The Silence Breakers Are Named TIME Person Of the Year 2017
#TIMEPOY
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Movie stars are supposedly nothing like you and me.
They're svelte, glamorous, self-possessed. They wear dresses we can't afford
and live in houses we can only dream of. Yet it turns out that—in the most
painful and personal ways—movie stars are more like you and me than we ever
knew.
In 1997, just before Ashley Judd's career
took off, she was invited to a meeting with Harvey Weinstein, head of the
starmaking studio Miramax, at a Beverly Hills hotel. Astounded and offended by
Weinstein's attempt to coerce her into bed, Judd managed to escape. But instead
of keeping quiet about the kind of encounter that could easily shame a woman
into silence, she began spreading the word.
"I started talking about Harvey the
minute that it happened," Judd says in an interview with TIME.
"Literally, I exited that hotel room at the Peninsula Hotel in 1997 and
came straight downstairs to the lobby, where my dad was waiting for me, because
he happened to be in Los Angeles from Kentucky, visiting me on the set. And he
could tell by my face—to use his words—that something devastating had happened
to me. I told him. I told everyone."
She recalls one screenwriter friend telling her that
Weinstein's behavior was an open secret passed around on the whisper network
that had been furrowing through Hollywood for years. It allowed for people to
warn others to some degree, but there was no route to stop the abuse.
"Were we supposed to call some fantasy attorney general of moviedom?"
Judd asks. "There wasn't a place for us to report these experiences."
Finally, in October—when Judd went on the
record about Weinstein's behavior in the New York Times, the first star to do so—the world
listened. (Weinstein said he "never laid a glove" on Judd and denies
having had nonconsensual sex with other accusers.)
When movie stars don't know where to go, what
hope is there for the rest of us? What hope is there for the janitor who's
being harassed by a co-worker but remains silent out of fear she'll lose the
job she needs to support her children? For the administrative assistant who
repeatedly fends off a superior who won't take no for an answer? For the hotel
housekeeper who never knows, as she goes about replacing towels and cleaning
toilets, if a guest is going to corner her in a room she can't escape?
Like the "problem that has no name," the
disquieting malaise of frustration and repression among postwar wives and
homemakers identified by Betty Friedan more than 50 years ago, this moment is
borne of a very real and potent sense of unrest. Yet it doesn't have a leader,
or a single, unifying tenet. The hashtag #MeToo (swiftly adapted into
#BalanceTonPorc, #YoTambien, #Ana_kaman and many others), which to date has
provided an umbrella of solidarity for millions of people to come forward with
their stories, is part of the picture, but not all of it.
This reckoning appears to have sprung up
overnight. But it has actually been simmering for years, decades, centuries.
Women have had it with bosses and co-workers who not only cross boundaries but
don't even seem to know that boundaries exist. They've had it with the fear of
retaliation, of being blackballed, of being fired from a job they can't afford
to lose. They've had it with the code of going along to get along. They've had
it with men who use their power to take what they want from women. These
silence breakers have started a revolution of refusal, gathering strength by
the day, and in the past two months alone, their collective anger has spurred
immediate and shocking results: nearly every day, CEOs have been fired, moguls
toppled, icons disgraced. In some cases, criminal charges have been brought.
Emboldened by Judd, Rose McGowan and a
host of other prominent accusers, women everywhere have begun to speak out
about the inappropriate, abusive and in some cases illegal behavior they've
faced. When multiple harassment claims bring down a charmer like former Today show host Matt
Lauer, women who thought they had no recourse see a new, wide-open door. When a
movie star says #MeToo, it becomes easier to believe the cook who's been
quietly enduring for years.
The
women and men who have broken their silence span all races, all income classes,
all occupations and virtually all corners of the globe. They might labor in
California fields, or behind the front desk at New York City's regal Plaza
Hotel, or in the European Parliament. They're part of a movement that has no
formal name. But now they have a voice.
II
In
a windowless room at a two-story soundstage in San Francisco's Mission
District, a group of women from different worlds met for the first time. Judd,
every bit the movie star in towering heels, leaned in to shake hands with
Isabel Pascual, a woman from Mexico who works picking strawberries and asked to
use a pseudonym to protect her family. Beside her, Susan Fowler, a former Uber
engineer, eight months pregnant, spoke softly with Adama Iwu, a corporate
lobbyist in Sacramento. A young hospital worker who had flown in from Texas
completed the circle. She too is a victim of sexual harassment but was there
anonymously, she said, as an act of solidarity to represent all those who could
not speak out.
