I have a lot of links this month, so I tried to organized them into themes.
Sexual violence & #MeToo
#MeToo is not all there is, and here’s why I’m not sharing my story – When activists like me criticize #MeToo, we’re not just hipsters trying to say, “we were fighting sexual violence before it was cool”. We’re trying to say that #MeToo was a step forward in terms of reaching a greater number of people, but in some ways a step back in the level of discourse. This is absolutely to be expected; whenever an important message reaches a new audience, it takes a step back to help people to catch up. In the public conversation, people keep on asking if #MeToo has gone too far, and my answer is that it hasn’t gone nearly far enough. This article talks about some things that #MeToo is missing.
Keep Your Acephobia Out of #MeToo, Jaclyn Friedman – Jaclyn Friedman, coauthor of Yes Means Yes, wrote an article about something she felt has been missing from #MeToo: a discussion of survivor’s sex lives, and how sex can be used to heal trauma. It’s true, this has been missing from the #MeToo conversation, but that doesn’t mean it’s missing everywhere. For some survivors, the narrative about sexual healing is so dominant as to be oppressive, especially for survivors who are ace. The sexual healing narrative must be paired with alternative narratives, where survivors do not have sex, and are not dehumanized for it.
When Boys Are Victims of Sexual Assault – This article has several first-person accounts of sexual assault from boys and young men. It seems that the experience interacts with masculinity in strange ways for many of them.