#Me Too

Writing group yesterday ended in a discussion of # Me Too--the tag for women on social media who have been sexually harassed, abused by men in power, denied jobs, raped by men.

I was reminded of the 1991 Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings when I first heard the term, sexual harassment. This courageous professor dared to tell the truth about her mistreatment by Clarence Thomas in a public and televised hearing that gave us all a name for things that had happened to us.

At the time of this hearing, I was traveling as a consultant with a government agency, teaching classes on communication.  As the old saying goes, we teach what we need to learn!

The "boss" in this enterprise said very inappropriate things to me on the plane one day flying back to San Antonio.  I felt icky.  I knew that I had to quit.  I couldn't travel with this man again.

Then other memories surfaced.  In my twenties and thirties, I was very naive about sexual harassment, and I thought--as women did back then--I "must have done something to cause it."  Maybe I should have dressed differently, smiled less, been less friendly.  Maybe my friendliness was being confused with flirting!

Anita Hill raised the consciousness of women and thousands of  complaints were filed--not that there were more incidences of sexual harassment than before, but women were no longer thinking: "I must have done something to cause it."

In the documentary, Anita, (on Amazon Prime), we see women and men of all ages gathered to support Anita Hill and to speak out about their own experiences.  Even now, 25 years later, women are talking about their experiences in ways that they were afraid to before Anita Hill called sexual inequality by its real names.

Since the Weinstein revelations, since scores of women came forward to tell their experiences with Bill Cosby, and since Trump's claim that "if you are famous they let you do anything," women are coming out of the shadows again to say # Me Too.