‘“Are you going to stand up?” the driver demanded. Rosa Parks looked straight at him and said: “No.” Flustered and not quite sure what to do, [the bus driver] retorted, “Well I’m going to have you arrested.” And Parks, still sitting next to the window, replied softly, “You may do that.”’
—from Rosa Parks: A Life, by Douglas Brinkley
‘I feel like there is a constructive fury that has resulted in a resolute pursuit of equity … This is not just my hurt, this is more than my hurt. This is not just my anger, this is our anger, and instead of it just being a feeling, it’s becoming an action.’
—Actor Tracee Ellis Ross on Time’s Up Now
‘What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have.’
—Oprah Winfrey, receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 2018 Golden Globes
Saru Jayaraman arrives at the Beverly Hilton on Wilshire Boulevard and steps, for one night only, onto the surreal ride of Tinseltown celebrity. She’s got this. Frankly, she looks like a movie star. Although most of the photographers haven’t a clue who she is, they recognise her date, Amy Poehler, who co-hosted the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s annual ceremony for three years in a row. ‘Amy! Over here!’ They pause and pose in their black dresses. Poehler points out someone out in the crowd, and Jayaraman squints, recognises them. ‘That’s fabulous,’ she says.
Jayaraman is attending the 2018 Golden Globes to support the Time’s Up Now campaign. Like almost every other guest, she is wearing black ‘in solidarity’. Think of it like a red carpet funeral procession, albeit a rather jovial one. The metaphorical death being celebrated is that of the culture of workplace sexual harassment, abuse and discrimination.
Awards shows have long been used to draw attention to injustice, with varying degrees of success. The previous year Meryl Streep used her Globes speech to dress down Trump for mocking a disabled person. Leonardo DiCaprio turned his 2016 Oscars speech into a plea for collective action on climate change. Others have used their absence to make statements. Jada Pinkett Smith, Will Smith and Spike Lee boycotted the Oscars, also in 2016, to protest against white bias. In 1973 Marlon Brando stayed home, sending activist Sacheen Littlefeather to refuse his Oscar for The Godfather, citing the industry’s persistent discriminatory treatment of Native American people. In those pre-internet times, such a large captive audience was a golden opportunity. In 1993, Richard Gere noted that since ‘there were one billion people watching this thing,’ he might as well take the opportunity to condemn human rights violations in China and Tibet.
Over the years, guests have worn red ribbons for AIDS awareness, blue ones for the American Civil Liberties Union and ‘Je suis Charlie’ badges (after terrorists attacked satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo). There were also ‘Time’s Up’ pins, and the inevitable sneers—feminism reduced to a trendy accessory—but in its scope, this activation is markedly different.
Time’s Up Now began with hundreds of women in the entertainment industry forming a leaderless collective (it is volunteer-run and made up of working committees)1 shortly after The New York Times published the first explosive story detailing sexual harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein on 5 October 2017. (‘Any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr Weinstein. Mr Weinstein has further confirmed that there were never any acts of retaliation against any women for refusing his advances,’ a spokesperson responded to The New Yorker. In May 2018, Weinstein was arrested in New York and indicted on first- and third-degree rape charges.) That opened the floodgates: scores of women who’d worked on projects produced and distributed by his studios, Miramax and the Weinstein Company, emerged with ‘me too’ stories, ranging from bullying and intimidation to rape. Stories poured out about other powerful men too.
On 12 October, the fashion model Cameron Russell, well known from Vogue covers and luxury advertising campaigns, took to Instagram to expose the problem in the fashion industry, posting about photographers abusing models, and their agents and others enabling them. ‘Hearing about Harvey Weinstein this week has sparked conversations about how widespread and how familiar his behavior is,’ she wrote. The first screen shot she shared was of a text message, sent by a model who was just fifteen years old, with a chaperone in the next room, when she was sexually assaulted by a photographer. This model wished to remain anonymous—the photographer was still working.
