#MeToo, social change, and the cyclical nature
of women’s push for power
Tarana Burke walked onto the stage in Toronto and the crowd in front of her rose to their feet. Hundreds had gathered in the theatre to see the founder of #MeToo speak, and dozens more had waited outside, a line snaking into the March cold, hoping the box office would release more tickets. By now, plenty of women in the room knew the bones of Burke’s story. How in 2006 Burke, a civil rights activist from the Bronx, started Me Too to help young women and girls of colour, as well as those from low-income communities, who had experienced sexual violence. How in 2017 that movement went viral, extending far past anything Burke had initially expected. And they knew that what she said mattered, because she, like so many of them, spoke from a survivor-informed perspective. That she herself could say, “Me too.”
But there was a time, Burke told the crowd, when those two words stuck in her throat. “People often accuse me of bravery,” she said. “But when I think about bravery, I think about Heaven.” Heaven is the pseudonym Burke has given to a young girl she met long before #MeToo went viral, and long before Burke founded her movement in 2006. It’s a story Burke has told often, and it’s a story that deserves to be told over and over again.
When Burke was younger, then also working as an activist and community organizer, she was at a girls’ camp in Alabama when the thirteen-year-old asked to speak to her privately. Burke looked into the girl’s eyes and knew, in her gut, that Heaven wanted to disclose something horrible to her. She avoided the girl all day. When she finally sat with Heaven, the girl told her she was being sexually abused by her stepfather. Burke interrupted her and sent her to another worker.44
“In my heart, I was thinking, This happened to me too,” Burke told the Toronto crowd. “I wish I could have said that to this child. I wish I could have given her the gift nobody gave me.” But she could not get the words out. Could not face them and all that they meant.
She kept thinking about that day, just as she kept trying to understand what healing looked like. Over time, she realized that what had helped her most was having others who’d experienced sexual violence empathize with her. It was having them believe her. It was as simple and as infinitely difficult as hearing the words “me too” from their own lips. And even though she hadn’t been able to say it then, she could start saying it now.
In the first year after Twitter set fire to the movement Burke had sparked, the #MeToo hashtag was used roughly 19 million times, according to the Pew Research Center.45 Put another way, that’s about 55,319 uses of the hashtag per day. It’s worth noting that the centre compiled only English-language tweets and those that were in the public domain; during high-volume use periods, only about 70 percent of tweets were in English. Use of the hashtag peaked on September 9, 2018, the day that Leslie Moonves resigned. Moonves was at that time chairman and CEO of CBS, and he stepped down following numerous allegations of sexual assault and harassment, dating from the 1980s to the early 2000s.46 (Moonves denied the allegations; he was initially set to receive $120 million in severance pay, but, following plenty of backlash, CBS withheld it.)47 Other spikes included the day Harvey Weinstein resigned from the board of his entertainment company, and the day Christine Blasey Ford testified in front of the Senate as part of the Supreme Court confirmation process for Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The #MeToo hashtag had become part of a powerful movement taking on powerful men.
Burke has said, more than once, that #MeToo is not a moment, it’s a movement. And she said much the same thing that night at her Toronto talk. “There’s nothing new about talking about sexual violence. There’s nothing new about fighting against sexual violence. What’s new is that we’re doing it out loud.” What’s new is that auditoriums now fill with people who are interested in hearing about sexual violence, and in doing something about it. What’s new is that so many more people can voice how sexual violence has affected their lives and not feel shame.
After making that point, Burke paused, and stressed that what she was about to say next should not be seen as discounting the work that came before #MeToo. “What we’re doing with #MeToo is building something that doesn’t exist. Literally. It’s an international survivor-led and survivor-focused social justice movement.” Cheers, applause, and loud whistles rose up through the crowd. She’d hit on exactly what was so different about #MeToo: who it put in power.
As I heard her speak, her voice like thunder, I thought back to something she’d said earlier. People dismantle power structures by telling the truth, she’d told media at the one-year anniversary of #MeToo. That’s where the whole idea of “speaking truth to power” came from: “the more truth that you tell, the less power people have over you.”48 For Burke, the real world-changing strength of #MeToo wasn’t in taking down powerful men — she saw that as a distraction — but in helping survivors to free themselves. To begin healing. And, in so many ways, even that was only the beginning of what #MeToo could do, has already done.
Power can be difficult to define. Questions of how it operates, and how the structures and hierarchies of power relate to individuals, groups, and societies, often require complex, and even equivocal, answers — when there are answers at all. Many sociologists have spent a lifetime studying power and are still unravelling it, perhaps only agreeing that it is, at best, ambiguous. A lot of academics rely on German sociologist Max Weber’s classical definition (Weber is generally considered to be one of the founders of sociology itself). Weber wrote that power is “the ability of an actor or actors to realize his/her/their will in a social action, even against the will of others.” Vincent Roscigno, a professor at Ohio State University and one of today’s big thinkers on power and inequality, notes in his 2011 paper “Power, Revisited” that those same sociologists are very likely to also offer “piecemeal caveats that render the original Weberian definition either useless or so complex that it becomes difficult to imagine how one might go about actually observing or studying it.”49 Oh, yay!
