“A super-bloom of horror”

Excerpts from this excellent essay by Rebecca Traister, in The Cut.

The image above is from artist Kruttika Susarla’s glorious The Feminist Alphabet.

What is the worth, exactly, of stories that are told mostly by women? To judge the worth, we have to be clear about the cost.

And of course, that’s how everything about the revelations of sexual harassment began: one woman’s story, flowering into a few other women’s (and also men’s) stories, eventually creating a super-bloom of horror.

Those who have spoken up about harassment are often referred to by critics and the men they accused as being part of a mob and even by their admirers as members of a kind of thrilling sisterhood. And some testifiers certainly did speak of the comforts (and obligations) of solidarity as well as how the choice of others to come forward compelled them to do the same.
But many others described isolation and loneliness. The treatment they’ve received — further abuse, insult, blame, guilt — has made some of them leery of human connection.

[Pollster Tresa] Undem has just completed new polling that backs up that hunch, finding that half (49 percent) of registered voters still say Kavanaugh’s confirmation led them to want to elect more women — a factor that just might be relevant moving into 2020.
These stories may be shaking the ground beneath our feet. Whether the powerful remember them or the details, lots of us have heard, read, and absorbed this particular body of civic literature.

Women’s speech has often been forward-looking, offered up to others who will come after, who will inhabit a world in which we hope women’s experiences, and women themselves, will be worth more. … The women and men who have told their stories are betting on that future and, in speaking up, have left a trace — of themselves, of their lived experience of a world in which power was distributed unequally, in which abuse and harassment were rampant and unchecked. Individually, they have almost uniformly been punished for it, have paid for it to one degree or another. But with their testimony, they have left their mark, an individual sacrifice offered up to a collective future, one in which we should all be worth more.

Excerpts from New York magazine’s series of 25 interviews with people who spoke up against sexual assault/ harassment.

Even when I would completely dissociate and begin crying on the stand, everyone would just sit in silence and watch and wait for me to gather and collect myself. It’s terrible to feel that and to have it answered by nothing, to just be asked more and more questions until you’re completely hollowed out. You can never say stop, you can never say enough, you can never say don’t put up naked photos of my body. … But as I was reading [the victim impact statement], I felt immense power, like everyone was trapped inside the sound of my voice and we were not going to go anywhere until I decided we were done. It was the only time I felt like I had any ounce of control.
~ Chanel Miller (sexually assaulted by Brock Turner in 2015, when she was 23. Turner faced up to 14 years in prison but was sentenced to six months in county jail. In court, she wasn’t allowed to read her whole statement. Later Buzzfeed carried the entire statement, which went viral.)

But if I were to go through the same thing again, I’d speak out again. I never regretted it. For me, the decision I made was always the right decision. In the beginning, I thought that as a migrant, as a Hispanic person, one didn’t have any rights. But after everything we went through, we shouldn’t keep this inside of ourselves, because no one has any right to humiliate or intimidate us for who we are.
~ Anonymous (worked at a Koch Foods plant in Morton, Mississippi, and was one of the plaintiffs in an EEOC case against the company, stating that supervisors openly groped and harassed female workers on a daily basis. One of the supervisors threatened migrant women with deportation.)

I associate my name in print with a fear of retaliation, with a loss of privacy, of losing any sense of agency over the way you might be perceived in the world by strangers or people you know.
… To come forward is expensive in a way I had no idea about and has cost more than double my financial resources. Nine times out of ten, it will involve legal entanglements that cost money. I’ve come to learn how expensive it is to get a photo pulled down or out of print. Therapy is expensive. All in all, we’re talking easily six figures, even with some pro bono representation, and I’m still paying it off. I have questioned whether I would do it over again. It’s also emotionally expensive. There is a literal tax on integrity.
~ Lauren O’Connor, a production executive at the Weinstein Company, wrote a memo indicting a “toxic environment for women” there. Another executive leaked it to the New York ‘Times’ in what became the first story to expose Harvey Weinstein.

I’d wanted to give the investigation a fair shake. That was one of my biggest flaws: believing in the system.
~ Paula Coughlin, along with others, was groped and wrestled to the floor by a group of officers at the Tailhook naval-aviation conference in Las Vegas in 1991.

I am the biggest of hypocrites. I work in a position where I am constantly trying to get people to tell their stories so we can make systemic change. But I’ve worked so hard to amass this small amount of power that I’m so terrified of that being taken away.
~ Anonymous

Candidates will not pick me out to work on their campaigns. People stop including you in things or stop asking you for strategic advice. It’s worth it, don’t get me wrong. But isolation is a really powerful tool.
~ Olivia Garrett says Alaska representative Dean Westlake groped her and made sexual comments to her while she was a legislative aide.

…he said, “Well, I’ve been reading all this stuff in the Globe, and I realize now that you’ve been right all along.” He wouldn’t believe his own son, but he believed the Boston Globe.
~ Phil Saviano, who was repeatedly sexually assaulted by Father David Holley when Saviano was a boy.

I’m interested in why so many interviewers want to make me feel bad. Is it because they want to see a woman on television crying because of what a man did to her? Why can’t they just have a woman sitting there matter-of-factly telling her story without bursting into tears or without being sad, sad, sad? I have a theory that they just don’t want to see a woman telling her story in a non-feminine way.
~ E. Jean Carroll wrote that in the mid-1990s, Donald Trump attacked and penetrated her in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan.

I remember being so happy I had boys. I didn’t have any answers for girls. I didn’t have to tell them, “Don’t be particularly ambitious, because this is what it’s going to come down to.”
~ Kellie Boyle was professionally blackballed by Roger Ailes for refusing to “lay with the big boys”.

People always said, “At least you weren’t raped.” It was unimportant, you were unimportant.
~ Terry Karl says she was repeatedly harassed, forcibly kissed, and threatened by Harvard professor Jorge Domínguez in the early 1980s.

I was demoted when I took this case on. I was put in uniform and sent to work in the security environment as punishment. I had to work in a tower over the perimeter of buildings to prevent inmates from escaping, up through midnight. I couldn’t have a radio, anything that would obstruct me from observing the perimeters. One day, three men tried to escape, and I had to use every firearm in that tower.
On three occasions, my fellow officers were found dead. That’s something I was never trained for. It was a constant barrage of emotional and mental punishment. They put me in these positions so I would quit.
~ Sandra Bundy filed a sexual harassment suit in 1977 and eventually won, but not before being demoted to dangerous positions for which she had not been trained.