Dialogue Description:

#MeToo has galvanized millions of people globally to name and explore issues of sexual violence over these past months. Founded by Tarana Burke, #MeToo has also visibilized long-standing dynamics about whose narratives of victimhood and survivorhood are believed, and whose are challenged. How do we mobilize in this movement moment to address gendered violence, building for accountability and collective liberation? How can we push to organize beyond exclusively white, middle class cis-women issues and towards intersectional racial justice in our work to end sexual violence?  How do we hold complexity and recognize possibility in decentralized, online campaigns like #MeToo?

Suggested readings/resources:

 

Dialogue Notes:

These are rough, uncut, unfiltered, and anonymous notes taken at the dialogue. We get that these may not be very readable to those who were not in attendance at the dialogue, and, honestly, sometimes even to those of us who were. We still feel it is important to keep them available as part of our accountability process and for archiving and reference purposes.  Some of these notes have been digested/transformed into blogs.

Check Ins

  • Recommitting in White Noise to exploring dynamics of race and gender together. Feeling rage about the patriarchy. Cat Person short story in the New Yorker. When the Aziz Ansari issues have come out, feeling like sex with men is inherently fucked up. Dynamics visibilized that I have put up with all the time in heterosexual interactions. Not feeling inspired, just rage.
  • Going through a lot of feelings including rage. In other spaces, focus is on race, not so much on gender. Has a white woman mentor to express rage, trying to figure out my own survivorhood. #MeToo feels complicated. Proud of posting #MeToo, then couldn’t really engage. Had to reduce use of social media. Feeling raw about everything.
  • Feeling highly triggered by hashtag. Challenges of movement used to justify state violence. Complexity of being a survivor and also someone who has cause harm.
  • How to consider race and gender together in #MeToo. Class also a part of it. Impact of the hashtag across different network – who feels comfortable sharing their stories? Who gets believed? What are different reactions? Statistics around men harming women – presence of people who cause harm. Focus on victims and survivors, not who is causing harm.
  • Reading about the Olympic doctor, getting so triggered by that. Needs to vent. When the #MeToo movement happened, equal parts delighted and enraged. Anger at how it forces people to feel even more invisibilized when people don’t feel comfortable sharing their trauma online. If you’re not saying #MeToo, nothing may be happening. Also pressure to share all the assaults. Felt like a freak for having so many harms. Aware of the impact of other who didn’t know finding out that way. How is my whiteness part of my desire to individuate and not be part of the conversation. Invisbilizes who don’t identify as women or femmes who experience assault. Creating a huge opportunity and political moment that couldn’t happen any other way.
  • #MeToo has been coming in directly, not online. First post I wrote about it, which got the most response to was about being verbally and financially abused by a man. How frequently experienced that in my life but it is normalized. Masculinities dialogue – looking at the impacts of toxic masculinity for all genders. What does consent mean in a culture where we are conditioned to be disassociated from needs and desires? I have two daughters, one who is gender fluid. She got assigned to write an op-ed looking at the resonant and dissonant themes of Jane Eyre in the #MeToo movement. Interesting to learn from her. Has anything changed since the time of Jane Eyre? Dynamics of race, class and gender. How does consent show up in intimate relationships? Magic of transformative justice.
  • Didn’t put anything up on #MeToo, obsessively sought out people who caused harm on FB. Moments in my life when a man’s behavior excluded me from the kinds of work I wanted to do. Cognitive dissonance around those choices. Thinking about coworkers of color where something traumatic for me I can’t control helps me empathize with coworkers of color.
  • Conversation feels so close to this place that WNC came from – what does it mean to own and acknowledge being oppressed, and an objectified body while also moving through the world with whiteness. Need to be careful about the amount of space one is taking up in relationship to experiencing oppression. When my favorite actors are being accused, feeling disappointed. How attached I am to their presence in my world. Is it that bad? Do they really need to be fired? Transformative Justice analysis around throwing people away. Don’t want to be an apologist – because I like what they did it is ok. Being a prison abolitionist and the ways that shows up. ‘What do you do with the murders and the rapists?’ Understanding that 1 in 3 people commit sexual harm, far fewer are incarcerated.
  • Impact of #MeToo movement across generations. What does it mean for younger people? Before 2nd wave feminism, we were house wives, sex slaves or old maids. We didn’t think about it because there was no other option at the time. When feminism came, we really woke up to it not being ok. Feminism not taken seriously, it was a persistent struggle to say no, practice boundaries. Felt like a weight was coming off me when #MeToo started. It has felt liberating to finally know that there is a possibility where women can have their say and say no. A lot of the movies out now also speak to the issue. Class dynamics. What is the repercussion of all this? Will anything change? What is the backlash? Importance of transformative justice practice. How can we make real change in disposability culture frameworks? Men need to be doing more. Men need to take this on now.
  • Really love women’s gymnastics, hearing them talk about the doctor. Saw it modeled that people who have caused harm don’t need to explain themselves. Consent and coercion as a neurodivergent person. What does choice mean in the moment? #MeToo was extremely triggering, felt like a tension for me, like the Rinku Sen article, problematizing the quick critique of the left.