Russell, thirty and pregnant with her first child, had ‘me too’ stories of her own: ‘On many occasions, I’ve been called a feminist for reporting unwanted groping, spanking, pinching, pressure for dates, phone calls and texts of a sexual nature, lack of appropriate changing areas, etc.’ she posted. Russell is a feminist, proudly so. ‘And because the response has always been “are you surprised?” or “that’s part of the job” I tolerated them.’ Russell invited models who’d had similar experiences to message her, anonymity assured. ‘I will post your words,’ she promised, ‘so the industry can see the size and scope of this problem.’ In forty-eight hours, she’d shared seventy-seven separate stories. The suggestion that models will never work again unless they accept unwanted advances or agree to explicit poses that make them feel uncomfortable is a depressingly recurrent theme.
Another New York Times exposé, ‘Weinstein’s complicity machine’, describes a network of ‘enablers, silencers and spies’ who allowed the producer’s behaviour to continue unchecked for decades. Those speaking out, as the actor Ashley Judd did, risked blackballing.2 (Judd told friends, family and others in the industry that Weinstein had sexually harassed her in 1997, and in 2015 she went public with the story in Variety magazine, although she didn’t name him. She believes Weinstein sabotaged her career after she rejected his advances. In April 2018, she filed a lawsuit suing him for defamation as well as sexual harassment.)
On 10 November, an open letter from the National Farmworker Women’s Alliance broadened the conversation. This wasn’t just a Hollywood or a Planet Fashion problem.
Dear Sisters,
We write on behalf of the approximately 700,000 women who work in the agricultural fields and packing sheds across the United States. For the past several weeks we have watched and listened with sadness as we have learned of the actors, models and other individuals who have come forward to speak out about the gender based violence they’ve experienced at the hands of bosses, co-workers and other powerful people in the entertainment industry. We wish that we could say we’re shocked to learn that this is such a pervasive problem in your industry. Sadly, we’re not surprised because it’s a reality we know far too well. Countless farmworker women across our country suffer in silence because of the widespread sexual harassment and assault that they face at work.
We do not work under bright stage lights or on the big screen. We work in the shadows of society in isolated fields and packinghouses that are out of sight and out of mind for most people in this country. Your job feeds souls, fills hearts and spreads joy. Our job nourishes the nation with the fruits, vegetables and other crops that we plant, pick and pack.
Even though we work in very different environments, we share a common experience of being preyed upon by individuals who have the power to hire, fire, blacklist and otherwise threaten our economic, physical and emotional security. Like you, there are few positions available to us and reporting any kind of harm or injustice committed against us doesn’t seem like a viable option. Complaining about anything—even sexual harassment—seems unthinkable because too much is at risk, including the ability to feed our families and preserve our reputations.
We understand the hurt, confusion, isolation and betrayal that you might feel. We also carry shame and fear resulting from this violence. It sits on our backs like oppressive weights. But, deep in our hearts we know that it is not our fault. The only people at fault are the individuals who choose to abuse their power to harass, threaten and harm us, like they have harmed you.
In these moments of despair, and as you cope with scrutiny and criticism because you have bravely chosen to speak out against the harrowing acts that were committed against you, please know that you’re not alone. We believe and stand with you.
In solidarity,
Alianza Nacional de Campesinas
Actor Rashida Jones summed up the mood: ‘There is no change unless you bring every single person along who has spent time being marginalised, harassed, assaulted … There are so many people who have been ignored as we deal with the long tail of the patriarchy. So for [Time’s Up], intersectionality is the hub, is the absolute centrepiece of everything that we do.’3
Still, Hollywood, being so visible, was a smart place to start.
