The Age of Change

The #MeToo movement emerged after allegation of sexual assault against Harvey Weinstein, a head of the Weinstein production company, were finally being recognized in mid 2017. It seems like forever ago that the movement began but its effects have been great. Hundreds of women, and men, have spoken out against their experiences with sexual assault and have been able to share their stories and feel a sense of relief from the guilt and shame they had been carrying after their assaults. The CNN article titled “How #MeToo could move from social campaign to social change” encapsulates the early proceedings of the moment, actually in an ironic twist they used a SNL skit as a reference to the idea of an ‘armchair movement’ that starred Louis C.K. a comedian who was later in the movement admitted to exposing himself to several women. The article compares the #MeToo movement to the civil rights movement, but says that it lack substance. The author claims that there needs to be some sort of whistleblower to make this a full blown social change, but arguably everyone actively participating in the movement already at the time this article was written, in 2017, was actively being a whistleblower. The article ends with saying that in order for this movement to make a real social change organizations need to get involved and people need to do more than just press ‘like’ on a tweet. The author of this article compared the #MeToo movement at its early stages to other ‘fad’ movements that had come before it like #ItsnotOkay which began in 2016 after an Author shared her sexual assault story or that of the ALS Icebucket challenge that took over the internet a few years ago but has since lost much traction and the ALS foundations people were supporting lost much of the donation support they had earned.
This article is an interesting way to discuss social change in its modern form. For the article top bring in the necessity of real life action is interesting for a movement like #MeToo because it tackles such a difficult topic. One could easily argue that the movement wasn’t made to make a huge change and to lock up these people who have been accused of sexual assault, while that would be ideal, it’s just not going to happen because there is still much stigma around reporting an assault to the authorities and pressing charges against the accused. What the #MeToo movement was doing in 2017 at this point was really just trying to reduce the stigma that lead to so many assaults being left unreported. The twitter platform that was both public but in its own way private, gave these victims a voice to share their stories and allowed them to help others understand that the stigma that exists around being a victim of sexual assault is something that needs to change. While the #MeToo movement more recently has made huge strides in getting high ranking men, and some women, out of power and facing real life consequences, the most important thing it has done is make sure that victims had the support and they needed to speak out about their experiences.

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