By Maybe you’ve scrolled past it on the way to work or while waiting for a friend. Maybe it keeps popping up on your newsfeeds or timelines and you’re not entirely sure what it means. Maybe you do know and wish you weren’t so familiar. It’s difficult. But it’s the reality of the world that we are all currently living in, one where women are continuously sexually assaulted without consequence for the assaulter.
Recently, a mass amount of accusations against Hollywood movie-producer Harvey Weinstein has shifted a spotlight onto the historic sexual abuse of women. They sparked an influx in the social media campaign, #MeToo, a hashtag used by women who wish to showcase their support and unity to remind other women that they are not alone.
Nearly 10 years ago, this campaign began by a woman named Tarana Burke. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have contributed to the campaign. Burke explains the significance of the campaign as providing a visual to the magnitude of the problem. You would not have hundreds of thousands of women standing up and saying, “Me too,” if this was something that didn’t affect a horrifically large percentage of populations worldwide.
Here are just a few of the tweets posted in support of the campaign:
Hi again y’all. I am alone here at the teacher:s room. The Musashino line had a 3 hour delay posted at Asaka-dai station. So I took the bus and walked. I started coming here because I am taking an online class on Christian and Muslim text comparisons. And I read a very interesting essay interviewing or from? the founder of this blog.
First, I have been wanting to say that men, did not come from Mars. They were raised by women. Why isn’t this dynamic mentioned in the discussion of men harassing and humiliating women? the mothers of sons are participants in this cycle, IMHO. I am no authority.
to jump to the recent past, I will admit that for a while on the trains….it lasted about a year…maybe….not something I was proud of because of my religious convictions…I had to wrest my physical desires away……..but I was alone in the struggle, and the conditions of the Tokyo trains were not conducive to aiding my struggles…….Jump to the more distant past…I remember being shocked at the new car commercials featuring a woman in a dress that was slit up the side…to her hips I think….but actually there was an under dress…something dark….that was 1960’s….so you know it was really quite tame. But for me…I grew up in a really sheltered environment, plus I was considered a nerd, so I wasn’t part of the jocks lunch table discussions…
You folks who are kinda new in the USA, I really feel for you….until you get adjusted like everyone else….or maybe not….What if Muslim women form a kind of leadership role in this still-disorganized movement of American women?
Has anyone read Toni Morrison:s novel?
“The magnetism of this scene comes not only from the vigor of its language. It’s also a reminder that sorrow infused with anger is the emotional foundation from which all eleven of Morrison’s novels have sprung, beginning in 1970 with “The Bluest Eye.” “God Help the Child,” which shares some of that first novel’s themes, can be read, in fact, as an imaginative summary of Morrison’s entire literary enterprise. It bears a lifetime’s worth of anger and sorrow, distilled to their essences and fiercely hung onto, tooth and claw.”