Rose McGowan—the actor-turned-activist who on 12 October, via Twitter, accused Weinstein of rape—describes Hollywood’s ‘systemic misogyny’ in her autobiography Brave. The Directors Guild of America, which represents working Hollywood directors, ‘is 96 per cent male,’ she writes. Hence, we ‘are fed a steady diet of largely male “thought” and bias about what women are and can be.’4 McGowan likens Hollywood to a cult, and argues that its commodification of women as sex objects normalises rape culture and casual sexism, not just on sets and at castings but wherever its influence reaches. It peddles stereotypical tropes that paint men as macho, vocal and active and women as passive, silent objects; just ‘girls’, valued only for their nubile beauty and desirability—while it lasts. Perpetuating these ideas broadly and negatively affects how all genders regard themselves and their roles, responsibilities and rights. ‘Hollywood creates a fucked-up mirror for you to look in,’ writes McGowan.
Unimpressed when reports first surfaced of the Globes fashion ‘blackout’, she tweeted: ‘Actresses, like Meryl Streep, who happily worked for The Pig Monster, are wearing black @GoldenGlobes in a silent protest. your silence is the problem. You’ll accept a fake award breathlessly & affect no real change. I despise your hypocrisy. Maybe you should all wear Marchesa.’ The Pig Monster is McGowan’s name for Weinstein, who by February had been accused of misconduct, varying from requests for massages to intimidating advances to rape, by more than seventy-five women. His ex-wife Georgina Chapman (they’ve since divorced) is the co-designer of fashion brand Marchesa, and Streep the star of several films produced by Weinstein. Streep said she’d been unaware of claims that he was a sexual predator.
But McGowan was wrong about the silent protest; the action was carefully planned to be noisy and strategic, not an end in itself but, rather, an unbeatable piece of marketing for Time’s Up and the launch of its Legal Defense Fund. Within two months, they’d raised US$21 million through Go Fund Me to subsidise legal support for those who’ve experienced work-place sexual harassment, everywhere. They’d persuaded lawyers to do pro bono work and received 1600 requests for assistance from people working in sixty different industries. By 1 March, a thousand potential plaintiffs had been connected to lawyers.5
The Globes action began with Best Actress nominee Michelle Williams calling up Tarana Burke to suggest she be her date. Burke’s initial response was, ‘Why? I’m trying very hard not to be the black woman who is trotted out when you all need to validate your work.’ Williams won her over, and the pair decided to flood the red carpet with activists. As Burke said to Williams, ‘“I know some badass women activists from around the country, across the spectrum, all races and classes, different issues”—and we wondered what it would look like if we used the time usually allotted to [red-carpet trivia] for our issues.’6
In the end, eight actors joined forces with activists/organisers and issued a collective statement outlining their reasons. There’d been too much Weinstein talk. It was time ‘to shift the focus back to survivors and on systemic, lasting solutions’. They hoped ‘to broaden conversations about the connection to power, privilege and other systemic inequalities’.7 This was a tipping point, made possible by the Women’s Marches and Me Too. The work now was about building a broad, inclusive movement to address workplace inequalities and abuse, especially in industries where women are most disadvantaged, like farm work, tipped work in the restaurant and service industry, and domestic work.So, who came to the party?
Mónica Ramírez was a no brainer. The civil rights lawyer, who co-founded the National Farmworker Women’s Alliance, partnered with Laura Dern (who won a gong for her work on the female-led show Big Little Lies).
Burke reached out to Rosa Clemente, the journalist, former Green Party candidate and social-justice campaigner behind the Puerto Rico on the Map project. ‘I know Susan,’ said Clemente of her date Susan Sarandon. ‘We’re Green Party folks. She supported me when I ran a long time ago.’8 The pair used the Globes to talk about the situation in Puerto Rico post–Hurricane Maria, where, Clemente said, half the people on the island were still without power, and 90 per cent lacked reliable access to clean water.
