Disbelief
“I can’t believe it.”
“Yes, we know.”
“That’s why they believed they could get away with it.”
“That’s why victims hesitated to come forward.”
“That’s why men are more worried about the rare false accusation than the epidemic of harassment.”
“That’s why women didn’t talk to you about what they experienced.”
“That’s why we’re seeing such a logjam of long-term, entrenched harassers.”
“Why are you getting so angry?”
“Why aren’t you?”
“I just hate seeing so many careers ruined.”
“Whose careers? The perpetrators or the victims?”
“I didn’t know.”
“That’s because you didn’t listen.”
“That’s because you looked away.”
“That’s because you treated it as a joke.”
“Now that you know, what will you do differently?”
Mari Kurisato
November 29, 2017 @ 10:28 pm
I’m just shaking with rage, Useless rage.
Eleanor Ray
November 30, 2017 @ 4:56 pm
“Why are you getting so angry?” // “Why aren’t you?”
That is extremely concise, and so much to the point. Humans get angry when something important to them is threatened. So, if you are not angered by what happens to so many women every day (and sexual advances and assaults against men, too), women are bound to feel you must think they aren’t very important. *This* is why we are enraged by all this–not by an individual case, but by the fact that almost every woman knows this goes on all the time (to family and friends if not to them), and that we have been saying so for decades, and it is only now (apparently) becoming important to very many men to accept it.
To those women and men long enraged by this? The fight for change is barely begun.
To those newly enraged? Welcome to the fight. Don’t forget you are part of the conflict, don’t hide out and let others get by with things.
mjkl
November 30, 2017 @ 6:29 pm
And people knew, but didn’t do anything. I’ve heard from insiders that many of these people were “open secrets”, with speed of firing often correlating with how well-known. When someone’s an open secret/missing step, it means that those in power considered them more important than all the women (or, in some cases, men) they were hurting.