When Kelly Lisenbee checked Facebook on Sunday night, she saw the same message repeated by many of her friends: “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too’ as a status, we might give men a sense of the magnitude of the problem. #MeToo”
Her, too: Lisenbee, 32, a surgical technician in Oklahoma City, was assaulted as a teenager. So she copied and pasted the message as her own status before going to bed. But at 2 a.m. she woke, unable to get back to sleep, she recalled later Monday. There was more to say.
“I didn’t know he was going to forcibly kiss me,” she wrote, in an updated post. “I didn’t know he was going to put his hand in my jeans. . . I didn’t know that after I pushed him away and told him no that he was going to tell all his buddies that it happened anyway.”
Stories like hers exploded across social media Sunday and Monday, among women galvanized by the abuse and harassment allegations involving Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. On Twitter, the #MeToo hashtag had been tweeted nearly half a million times as of Monday afternoon; more than 600,000 people were talking about it on Facebook. Celebrities like Alyssa Milano and Rosario Dawson first helped to amplify the hashtag on Sunday afternoon, as thousands of women shared that they were victims of harassment and assault. Some contributed wrenching accounts of romantic overtures by bosses, catcalls from strangers and sexual assault. Others simply chose to write, “Me too,” offering no further details.
For Lisenbee, the online conversation was an epiphany. No one talked about these things when she was growing up in Broken Arrow, Okla., she said; now, the messages on Facebook had her thinking about a connection between her assault and her subsequent struggles with her weight.
“I’m just so glad that we’re talking about it,” she said in an interview. “I hope that it saves the next generation of women.”
But for other women, the #MeToo discussion is feeling all too familiar.