Jayaraman and Poehler were a good fit since Poehler worked in restaurants before she found fame. ‘I was a white woman who had certain privileges allowed to me, and I worked with very reasonable restaurant owners,’ she explained at a rally she attended in New York with Jayaraman a month later. ‘But I did, like every woman in this room, deal with incredible amounts of harassment from customers and co-workers.’9
Ai-jen Poo, executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, checked her voicemail one day to find a message from Meryl Streep: ‘[I] heard her soft voice, familiar from so many of my favourite films, introducing herself. There she was, asking to discuss the possibility of attending the Golden Globes together. Yes, Ms Streep, we can definitely discuss that.’10 They met over cups of tea to brainstorm how to use the occasion, together, to get the message out about the conditions faced by America’s two and a half million domestic workers: the nannies, care workers and cleaners ‘who do the work that makes all other work possible’. Ninety per cent are women, and most are women of colour. Just one in ten has access to healthcare, and 30 per cent are undocumented. According to Poo, this is a workforce defined by its invisibility, toiling ‘behind closed doors [in] isolated environments. You could go into any neighbourhood and not know which homes are also workplaces; it’s not like there’s a list or a registry anywhere.’11 People smuggling and slave-like conditions are a risk. Harassment and worse must be frighteningly common.
Emma Watson brought Marai Larasi, who runs the London-based Black women’s rights organisation Imkaan. Emma Stone brought the tennis legend Billie Jean King, who in the 1970s fought for equal pay for women athletes, and continues to be an outspoken advocate for equality and LGBTQ rights.
Shailene Woodley, another Big Little Lies cast member, partnered with Calina Lawrence, a singer and member of the Suquamish tribe who campaigns for Native treaty rights. Woodley is an activist herself. She was arrested protesting against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016.
While Oprah Winfrey didn’t bring a change-maker in physical form, she brought several in spirit. Winfrey was honoured with the Cecil B. DeMille Award for being awesome over a long period of time. In her acceptance speech, she acknowledged all the women who’d shared ‘me too’ stories, and those who’ve endured abuse and assault but ‘whose names we’ll never know’. There was one in particular she wanted to mention: Recy Taylor, who had just died at the age of ninety-seven.
In 1944, Taylor, a young mum, was walking home from church when she was gang-raped by six armed white men. ‘They threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone, but her story was reported to the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People], where a young worker by the name of Rosa Parks became the lead investigator on her case, and together they sought justice,’ said Winfrey. ‘But justice wasn’t an option in the era of [the] “Jim Crow” [segregation laws]. The men who tried to destroy [Taylor] were never prosecuted … For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth.’ To men who abuse their powers, Winfrey had this to say: ‘Their time is up.’
You can work all hours on something vital and important, like trying to help the Recy Taylors of this world, and no one outside of your own circle will notice, then a seemingly little thing, unplanned, goes and changes everything for everyone. Not that Rosa Parks did what she did a decade later in a vacuum.
As a Black woman living in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks was sick and tired of the injustice that was her constant companion. Her husband was a union organiser and civil rights activist, and Parks knew that key figures NAACP were planning to challenge the city’s racism. Discrimination wasn’t just rife; in the Southern states it was written into law. In Alabama, segregation was enforced in many public places, including restaurants, theatres, bathrooms, parks and cemeteries, and on public transport, and Black voting rights were severely restricted by racially motivated criteria.
Montgomery’s buses had designated rows for Black passengers at the back, leaving the front seats reserved for white passengers. Some seats in the middle were undesignated, so first come, first served. On the evening of 1 December 1955, Parks was travelling home from work (she was employed as a department store seamstress). She boarded the busy 2857 to Cleveland Avenue and took a seat in the undesignated section. The bus was soon full. When a white man boarded, the white driver asked Parks and three others to move to the back and stand.12 She refused. The driver, a known racist bully who’d picked on Parks before, called the police, and Parks was arrested and briefly imprisoned. Her mother’s first question when Parks called home was, ‘Did they beat you?’
‘People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired but that isn’t true,’ said Parks later. ‘I was not tired physically. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.’13
The Women’s Political Council gave out flyers calling on Montgomery’s Black citizens to protest: ‘Don’t ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday.’ A system of carpools was organised, and taxidrivers reduced their fares. That night a local pastor spoke at a political meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church. ‘The great glory of the American democracy is the right to protest for right,’ he said. It was Martin Luther King. The boycotts lasted a year, until the Supreme Court ruled segregation on public buses unconstitutional. With her act of peaceful resistance, Rosa Parks helped change the world.
