#metoo

It was two days ago that I scrolled through my Facebook feed. I spotted a few sporadic posts with the simple phrase, "me too." Thinking it was just another weird social media game, I ignored it. It wasn't until I saw a few more that I decided to research it further. The first thing that popped up was a tweet by Alyssa Milano.

In this last couple of days and weeks it’s been hard to avoid the fact of the disgraceful acts shown by Hollywood heavyweight Harvey Weinstein. The outrage shown by society and the injustices towards women has enraged and sparked a lot of women to follow the lead of Hollywood actor Alyssa Milano in hash tagging #Metoo to show that women aren’t alone in the fight against sexual harassment in public spaces or anywhere. The amount of comments and responses to the initial post has reached all corners of the globe and raised a lot of concerns and for me, a lot of sadness that the number of women have been left threatened and made to feel humiliated by men in a sexual way.

We have all seen #MeToo all over the place lately. If you haven't, I will catch you up.

Female, 20, USA, Anonymous:

Me too.If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote "Me too" as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.

You see "Me too" on your Facebook and you think, "Stop making yourself a victim." You think, "Stop living in the past." You think, "You're exaggerating the problem, exaggerating the pain." And if you don't understand, you may think those are fair things to say. Honestly, that means you are lucky because that means that you've never felt the need to cover every inch of your body for fear of what will be said about skin showing. You've never walked down the street in fear you'll run into that one person you know always makes you feel uncomfortable because while you've stated you’re not interested they continue to make sexual advances. If you're against the "Me too" trend, as some are calling it, you've never sat in a room so self-conscious of your body you have no idea what anyone else is saying.

So, the last few weeks have been filled with news from Hollywood about Harvey Weinstein and the numerous women coming forward with a voice. I've had a lot of thoughts go through my head about it all... "What a disgusting man," "What brave women," "Are men really supporting him?"

Change can’t happen without a little discomfort. What I’m about to talk about makes me uncomfortable, because I worry about distressing people who've had traumatic experiences and I don’t want to shock or upset others who might be living in ignorant bliss…there’s one other fear I have, but I’ll tell you that later. The fact is the following affects us all, and I believe the solution is for people to speak up. So if I don’t speak out myself, I’ll be the ultimate hypocrite. So here goes…*trigger warning.*

Today on Facebook, several friends of mine posted a copy/paste update that read like this: