One Small Voice: Will we make ‘MeToo’ a cultural shift?

“Where have all the good men gone and where are all the gods?”

— “Holding Out For A Hero” by Steiner and Pitchford, c1984, written for the soundtrack for FOOTLOOSE and recorded by Bonnie Tyler.

“So, Dave, do you think Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer get together mornings now to chat over coffee?” Me, to my husband, a couple of days after the fall of Lauer.

For so many weeks in these waning months of 2017, we’ve been hearing other shoes drop in the metaphorical bedroom of sexual harassment in America. Wednesday, TIME magazine named #MeToo as the Person of the Year. This signals a very important milestone in the way we have treated one another in America with regard to how sex is used to dominate, demean and disrespect.

#MeToo may be called a movement by some. And maybe it is. But in my mind a movement seems like a fad that ebbs and flows, rather than a significant cultural shift. And I think #MeToo is a cultural shift. It’s like the volcano in Bali that has begun shooting rock and ash into the atmosphere, and threatens to erupt violently.

The revelations about Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes, followed by those of Harvey Weinstein, were the first terrible rumblings of something that has long been roiling underground. Then the smoking of the volcanic cone began, with revelations about Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K. and other entertainers. And when we began to think the earth was settling down, the cone blew off the top of the sexual harassment volcano when Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer and Al Franken were revealed to be among the unwelcome magma oozing down the sides of the American mountainside.

We have distracted ourselves lately with regard to this epidemic.  We have allowed ourselves to get sucked into the “yeah buts” as we struggle to defend the various perpetrators, according to our political leanings, our biases or our fanhood. We have all felt betrayed to one degree or another. I, personally, was particularly crushed when Charlie Rose was exposed. I have considered him to be a particularly intelligent, articulate and trustworthy journalist for many years. When his exploits were revealed, I had thoughts similar to, though certainly not as intensely felt, as those of Gayle King, his CBS Morning co-host, who said she was having a terrible time reconciling the co-worker whom she loved and admired with the perpetrator of such bad behavior that he had been revealed to be.

How do we resolve these emotional conflicts within ourselves when our “heroes” fall?

What is so important about #MeToo is that it moves the scandalous behavior of (some) men from the lofty heights of entertainment, journalism and politics into the mainstream of average American life, into the everyday lives of American girls and women who live among and around us. It exposes many decades of such bad behavior that girls and women have coped with and repressed for years, letting it roil under the surface until events finally rupture the festering boil.

I have a couple of stories to tell.  

It’s 1966, or thereabouts, and a 16-year-old girl has found a job in a retail business at the local strip mall. Other than babysitting, this is her first real job. Very early on she finds herself in a very awkward situation. Her much older, new boss is teaching her how to ring up sales on the cash register.  While she practices entering transactions on the keys, he stands behind her.  His hands move to her upper arms, gently grasping her biceps. Then his fingers begin to brush against her breasts. It only lasts a few seconds, and she pulls her arms in tight to her sides and wriggles away. The following weekend when she works, it happens again. Not at the cash register, but in another situation where he can “innocently” brush against her breasts. This time she mentions it to a teenage co-worker, who tells her that, hey, he does that to all the girls. But they try never to let him alone with each other, and they have all learned to keep something between him and them at all times.  The young girl learns to adopt this strategy, too, for the remainder of her two years working there. She feels guilty and ashamed. Nothing else is ever said.

It’s about the same year, in the summer. A teenage girl has been hanging out at her friend’s house, like she usually does. They go back and forth between their houses all the time, every day. It is customary for the dads to walk the girls home if it is after dark. It’s only two blocks, but it’s the courteous thing to do. This particular night her friend’s dad, using the excuse that the evening is chilly, puts his arm around her as he walks her home. But as they walk, his arm moves from around her shoulder to around her waist, with his hand at her side. And as they walk, his hand moves slightly forward to just under her breast, and his thumb caresses the underside of the breast.  Alarmed, but raised too polite to make a scene or embarrass him, she manages to move out from his arm for the rest of the walk home. It is the last time she stays at her friend’s house past dark, so as never to have to accept his offer of an escort home. She feels guilty and ashamed. She never tells anyone about the touching.

These are true stories. They are my stories. They are examples of how seemingly innocuous instances of sexual abuse can be. And if they can happen in the mid-1960s to a middle class girl in middle class suburbia by middle class men of her father’s kind, how widespread might this be?

Then extend such abuse to less “innocent” settings in more modern times.  What might be happening to girls or women in similar retail jobs at the hands of men who aren’t the fathers of their friends? What about a manager who knows these females may need the jobs badly, who cannot make a scene without losing employment, or who have no human resources department to report the incident to? What about the girl whose neighbor touches her inappropriately, but she has been raised to be demure, to not embarrass the neighbor, to cope by repressing the event and altering her behavior so that it cannot be repeated? Or worse?

#MeToo happened because one woman finally spoke up about what had happened to her. What had made her feel like she had to keep it a secret.  What had made her feel shame and guilt about something that was not her fault. She made it possible for average women like me to remember and tell our stories.

And we now know that #MeToo can apply to males as well, because Kevin Spacey perpetrated such abuse on innocent boys.

How we move on as a society is clear. We no longer accept such behavior as okay, to be endured, for which to make excuses. We speak up, we expose the behavior to correct it. We teach our children basic respect and boundaries.  And we teach them to repress the baser impulses they may have that may harm others, and come back to haunt them later in life.

This is an opportunity to turn our society toward a higher standard of conduct. It is an opportunity to unlearn misogyny and abuse of power. This is an opportunity to aspire to be better people. Will we embrace it?