‘I just hope,’ said Winfrey at the Globes, ‘that Recy Taylor died knowing that her truth—like the truth of so many other women who were tormented in those years, and even now tormented—goes marching on. It was somewhere in Rosa Parks’ heart almost eleven years later, when she made the decision to stay seated on that bus in Montgomery, and it’s here with every woman who chooses to say, “Me too.” And every man, every man who chooses to listen.’
It was all over social media. Here, surely, was the sort of person America wanted to see in power. In a New Yorker piece titled ‘The Fever Dream of Oprah for President’, Doreen St Félix commented:
Lately, we’ve been especially deprived of the sort of galvanizing that Oprah can induce. We have been lacking, too, the delights of a well-wrought oration … One could immediately sense the shift in the room. In our fidgety political climate, any sort of cogent articulation from a person of power has the ring of a stump speech … The notion of a Winfrey Presidency took hold instantly. ‘She launched a rocket tonight,’ Meryl Streep said, after the ceremony ended.14
‘I can’t believe I have to explain why Oprah shouldn’t be president,’ countered Vice writer Eve Peyser.15 ‘Can we let celebrities just be celebrities? … Have we learned nothing from Donald Trump?’ Not to worry. Winfrey dismissed the idea. She has no interest in the job, she said.16 And yet. I feel like America could do worse than elect Oprah for president. Sorry, not sorry.
Alyssa Milano was getting ready for bed on 16 October 2017 when she got a text. It was from Charlotte Clymer, a transgender woman, who when identifying as Charles Clymer in 2014 ran a Facebook page called ‘Equality for Women’ and managed to offend some members so much they started a hashtag #StopClymer. But if Clymer was off message back then, she was on it now. Her text to Milano was a screen grab of something she’d seen on Facebook. It read, ‘Suggested by a friend: if all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote “me too” as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.’
Milano thought it was a fine idea. Just the other day, she’d joined a 24-hour Twitter boycott after the platform had temporarily silenced McGowan. Officially McGowan’s account was suspended because she violated the rules, but she was convinced it was a result of her speaking out about Weinstein.
For a while, Milano had avoided commenting publicly about the movie mogul—she is mates with Georgina Chapman (they’d worked together on Project Runway) and wanted to give her and her kids some space—but she was ready now. On 9 October, Milano had published her thoughts on her website: ‘Men like Harvey Weinstein are around every corner,’ she wrote. ‘Statistics say that 1 in 3 women are sexually harassed in the workplace. Really think about that. Really allow that statistic to become a part of you. Also, while you process it, think about the gender inequality women—particularly women of color—face in salary and opportunity. Actually, fuck the statistics, just do better, world.’17 And so Milano forwarded Clymer’s message, with the additional line, ‘If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write “me too” as a reply to this tweet.’ Then she went to sleep.
She woke the next morning to 30,000 replies. Within twenty-four hours, there’d been more than twelve million #MeToo posts across social media. What Milano didn’t know as these events unfolded was that Tarana Burke was behind Me Too.
Burke is a New Yorker who went to college in Alabama, where she founded the African American Student Alliance then built her career working with marginalised communities, first in housing, then with youth. In the mid-2000s, she was working with kids in Selma when she and a friend got to thinking about how the girls had different needs from the boys. Their solution was a program that focused on girls’ self-worth. They called it Just Be. ‘The world tells Black girls that you’re more worthy if you’re smart, [or] you’re more worthy if you’re pretty, or if you’re light-skinned,’ she explains on the podcast The Call.18 ‘It’s qualified by something. What we wanted them to understand is, you are worthy just as you are, in your own skin, how you exist, right here, right now … Let’s give this context.’ Also, many of the girls Burke met through the program were survivors of sexual violence. She knew what that was like.