From
a distance, these women could not have looked more different. Their ages, their
families, their religions and their ethnicities were all a world apart. Their
incomes differed not by degree but by universe: Iwu pays more in rent each
month than Pascual makes in two months.
But on that November morning, what separated them was
less important than what brought them together: a shared experience. Over the
course of six weeks, TIME interviewed dozens of people representing at least as
many industries, all of whom had summoned extraordinary personal courage to
speak out about sexual harassment at their jobs. They often had eerily similar
stories to share.
In almost every case, they described not only
the vulgarity of the harassment itself—years of lewd comments, forced kisses,
opportunistic gropes—but also the emotional and psychological fallout from
those advances. Almost everybody described wrestling with a palpable sense of
shame. Had she somehow asked for it? Could she have deflected it? Was she
making a big deal out of nothing?
"I thought, What just happened? Why didn't
I react?" says the anonymous hospital worker who fears for her family's
livelihood should her story come out in her small community. "I kept
thinking, Did I do something, did I say something, did I look a certain way to
make him think that was O.K.?" It's a poisonous, useless thought, she
adds, but how do you avoid it? She remembers the shirt she was wearing that
day. She can still feel the heat of her harasser's hands on her body.
Nearly all of the people TIME interviewed about their
experiences expressed a crushing fear of what would happen to them personally,
to their families or to their jobs if they spoke up.
For some, the fear was borne of a threat of
physical violence. Pascual felt trapped and terrified when her harasser began
to stalk her at home, but felt she was powerless to stop him. If she told
anyone, the abuser warned her, he would come after her or her children.
Those who are often most vulnerable in
society—immigrants, people of color, people with disabilities, low-income
workers and LGBTQ people—described many types of dread. If they raised their
voices, would they be fired? Would their communities turn against them? Would
they be killed? According to a 2015 survey by the National Center for
Transgender Equality, 47% of transgender people report being sexually assaulted
at some point in their lives, both in and out of the workplace.
Juana Melara, who has worked as a hotel housekeeper for
decades, says she and her fellow housekeepers didn't complain about guests who
exposed themselves or masturbated in front of them for fear of losing the
paycheck they needed to support their families. Melara recalls "feeling
the pressure of someone's eyes" on her as she cleaned a guest's room. When
she turned around, she remembers, a man was standing in the doorway, blocked by
the cleaning cart, with his erect penis exposed. She yelled at the top of her
lungs and scared him into leaving, then locked the door behind him.
"Nothing happened to me that time, thank God," she recalls.
While guests come and go, some employees must
continue to work side by side with their harassers. Crystal Washington was
thrilled when she was hired as a hospitality coordinator at the Plaza, a
storied hotel whose allure is as strong for people who want to work there as it
is for those who can afford a suite. "Walking in, it's breathtaking,"
she says.
But then, she says, a co-worker began making
crude remarks to her like "I can tell you had sex last night" and
groping her. One of those encounters was even caught on camera, but the management
did not properly respond, her lawyers say.
Washington has joined with six other female employees to
file a sexual-harassment suit against the hotel. But she cannot afford to leave
the job and says she must force herself out of bed every day to face the man
she's accused. "It's a dream to be an employee there," Washington
says. "And then you find out what it really is, and it's a
nightmare." (Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, which owns the Plaza, said in
a statement to TIME that it takes remedial action against harassment when
warranted.)
Other women, like the actor Selma Blair,
weathered excruciating threats. Blair says she arrived at a hotel restaurant
for a meeting with the independent film director James Toback in 1999 only to
be told that he would like to see her in his room. There, she says, Toback told
her that she had to learn to be more vulnerable in her craft and asked her to
strip down. She took her top off. She says he then propositioned her for sex,
and when she refused, he blocked the door and forced her to watch him
masturbate against her leg. Afterward, she recalls him telling her that if she
said anything, he would stab her eyes out with a Bic pen and throw her in the
Hudson River.
Blair says Toback lorded the encounter over her for
decades. "I had heard from others that he was slandering me, saying these
sexual things about me, and it just made me even more afraid of him,"
Blair says in an interview with TIME. "I genuinely thought for almost 20
years, He's going to kill me." ( Toback has denied the allegations, saying
he never met his accusers or doesn't remember them.)
