Catharsis: The #MeToo movement is revolutionary in its own right

Last November, on the Promenade des Berges overlooking the Seine, I realized I was afraid of what it meant to be a woman. I was 18, three months into college, alone in Paris and forced to confront the implications of the femininity I’d barely grown into for the first time.

Bearing my wooliest scarf and a tote brimming with books and pens, I had planned to spend a quiet afternoon next to the river, alone with Patti Smith’s memoir and my own thoughts. Minutes later, a man at least 20 years my senior seemingly materialized before me and tried to strike up a conversation.

I gave curt but friendly responses in the best broken French I could muster and kept a stagnant smile on my face in the hopes that the awkward encounter would end and I could return to my reading. He asked if he could take a photo of me because I looked so beautiful. Politely, I declined. Undeterred, he persisted. Increasingly discomforted, I defected again. He made a sudden move, as if to forcefully remove my phone from my lap and as I recoiled instinctively, he played it off as placing his arm across the bench behind me. I stammered that I had to leave and as I left in a haste, he told me that I had made him sad.

As I boarded the métro home, I felt a surge of vulnerability. Evidently, I couldn’t even go to a park alone without being targeted just for being there. What intimidated me most wasn’t that he’d tried to touch me without permission but that he felt so entitled to my body he tried to guilt me for my response.

And this wasn’t an isolated incident. There were the people who got handsy in Parisian clubs without me even making eye contact with them. There were the countless acts of street harassment, from the jovial to the menacing. There was the guy who used the mosh pit at The Growlers’ concert to press into me while I couldn’t fight back, which I decided against writing about in detail because it was more graphic than I feel comfortable sharing.

For a long time, I felt like I couldn’t talk about these instances because they seemed banal in contrast to the tales of full-fledged assault and rape circulating in the news. I joined the ranks of women and men who defined sexual harassment as something meant to remain unspoken, private and unacknowledged. Although they shouldn’t have, these moments happened and I felt lucky that I remained unharmed. But, in a colloquial sense, “harassment” encompasses a wide range of misbehavior that is of an entirely different category than “assault.” To declare kinship with those who had sustained more serious acts of violence seemed inappropriate to me.

But last week, in light of the #MeToo social media movement, a capacious umbrella of solidarity opened up — and included me. The outpouring of tens of thousands of responses has become a powerful testament to the sheer scope of the problem, far more moving and widespread than mere statistics could ever be.

Although women’s voices have been speaking the loudest, we must be cautious about branding this as a social issue that pits the genders against each other. This is primarily an issue of aggressors versus victims, regardless of gender. The internet has created a safe space for men and women alike to speak out in a way that engenders self-empowerment but refrains from purporting blame — it is a show of hands rather than a pointing of fingers.

There are still tremendous strides to be made in the fight for individuals to feel safe in their own bodies. Next week, we may very well fade back into the passivity characteristic of most forms of social media activism and lay dormant until the next high-profile sexual harassment scandal. But during its 15 minutes of fame, the #MeToo movement accomplished exactly what it intended: It exposed the magnitude of the problem. It was neither a call to action nor a retaliation against perpetrators. It merely forced all social media users to confront the appalling reality that tens of thousands of men and women have been regularly encountering their own Harvey Weinsteins but, for whatever reason, did nothing and believed that nobody cared. But uncovering the colossal scale of the problem is revolutionary in its own right. If it can teach just one young girl in Paris that her experiences are normal rather than shameful, that’s not nothing. I, for one, no longer feel alone.

Catherine Yang is a sophomore majoring in communication. She is also the lifestyle editor of the Daily Trojan. Her column, “Catharsis,” runs every other Wednesday.