When #MeToo Hit Home | The Feminist Consciousness Chronicles 01
A Personal Reckoning with Feminist Rage and Resistance
Content warning: sexual violence
On October 17th, 2017, during the first viral “feminist flashpoint” (Banet-Weiser, 2018) of #MeToo on Twitter, I was graduating from my Masters degree in community arts practice at the Victorian College of the Arts at Melbourne University. I woke up on the day of my graduation feeling wretched, having spent the previous evening at my end of year work party at a queer bar where a man approached me and thrust his head up my skirt. Shocked at the sudden violation – especially because I had assumed my safety was proximate to the type of bar I was in – I reacted by pushing him away, hard. No one saw what he had done, so they assumed I was the aggressor. Punters treated me like a violent, angry, woman. I told the bar staff and the venue’s security, but they said nothing could be done.
That next morning I received a call from a friend who told me that her friend had just been raped and she wanted to know how she could best support her. Through my hangover, and my own shame and self-blame, which by then was creeping through, listed off some support lines and some basic techniques for how to support a friend in such a crisis. I felt inadequate: who was I to dish out advice when I couldn’t even confront my own sexual predators in a way that was calm, clear and appropriate? It was not until later that day when I went online that I saw the outpouring of stories of sexual violence, harassment and abuse, all with the same underlying message: Me Too.
Those initial days of #MeToo felt like a fever dream: shrouded personal experience became synchronistic with universal truth-telling. My experience at the bar during what in my mind will always be the #MeToo weekend, became fused with my reinscription of the event on my social media profile thereafter. I was struck by the public’s willingness to engage with resistance and challenge oppression through digital means. I was intrigued at the ways multitudes of individual stories, grouped through one small hashtag, could generate so much momentum and signify such a table-turning moment.
Following the emergence of the #MeToo movement, political commentary quickly followed and feminist responses to sexual violence were often framed as a type of aggression. The backlash against #MeToo was primarily led by men who claimed that allegations without corroboration should concern "every man" (Gill, 2016). In addition, Donald Trump Jr. posted a meme that implied that the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh were a form of political sabotage (O’Neill, 2018). I thought about my own violent reaction to sexual violence that night, and the ways an opportunistic perpetrator had taken advantage of the queer, crowded space to violate my body. I thought about the ways my rage was proportionate to my understanding of his actions as being a form of sexual violence (had it been five years prior, I would have laughed off the incident). I thought about the way my reaction had been more visibly violent than his action had been, and so I had become the aggressor. I thought about whether I was right or wrong to fight him off physically at that moment. I thought about the way physical force had not achieved any sense of justice for me because it corresponded with the disbelief of the authorities and witnesses in the room that I deserved any. I thought about the ways that women silently absorb and accept the threat of violence and violence itself until they are driven to a breaking point, and how that breaking point becomes something they are judged for, shamed for, detained for or ignored for. As Sara Ahmed stated, “we revolt because the truth is brought home to us” (2017, p. 210).
But how do we bring home the truth?
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