Molly McGrath Tierney

1 in 5 women are victims of sexual assault in this country[i]. Based on my back-of-the-envelope math, this must mean that every woman in the United States has either been attacked, planned her daily activities around avoiding being attacked, or both. Regrettably, I count myself in the latter category.

Talking about it is all the rage in the #metoo[ii]era. I hope that bringing this issue out of shadows and into the light will both reduce the risk to women and also help to shift power from the hands of white men into a more egalitarian distribution.

Then came Harvey Weinstein 2017. And I thought, quite honestly, sure he did it. All of it. This belief was confounded by an equally strong opinion that the women who went to his home, hotel room or office were participating in a profession that is riddled with all the trappings of Sodom and Gomorrah[iii]. I don’t mean to say they weren’t victims. To be sure they were. But I also heard them say some version of “I had to do it if I wanted the part.” And I thought: surely they knewthat was the deal in Hollywood. Which means they also knew that they could have stayed home in their little do-nothing towns and gotten a job at the Walgreens like the rest of us. None of this gives Harvey cause and I think he should rot in jail. But something about this story being a big splash made me see more clearly the difference between sexual harassment and rape.

They are wildly different. Sexual harassment is pressure to choose an awful, impossible option. Rape is a violent act of terrorism. A hate crime. It occurs in epidemic proportions – and that based on the fraction of those that are actually reported. One possibility is the epidemic is due in part to the fact that rape is masked as a sex crime. A phrase that puts us at risk of paying more attention to the word ‘sex’ than we do to the word ‘crime’ – and therefore looking away because boys will be boys, or girls should not dress that way or she should not have been in that area that late at night…. And once it’s clearly categorized in our mind this way, it’s an easy road to merging sexual harassment and rape. That choice will keep us from owning up to the terrorized experience of so many women who have been raped. While #metoo may bring sexual harassment into the sunshine, rape will stay in the shadows. That will end up being a dis-service because if we – men and women – don’t own it, we can’t fix it.

Then came Bill Cosby 2018. And I thought, quite honestly, sure he did it. Probably all of it. Being a person who believes that the myth of the black man is the single greatest conspiracy in the history of time, I was ambivalent. A black culprit, especially of a sex crime against white victims, would be a brilliant method of drawing attention away from the hundreds of thousands of white men who have committed, and still commit, these very same crimes without retribution.

Then came Kavanaugh. And I am absolutely sure he’s been a beer guzzling frat boy predator who has capitalized on his privilege for the duration of his life. No doubt: he did it.  He represents the circular logic of the archetype: white man can do what he wants when and to whom he wants it because he can. And in the face of this high-profile case, we rejoice in the potential power of the #metoo.

But wait. 1 in 5. And, as all victims know, every time the subject of rape comes up we are returned to the most terrorizing moment of our lives in technicolor and hi-fidelity. And now every news source – radio, print, tv – has rape and sexual assault as the top headlines. All day every day. That means that one fifth of women in this country are debilitated every time a head line hits. And the white producer is going to buy his way out of his crime. And the black actor is sitting in a jail cell. And white lawyer is going to be appointed to the Supreme Court.

This leaves me feeling painfully naïve and worrying that in the celebration of what feels like the success of #metoo, we have been blind to a calamitous detail. The power white men hold in this country is entrenched without vulnerabilities and approaches the insurmountable. This power is intrinsic to the very structure of our nation. In it, we used our own movement take ourselves out of the game without even realizing it.

[i]http://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc_factsheet_media-packet_statistics-about-sexual-violence_0.pdf

[ii]https://metoomvmt.org

[iii]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodom_and_Gomorrah