I know from asking the roughly one hundred people interviewed for this book that even people who don’t spend their entire academic careers looking for a definition rarely agree on what power means. Roscigno opens “Power, Revisited” by observing that “There is perhaps no construct in sociology as theoretically ambiguous yet simultaneously appealing as power.” Again, that word: ambiguous.
I decided to call Roscigno in hopes he might have more to say on the subject — particularly about how social movements might disrupt power, and also about power and inequity. As a historical sociologist, Roscigno has spent a lot of time looking at how and why structures of inequality shift. In poking at these long-term trends, he often comes back to power. A question that lingers at the back of his mind, he told me, is this: Why do structures of inequality not change much over time, and if they do, why are they so slow to change? Much of what we see as progress is really only a blip — a moment, to borrow Tarana Burke’s phrase in reverse, and not a movement. Take for example the Women’s March on Washington, generally agreed to be the beginning of today’s resurgent feminism. To Roscigno, this was a blip.
He wasn’t being intentionally dismissive. The march was amazing, he said, and, like many others, he watched it thinking, Oh, this is it. But it hasn’t yet moved past the first step in making a movement: consciousness-raising. Yes, there’s a need to get people on board with the message, to give them information about what’s going on and why so many people marched that day. Yet, he added, without a fundamental structural or cultural shift, nothing will happen to actually undermine inequality in meaningful, concrete ways. “The next step is to get politicians to do something about it,” he added, “and I sort of scratch my head about whether or not we have social movement action now that generates that kind of reverberation or earthquake in the structure.” The reverberation needs to be big enough, loud enough, dangerous enough that politicians must get involved, must change laws, must bow to pressure from the public.
Then again, he added, none of this is happening in a vacuum. Roscigno’s research looks at what makes social movements successful in disrupting power, but also at why they dissipate. Good, powerful, world-shaking social movements are contentious by nature; they often provoke backlash. In terms of feminism, that backlash has been on the rise since women effected changes to the law in the 1960s and ’70s. A lot of major, progressive legislative change, at least in the United States, added Roscigno, has flatlined, if not started a slippery backslide. That backlash has generated the same sort of unease and walls-crumbling-down feeling that’s usually reserved for progressive social change. Roscigno would like to see progressive movements become more innovative, for them to stop playing by the rules and to create distress in the system. “The Women’s March at least reinvigorated hope, but successful social movements only happen when they’re durable,” he said. “That is, when they last. When they last over time and can create actual organizational, political momentum and changes.”
So where does that leave #MeToo? At first glance, it seems as though the movement has caused massive change. On further examination . . . well, everything is a bit more complicated at second glance.
Seen from Burke’s point of view, #MeToo has already done something remarkable: it has restored power to those who have felt robbed of it. But when it comes to the type of tangible, cultural change Roscigno talks about as being central to a successful social movement, #MeToo has hit some surprising roadblocks. For a movement that seems to be everywhere, I’d expected — or maybe hoped — that its ubiquity would have translated into measurable change, whether in popular perceptions or in application of our legislation. Not so much. After one year of #MeToo, numerous publications and research firms tried to capture that exact shift I’d hoped for, offering us a plethora of data on people’s views toward sexual harassment and violence as well as consent. The numbers did not tell a happy story. It turned out that, if anything, people had become even more skeptical about sexual harassment, more confused about sexual assault, and even less inclined to do anything about it.
Men are more likely to feel this way, but such frustration isn’t relegated to one gender — as we saw when French actor Catherine Deneuve and one hundred other women denounced #MeToo in an open letter, arguing that “insistent or clumsy flirting is not a crime, nor is gallantry a chauvinist aggression.”50 As one twenty-four-year-old woman put it to me when I asked about her experience of harassment at work: “As for verbal sexual harassment, personally I’m confused [as] to what . . . that even mean[s] anymore considering it’s 2019 and post #MeToo. Does that mean have I been harassed in an extremely inappropriate manner? And does that also include if someone has given me compliments or tried to be insistent on expressing how attractive they think I am?”
She went on to explain that some might think she’d been harassed at work, but she believed it wasn’t so cut and dried. “Have men I worked with made comments on my appearance, suggesting I was attractive, sexy, etcetera?” she said. “Yes, but I did already have a great rapport with them and it did not make me uncomfortable.” The same went for office humour that some might construe as not funny at all. “Have I worked with someone who made extremely inappropriate jokes with women around the office? Yes. Was he a bad guy? No, he was married, had kids, in his sixties, came from a Maritime culture where that was normal, and to be honest some of the jokes were funny. Some were just dumb.” She continued: “Was I personally offended or uncomfortable? No, because I was friends with [him] and he was harmless.” She was, he said, a nice guy. “Were some of the women offended by his jokes? Yes, some were, and when they voiced their feelings, he would apologize and refrain from doing those jokes around those women.” She conceded that there were likely other women who did not speak up and may have been uncomfortable around him.