Many of the people who have come forward also
mentioned a different fear, one less visceral but no less real, as a reason for
not speaking out: if you do, your complaint becomes your identity. "'Susan
Fowler, the famous victim of sexual harassment,'" says the woman whose
blog post ultimately led Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to resign and the
multibillion-dollar startup to oust at least 20 other employees. "Nobody wants
to be the buzzkill," adds Lindsey Reynolds, one of the women who blew the
whistle on a culture of harassment at the restaurant group run by the celebrity
chef John Besh. (The Besh Group says it is implementing new policies to create
a culture of respect. Besh apologized for "unacceptable behavior" and
"moral failings," and resigned from the company. )
Iwu, the lobbyist, says she considered the
same risks after she was groped in front of several colleagues at an event. She
was shocked when none of her male co-workers stepped in to stop the assault.
The next week, she organized 147 women to sign an open letter exposing
harassment in California government. When she told people about the campaign,
she says they were wary. "Are you sure you want to do this?" they
warned her. "Remember Anita Hill."
Taylor Swift says she was made to feel bad about the
consequences that her harasser faced. After she complained about a Denver radio
DJ named David Mueller, who reached under her skirt and grabbed her rear end,
Mueller was fired. He sued Swift for millions in damages. She countersued for a
symbolic $1 and then testified about the incident in August. Mueller's lawyer
asked her, on the witness stand, whether she felt bad that she'd gotten him
fired.
"I'm not going to let you or your client
make me feel in any way that this is my fault," she told the lawyer.
"I'm being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are a
product of his decisions. Not mine." (Mueller said he would appeal.)
In an interview with TIME,
Swift says that moment on the stand fueled her indignation. "I figured
that if he would be brazen enough to assault me under these risky
circumstances," she says, "imagine what he might do to a vulnerable,
young artist if given the chance." Like the five women gathered at that
echoing soundstage in San Francisco, and like all of the dozens, then hundreds,
then millions of women who came forward with their own stories of harassment,
she was done feeling intimidated. Actors and writers and journalists and dishwashers
and fruit pickers alike: they'd had enough. What had manifested as shame
exploded into outrage. Fear became fury.
This was the great unleashing that turned the #MeToo
hashtag into a rallying cry. The phrase was first used more than a decade ago
by social activist Tarana Burke as part of her work building solidarity among
young survivors of harassment and assault. A friend of the actor Alyssa Milano
sent her a screenshot of the phrase, and Milano, almost on a whim, tweeted it
out on Oct. 15. "If you've been sexually harassed or assaulted write 'me
too' as a reply to this tweet," she wrote, and then went to sleep. She
woke up the next day to find that more than 30,000 people had used #MeToo.
Milano burst into tears.
At first, those speaking out were mostly from
the worlds of media and entertainment, but the hashtag quickly spread. "We
have to keep our focus on people of different class and race and gender,"
says Burke, who has developed a friendship with Milano via text messages. By
November, California farmworkers, Pascual among them, were marching on the
streets of Hollywood to express their solidarity with the stars.
Women were no longer alone. "There's
something really empowering about standing up for what's right," says
Fowler, who has grown comfortable with her new reputation as a whistle-blower.
"It's a badge of honor."
III
Discussions of sexual harassment in polite
company tend to rely on euphemisms: harassment becomes "inappropriate
behavior," assault becomes "misconduct," rape becomes
"abuse." We're accustomed to hearing those softened words, which
downplay the pain of the experience. That's one of the reasons why the Access Hollywood tape
that surfaced in October 2016 was such a jolt. The language used by the man who
would become America's 45th President, captured on a 2005 recording, was, by
any standard, vulgar. He didn't just say that he'd made a pass; he "moved
on her like a bitch." He didn't just talk about fondling women; he bragged
that he could "grab 'em by the pussy."
That Donald Trump could express himself that
way and still be elected President is part of what stoked the rage that fueled
the Women's March the day after his Inauguration. It's why women seized on that
crude word as the emblem of the protest that dwarfed Trump's Inauguration crowd
size. "All social movements have highly visible precipitating
factors," says Aldon Morris, a professor of sociology at Northwestern
University. "In this case, you had Harvey Weinstein, and before that you
had Trump."
