#MeToo : How much ‘Awareness’ before some ‘Action’?

We’ve seen our family, friends, peers and colleagues take to social media to express that they too have been victims of sexual harassment, under the hashtag ‘Me Too’. The sheer number of posts that have been flooding our timelines only highlight the severity of what women are actually dealing with.

According to a report in The Independent, the idea for the hashtag started with singer/actress Alyssa Milano, as a means of addressing the prevalence of sexual assault and harassment in America. The celebrity posted on Twitter, asking people who had experienced sexual violence to reply “me too” to her tweet.

She explained the idea behind the action in an accompanying screenshot.

“If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem,” she wrote. Her Tweet has received more than 60,000 replies and above 20,000 retweets.

But it was later discovered that Tarana Burke, founder of the youth organization Just Be Inc was the original creator of the #MeToo campaign back in 2006, long before hashtags even existed. Burke told Ebony magazine that the movement was created to spread awareness about sexual harassment in underprivileged communities.

At first, the hashtag seemed well received, but it brought on a certain sense of déjà vu. We’ve all done this before. We’ve plastered posts on our social media walls about that pervert nudging you inappropriately while you ran to catch that train, the autorickshawala staring viciously at you any time your clothing was above your knees, or those Roadside Romeos passing lewd comments or ‘undressing’ you with their eyes, but you were too frozen with fear to react, and all you cared was getting home safely.

The hashtag even caught on with the male members of the community, with some of them openly coming out as victims of sexual harassment. And how were they received? They were mocked and ridiculed by their own peers, and strangers, some even went on to say that men are meant to ‘enjoy’ such incidents. But how can anyone in their right mind enjoy sex without consent? How can anyone who has been touched inappropriately not feel utterly violated. The movement is in no way specific to women, and it’s time we understand that sometimes, men too are grappled with such acts of crime, instead of blatantly ostracizing them.

But the real questions is, how many times are we going to put our experiences out into the world till someone finally does something about it? It definitely helps victims feel like they’re not alone, and that we somewhat empathize with them. But shouldn’t we be able to show our solidarity even without social media?

This doesn’t make #MeToo unimportant or invalid, and one can’t deny how it has unified an inconspicuously large group of people, much more than the awareness it hoped to create. #MeToo has brought all its victims to the forefront, and they’ve all borne themselves to the world. Perpetrators, where you at?