C/TW: rape, sexual assault, stalking, sexual harassment.
“Me too” has become a powerful weapon for survivors of sexual assault, predominantly but not exclusively women, to raise awareness of the sheer number of sexual assaults, rapes and harassment that we’ve experienced.
It is something that is constantly on my mind, swirling around. I see my friends, who are more my family, who I couldn’t imagine being hurt coming forward with stories of unfathomable pain and yet they’re the ones you wouldn’t expect it from because they carry themselves proudly and loudly. I think the scariest place in is a place I have been in several times before – not realising something was actually assault. I was raped in 2011. It was the end of exams, I was at a farm party (a bush doof for you Aussies) and I was 17 years old. I had some friends there, and I mostly spent the night with them and I was drinking. However, I was not drunk or incapacitated until a man I didn’t know fed me Slate – a hard liquor. I’d never had hard liquor let alone in these amounts in this time frame and I got drunk. I can remember snippets of time after that but not much. What I do remember is waking up with the same man on top of me and I was powerless. I was lucky, and I use that term loosely, that I don’t remember anything else because I passed out again. I had never even been kissed. In the morning when I woke up and realised what happened, I told one of my friends and he stormed around the property until he found the guy and he beat him up. After that, I told my closest friends (I’d lost the social construct of virginity – it felt like a big deal) and I put it to rest.
The scariest part for me, was not realising I was raped until I started counselling 4 years later. I disclosed it to my counselor as something I didn’t feel great about and left me a bit uncomfortable around men. He looked at me and said “Rachael, you were raped” and I didn’t believe him. But upon reflection – I had not and was not able to give my consent and I had been drugged. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I was able to disclose this information to my friends and my family, and to be comfortable to talk about it in public forums. I cannot put into words the courage, the sheer bravery and the unwavering strength it takes to put yourself in this spotlight in a world where less than 3% of rapists spend even a night jail yet 99% of rape allegations are in no way falsified. Where the reality is Brock Turner – a man who was caught by two sober (male) witnesses raping a woman in an alley only got 3 months in prison. A reality where dead women are showing up all over the country and all over the world, raped and killed with no consequence.
It was not and not likely to remain the last time I have sexually harassed or assaulted. In fact, just last week I was stalked. I left a hub at 11.30 and walked less than 50m on a well lit, well populated street and was asked to get in a car by strange men. I had the upper hand in having my rape whistle in hand and the confidence to outrun them back to the club. But what if I had been drunk? What if I had been incapacitated? What if a car hadn’t pulled up behind them? What if I was the next dead, assaulted body? It’s funny, when I tell women about what happened – their hearts bleed. They ask if I’m ok, they congratulate me on keeping my whits about me and they say “you shouldn’t have gone out alone” and “shouldn’t have given them so much attitude”. My mistake in thinking I could walk 50m to my car without being harassed in one of the safest cities in Australia. When I tell my male friends – it’s confusion. Why was I holding my keys? Why did I lie about getting something from my car and going back to my friends? Why did I ask the car behind them to watch me get into my car?
The fact is, that if I had a) been a man or b) been accompanied by a man – I wouldn’t have been approached and they certainly wouldn’t have turned the car around to come back and look for me. Those men were absolutely banking on me either being scared or incapacitated. I took it upon myself to go back and tell the event organisers and the bar next door what happened in the hope of other women not leaving alone, and they more or less believed me. When I called the police to report it, I spoke to a woman and her first response was “did they take you seriously?”, and I said “yes” and she was surprised. What kind of world do we live in that a woman can be stalked and try to spread the word and not be believed or taken seriously?
The thing that has got me thinking about all of this again was seeing Daniel Sloss live last night. He was fucking excellent – I haven’t laughed that much in months and it was a highlight of a low fortnight. At the end, he disclosed a friend of his had raped another friend of his and he didn’t know how to handle it. He made an excellent point though, as much as he wanted to hold his mate accountable – beating him up would make the man the victim and that’s true. He spoke about how he didn’t realise how many women in his life were on the other end of this, and how the monsters among us are dressed as people. We know them, we unknowingly love them.
On the back of Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette” and Harvey Weinstein, we are living in a world of “me too”. We are living in a world where Terry Crews has had to face ridicule, mockery and straight disgust for coming forward about his sexual assault. We are living in a world where drug charges are worse than rape. Where men think they have autonomy over everyone’s bodies. Among my female friends, I don’t think I can think of a single one who hasn’t had an encounter. Whether it be a passing comment or like me, an actual rape. It boils my blood but it is not new. When I told my Mum about the stalking men in the car she said “nothing has changed, I had to walk around my keys in hands and my wits about me growing up as well” – that would have been 50 years ago. When I tell my male friends about being raped, it’s almost the same reaction every time. Disbelief. The concept that going through that trauma and still pressing on everyday like nothing is different is a woman’s reality, we don’t have a choice. We can’t be emotional because our career suffers. We can’t be public about it because our career suffers. We can’t fight because our career suffers. Our careers suffer without any of this added to it.
If you don’t know someone with a “me too” moment, you aren’t trusted with the information and could even be a perpetrator. For women, we can do nothing but stand in solidarity with each other. We can fight together. But, we are not the problem. We do not an awful lot to avoid getting raped, it’s how we’re brought up. Men are not taught to not to rape, women are taught to not be raped. Men who know they are innocent of these crimes yet do nothing are complicit in the issue and do as much damage as the perpetrators. Not calling your friends out for bad behaviour, forgiving them, not setting a much higher standard is perpetuating the element of this issue where women are not believed, not helped and not taken seriously.
It’s heavy, it’s hard to hear and to listen and it’s hard to accept – for everyone. It’s hard to talk about, it’s hard to open up dialogue about it and it’s hard to communicate the real severity of the issue. It is really fucking hard to say “me too”. Everything about it is hard but it’s not something we can ignore. From January to February this year, over 45 women in Australia had been killed at the hands of domestic violence. If 45 people had been killed by sharks, or strawberries with needles in them – we would have trained oceans and burned farms. What will it take for our voice to be heard and for action to be taken? What will it take to make this a palpable issue as women and men die every hour of every day at the hands of their “partners”? What will it take for the sentiment of “me too” to be transformed into a comment on calling someone out on unforgivable behaviour? What else, other than death, violence and rape, will it take? The world is ready for another feminist revolution, this time with critical allies.
Me too.
Girl With an Elephant Tattoo 