Megyn Kelly, the NBC anchor who revealed in
October that she had complained to Fox News executives about Bill O'Reilly's
treatment of women, and who was a target of Trump's ire during the campaign,
says the tape as well as the tenor of the election turned the political into
the personal. "I have real doubts about whether we'd be going through this
if Hillary Clinton had won, because I think that President Trump's election in
many ways was a setback for women," says Kelly, who noted that not all
women at the march were Clinton supporters. "But the overall message to us
was that we don't really matter."
So it was not entirely surprising that 2017 began with
women donning "pussy hats" and marching on the nation's capital in a
show of unity and fury. What was startling was the size of the protest. It was
one of the largest in U.S. history and spawned satellite marches in all 50
states and more than 50 other countries.
Summer Zervos, a former contestant on The Apprentice, was one of
roughly 20 women to accuse the President of sexual harassment. She filed a
defamation suit against Trump days before his Inauguration after he disputed
her claims by calling her a liar. A New York judge is expected to decide soon
if the President is immune to civil suits while in office. No matter the
outcome, the allegations added fuel to a growing fire.
By February, the movement had made its way to
the billionaire dream factories of Silicon Valley, when Fowler spoke out about
her "weird year" as an engineer at Uber. "I remember feeling
powerless and like there was no one looking out for us because we had an
admitted harasser in the White House," Fowler says. "I felt like I
had to take action."
Barely two months later, Fox News cut ties with O'Reilly.
Over the next several months, media outlets reported that O'Reilly and Fox News
had spent more than $45 million to settle claims with women who alleged
harassment. Wendy Walsh, a psychologist and former guest on the network, was
one of the first women to share her story about the star anchor—but she was
initially reluctant to go on the record. "I was afraid for my kids, I was
afraid of the retaliation," she says. "I know what men can do when
they're angry."
Eventually she allowed her name to be used.
"I felt it was my duty," Walsh says, "as a mother of daughters,
as an act of love for women everywhere and the women who are silenced, to be
brave."
The downfall of O'Reilly, who has denied all
allegations of harassment, would prove to be just the beginning of the
reckoning in media and entertainment. In June, Bill Cosby was brought to trial
on charges that he had drugged and sexually assaulted a woman named Andrea
Constand, one of nearly 50 women who have accused Cosby of sexual assault over
several decades. Although the case ended in a mistrial—it is scheduled to be
retried in April—the fact that it happened at all signaled a shift in the
culture, a willingness to hold even beloved and powerful men accountable for
past misdeeds.
Complaints at the University of Rochester helped expose
harassment in academia. The chief executive of SoFi, the $4 billion lending
firm, resigned following a lawsuit over claims of sexual harassment. Then, in
early October, the dam finally broke.
On Oct. 5, the New York Times published the first
story to expose Weinstein, one of the most powerful men in Hollywood and a
leading Democratic political fundraiser, as a serial sexual predator. The
revelation was quickly followed by New
Yorker investigations that widened Weinstein's list of accusers and
showed the incredible lengths he went to cover his tracks. Weinstein denied the
allegations, but the levers that he had long pulled to exert his influence
suddenly were jammed. Fellow chieftains refused to defend him. Politicians who
once courted him gave away his donations. His company's board fired him.
Within days, the head of Amazon Studios, an
influential art publisher and employees at the financial-services firm Fidelity
had all left their jobs over harassment claims. By the end of the month, the
list of the accused had grown to include political analyst Mark Halperin, a
former TIME employee; opinion-shaping literary critic Leon Wieseltier; and
numerous politicians and journalists. The Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey was
scrubbed from a completed movie.
The response to the Weinstein allegations has shaped the way
people view women who come forward. In a TIME/SurveyMonkey online poll of
American adults conducted Nov. 28–30, 82% of respondents said women are more
likely to speak out about harassment since the Weinstein allegations.
Meanwhile, 85% say they believe the women making allegations of sexual
harassment.
The movement—and fallout—quickly spread
around the world. Michael Fallon, Britain's Defense Secretary, quit the Cabinet
after journalist Jane Merrick revealed that he had "lunged" at her in
2003, when she was a 29-year-old reporter. In France, women took to the streets
chanting not only "Me too" but also "Balance ton porc," which translates roughly
to "Expose your pig," a hashtag conceived by French journalist Sandra
Muller. In the week after #MeToo first surfaced, versions of it swept through
85 countries, from India, where the struggle against harassment and assault had
already become a national debate in recent years, to the Middle East, Asia and
parts in between.