One Economist/YouGov poll found that, in the year since #MeToo went viral, a slight shift against the complainants had occurred.51 More American adults felt that any men who’d sexually harassed women at work in the more distant past (say, two decades ago) should keep their jobs. More Americans thought that those who bring forward sexual harassment complaints cause more problems than they solve. And more Americans thought that so-called false accusations were a bigger problem than attacks that go unreported or unpunished — a result that was replicated in a different poll completed by HuffPost/YouGov.52 Only 17 percent of those surveyed for the HuffPost poll felt the movement hadn’t gone far enough; 28 percent felt that it had gone too far. Less than half of Americans held a favourable view of the movement. Lest we think this is a problem singular to our frenemies in the south, the Canadian Women’s Foundation also found that, in the year after #MeToo, understanding of consent actually dropped.53 Half of the women surveyed said they’d felt pressured to consent at some point in their lives.
This mixed public sentiment, unsurprisingly, hasn’t done much to move policy. University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers released a report in December 2018 that looked at how the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission dealt with sexual harassment complaints over a five-year period. Researchers estimated that 5 million people experience sexual harassment at work every year in the United States, but only 9,200 of them, on average, file a charge with the EEOC or their state’s Fair Employment Practice agencies. In other words, noted the researchers, 99.8 percent of people who experience sexual harassment at work never file a charge.
Perhaps those 99.8 percent of people know what kind of bullshit is heading for them if they do. Of those who filed, only 1,800 received any kind of redress, even though the EEOC judged almost 90 percent of the charges plausibly legally actionable on intake. Almost three-quarters of those who reported workplace sexual harassment received no benefit from the EEOC, a scant 15 percent received monetary benefit, 8 percent received monetary and workplace change, and 4 percent saw only change at work. The majority of those who filed were, in fact, subject to punitive measures from their employers. Because of course they were. About two-thirds of those who filed were either fired or faced retaliation at work.54But, yeah, sure, people must be lying if they don’t file charges right away. There could be no other plausible reason!
At the same time, there’s a deliberate diminishment that comes with characterizing #MeToo as a movement that focuses only on sexual harassment. The movement is very much about those who’ve faced sexual violence — including rape — the vast majority of which did not happen in the workplace at all. If we’re going to talk about public response to women speaking out, en masse, about the sexual violence they experience, we’d be remiss not to mention the arguably corresponding astronomical rise in calls to Canada’s rape crisis centres. The first noted rise happened during one of the first “blips,” as Roscigno might say, of the new movement to end sexual violence: the national conversation around former Q host Jian Ghomeshi, who was charged with several counts of sexual assault and one count of overcoming resistance by choking in 2014. In one pre-#MeToo year, for instance, Ontario’s centres responded to 50,000 crisis-line calls — up from 30,000 in 2009. Centres only became more inundated with #MeToo. One Toronto clinic, for example, reported an 83 percent increase in requests for counselling in 2017. Yet some centres have not seen changes in their staffing levels since the early 1990s. No wonder centres have seen a devastating surge in wait times for counselling, with some waitlist times stretching as long as eighteen months.
In Ontario, where Canada’s most populist-macho leader, Doug Ford, governs, political will has turned chilly toward #MeToo’s aims. In early 2018, the Ontario government, then headed by Liberal Party leader Kathleen Wynne, pledged a 33 percent increase over three years to Ontario’s nearly forty rape crisis centres as part of its gender-based-violence strategy, “It’s Never Okay.” In many centres, that money would have gone to hire additional counsellors, which, in turn, would have helped to alleviate increasingly long wait times as centres struggle to keep up with skyrocketing demand. Ford’s government has repeatedly refused to honour the promise. Considering all this, it becomes easier to understand why Roscigno isn’t so quick to bless the change-making potential of the current iteration of the women’s movement. Then again, maybe it really is more ambiguous than all that.
There is an iconic photograph of Christine Blasey Ford taken on the day she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2018.55 Snapped at the moment of her swearing-in, the much-circulated image shows Blasey Ford with her palm raised, head tilted up, eyes closed, shoulders squared. She is somehow bathed in light. Like many others, when I look at that photo I see someone who appears to be taking a deep breath, steeling herself before the expected onslaught, an emblem of grace and courage.
She was there to recount how Brett Kavanaugh had raped her nearly four decades earlier (a charge he has denied). I watched that testimony streaming online, as did so many of the women I knew, texting each other notes of rage and reassurance, filling each other’s phones with Are you okay? and I am here for you. We could see ourselves in Blasey Ford. We could relate when she opened her testimony by saying, “I am here today not because I want to be. I am terrified.” We were terrified for her.
Blasey Ford had already experienced death threats. Her email had been hacked, and she’d been impersonated online. She’d even had to relocate her family — and would eventually go on to move at least four times and be forced to hire private security.56 Watching her testify, it was hard not to think of her initial reservation about coming forward: “Why suffer through the annihilation if it’s not going to matter?” The question became even more heartbreaking when senators voted to confirm Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in October that year. Blasey Ford had challenged a powerful man, in a powerful institution, and she had not, it seemed, shifted any of that power. Many people asked if she came forward for nothing, the silent “Yes” hanging after their question mark. But, then again, how does that saying go? Vast patriarchal institutions that support, and even elevate, sexual violence against women weren’t un-built in a day? In testifying, Blasey Ford showed us a different type of power, one that resonated with women in particular.