Dialogue

  • Last years Oscars, there wasn’t anything that happened, felt disappointed. This year, also felt disappointed. Everything is so easily criticizable.
  • Touched by the golden globes and brought activists with them.
  • The other option would be do not use their platforms. What is the magic option c that the actors should have done?
  • If your identity is to be critical, and positive things are happening, have to be willing to practice humility, holding complexity.
  • Joyful Militancy book as an anecdote of hyper-critical, rigid cultures
  • A man friend is writing a blog about #MeToo, appreciating other men for trying to talk to each other.
  • How to treat everyone I critique tenderly.
  • Has anyone talked with men since #MeToo?
  • Masculinities Dialogue – hosted an event, mixed gender, held in ritual space, diversity of ages, men were pretty prescient and were willing to explore things in their own behavior and things culturally, was beautiful and humbling, gave space for women to speak from their experience, did a fishbowl where men spoke amongst themselves as though the women weren’t there
  • Men peeling back the layers and experiencing the grief of their own conditioning
  • Internalized rape culture: important for me to say no and set boundaries around what I will be complicit in within that culture
  • When it “costs less” (emotionally, energetically, financially) to just go along with something, rather than to set a boundary
  • Cultural appropriation: how people feel okay taking a culture when they’ve received permission to do it from someone of that lineage, and how capitalism can create conditions in which people give consent
  • What’s the obligation to really hear consent, how do you give someone the power to not give consent and really mean it
  • The feminist concept of consent and its origins, evolution of the different feminist waves, how fraught it is to talk about consent in an intimate situation where you are setting boundaries in a physically fraught situation; framing of article is that consent is a dialogue between multiple actors
  • Not just men, also thinking about consent within the queer community, and misogyny in the queer community
  • Language that comes to mind is cognitive dissonance or holding of multiple realities, knowing that something doesn’t feel right or isn’t sitting right, but not holding on fully to that knowing as a survival strategy
  • Ways that some experiences are being lifted up helps make conscious how some people have held things that aren’t okay within themselves
  • Not wanting to be alone or wanting to be loved can get played by people with power in relationship; how is this being lifted up in this time along with more normative victim narratives of #MeToo
  • Desirability politics and the desire to be loved
  • Pod structure: who has access to enough people to even be in a pod
  • If you’ve caused harm, 3-4 people you trust, and if you experience harm you go to 3-4 people you trust, and then are facilitated together in a process around transforming that harm
  • Different access to power you even have to have to have people in your pod
  • Aziz Ansari and the politics of desirability make it very complicated
  • I want to create a world where I can trust that consent is consent because everyone has been given the power to actually say what they need
  • Accountability and where am I expecting the other person to do my work, if I know that I’m not actually in touch with a real yes in my body than am I expecting the world to know this and not ask me for a yes?  Where does accountability lie for myself and for the other person?
  • If my desire is to live in a world where less harm happens in the future than I will do this work
  • There is always more than one thing happening at once, have multiple desires that are sometimes at odds with one another
  • Let’s agree that it is going to be imperfect and messy, but default to say things out loud
  • Overall things got way clearer than when we were working with assumptions
  • What does it take to deeply uproot and change in a culture that is inherently oppressive and non-consensual?
  • Trusting in people’s worthiness as much as possible without it being measured by what they do
  • Black feminist analysis around liberated zones: how can they access that quality that has existed across time around liberated zones, an anecdote to the oppressive cultures we are speaking of
  • The power of Harriet Tubman knowing her freedom, “I am free”
  • A literal ripple forward and backward in time that she can access the experience of freedom within her context of time
  • In liberation there is maybe some forgiveness of each other, a softness there
  • Desirability vs disposability
