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Sexual abuse survivors are powerful. #MeToo has already changed the world.

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Back in November I was in the middle of writing a comment on this diary about how sexual abuse allegations are about real, actual people when a realization hit me.  We were all sharing our own stories.  Here’s the comment:

Nov 13 · 08:14:28 PM 

My abuser was my father, from when I was 11 and couldn’t know he was full of it when he said my mother would have a heart attack if I told anyone, to 19 when I had learned something about the law, and told him “Never again” in a threatening way.  (I consider that the day I became an adult.)

I disclosed to a friend at 21 or so, then my mother (after a lot of therapy) at 22… to my great relief, the rest of the family all believed me.  And I’ve been pretty open about it ever since.  This was at the time, early-mid 80s, when it was all coming out, so I was lucky that way.

But what was both funny and irritating was that, on learning about it, some people started telling me how to behave.  “You have to forgive.” “You can’t take revenge on him.” “You should sue him”— my mother was pushing that hard, and also anonymously sending him newspaper clippings about women who’d won six-figure awards or settlements from lawsuits against their dads.  She didn’t ask me whether I wanted her to do this (I didn't).  (I did eventually sue, after she died.)

To all these people, I kept wanting to say, “Don’t you think the person you should be telling how to behave is him?” Also, “You got your expertise where?” Everyone who had actual expertise, i.e. the therapists I went to (except one bad one) refrained from telling me how I should act, but rather helped me learn myself what I wanted to do by supporting me.

You’d almost think your female sexual abuse survivors are Hillary Clinton or something, with all the shoulds that get dumped on us.

[This is where the realization hit.]

Which makes me realize something about why they do it.

Sexual abuse survivors are powerful.

We flip the traditional order upside-down.  I remember, while I was in the four-year process of suing, I would sometimes get out of bed and suddenly feel the room was turning over, though I wasn’t dizzy.  I realized in time that it was a sensation symbolic of what I was doing — turning the hierarchy on its head.  I was basically refusing to be on the bottom of the family/societal pecking order, but instead demanding my rights as an equal, under the law.

We are powerful… just by speaking our truth, we can destroy reputations, trash careers, stop powerful men from getting more power, or bring them down completely.

Because of that, we are scary to those powerful men.  Of course they want to control us!  Hence the discrediting, the trivialization, the harassment, the death threats, etc., that trigger our old feelings of helplessness.

These things are actually badges of honour for our courage to speak out and pose a threat to the abusers.  We are powerful.  We make their lives unpredictable.  There are movie moguls, stars and politicians out there who haven’t been exposed yet but know what they’ve done — and are shaking in their boots right now, dreading the possibility their names will be in the headlines and trending on Twitter tomorrow.

We kick over the hierarchy, make the powerful feel helpless in a delightfully karmic role-reversal.  They made us feel helpless back then because they knew damn well we would be powerful if we spoke up.  They plotted against us in all kinds of ways, too long to get into in a comment — but it was all designed to make us feel helpless and that the crime was at least partly our own fault, so they’d get away with it.

However helpless we might feel, the moment we speak up, we are powerful.  We are dangerous — to those who endangered us.

Whichever side of the situation you’re on, if you’re on a side, don’t forget it.

The #MeToo movement has gone on to bear this out.  Never mind “it might change the political discourse”; it already has.

Recall the excellent NYT column by Jill Filipovic, diaried here and here, in which she noticed that journalists Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Mark Halperin and Glenn Thrush, all now exposed as sexual predators against women, covered Hillary Clinton in a misogynistic and dismissive way, possibly tilting the election towards Donald Trump.

Of course there is a correlation between sexual predation by men of women, and general misogyny; these are men who consider women meat and playthings, not presidential material.  But it took their accusers to bring that reality out into the open.

The thing is, those guys are now all gone.  They’ve lost their big pulpits from which they could powerfully influence news coverage of women and therefore the public discourse about women—purely because of the #MeToo movement.  That is already affecting how, for instance, the Alabama senatorial election with its teen-chasing Republican candidate Roy Moore is being covered.

MSM misogyny directed at women running for the highest offices did not begin with Hillary Clinton.  I first remember it rearing its ugly head when Geraldine Ferraro ran for VP on the Dem ticket with Walter Mondale in 1984. For instance:

She faced a threshold of proving competence that other high-level female political figures have had to face, especially those who might become commander-in-chief; the question "Are you tough enough?" was often directed to her.[67]Ted Koppel questioned her closely about nuclear strategy[68] and during Meet the Press she was asked, "Do you think that in any way the Soviets might be tempted to try to take advantage of you simply because you are a woman?"[69]

As well, the media dug into Ferraro’s and her husband’s finances in search of dirt. Ferraro disclosed her own records, but when she made the valid point that her husband’s need not be opened up because they were not relevant to her candidacy, the MSM suggested the couple had something to hide.  Eventually he made full disclosure and no wrongdoing was ever discovered, but the damage was done in time for the election, which was won by Reagan.

I recall reading at the time, and wish I could cite it, that at least one TV network gave absolute carte blanche, unlimited funding, to the crew assigned to muckrake against Ferraro, something they’d done with no other candidate.  

Make no mistake, misogyny is a powerful force in American politics, journalism and entertainment.

However, in 2017, #MeToo exercised its own immense power. Through a combination of steely courage, agonizing honesty and sheer numbers, it’s kicking the feet out from under misogyny in all three of those places by exposing the most pernicious way it manifests, toppling the sexist predators from their thrones and striking fear into the hearts of those who remain on their thrones (for now).

The biggest predator on the biggest throne has yet to be removed, but it’s coming.  His evil actions are so many that sexual predation is a fraction of them, but I suspect it will be a significant part of his downfall.

Time awarded ‘Person of the Year’ to ‘The Silence-Breakers’ because, I think, the Time editors agree with me that #MeToo has altered the discourse permanently. Not only are the sexists/predators quickly losing influence, but the movement is successfully requiring sexual abuse disclosures across the board to be credited rather than ignored.  There are simply too many survivors coming forward in every walk of life for their stories and the awful reality they reveal ever to be shoved back under the rug.  Instead, the culture as a whole is having to face it, and men in particular have to soul-search.  You can see that already happening.

Time gave it to them—us, if you are one—because the magazine’s criterion for ‘Person of the Year’ is ‘the person or persons who most influenced the events of the year.’  #MeToo beat out Robert Mueller, Kim Jong-Un and even Donald Trump (oh, how that must hurt his ego, lol) because Time saw us as more influential than any of them.

Because sexual abuse survivors are powerful.  Never forget it.

I’m an SMWM (single mom with mortgage :-) ) who earns every dollar I earn by writing.  If you’d like to support my work on DKos, please consider sending a donation my way.  Suggested amount $3.  Update: thanks to everyone who has supported me so far, but especially those who have been particularly generous.


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