“In her courage, many Americans saw the opposite of everything they think is wrong with Washington. Politicians spin, fudge the truth, grasp at power. Ford appeared guileless,” wrote Time journalist Haley Sweetland Edwards, adding that Blasey Ford spoke up even though she knew she was unlikely to gain from it. “That kind of courage is rare, especially in Washington today. And Ford showed how powerful it can be.”57
From one angle, her testimony confirmed the fortress-like hold men have on power. From another, her decision to speak up, and people’s reactions to it, proved that power can wear many faces — likely one reason why it’s so difficult to define. It doesn’t always look like a person (usually a man) sitting at the top of a company or government, looking down. Power can also look like speaking your truth, forcing inconvenient questions into the mainstream, and inspiring countless others to do the same. Power doesn’t always have to win; it isn’t always a triumph over someone else. Sometimes it’s what happens when a person breaks the silence. It’s what happens when a person acknowledges to others, and to themselves, that their experiences matter. Sometimes, it’s just for you.
Media and researchers alike have gravitated toward evaluating #MeToo based on what people think about it, as if we need a consensus for rebellion. We ask if people agree with it. If people #BelieveHer. If people were surprised at the sheer magnitude of it. If he — any he — should be punished, and if it matters if the alleged assault happened so many years ago. (Incidentally, people were significantly more inclined to support Kavanaugh’s confirmation once they learned the alleged assault happened more than thirty-five years ago, as if there’s an expiry date on being a horrible human being.) These are all worthwhile questions, and it’s important for us to consider them. They help us gauge the likelihood of institutional change, as Roscigno rightly noted, which is necessary for a movement’s success. But I have to wonder if Burke struck closer to the real change-making potential of #MeToo when she spoke about its power to heal. Because these methods and measurements do little to help us evaluate the movement’s power outside of an institution and the dominant culture that influences it.
Blasey Ford made her first public statement since the testimony in December 2018 when she presented the Sports Illustrated Inspiration of the Year Award to Rachael Denhollander, the first woman who spoke up to publicly accuse Larry Nassar, the former U.S. gymnastics team doctor, of sexual abuse. Eventually more than 150 women and girls publicly accused him; their victim impact statements took a full seven days to be read in court. One, from gold medallist Aly Raisman, spoke to what many have taken to calling an “army of survivors.” “We, this group of women you so heartlessly abused over such a long period of time, are now a force, and you are nothing,” Raisman said. “The tables have turned, Larry. We are here. We have our voices, and we are not going anywhere.”58 And while it should be lost on nobody that it took 150 women to take down one powerful man, it should also not be lost on us that these women did come together, for the first time in their lives. In many ways, their speaking up was also about reclaiming their own power: power over their own narratives, power over their own voices, power over their own truths.
In her award presentation, Blasey Ford herself acknowledged the risk Denhollander took in speaking out, and also how her actions galvanized others. “The lasting lesson,” she added, “is that we all have the power to create real change and we cannot allow ourselves to be defined by the acts of others.”59 In another context, that statement would sound like a platitude. Except we know that the tide of #MeToo has washed over far more men than Nassar — despite the generally lukewarm attitude toward it (itself arguably a product of that change). In the year after media broke the Harvey Weinstein story, #MeToo brought down a total of 201 once-powerful men, according to a New York Times report.60 In contrast, the year before, only thirty high-profile people made the news for losing their jobs following public reports of sexual misconduct. More interestingly, though, in the 124 cases in which companies hired replacements to fill the big (ass)hole at the top, a total of fifty-four women were chosen. (Presumably still in turmoil, some companies had yet to hire anyone at all.)
That’s far from a guarantee of deeper power shifts. As we’ll see later, in chapter 4, just as parity is not always synonymous with equality, having a woman CEO does not necessarily guarantee her, or any other woman in the company, power. But disrupting the default-male-CEO tradition is a start — evidence that, as The New York Times put it, the #MeToo movement is shaking the most visible power structures. “We’ve never seen something like this before,” Joan Williams, a professor who studies work, gender, and class at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, told the paper. “Women have always been seen as risky, because they might do something like have a baby. But men are now being seen as more risky hires.”
And yet it’s more than that. There’s a reason Burke — and others — calls focusing on the number of downed men a distraction. What about those of us who’ve experienced violence at the hands of strangers, casual acquaintances, or people we thought we loved or trusted? Threaded through all of this is one constant, and it isn’t bad bosses. It’s how #MeToo has given those who’ve experienced sexual violence a way to talk to each other, unfiltered and without any interference from the systems they are typically forced to navigate. Some have used that power to cut the head off the monster. Good for them. Others have used it to do something that is Burke’s goal for the movement, something that is perhaps far more radical: to begin healing. I cannot think of a more anti-patriarchal vision of power than thousands of women coming together to heal one of the deepest wounds that system can inflict.
As someone who has experienced sexual violence as a child and as an adult, I know first-hand how shame, guilt, and silence can eat away at your sense of self, your own sense of power, and even the belief that anything can change. I know that sexual violence is itself not an act of passion-gone-wrong, as it’s so often portrayed, but a particular exertion — and abuse — of power. Those who benefit from traditional power structures should fear #MeToo not because they could be the next target, but because it facilitates a way for us to validate each other and our experiences, to share knowledge and compassion, to be vulnerable and honest, and to land in the open arms of a thousand hugs, real and virtual. It tells us we can cry and rage and stumble. It tells us we deserve to talk about these things, and in the way that we want to. Ultimately, in speaking up and being listened to, we become more whole again. #MeToo helps us to imagine what we can do when we’re not being systematically, intentionally broken down; to dream of all that can happen when the systems that break us are themselves broken, torn down, set on fire. And it invites us to believe that such a future is, at last, possible. Hope. It gives us hope.
