexual predation that is, I contend to this day, so very commonplace in the entertainment industry. I would have specifically called for an increased and unwavering attention on what the Times termed the “complicity machine” made up of industry lawyers and publicists, fixers and enforcers, that has enabled the casting couch to be both a fixture and a safe space for sexual predators in Hollywood for almost a hundred years.
When I think of #MeToo, my thought process was and still is centrally fixated on Hollywood. Today, as on this day four years ago when I typed my “Me, too” comment on the New York Times website, I still believe that the sheer numbers of women in Hollywood who could check my “sex/career quid pro quo” box would shock and outrage the public, and that by having such an endemic part of the movies and television business as it exists for women laid bare for the world to see, that the wheels would begin turning both in the industry itself and from within local, state, or federal law enforcement to finally bring real change to entertainment industry workplaces.
But Hollywood is relentless, its image making capabilities unmatched, and its power to influence both behind the scenes and publicly is overwhelming. The image makers in Hollywood have succeeded in creating a singular perspective on their industry in the minds of most every person living on this planet. That perspective is one that sees Hollywood, and specifically having a personal or contractual connection to it in the form of either the creative validation the industry can represent, or the glamour and wealth it can provide, as the ultimate pot of gold that can exist at the end of anyone’s personal or professional rainbow.
Underestimating the power of Hollywood to influence and control the #MeToo narrative and thus defend itself against the corrective efforts of a movement born from a desire to curtail sexual abuses occurring behind its own doors is the greatest threat to #MeToo that it will likely ever face. This is and will remain a weak spot for anyone closely associated with #MeToo who has ongoing business in the entertainment industry or is desirous of establishing a Hollywood connection for themselves. The massive entertainment and news media empire that #MeToo helped bring to a reckoning can easily absorb the principle voices of this or any other movement and by doing so control that movement’s focus and direction.
The #MeToo I envisioned when I made my comment would have been only the beginning stages of a demand that an industry long known for being the epicenter of sexual predation of young people should finally clean up its act and that laws might be enacted or changed to put teeth into workplace protections specifically designed or adapted to the difficult challenges of enforcing those protections inside the vast entertainment industry.
There are multitudes of young people including children who have yet to experience sexual assault or harassment in their lives and more born with each passing moment. But once the damage of sexual abuse is done, we know the effects last a lifetime. #MeToo should be engaged first and foremost in the effort to change the workplace environments these not-yet victims will walk into in pursuit of their dreams in Hollywood or anywhere else in the world.
There are, of course, the millions of survivors of sexual predation who need and believe in #MeToo and who have already found a place for themselves in the power of this awesome movement. And I know there will be countless more long after I’m gone from this life who will look to #MeToo as a powerful collective used to push back against their abusers.
Altogether, past, present and future survivors of sexual misconduct make up a portion of humanity so heartbreakingly large and dynamic that I will never fully quantify them or even comprehend what their numbers mean about us as human beings on this planet. But it is because of them that I’ve come to accept that #MeToo is something that will never let me rest.