Can We Talk Here? A Dialogue

SG: How are your students and colleagues seeing the #MeToo movement and its message?

RW: The other day, a student said to me: “That [#MeToo] doesn’t apply to me and my friends.” She explained her take that it’s a white, upper-middle class women’s movement, whose well-known protagonists don’t often focus upon the domestic workers, service workers, and homemakers who are rendered virtually invisible, in their own worlds, and make up millions of sexually abused women nationally and internationally. My students, from many ethnic

Page 28

backgrounds, don’t feel they are included in the #MeToo movement.

SG: Well, a movement has to start someplace. By starting with well-known stars in the film, music, and sports industries, public attention is generating conversations in many parts of society.

RW: Just in the last week, a man masturbated in front of me on the subway. I moved away. I did not raise an alarm; this is such a common occurrence that I need to pick my battles. I can just imagine the experiences of my many female students going to and from high school every day on the train. In most of these “casual everyday” cases there is no help for them.

SG: Yes, that very same thing happened to me last week. I find it very hard to decide in which cases to overtly fight back. I have raised my voice at times, yet not every time.

RW: It’s like smog. When we live in it, it’s so pervasive that we stop noticing it, despite its continuing to be dangerous to our health.

SG: I’m wondering what’s happening with your colleagues at work since the #MeToo movement started?

RW: There are many attempts at conversation, most of which don’t go very far because the men, who are afraid of being misunderstood and accused of something untoward, quickly “explain” sexual abuse and harassment, while rarely asking me and my female colleagues how we understand it.

A few male colleagues have asked me to explain to them what women are wanting when they speak out. My female colleagues and I respond that, first of all, we need the respectful acknowledgement of being heard and believed. Then we need ongoing dialogue around what we all can do remedially.

Since we women have been trained since childhood not to check in with our discomforts, at first, I found myself surprised to have any male colleagues ask me about my needs. In society, it is the norm for females stoically, often unaware, to endure discomfort; by contrast, men are trained to seek pleasure and comfort as their norm. Women’s seconding them is prized. For men to begin to understand this fact would be a very important step.

For example, the high school I teach in is a city block square. There isn’t a female student lavatory on every floor. (And the facilities for my gender non-binary students are even more lim-

Page 29

ited.) It can take ten minutes to make the trip to a restroom and back from my classroom. The time allotted for passing between classes is only four minutes. As a result, if my female students want to use the bathroom, they miss a significant amount of classroom instruction. The male students, however, have a lavatory on every floor. The unconscious message sent by this seemingly innocuous architectural detail is absorbed by every teacher and student in the school—that we must teach and learn in an unequal environment yet are all expected to achieve on the same level.

SG: This reminds me of the “separate but equal” doctrines in the Jim Crow South.

RW: Interesting point. Additionally, women who do speak up are most often accused of being either opportunists or bitches. Recently, I read Mary Beard’s new book Women & Power: A Manifesto, which greatly resonated with me. In it she states, “For a start it doesn’t much matter what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It is not what you say that prompts it, it’s simply the fact that you’re saying it” (2017, 57).

In speaking up, women are outing themselves as having been “sullied” as commodities in a male-dominated market. When I was teaching in Hong Kong, we took our students to a summer program in England. One 18-year-old exchange student reported being ongoingly sexually assaulted by the father of the host family she was living with. The three senior teachers in my program, all male, worked very hard to not make her plight public, and especially spoke about the importance of not telling the man’s wife. My student also believed she could not tell her parents, because in her culture she would be accused of having invited the man’s actions and would be shamed as “dirty.” Blaming the victim is a well-known way of keeping women silent.

SG: So, these #MeToo events occur around the world in the millions every day. I read in the New York Times recently that those speaking up are already seen as tradeable commodities, in this way: small loan companies in the U.S. are now offering female accusers thousands of dollars in “payday loans” in anticipation of large legal settlements. Here I do not blame the women, but rather a society that encourages the commodification of almost everything.

RW: Another student of mine told me about going to her local New York City police precinct to report sexual abuse in her home. The

Page 30

officers she spoke with laughed at her. Later they came to her home unexpectedly, and so the perpetrator knew that it was she who made the report. This made her feel that there was no safety for her. She felt impotent in defending herself, and this was rage-inducing. It’s a “schizophrenic” situation in which our society says, “Women can achieve anything they want to,” and yet my student got no help when she needed it.

SG: Rachel, I would very much like us to continue this conversation in the future. I feel that we have just begun to unravel this difficult tapestry which touches all women’s lives. As we end our conversation, would you like to suggest some actions women and men can take to move forward with undoing the civic inequalities we have touched upon here?

RW: I believe it is necessary for us to learn to see what is really here. As Michael Pollan quipped, when you want to see, you need to “get your eyes on” (The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, 2006, 386). We need to listen and respond to one another in ways that assure all sides are being heard.

I think, too, that teaching our students and one another how to express ourselves from a stance of experience—sensate, emotional, and cognitive—we have a chance to build a community in which we may work together for gender equality and other kinds of change.

I’m glad we could start this today intergenerationally—you who grew up in the 1950s, I who grew up in the 1980s, and my students who are growing up now. Thank you.

SG: Thank you, Rachel, for being available to undertake this conversation.

Page 31