In so many ways, then, #MeToo not only allows survivors to reclaim their narratives, it also enables them to reclaim power itself. Maybe it won’t yet stop assault, maybe it won’t yet punish everyone who’s at fault, maybe it won’t get every bad man fired, but #MeToo sure as hell lets us know we’re not alone. And that none of what happened to us is our fault. Nobody can demand our damned silence anymore. In reclaiming power, we’re also forcing systems to change the way they deal with survivors. Consider all the women who have asked for their publication bans to be lifted in the #MeToo era so that they can speak out, connect with other women — and criticize the system. In March 2019, one thirty-one-year-old woman, Bekah D’Aoust, who lives in a small town outside of Ottawa, petitioned the court to lift the publication ban on her name after meeting many other women who’d also experienced sexual violence. She told the Ottawa Citizen that those women found strength in each other, and that she wanted to offer that strength to other women. The best way to do that, she thought, was by releasing her identity.61
Another woman, twenty-year-old Vancouver-based Sam Fazio, had the publication ban on her name lifted after her rapist, then nineteen, served only two weeks in a detention centre for assaulting her and another woman; the rest of his three-year sentence would be served at home, under supervision. Part of the judge’s reasoning? That even though the second assault occurred after the first, he deemed the teen unlikely to reoffend. Fazio told the CBC she wanted to come forward, with her name, so she could publicly question why anybody would report their assault when the system still treats them like this. Her story inspired two women, who didn’t know her, to organize a protest on the steps of Vancouver’s provincial courthouse.62
Then there is the group of women who in early 2019 petitioned to have their names heard in the case against Canada’s former national ski coach, Bertrand Charest. One said she wanted to come forward because hearing so many women share their #MeToo stories had helped her, and she wanted to help others in the same way.63 Another said that restoring her name to the public record was important for her to continue on her path toward healing. In many cases, it’s as simple, and as difficult, as that: the decision to reclaim an identity that feels stolen. “For eight years part of my identity has been taken away from me. You have all known me as a victim, but today I am more than that. I am a wife, I am a daughter, I am a sister,” D’Aoust said in a statement posted online. “I am extremely proud to say I am also a survivor, and I hope in the future that I become an advocate.”64
It was almost as if, pre-#MeToo, people saw women who’d experienced sexual violence as machines, as Sarah Sharma, an associate professor at the University of Toronto and the director of the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology, told me one day over coffee. Those who enacted the violence certainly did not treat them as human, and nor did much of wider society and the systems that maintain it. The women were seen as unfeeling objects, not dissimilar to a computer or, perhaps more accurately, a toaster. When I spoke to her, Sharma had recently spent a lot of her time looking at common contemporary gender struggles through a technological lens. Suddenly, with #MeToo, she said, it was as if the machines were talking to each other, forming this powerful mass of people — and that really freaked out men.
When you’re talking about the elements of #MeToo that should be harnessed for future change, she added, it’s exactly that. “You can name any space in this city, you can name any company, you can name any university — women are sexually harassed in it,” she said. “The more interesting thing about #MeToo is the fact that women were talking to each other without regular institutional help, without doctors, without lawyers.” She paused. “That’s what was so great about it: it was rogue.”
We should ask ourselves something else, though, too, she contended: What was going on? What was happening in all these places — a person’s everyday workplace, their domestic arrangement, their university or high school classroom — that these thousands of people initially felt safer turning to the internet, land of Reddit and misogynistic trolls?
Mandalena Lewis would know the answer to that question all too well. After a pilot assaulted the then WestJet flight attendant during a layover in Maui in 2010, she did all the “right things.” The next morning, Lewis messaged her then partner, disclosing right away. Then, she told her first officer. When she got home to Vancouver, she told the company itself what had happened. The next day, she reported her assault to the police. None of it was easy, she told me, and she immediately understood why more women don’t report. She waited and waited and waited for something to happen. But, she said, WestJet did very little.
Eventually, the company called her into a meeting where she recounted everything that had happened, again. She was asked never to speak the pilot’s name. She was asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement. And, at the end of the meeting, throughout which Lewis said she was “crying, yelling, screaming at how unjust this all was,” a woman pulled her aside and asked why she didn’t just leave WestJet.
Lewis walked out of that meeting with the clear message that she was the problem. And while she was never scheduled to work with the pilot again, she saw him all the time: at the airport, at the hotel gym, constantly. Every time it happened, WestJet representatives gave her one answer, she said. Write it up. She sent email after email. Finally, years later in April 2015, her complaint still unresolved, she attended a career resource management class, and at the end of it she asked about what she felt was the company’s inadequate (or non-existent) sexual harassment training. It was so quiet, she said, you could have heard a pin drop in the room. Somebody reminded her that men can be assaulted too. Several months later, though, she received a Facebook message from a woman who had also been at the seminar and wanted to share a story with her. Lewis was on a layover in Toronto and it was 1:00 a.m. Still, she told the woman she could call her, and she did. Over the next two hours, the woman shared her own story of rape. It didn’t take long for the women to realize they were talking about the same man.
