"Nothing Is as Powerful as a Idea Whose Time Has Come"; How Quickly the Issue of Sexual Assault Went Viral
by Jo Freeman
"Nothing is as powerful as a idea whose time has come ..."Victor Hugo
One of the most striking aspects of the protests against putting Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court was how quickly the issue of sexual assault went viral. There are many reasons to not want Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court but that’s the one that caught fire.
Another striking aspect was that 90% of the people who turned out to protest, at least in DC where I participated in those protests, were women. They were mostly older women, not the younger ones who usually populate protests.
As I finally realized after listening to a lot of women (and a few men) tell their stories, pretty much all women have been sexually assaulted at some point in their lives. Older women have lived longer so the probability is greater. They were raised during an era in which no one talked about it, because it was so normative. Now it’s coming out. Women, especially older women, are resurrecting buried memories.
Those assaults were not necessarily as bad as the ones that have made recent headlines, but women lived with the fact that they could be groped and grabbed at any time. When I was young I heard jokes about the casting couch. Women who got ahead in their jobs were assumed to be sleeping with the boss. A common cartoon showed a male boss chasing a female secretary around the office desk. No one said “isn’t this horrible.” It was normative.
Why is that changing now?
Having studied social movements for decades (as well as participating in a few), I know that they come in surges of rapid change preceded by long periods of slow development. One cannot predict when a surge will happen, but when it does, you know it.
Complaints about sexual harassment have been poking their way into the public consciousness for many years. Initially, public complaints by women were not taken seriously, or were dismissed as idiosyncratic. After “#MeToo” emerged in 2006 more women spoke out. More men in high places were accused not only of acting like “boys” but of abusing their power in order to do so. When sexual abuse by priests of boys became public, it highlighted how pervasive it was in places where it was least expected.
Social movement surges are usually sparked by a precipitating event, sometimes more than one, which encapsulate people’s experiences in a particularly egregious fashion. The precipitating event for the civil rights movement was the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy in Mississippi, and the acquittal of his killers. The early women’s liberation movement was started by a series of small crises in different places. There were too many to list here, but some are mentioned in my 1975 book.
The current surge against sexual abuse was precipitated by electing as President a man who bragged about grabbing pussy. The idea snowballed into several million people, mostly women, marching and protesting all over this country, indeed all over the world. While many issues were raised, the signs carried by marchers highlighted the importance of putting a man into the highest office who thought groping women was perfectly OK.
Where this will lead is hard to say. The movement will spread to other issues and other groups — that always happens. But changing practices specifically about sexual abuse requires changing attitudes. That’s harder. We don’t need more laws. There are plenty of laws in the penal codes prohibiting different types of sexual contact. We need to change the culture.
Not all men grope and grab women (or other men). But all exist in culture in which such actions are accepted as normal behavior (“boys will be boys”). By way of analogy, a hundred years ago, when lynching was common, only a small portion of the population actually participated in a lynching. But they existed in culture which looked the other way when it happened and came up with rationalizations to justify it when it did. It was a cultural change that reduced lynching to a rarity. And it’s a cultural change that will persuade males not to paw females.
There’s no easy way to change a culture. It’s a little like moving a refrigerator — by hand, without wheels or a dolly. You tug a little on this corner, then push a little on that one. And slowly, you move it across the floor. Of course moving it up or down stairs, without a dolly, and without its falling over — maybe on you, is a lot harder. For that you need help.
When Donald Trump mocked Dr. Christine Blasey Ford for what she told the Judiciary Committee about her experience with Brett Kavanaugh, it was like Trump was sitting on the refrigerator. Support in high places for bad behavior, and demeaning those who talk about it, make cultural change harder. But it doesn’t make it impossible.
We can do it. And we will.
©2018 Jo Freeman for SeniorWomen.com
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