As a child, Burke had been molested by a gang of neighbourhood boys. What she needed back then was an adult to confide in, someone trustworthy to make her see that it was not her fault. Later, she was lucky enough to meet a group of women who helped her recast her narrative, not as a victim but as a survivor. It was this, above all, that Burke wanted to bring to the marginalised girls and women she was working with in Alabama.
She visited a local rape crisis centre to get some information and met a frosty, older white woman who all but closed the door in her face. Burke got back in her car, seething, and decided then and there, ‘I’m going to do this myself. Like, I can’t depend on these white people to support my girls.’
One of the first steps Burke took was to write down her own experiences. There was another episode that haunted her: an encounter at a youth camp with a thirteen-year-old. Heaven was a handful: clingy but prone to mood swings. When the girl asked to speak to Burke in private, Burke knew something terrible was coming. ‘For the next several minutes this child, Heaven, struggled to tell me about her “stepdaddy” or rather her mother’s boyfriend who was doing all sorts of monstrous things to her developing body … I was horrified by her words, the emotions welling inside of me ran the gamut, and I listened until I literally could not take it anymore … which turned out to be less than five minutes.’19 Burke cut the girl off, and referred her to a colleague she deemed better equipped to help, but she never forgot Heaven’s disappointed little face and visible shock at being rejected. ‘I could not muster the energy to tell her that I understood, that I connected, that I could feel her pain,’ writes Burke on the Just Be Inc. website. ‘I could not find the strength to say out loud the words that were ringing in my head over and over again as she tried to tell me what she had endured … I watched her put her mask back on and go back into the world like she was all alone and I couldn’t even bring myself to whisper … me too.’
Burke introduced Me Too at a workshop in 2006, as ‘an outreach mechanism’ to create a safe space for girls to admit they needed help with the trauma of sexual violence. Then, for more than a decade, she got on with the work of guiding them towards healing and self-empowerment.
The night after Milano sent her cataclysmic tweet, Burke was scrolling through Twitter when she noticed the hashtag. Initially, she panicked. ‘I felt a sense of dread, because something that was part of my life’s work was going to be co-opted and taken from me and used for a purpose that I hadn’t originally intended.’20 Milano, Burke stressed in a Twitter post on 22 February 2018, ‘has been an ally and a friend from the moment she found out’. And yet she worries that the broader media storm risks erasing the years of work done on the ground ‘invested in the lives of Black and brown girls’. It has to be more than a slogan. ‘The work of Me Too is about supporting survivors.’
In 2017 TIME bequeathed its Person of the Year status on a group: the Silence Breakers, ‘the voices that launched a movement’, which the editor-in-chief calls ‘one of the highest-velocity shifts in our culture since the 1960s.’21 The cover features five women’s faces (and one woman’s arm, that of an anonymous Texan hospital worker): Ashley Judd; Taylor Swift, who took a man to court for grabbing her in the street, and won; Susan Fowler, who blew the whistle on the culture of sexual harassment at Uber; lobbyist Adama Iwu; and a farmworker using a pseudonym. The inside story profiles others including Burke, McGowan and Milano, but the change has been driven by thousands of voices. TIME describes it as ‘a reckoning’ that ‘appears to have sprung up overnight. But it has actually been simmering for years, decades, centuries.’22 Or millennia?
I reckon we can trace this stuff back to when someone wrote a book about the world’s first woman being created from the rib of the world’s first man ‘as his help’. Adam and Eve lived in a beautiful garden until an incident with some fruit after which their god banished them—Eve was to blame, apparently. (It’s always the woman’s fault.) The Almighty told Eve that Adam ‘shall rule over thee’. It became a global bestseller, this book, and so the story grew in power and influence, and was twisted and built-upon by those on top. Meanwhile women, being subjugated by male privilege and kept busy raising the children needed to perpetuate the human race, missed out on most of the power play that kept men ahead in courts and councils. And we ended up with the patriarchy.