"Suddenly," says Terry Reintke, a German member
of the European Parliament, who discussed her own harassment in a speech on
Oct. 25, "friends from primary school or women that I know from completely
different surroundings that would never call themselves feminists were starting
to share their stories."
By November, the spotlight was back on
American politicians. A woman named Leigh Corfman told the Washington Post that Roy Moore, the
Alabama Republican nominee for the Senate, abused her when she was 14 and he
was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. Nine women have come forward to
describe inappropriate encounters with Roy Moore, including several who say he
pursued them when they were teenagers. Moore has called the allegations
"false" and "malicious." "Specifically, I do not know
any of these women nor have I ever engaged in sexual misconduct with any
woman," he said in late November.
The following week, radio host Leeann Tweeden wrote that
Minnesota Democratic Senator Al Franken groped her on a USO tour in 2006,
before he was in office. Several other women have since come forward with
similar harassment allegations against Franken, who has called on the Senate
Ethics Committee to investigate his own behavior. On Dec. 5, Michigan
Democratic Representative John Conyers resigned amid allegations that he had
made sexual advances toward the women on his staff. He has said that the
allegations "are not accurate; they are not true."
Texas Republican Representative Blake
Farenthold has also found himself in the crosshairs after media reports that he
used $84,000 in taxpayer dollars to settle a sexual-harassment lawsuit with a
former aide in 2014. Farenthold denies that he engaged in any wrongdoing and
has vowed to repay the settlement.
The accused were both Democrats and Republicans, but the
consequences thus far have been limited—and often filtered through a partisan
lens. In politics, at least, what constitutes disqualifying behavior seemed to
depend not on your actions but on the allegiance of your tribe. In the 1990s,
feminists stood up for accused abuser Bill Clinton instead of his accusers—a
move many are belatedly regretting as the national conversation prompts a
re-evaluation of the claims against the former President. And despite the
allegations against Moore, both President Trump and the Republican National
Committee support him.
That political divide was revealed in the
TIME/SurveyMonkey poll, which found that Republicans were significantly more
likely to excuse sexual misdeeds in their own party. The survey found that
while a majority of Republicans and Democrats agree that a Democratic
Congressman accused of sexual harassment should resign (71% and 74%
respectively), when the accused offender was in the GOP, only 54% of
Republicans would demand a resignation (compared to 82% of Democrats).
As another election cycle approaches, Americans find
themselves trying to weigh one ugly act against another in a painful calculus
of transgression. Is a grope caught on camera more disqualifying than a
years-ago assault that was credibly reported? What are we willing to forgive or
ignore or deny if the violator shares our politics?
IV
It wasn't so long ago that the boss chasing
his secretary around the desk was a comic trope, a staple from vaudeville to
prime-time sitcoms. There wasn't even a name for sexual harassment until just
over 40 years ago; the term was coined in 1975 by a group of women at Cornell
University after an employee there, Carmita Wood, filed for unemployment
benefits after she had resigned because a supervisor touched her. The
university denied her claim, arguing that she left the job for "personal
reasons."
Wood, joined by activists from the university's
human-affairs program, formed a group called Working Women United that hosted
an event for workers from various fields, from mail-room clerks and servers to
factory workers and administrative assistants, to talk about their own harassment
experiences.
It was a proto-version of the social-media
explosion we're seeing today, encouraging unity and reminding women that they
were not alone. But even as public awareness about the problem of sexual
harassment began to grow, legal and policy protections were almost nonexistent.
In the 1970s, most businesses and institutions had no policies on sexual
harassment whatsoever, and even egregious complaints were regularly dismissed.
In 1980 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
(EEOC), the federal agency tasked with enforcing civil rights laws in the
workplace, issued guidelines declaring sexual harassment a violation of Title
VII of the Civil Rights Act. It was a victory, but with caveats: even after
sexual harassment became explicitly illegal, it remained difficult to lodge a
complaint that stuck—in part because acts of harassment are often difficult to
define. What separates an illegal act of sexual harassment from a merely
annoying interaction between a boss and his subordinate? When does a boss stop
just being a jerk and become a criminal? Because the Civil Rights Act offered
no solid legal definition, interpretation has evolved slowly, shaped by judges
and the EEOC over the past 37 years.
