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Monday, October 16, 2017

Me Too

There is a Facebook campaign going around about "me too." The idea is that if enough people who have experienced sexual harassment or sexual assault joined in with "me too," others would understand the scope of the problem. This is in direct response, or at least I assume, to the allegations that Harvey Weinstein, famous movie producer, is a serial sexual harasser and possible perpetrator of sexual assault. Or something like that... I was in Rwanda when this news broke. I came back to less the headlines than the Facebook posts about "why are these women only coming out now," and "why is everyone jumping on the bandwagon against him?" and "why didn't they say anything at the time."

I thought long and hard before I posted "Me too" on my Facebook page. I consider myself lucky: I've never been sexually assaulted. I have been sexually harassed. I don't have residual trauma over it. Sometimes I've wondered if the harassers really understood what they were doing was harassment. So I wondered "do I really have the right to say, 'me too?'"