Earlier this year, I read an essay by ex-Washington Post journalist Mike Tunison about the toll that anonymous online allegations of sexual harassment, in the form of an entry on the “Shitty Media Men” list, had taken on his life. Two years later, he was working as a janitor, unable to get a date, and suffering from mental health issues that led him to call a suicide hotline. I couldn’t help but notice a strange symmetry between the consequences he described and the experiences of those on the other side of #MeToo—the women who had their careers damaged for reporting a superior for sexual harassment, who had trouble having healthy relationships after rape, or who required years of costly therapy to regain a sense of confidence and safety. I see my own reflection here as well, part of the collateral damage of a society that didn’t take allegations like these seriously—until it suddenly did.
From 2015 to 2019, I was writing a book of personal essays about the pervasive effects of a sexual and physical assault (separate incidents), which had seeped into every crevice of my life without me even noticing. I only came to terms with the fact that I had been raped ten years later. I always knew that it happened but was either willfully or subconsciously ignoring it. It was kind of like driving around with a body in the trunk—something stank, but I didn’t see what I could possibly have to gain by investigating it. Watching Emma Sulkowicz carry her mattress around Columbia university in 2014, however, forced me to think more about the weight of a single night in my young life.
I noticed a larger cultural shift in the summer of 2016, when Chanel Miller’s victim impact statement went viral—in which she eloquently articulated the depth to which the actions of her convicted rapist Brock Turner had affected her life. For the first time, I felt heard, if only by proxy. Oddly enough, I recall Vice President Biden’s response—that her words were “forever seared” on his soul—because it made me cry. It’s difficult to square this experience with the man described in Tara Reade’s accusation, the man who forcibly penetrates her digitally, and when she resists, declares “You are nothing to me.” To be clear, I have no reason not to believe Tara Reade, but I also believe Joe Biden is a kind and decent person—an example of how the two sides of the #MeToo equation don’t always add up.
Reade’s accusation is one of the instances that makes me question the utility of a society that makes it nearly impossible for men to express remorse. Naming harm is a crucial step in the process, but I’m starting to think the shaming is counterproductive—in part because it doesn’t seem to work. Instead of creating an opportunity for self-awareness, accusations are often seen as an attack that must be shut down at any cost (we all remember the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing). I am not suggesting we excuse those who deny their misconduct to avoid consequences, nor that we tiptoe around the damage caused, rather that we need a broader solution than the current system of whack-a-mole.
In a 2019 article for Slate, Mischa Haider argued that the next phase of the #MeToo movement should be a collective reckoning with “male fragility,” suggesting that the framework outlined in Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility could also be useful for addressing toxic masculinity. In her book, DiAngelo explains that white people are all steeped in a racist culture and therefore cannot help but behave in ways that reflect racism—whether or not they believe themselves to be “racist.” The same could be said for men who inhabit a patriarchal society that objectifies and dehumanizes women. In other words, thinking you’re a “good guy” can blind you to your own complicity and bad behavior.
It’s precisely this phenomenon that makes the current moment feel like a one-way mirror into women’s vulnerability—one that’s coated with a particular kind of defensiveness that must be shed in order for any sort of reciprocal empathy to exist. Those for whom the movement came tend to offer little more than vague platitudes about how women should be heard, yet rarely display any evidence that they’ve actually been listening, let alone possess even a modicum of understanding as to the extent in which a woman’s life can be undone as much by speaking out as it can by staying silent. They decry the lack of due process, seemingly oblivious to the fact that historically, it has been the victims who have borne the brunt of this injustice, as their allegations have been ignored by the police, the courts, and forensic labs.
Now that we are taking allegations more seriously and investigating them, we still have to grapple with the fact that punitive measures do little to solve the larger problem or restore justice to victims. My own experience going to court over a violent boyfriend in high school showed me how much I would have preferred an apology—and perhaps some examination of the root factors that led to his behavior—over the two-and-a-half-year sentence he received, which only seemed to make it worse. This formative experience is why, in 2015, I decided to email the acquaintance who had raped me ten years before, in hopes that such an exchange might take place. I explained how his actions had affected my life, and he expressed regret but seemed triggered by the word “rape” (the apparition of the metaphorical dead body). He became angry and defensive, as if accepting this truth and owning it would somehow change him for the worse—and not for the better.
I understood how painful it would be for a person to unpack that kind of trauma, since I’d been forced to do it myself. The only time I’ve ever seen a man truly take responsibility for a sexual assault was in a 2017 Ted Talk that featured both a perpetrator and his victim. In it, 38-year-old Tom Stranger admits that when he was 18, he raped his 16-year-old girlfriend, Thordis Elva, after a high school dance. Somewhere deep down he understood what he’d done was wrong, but couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge it. A decade later, she emailed him, and over several more years, they managed to reconcile. In the searing talk, Tom admits that despite growing up with equitable gender roles modeled in his household, that night he’d felt entitled to Thordis’s body.
For me, seeing this was a revelation. Just like I’d found my pain validated by another woman’s viral victim impact statement, I got the answer I was looking for from someone else’s rapist—except he was more than that. He was a person with a name who neither denied what he’d done, nor let it define him. It somehow felt like the missing half to my own story—and the missing half to an entire movement. I wondered what kind of radical empathy Thordis must have shown Tom for him to arrive there, and whether it might be precisely what our culture needs to heal. Obviously, we can’t expect every victim to forgive their abuser, or every perpetrator to own up to their actions, but we can strive for some sense of mutual understanding.
Whether you agree or disagree with the DiAngelo’s premise in White Fragility, the book does offer a framework for white people to interrogate their own assumptions and prejudices. By painting society as a whole as racist, it creates a permission structure to engage with one’s own racism, to feel ashamed of past acts and alter future behavior accordingly—a discourse that’s still largely absent from the #MeToo movement. As many of the survivors who helped make Tarana Burke’s hashtag a global trend have learned, shame can be a path to redemption, but it’s not one easily walked alone.
Editor’s note: This article was first published on Medium, and is republished here with permission of the author.
