I described this feeling of rage to my friends on Facebook like “tremors through my feet”. The wake of the Weinstein revelations rippled through social media last week, but with the passing of days, the accumulation of testimony, those early waves have swollen, growing taller, stronger and monstrous. Activists suggested women survivors of sexual harassment or assault acknowledge their experiences just with the words “me, too”.
Now, the storm of unleashed admissions are pounding every digital shore.
Me, too. Me, too. Me, too. Tweet after tweet. Facebook page after page. Women I don’t know. Women I do. Old, young, black, white, gay, straight, cis, trans. For once, given permission to express their deepest personal shame, their most private of terrors, as something finally removed from themselves. It’s an unprecedented public event of mass, collective de-shaming.
Yes, of course: me, too. At the centre of my own complex, terrifying whirl of memory, expression and retrospection, me, too.
In some ways, it’s exhilarating to be finally liberated of the illusion that these violations were ever individual, rather than mere incidents of a syndrome. In other ways, it’s annihilating to believe every woman harassed, cornered, manipulated, objectified by a man with enough power to render her powerless was a mere note in the music of every perpetrator’s favourite tune, rather than even the whole song. But the emotions untethered by what’s turned out to be a swift, overwhelming public judgment against Weinstein are going to be as contradictory as they are extreme. It’s not merely that suppression reversed can provoke the volcanic. It’s that perpetrators evade exposure by fracturing the realities of their victims and hiding in the cracks that they create. It was reading actor-director Asia Argento’s own Weinstein story that unravelled me. By her own account, he was at times her rapist and protector, her friend and her colleague, her transactional lover, her generous benefactor. And he hid in each of these personalities to destabilise and manipulate her, creating of a human woman a mere instrument to his own ends, pleasurable or otherwise.
Or maybe Argento’s painful testimony unspun me because her experience was so similar to my own. Of all the ugly emotions dredged from my own suppressed history, my hardest wrestle has been with the instinctive, acidic jealousy that’s surfaced towards the women who spoke of fleeing Harvey Weinstein, of fighting him off, of saying no.
Because when I was a young, powerless woman trapped alone in a rented room with a predator – the scenario seems ever the same – I did not run. I did not say no. I suppressed my disgust for him and for the situation I was in and for myself with enough alcohol to anaesthetise my limbs before I gave in to something that was nothing like bliss and everything like darkness. Submission impending, I remember standing before the mirror in the bathroom, staring at a blue stain that had been left on my lips and tongue by whatever it was I’d been drinking with some gratitude that the pale, sad-eyed and swollen-faced woman reflected there was, at least, not someone I recognised.
Not every predator is a Hollywood producer, but such men adapt themselves, like Pennywise, to whatever shape of shadow is required to block out a woman’s sun. I was young, he was older and powerful. We met by chance and I know now he saw in me the opposite of something remarkable; I’d met a checklist of criteria for suitable exploitation. I was a penniless participant within a team project, one that my predator was in a powerful position to advance. The invitation to accompany him on a date was delivered through an invested third party. “You don’t have to do this,” warned my colleague as I slid into heels, but between our hard work and our project’s ambitions stood a man who could, and just might, ruin us.
“I know what I’m doing,” I said. That I didn’t was apparent from the moment I met my date at a theatre. His eyes scanned from my tits to my knees and back, no further. “You can pay for your ticket after the show,” he growled in my ear.
Why didn’t I run? Predators are expert geographers of isolation. Even now, the nasal, suburban blare of my accent sounds a klaxon warning that a bogan object has entered a bourgeois space. Box seats to an expensive show, the private cocktail club he took me to afterwards – even the location of his rented room – are not the preserve of the class that I come from. Neither was the project or the team that had brought us into contact, and he, of course, knew it. My predator’s brilliant, unspoken persuasion was that him smuggling my peasant vulgarity into such places demanded an act of compensation. How palpable my envy is of the fleeing girls whose sense of self-worth was greater than mine. How deep my empathy runs for those whose social exclusion or inexperience recruits them into the universal premise of all cons: convincing the prey that the precise act of sin was always – always – their own idea.
Twenty years later, I can see how, like any actress, I just performed the script that someone else had written; something which – women, beware – had been drafted and redrafted many times by the producer far in advance of my own performance. In subsequent scenes, he engineered my deliberate introduction to his loving wife and innocent children. Such men who make objects of young women easily make their families human shields against disclosure. It would not be his own acts that shattered these people, he made clear. It would only ever be mine.
These bought silences, these transactions, compromises, sacrifices – this is the currency traded in the land sexual predators inhabit, not just in their exploitation of women but in an exploitation of the skills of manipulation and profit that bring power to them in the first place. The allegations against Weinstein may have exploded the discourse around men, women, sexual exploitation and power. But “the art of the deal” is the framework value of modern power, and a proud pussy-grabber-in-chief occupies the White House. I wonder if advantage will remain fireproof while wrathful women are left to burn themselves up, unless rage ignites the structures of power itself. “Don’t agonise, organise,” I chant to myself. “Don’t get mad. Get elected.”
The morning after my own humiliation, I was despatched from the rented room without ceremony. He offered to call me a taxi, I refused. Instead, I walked myself home across an entire city from that hired place. My tongue was still stained with whatever I’d been drinking the night before. My makeup was smeared, my hair matted. Stale clothes were stuck to my skin as I hobbled in last night’s shoes. I delivered myself to the doorstep of my team leader, like a cat presenting a mauled bird to its owner, except that I was both cat and bird. My colleague did not answer the doorbell. All these years later – after guilt and shame and self-disgust have bubbled into fury, vengeance, resentment and rage, rage, burning rage – my greatest sadness remains that closed door, that silence and that sense of being one of so many, and yet alone. So alone.