  • To have the security to be messy and not consent one has to not feel disposable
  • If I don’t consent to things, I will be disposed of
  • Because of growing up in a culture of non-consensual passive consent, it is hard wired into me to be attracted to that
  • Confusion of having a feminist, supportive, loving partner and having that not feel attractive or a turn on
  • Why is the whole conversation with regards to heterosexual sex framed around women being the ones needing to consent?  Why can’t it be flipped?
  • Power dynamic usually scripted as person getting consent has power. What if consent is the position of power
  • Interesting question: spent almost a year trying to get an organization to investigate a case of alleged sexual assault between a female supervisor and a male worker
  • Fantasy of who are perpetuators – white women experiences of violence that lead to criminalization of men of color.
  • White male executive has been the focus, not just few bad apples, fundamental logic, haven’t seen it fall as much into tropes of white women victim and man of color perpetrator – more focused on class and power.
  • Democratizing of social media – real stories which  focus on those you are in intimate relationships with, spilling forth of the true story. Continued focus on men in power is remarkable. Not just Cosby anymore, shifting. How much is Trump being president enabling the discourse?
  • White Jewish men being called out for creepy things. Worried about fallout for Jewish people, which was surprising.
  • Logics of prison still happening. Pushing people out, isolating them from society.
  • Spreadsheet where folks can anonomously document allegations – Shitty Media Men List – came with caveats, but if someone on the sheet was accused of two violent acts it goes red. Came out because another woman was calling it histrionic and threatening to out her. She took the list down. Live for 15 minutes but went viral. Some people fired because of the spreadsheet.
  • Women’s Marches – one of speakers connected to day labor movement – spoke about incredibly high rates of sexual violence against undocumented workers because they can’t report it.  Only worse now with ICE escalating. Letter of solidarity from Domestic Workers to Times Up.
  • Food justice certification – organic has no consideration for health and safety of workers. Should have this kind of marker/discernment. Led by farmworker women. There are some farms in CA with this certification.
  • Who the law protects and who it doesn’t – learning how prosecution works on reservations. White men coming to reservations to perpetrate knowing they will not be prosecuted.
  • People came out against union because managers who could not join the union couldn’t join the union. Even when perpetuating violence, still protect them because part of community. Avoid creating rift in entire communities that creates crisis across lives.
  • Assumption because of MeToo that if you aren’t speaking out then you’re fine. But actually amplifying tension of who can’t speak out. And how long these issues have been going on without this moment/visibility. Lots of layers of privilege.
  • Closing takeaways:
  • My work to recognize yes in my body, and the grief of that being my work, shouldn’t have to do it, makes me angry
  • Relationship between desirability and disposability – capitalism fundamentally questions our value – will always have competing desires – knowing loved is one– puts people in compromising situations, especially those less valued by capitalism.
  • Frustrated by prison logic.
  • Thinking about bad backs, having a “spine” – ways in which socialization of being nice and smiling affects us physically – complacency and trying to please even if means violating ourselves
  • Hopeful moments in which men have actually demonstrated self examination
  • Recognizing different experiences – causing curiosity
  • Talking about the things and also the things that define the shape of what we’re talking about, rich place to bring attention to those places
  • Thinking more broadly about MeToo movement rather than individual perspective. Movements emanating from centers of power vs margins. Clarifies and complicates dynamics today – who is believed, who is exalted
  • French translation – “squeal on your pig”
  • Lot of harm experienced, own way of breaking down isolation that is connected to harm. Previous generations that have started the work of naming the violence.
  • Being seen, the messiness of what it requires to be seen and access care, tread cautiously, with humility – places of causing harm and experiencing harm
  • Lots to process
  • Prison abolition connections. If the consequences of being “guilty” weren’t so high, more people could engage in accountability.