At least most of us did. The Mosuo people who live near China’s border with Tibet in what’s known as ‘the Kingdom of Women’ are one of just a handful of matriarchal societies. Mosuo women, as the traditional heads of their households, control the finances. They may choose and change partners as they wish, and there are no words for ‘father’ or ‘husband’ in their language.
Most everywhere else, the men are in still charge, despite the progress made by the feminist movement. The patriarchy is a power structure that’s dominated by men. Gender-based discrimination and violence are two of its side effects. #NotAllMen, but so what? As Chris Hemmings, author of Be a Man: How macho culture damages us and how to escape it, writes:
While it’s perfectly obvious that not all men are sexist, it would be absurd to argue that sexism isn’t a mostly male pursuit. Equally it’s true that not all men are violent, but in the same breath almost 90 per cent of violent crimes are carried out by men … and almost 97 per cent of sexual assaults have a male perpetrator.23
As Rose McGowan puts it, ‘Do I make you uncomfortable? Good.’24 Yes, this reckoning has been a long time coming, but it shifted gear in 2017. As I write, there’s a constant flow of new developments involving studio execs, politicians, comedians, news anchors, radio hosts, film directors, photographers, NFL players, celebrity chefs, Australia’s once-favourite TV gardener. Then there are those ‘100% fabricated and made-up charges’25 against President Trump that keep making ‘fake news’ headlines.
The Women’s Marches undoubtedly catalysed the mass take-up of Me Too. As the Hollywood pus was being drained, I remember thinking, Surely rock‘n’roll is next. In November, close to 2000 Swedish women in the music industry—‘artists, musicians, composers, students, record company employees, trainees and others’—endorsed an open letter condemning widespread sexual misconduct and signing it off, ‘We know who you are.’ Australian women in music had their own push, with the hashtag #MeNoMore. At the 2018 Grammys, artists wore white roses in solidarity. This had its critics (too tame, too quiet—where was the risk?), but as the Australian feminist and author Tara Moss says, ‘Every conversation makes a difference. Stand up for women, and believe them. Stand up for women, men and children who speak out against abuse. Show them respect. Be part of the change.’26
I contacted Moss to get her take because she began speaking out against sexual harassment and violence before this new atmosphere of solidarity kicked in. As a model, her experience was similar to Cameron Russell’s in that it involved a string of early gropings, leerings and harassments. Once, in Milan, four men in a car chased her down the street as she was walking home. Today Tara Moss is a women’s rights advocate, a bestselling crime novelist, a rape survivor, and someone who knows firsthand how speaking out about sexual violence can lead those who feel threatened to try to silence you.
Echoing Jayaraman, Moss says that ‘change is cumulative and collective’, and not easily won. ‘Those who haven’t experienced sexual harassment or abuse often underestimate how common it is, or how much pressure it puts on the survivor/victim. When I wrote about my experiences as part of my memoir The Fictional Woman, I had genuine concerns about losing public work contracts. I worried that people would look at me differently, and I was right about that, but I was also lucky in that the public response was overwhelmingly positive—albeit with some rape threat trolls and so on—and I did not lose the jobs I needed to support my family.’
Both Moss and Tarana Burke emphasise that public disclosure is not a suitable path for all survivors. But this new atmosphere is persuading women in large numbers and from all walks of life and locations to break their silence. In February 2018, as Sarah Reyes, a former combat medic in the US army, detailed her story of being raped at work,27 a 22-year-old Indonesian woman was posting CCTV footage online that shows the moment a man groped her in broad daylight in Depok, West Java. She’d reported it to the police, she said, but they were stalling. In China, censorship can make speaking out difficult: feminist websites have been shut down and activists arrested,28 but in January, after the #MeToo hashtag was blocked by Weibo and WeChat, #RiceBunny started trending instead—in Chinese it’s pronounced ‘mi tu’.
There’s no stopping it now. The frames are changing, and even with a backlash, which I suppose we must expect, we’ve seen it now, haven’t we? In clear light. We’ve all of us—including the abusers and their enablers—have had to take a tough course in looking.