hashtags never sit well with me. i always feel the urge to sand them furiously, to wear down the jagged edges until they fit neatly in my palm and don’t cut so deeply. but i recognize their power within the sphere of social media, especially as a tool to weave together experiences that would otherwise have sat isolated. typing out #MeToo, as much as it hurts to lance the wound(s) i’ve let fester quietly so long (too long?), connects my experience, my pain, to others’ stories.
we’re not just women. we’re nonbinaries and queers. we’re some men, too. the cruel thing about the toxicity of male entitlement is that it’s a universal solvent. it leaves chemical burns on your soul regardless of your gender. it’s important to center the voices of women in #MeToo, because women are the prime targets of toxic masculinity and the culture of rape it cultivates. but there are other voices, and even though i’m not a woman in any strict binary sense, i need to speak up.
me too. i can’t have been more than 5 or 6 years old. just learning to shower. learning the shower wasn’t just for cleaning my body. the shower was a place of danger. and a place to scrub at the residue of shame that danger left all over my body.
me too. in my “big boy bed.” often enough that i stopped sleeping because of nightmares. the solution was for him to sleep in my room with me. that was supposed to help me feel safe but it only furnished more opportunities.
me too. in hotel rooms and offices. plying the trade those first formative embodied experiences told me i was fit for. there’s no protection or authority to turn to when the circumstances of the assault were something that could get you arrested on their own.
this is a hideous and corrosive type of power at work. the point of #MeToo is to demonstrate the ubiquity of sexual assault, to cut through the bullshit and expose the full extent of toxic masculinity. but i also need to wear it down into something for me to hold onto. a smooth and weather-worn stone, a totem that reminds me i’m not alone. that puts the heinous particularities of my experience in perspective as part of a larger problem. that helps me connect with those around me who are processing (or struggling to process) similar experiences.