“I had my first panic attack on my plane back to Vancouver that morning,” said Lewis. Somebody made a “that’s what she said” joke and she just “snapped.” When she returned home, this time she asked for a copy of her employee file to see what, if anything, WestJet had done in the five years since her complaint. Company policy, she said, guarantees the file within thirty days. By day 125, after many follow-ups, Lewis lost her patience and sent a terse email: “Where the fuck is my file?” She was fired, over email, shortly after. She decided to sue the company, and eventually she launched a class-action suit that accused WestJet of fostering a workplace culture that fails to keep women employees safe and, in fact, tolerates harassment. Over a period of two years, WestJet twice tried to quash that suit but failed. Lewis has regained some of her power by speaking out, by not letting a giant corporation silence her, and by starting a very loud conversation that is making that corporation very worried.
While waiting for her lawsuit to make its way through the system, Lewis co-founded a website called You, Crew, and #MeToo. The website is dedicated to providing information and community-building to support other flight crew who are experiencing sexual harassment at work. Lewis told me that she wanted to see #MeToo move off the screen and into action. She seemed skeptical that this was happening, or that it was happening fast enough. It certainly must have felt that way when women routinely reached out to her and just as routinely demurred when it came to the point of speaking out. Right when she was reclaiming some of her power, the system — and the corporations that benefit from it — were reaching back for some of their own. But I wondered how many of the women who refused to join Lewis in speaking out publicly were perhaps acting in other ways, how many had started to work on shifting things in their own way, without her even knowing it. Because the more I delved into the nature of #MeToo, its reverberations, and its potential, the more I realized one thing: those who’ve experienced sexual violence are everywhere, including in the system.
Past movements have often relied on outside pressure to force change within a system. We need that pressure; it works. (And, as we have already discussed, it’s hard to push from the inside when you’re not represented at all within most institutions.) But, in so many ways, we are now the change. Groups that seek equality are pushing their way into spaces of traditional power with the explicit mission to overturn that power — not easily, and not yet en masse, but it is happening. We’re seeing this push in ways both big and small. It could be as microscale as employees successfully banding together for gender-neutral washrooms or to get an updated, more equitable, harassment policy. It could be the newspaper or magazine editor who prioritizes bylines from people of colour, or the director who hires transgender actors. And it could be the politicians who, after fighting their way into the system, extend a hand to others.
In February 2019, for instance, uber-popular (and uber-loathed) U.S. Congress representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez literally brought a survivor into the halls of power as her guest to the State of the Union Address. That day, she and Ana Maria Archila, one of the two women who confronted Arizona senator Jeff Flake in an elevator after he said he’d vote to confirm Kavanaugh, both arrived in white, part of a tribute to the suffragist movement. Archila told media at the time, “I just feel particularly moved that in her first participation in the State of the Union, she is inviting me to join and inviting that moment of the elevator, my confrontation with the men who do not understand the life of women and the lives of people who are not in power, that she’s inviting that into the imagination of people again.”65
Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet announcing Archila as her guest was “liked” 42,000 times. Some people might be tempted to remark, “Sure, yes, but it’s just Twitter.” They’d do well to remember that not only did #MeToo gain much of its present power through Twitter, it’s the primary method of communication for America’s 45th president. (Twitter is also where, months later, he would attack Ocasio-Cortez and three other congresswomen, saying they should “go back” to where they came from and that he did not believe they were “capable of loving our Country.”)66 The support Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet received was a signal to survivors that, perhaps for the first time ever, there exists a mass of other people, like us, who are saying yes, yes, yes, this is a priority for me too. Which is a good thing, because to crush anything, even vast misogynistic systems of power, you need to exert pressure from both sides . . . pop! Just like cracking a nut.
Still, we’d need more than disruptive party guests to truly reimagine a system that works for women. One of the many flaws in the system that #MeToo has revealed is that the legal establishment seems to fail those who have experienced sexual violence the most often and the most gravely. But if those inside the system weren’t just bowing to pressure, if they truly believed in the goals of a movement like #MeToo — healing, survivor-first, radical power shifts — what new system would they create? If these new systems wanted to centre women and survivors, what would they actually look like? How would they restore power to those who’d been denied it or robbed of it? To find out, I boarded a plane to Halifax in February 2019 to attend the annual Law Needs Feminism Because forum — a gathering of, as the name suggests, hundreds of lawyers, lawmakers, and others in the establishment who believe in a feminist legal system. That year’s theme: the power of grassroots movements. The power, essentially, of #MeToo.
The organizers — students from law schools across Canada — wanted to highlight the idea that groundswell change can lead to bigger change. The organization itself was born when a group of students started a photo campaign asking people to take and share pictures of themselves holding up signs that completed the phrase, “Law needs feminism because . . .” They soon realized that the potential conversations were much too big to fit on bristol board. The previous year’s conference was held in Ottawa, with only those in the legal profession invited to attend. But if they were going to highlight grassroots movements, thought the 2019 organizers, maybe a better location was away from Canada’s symbolic centre of power. They also opened up the event to those outside the profession, including activists, social workers, and staff at rape crisis centres. Most (but certainly not all) of the attendees the year I went were young, either still students or in the early stages of their careers, those years when they will decide their governing values in the workplace and in their lives.
