This month, media in the United States told stories about two well-kept secrets: twenty years of long rumoured sexual predation of women in his industry by New York movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. And a $32 million settlement in a lawsuit over sexual harassment by Bill O’Reilly, the disgraced old anchor at Fox News, where the chairman, the late Roger Ailes, resigned last year over similar behaviour.
On October 15, actress Alyssa Milano responded to the stories by tweeting a friend’s suggestion of how to “give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem,” asking women to “write ‘me too’” in response if they had experienced sexual harassment or assault. It set off a cascade of testimonials, generated the hashtag #MeToo, 1.7 million tweets and 12 million posts on Facebook. American parliamentarians and all told stories. Three days before that, here in TTO, the latest tee-off from the fertile mouth of Keith Rowley had launched its own round of rejoinders, from several fields, about misogyny.
Milano quickly heralded Tarana Burke when the story was revealed that the 44-year-old African-American had coined the words Me Too back in 2006 BH, before hashtags, as the basis of a movement for solidarity, sometimes in whispers, with others. Burke emphasised that the matter was one of movement-building, and not slogans.
Like Burke, long before our quick responses to jamettry or golf courses, Caribbean women have been giving a counter voice to a culture for which the region’s Prime Ministers, in St Vincent & the Grenadines and Trinidad & Tobago, have become notorious voices.
Young women carry on that tradition. In Port-of-Spain, they turned out in numbers and costume bikinis and said Me Too when a former mayor sneered that a dead woman might be responsible for her assault. In 2012, Guyanese Sherlina Nageer and Barbadian Tonya Haynes imagined to life CatchAFyah, as a grounding for youngish feminist activists to organise regionally. Haynes had led CODE RED for gender justice when it was started by UWI Cave Hill students around 2009, and helped make Caribbean feminism digital. Last year, Taitu Heron, Latoya Nugent and Nadeen Spence in Jamaica founded the Tambourine Collective, invoking survivors of childhood sexual assault to #SayTheirNames. Jamaican police arrested Nugent for cybercrimes, and UWI Mona authorities harassed Spence.
But what about men? Sadly, too many of us responded to #MeToo in ways that made the conversation about us. With a whining Me too, complaining men were being left out of the conversations as sexual assault victims. With boasts of Not Me, that we aren’t one of “those” men, or that they are the exception. With protests that all men were being tarred, unfairly. Or with irony that belittles everyone.
We can’t just declare: Men are good. As men, we are all responsible for masculinity. Whether we sit by in our corner, make judgments, and leave it the way it is. Or we change it.
For me, feminism doesn’t have to always be bound up with pain and contest. Sometimes it is about joy and hope.
This weekend, 17 men began a five-week workshop to be part of creating a culture of sexual justice. It was conceived by Attillah Springer and Angelique Nixon. Marlon Bascombe and Rondel Benjamin, Amilcar Sanatan and Keegan Taylor are among the presenters. One of the sessions is titled Change Begins With You.
And, of course, it ends with a session on learning how to tell stories. Stories about masculinity the men will be supported in telling each other. Telling in the communities they go back to.
It’s a different way of saying Me too!