As I walked home through Melbourne last Friday night, two men harassed me on the street. It was nothing notable, just your garden-variety harassment that most women are used to. One denigrated my appearance audibly to the other, who turned to him, laughed, high-fived him. “Good call, man!”
My face burned and my pace quickened, and they watched, laughing, as I walked away. Thanks, mates. Good call.
Most women are used to it, many have had worse, but it hit me like a punch in the guts that night. One week earlier, the Weinstein allegations had landed and, in the days since, the voices of women who have been victimised had reached a chorus of screams.
My skin had already been crawling and thanks to these two men it was hissing with anger. That hissing hasn’t stopped.
The piece of theatre I was walking home from that night was the second six-hour instalment of Taylor Mac’s phenomenal queer retelling of American history: the 24-hour centrepiece of this year’s Melbourne festival. It has been elating, educational, community-building.
Mac had taken us through key moments of US history, celebrating stories of the oppressed and forgotten. Women in the crowd had moustaches painted on our faces to represent the 400 women who dressed in drag to fight in the civil war. We were getting ready for the suffrage era of the late 19th century when a group cartwheeled triumphantly through the aisles in denim overalls, Rosie the Riveter headscarves and huge smiles.
Their thigh muscles bulged, their arms and shoulders bursting, as they balanced on poles and held each other aloft. Mac sang a protest song from 1871 – Daughters of Freedom, The Ballot Is Yours:
Daughters of freedom, arise in your might, march to the watch-words, Justice and Right ...
Daughters of freedom, the truth marches on, yield not the battle ’til you have won.
The women of Circus Oz climbed each other, reaching heights together that one couldn’t reach. Their muscles were straining but their bodies were strong as they gripped and carried and spun one another. I realised I was crying. At the bloody circus.
And then I walked home and two men hassled me on the street. Not even the most empowering show on earth can save us from this crap.
My mother’s generation and those who came before it have dealt with this – and more – with strength I can’t even fathom, but for my generation this feels like our watershed moment. We almost got our first female president, but we watched a pussy-grabber get elected instead; and we’ve grown up with an implicit understanding that our gender will affect every part of our existence.
We have grown up knowing that we shouldn’t walk the city streets at night alone. We know that one of us in Australia, each week, will be killed by a partner or former partner; that one in three of us will experience physical violence, and that for one in five it will be sexual.
I’m privileged, supported, I’ve never been brutally attacked or raped – but I haven’t escaped it all. When I was in high school at a crowded all-ages gig, a man reached under my skirt from behind and had pulled my underpants aside before I got away. When I was 19, my boss would bring me into his office each Friday to watch him scroll through the porn he had been sent from upper management – “You can’t leave until we get to the end!” I would have to travel with his clients alone in the elevator so I could “flirt with them” to lock in the sale.
Taylor Mac has evicted all men aged 14-40 from the audience (we’re up to WW1 conscription), and LOL yep this is the week for it. #melbfest pic.twitter.com/ezseubrz6S
— steph harmon 🌈 (@stephharmon) October 18, 2017
When I was in my early 20s, I was asked in a job interview if I was planning on getting pregnant soon. (“Good, we don’t want distractions.”) I got the job, and got my butt squeezed at the Christmas party. I laughed it off as cliche.
For me, the rage started building after Trump was elected, and began to peak as I watched the phenomenal adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, which took me months to shake off. But it wasn’t until the Harvey Weinstein story broke that it felt as though the floodgates had opened and that I wouldn’t be able to laugh any of this off any more.
Gender has found a way to creep into every part of every day and night since then, and now I can’t even watch TV, walk down the street or go to a show without it hanging in front of me like a clenched fist.
I can feel it everywhere. An unspoken rage bristling between women on public transport. Female colleagues meeting in the corridors or on instant messenger to share their anger and support. The playlist at a recent party had so much music by known abusers that I stopped dancing.
On Monday the Icelandic singer Björk posted allegations against a Danish film director who, she claimed, sexually harassed and touched her on set. Before the Guardian could run the story, we wanted comment from Lars von Trier, the only Danish film director she has worked with on a feature (who has since denied the allegations).
I emailed the head of his production company to ask for Von Trier’s side of the story. The reply I received was chilling. “I know nothing about it,” wrote Mark Denessen, Zentropa’s managing director. “If Björk had complaints then she should have said it while accepting the Golden Palm … I think this kind of opportunistic sensationalism is below your standard.”
A man rejecting a woman’s claim of violence because she didn’t behave the way he thought a victim should. A man dismissing coverage of the systemic sexism that had been exposed in his industry as “opportunistic sensationalism”. A man telling me how to do my job. Yep, the trifecta.
Some outlets, meanwhile, profit from their coverage of Weinstein’s myriad abuses while facilitating the sexism that helped give rise to men like him. The Australian youth site Pedestrian, for instance, has published more than 40 stories about the Weinstein allegations and fallout. But amid it all also published video of an identifiable woman filmed having sex in public, and described her as “a lass, sans undies … getting rimmed to hell and back”. The comments under its Facebook post of the video are worse.
Progressive outrage gets clicks but a sex tape gets clicks too. Why not have both?
And then the #MeToo hashtag happened and it was right there in front of me, rolling endlessly through my Facebook feed – stories from women I admire, from women I barely know, from some of my best friends and some of their mothers. There was the woman who was groomed by an industry mentor when she was 16 and he was 47, before he fed her drugs and “did things to my body that he had no right to do”.
There was the woman who woke up with a stranger on top of her when she was just a teenager at a house party, and the woman whose boss told her she’d get better shifts in return for a blowjob.
One woman actually tagged in her assaulter, finally eliciting an apology from him. Another had only transitioned three years ago but already had #MeToo stories.
There was the woman of colour who took the entire campaign to task: “How much more trauma do we have to endure and relive in order for you to believe us?”
And there was the woman who made me acknowledge my own unforgivable, hypocritical complicity: “Me too,” she wrote. “A lot of you are still friends with him.”
If you’re shocked at the volume of #MeToo posts, you haven’t been paying attention
— Sarah 🍓 (@SarahJ_Berry) October 18, 2017
On Wednesday one of my closest friends texted me out of the blue: “Hello. Me too. And I don’t know who else to tell or how I feel,” she wrote. “I am only just identifying some things that happened to me ... oh my god it is awful and I want to cry forever for all of us.” When I called her, we were both in tears.
The #MeToo campaign has been empowering for some, and it has proven how prolific and undeniable the problem is. But it has also been extremely triggering, and thrown the onus back on women in ways that not all of us have the capacity to deal with. Of course it should be up to men to change this broken system.
As Anna Spargo-Ryan wrote on Meanjin: “You have said, I wish I had known. Well, now you know. What are you going to do about it?”
Of course, one high-profile media commentator missed her point so spectacularly that he ended up illustrating it.
“Sorry, no. I’m a man,” he tweeted. “We’re not all that way, actually.”
Read the room chief
— Charlie Lawry (@CharlieLawry) October 18, 2017
We clearly have a long way to go.
Over the past few days the conversation has shifted from the trauma to the rage, to a fear that this rage will dissipate; that what we felt was a watershed moment will just be another social media blip.
That the men who shared their anger and support and acknowledged they hadn’t done enough will pat themselves on the back for listening this week, but will block their ears the next. That things will go back to a normal that should never have been normal.
One friend wrote in her #MeToo post: “Would prefer angry reactions to sad ones, because anger makes change happen.” Me too on that, too.
But at the least – the very least – we have a more visible community now: women all around with shared experience, who can catch us and hold us up, their muscles straining but their grip tight as steel.
• Steph Harmon is Guardian Australia’s culture editor