To one co-organizer, Kathleen Kontak Adams, the idea behind the event was the same as the one behind the organization itself. “Small movements just pick up speed and pick up speed and pick up speed,” she told me. “But those little cracks in the marble start with one little person [speaking up].” I thought of what she said as I walked down the hallway to the main conference room, passing “Law Needs Feminism Because” posters, stark against the white hallways. One, written by a man, said, “If law isn’t feminist, it’s just power.” Another said, “If you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re probably on the menu.” A third showed a black woman who’d inserted “intersectional” into the tagline, writing below: “No Supreme Court Justice looks like me.” I thought again about all these steps we must take, fast and slow, as I looked out the window of Halifax’s Pier 21 Immigration Museum, where the conference was held, and gazed at the vast expanse of cobalt water that was working over the stones, turning them to sand.
The day’s workshops included sessions that, rightly, stretched far beyond #MeToo, including ones on women and wrongful convictions, how to use social media for advocacy and activism, and reproductive justice for criminalized women and transgender people. At one session I attended, focusing on grassroots organizing “by survivors for survivors,” the speaker system from the adjoining room blared such loud, repeated feedback that the presenter, the Dandelion Initiative’s Larissa Donovan, couldn’t be heard. Every time she opened her mouth to suggest how anti–workplace harassment policies might better serve complainants by becoming survivor- and trauma-informed, the system screeched at jaw-clenchingly loud volumes. Eventually, the group huddled into one of the museum’s common areas, a few young women in blazers and “Je Parle Féministe” T-shirts joking, “They’re trying to silence us!” I laughed, but as the day wore on, it seemed less and less funny.
In another session, we learned how sexual assault centres, including the Nova Scotia–based one that led the discussion, were fighting the use of counselling records in sexual assault trials. Those counselling records are often used by defence lawyers to, unsurprisingly, undermine the complainant. Their use is also on the rise across Canada, with courts granting 51 percent of applications to obtain the records from 2011–17, up from 30 percent in 2007–11. The reasons for granting said applications has also shifted, with judges most often allowing that the accused needs those records to make a full answer of defence. As a result, shared the presenter, they are seeing women opt out of treatment, knowing that treatment might one day be used against them.67 In fact, I only had to open up Dalhousie University law professor Elaine Craig’s most recent book, Putting Trials on Trial: Sexual Assault and the Failure of the Legal Profession, which I’d started reading shortly before my trip, for a flood of examples of just how brutal the system can be for survivors.
To wit, Craig quotes from the transcript of one 2013 trial, R v. Adepoju, held in Red Deer, Alberta:
Q: And — and then eventually you stopped saying no, and you opened up your legs and the sex act occurred; correct?
A: Yes.
Q: You didn’t scream?
A. No.
Q: You didn’t cry?
A. No.
Q: You didn’t go lock yourself in the bathroom?
. . .
Q: Well you did let him have sex with you; right?
A. Eventually, yes.
Q. Yes. You stopped saying no.
A. But I didn’t say yes.
Q. You stopped saying no, and you used body language, um, complying with the sexual act; correct?
A. I — I guess I’d [sic] did.68
One of the other presenters, Grace Cleveland, had a very simple but very revolutionary idea to stop exchanges like that from happening: make every law student take a course on feminist jurisprudence as a requirement for graduation. “Feminist legal methods combine to show that neutral rules and procedures are not so neutral, that the decision-making process is always inflected with ‘the ideologies of the decision-maker,’” she wrote in a handout for her talk, “and that much work remains to be done in order for women to be supported through, rather than subordinated by, the Canadian legal system.” Under this paradigm, lawyers and judges might “unmask the patriarchy” — that is, confront the idea of a neutral law — and they might also use a feminist framework to reach decisions. If survivors’ voices were centred in the legal system, for instance, we might see more cases of restorative, not punitive, justice.
While over half of Canadians still report limited familiarity with the concept,69 restorative justice has gained ground in recent years among those searching for alternatives to a system that often works against, not for, survivors. Restorative justice holds offenders accountable, and while it can include punishment, that isn’t the primary goal of the process. Instead, it provides an opportunity for those affected — the survivor, the offender, and their communities — to talk about their needs and to find a solution that puts healing first and focuses on reparation, reintegration into communities, and solutions against future harm. Essentially, it seeks to treat everybody as a human being.70 And although only 5 percent of those who’ve been sexually assaulted in Canada report it to the police, as many as one in four survivors are interested in restorative justice; in some studies that number is over 50 percent.71 There’s good reason for this: research suggests that restorative justice can help reduce symptoms of PTSD and post-assault stress. Participants in one pilot project in Arizona agreed that, in comparison to other justice options, it helped them “tak[e] back their power.” Yet those who choose restorative justice often face backlash from a public that is more focused on equating punishment with justice.
If we reimagine a legal system that operates according to feminist values, we might also see a legal system that is anti-colonial and anti-racist. After all, a feminism that successfully disrupts power is not just about helping white women who’ve experienced sexual violence. It’s about (or it should be about) making everyone’s lives more equitable. Canadian law has long been wielded to disempower Indigenous people — this is what I was told by Naiomi Metallic, a member of the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation, an assistant professor of law at Dalhousie University, and the school’s Chancellor’s Chair in Aboriginal Law and Policy. But the law is also more flexible than we often imagine, and it can be used as a tool for reconciliation as well. That’s particularly true if the face of those who practise the law also changes. She pointed to the Indigenous Blacks & Mi’kmaq Initiative at Dalhousie’s Schulich School of Law, which acts as an affirmative action access program for the school, and which celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in September 2019.
As Metallic noted, Nova Scotia is not alone in its long history of racism, but it is one of the few provinces in Canada to put that history under the spotlight via a public inquiry. That inquiry, eventually dubbed the Marshall Report, was made public in 1989. At that time, none of the province’s 1,200 lawyers were Mi’kmaq and only about a dozen were Black. Today, three decades after the launch of the affirmative action initiative, crafted in part as a response to the report, 2.2 percent of the lawyers in the province are Indigenous and another 2.7 percent are Black. That still isn’t enough, but it’s a whole lot better than zero. In increasing the number of Black and Indigenous lawyers in the province, the initiative gives more power to those individuals but also to the communities they represent — and power, after all, said Metallic, is really about the ability to affect lives and effect change. “Diversity is important because we’re important,” she told me. “The law permeates everything.”
Back at the conference, discussing those possibilities for change involved getting the lawyers to engage in “feminist practical reasoning.” In one scenario, they were asked to consider what to do when a white foster family and the biological parents of an Indigenous child are both seeking custody. Questions they were encouraged to ask poked at biases, social conditioning, and facts beyond those traditionally considered “legally relevant.” My own group was asked to look at consciousness-raising, which is the practice of sharing personal experiences to illuminate deeper truths and build both empathy and community. In this context, though, it was also presented as a tool to help other lawyers (i.e., the grizzled white dudes who still hold all the power) to “get it.” We were asked to share what barriers or harm we’d experienced during our careers and then discuss how we might use the narrative around those experiences to help build empathy.
As we went around the table, it became clear that we all had alarmingly similar stories to share, despite our differences. One older woman, one of the few lawyers there, told us about standing before a male judge, along with a group of male lawyers. The judge asked the others about their cases, but when he got to her he only remarked on how nice she looked that day. A younger woman, still a student, who’d driven all the way from Fredericton, New Brunswick, that morning, was there to see if she might go into law after completing her environmental sciences degree. She told us about a job interview she’d had in Alberta in which the interviewer had asked at the end how she’d handle the mostly male staff, who were known to be fairly crude, especially in the field. She declined to take her callback interview. One of the presenters was also at our table. She shared how impossible it was to find a clerking position with her impressive feminist legal organizing on her CV; she’d been baldly told it would be easier for her if she deleted it.
I told a story, which I’ve shared elsewhere, about a writer-in-residence who, not realizing he’d written for the magazine I was editor of at the time, spent an inordinate amount of time commenting on my skirt and then told me my career would pick up after I’d written my first magazine article. I’d just won a gold medal at the National Magazine Awards.
Hearing the stories shared around the table, so easily recalled, I felt furious and I felt sick, as if an army of bees were blinking in my stomach, across my skin, my vision. Forget stopping with law. Every field needs a mandatory feminist course.
A couple of days later, I called Lady Drive Her, a female-drivers-only cab service, to take me to the Halifax airport. Crissy McDow launched the company after several high-profile sexual assault accusations in the city involving taxi drivers, or those posing as them. When I called, the service was still restricted to doing airport drop-offs and pickups, with a proposal before city council to become fully licensed to operate throughout Halifax. Perhaps predictably, the proposal had raised some controversy, including debate over the risk female passengers actually faced.72 I thought about that backlash as my driver picked me up from my hotel, wind whipping a slushy, freezing rain into my face. I thought about how one of the Law Needs Feminism Because co-organizers had told me that she’d joined the group after seeing its posters vandalized all across the Dalhousie campus. Her own poster soon said “. . . Because this isn’t Don Draper’s 1961.” When my driver told me she was going slowly that morning because the rain had caused blackout puddles, it seemed symbolic.
The emerging lessons of #MeToo seem both simple and impossible. First, break the imbalance by breaking the silence. Second, show women and other equity-seeking groups a new version of power by also showing them a way to start healing. Third, take that tenderly healing nation and that thunderous chorus of voices and use it to squeeze out the rotten power, putting pressure on systems from within and without, grinding down like a vice. Fourth, build something new and feminist in its place. A practical step-by-step guide to remaking the world!
Except that, as much as #MeToo has started to give women new ways to think about power, and to enact it, it has also generated enormous backlash. And that backlash is popularizing a regressive, violent form of power, one that operates with a not-so-hidden goal of silencing women. Thinking of the roadblocks ahead, it seems as though we face the same thing we always have: patriarchal power. Except on steroids.
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67. Nora MacIntosh, Avalon Sexual Assault Centre, in presentation to Law Needs Feminism Because forum, Halifax, Nova Scotia, February 23, 2019.
68. Craig, Elaine. Putting Trials on Trial: Sexual Assault and the Failure of the Legal Profession. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018, 36–7.
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