In 1991, Anita Hill testified before the
Senate committee confirming Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, accusing him
of sexual harassment and bringing national attention to the issue. But, she
says, "The conversation was not about the problems in the workplace. It
was about the fallout in politics."
Even now, the contours of what constitutes sexual
harassment remain murky. Some of the recent stories clearly cross the line,
like a boss exposing himself to a subordinate or requiring that his researcher
sit on his lap. But others feel more ambiguous. Under what circumstances can
you ask a colleague about their marriage? When is an invite to drinks alone a
bridge too far?
Jonathan Segal, a partner at the Philadelphia
law firm Duane Morris, who specializes in workplace training, says he hears
that confusion in the conversations men are now having among themselves.
"It's more like, 'I wonder if I should tell someone they look nice, I
wonder when it's O.K. to give a hug, I wonder when I should be alone with
someone in a room,'" he says.
This uncertainty can be corrosive. While everyone wants
to smoke out the serial predators and rapists, there is a risk that the net may
be cast too far. What happens when someone who makes a sexist joke winds up
lumped into the same bucket as a boss who gropes an employee? Neither should be
encouraged, but nor should they be equated.
Companies, meanwhile, are scrambling to keep
up. Most large U.S.-based corporations now have fairly complete policies on
sexual harassment, and many have anti–sexual harassment training programs and
claim to be "zero-tolerance workplaces." A 2016 EEOC report found
that a company's willingness to protect so-called rainmakers—high-performing
men like Kalanick, Weinstein and O'Reilly—to be one of the most pernicious
reasons C-suites and corporate boards overlooked harassment. It doesn't matter
how good a company's policy is if its systems are ignored or don't work.
"So much harassment training is like an episode of The Office," says
Victoria Lipnic, the acting chair of the EEOC.
In some instances, sexual-harassment training
has even been shown to backfire. In a 2001 study, Lisa Scherer, an associate
professor of industrial-organizational psychology at the University of Nebraska
at Omaha, found that while training increased knowledge about what constituted
sexual harassment, it also sometimes had a corrosive effect on workplace
culture. "What was disturbing was that the males who had gone through
training showed a backlash effect," she says. "They said they were
less willing to report sexual harassment than the males who had not gone
through the training."
Employers are also girding for future
allegations and lawsuits. The insurance company Nationwide reported a 15%
increase in sales of employment practices liability insurances between 2016 and
2017. And Advisen, which tracks insurance trends, says that EPLI insurance
price has increased 30% since 2011, which indicates that more companies are
reporting losses.
Corporate boards, wary of alienating female employees and
customers and of drawing bad press, have been among the quickest to make
changes. Uber, for example, which built its reputation on a willingness to
flout norms, used to be a guiding light for small startups. Now nobody is
pitching their company as the next Uber, says Fowler. "There's a shift to,
'We're not disrupting anymore. We're trying to build something that's good for
consumers and treats employees fairly.'" It's a start.
State and local governments have also taken
some concrete steps. In October, the Chicago city council passed an ordinance
requiring hotels to provide panic buttons to employees who work alone in hotel
rooms. In Springfield, Ill., lawmakers passed a measure that will allow an
investigation into a backlog of sexual-harassment complaints in the
statehouse. In Arizona, pending legislation would void nondisclosure agreements
signed by victims of harassment to keep them silent.
At the federal level, the House and Senate have passed
new rules requiring members of Congress and their staff to complete mandatory
sexual-harassment training. A handful of Senators have also introduced
legislation to rein in what are known as mandatory arbitration agreements—legal
clauses that can appear in employee contracts that prevent workers from suing
their employers in court for any reason, including sexual harassment. Some 60
million American workers are currently bound by them.
V
We're still at the bomb-throwing point of
this revolution, a reactive stage at which nuance can go into hiding. But while
anger can start a revolution, in its most raw and feral form it can't negotiate
the more delicate dance steps needed for true social change. Private
conversations, which can't be legislated or enforced, are essential.
Norms evolve, and it's long past time for any
culture to view harassment as acceptable. But there's a great deal at stake in
how we assess these new boundaries—for women and men together. We can and
should police criminal acts and discourage inappropriate, destructive behavior.
At least we've started asking the right
questions. Ones that seem alarmingly basic in hindsight: "What if we did
complain?" proposes Megyn Kelly. "What if we didn't whine, but we
spoke our truth in our strongest voices and insisted that those around us did
better? What if that worked to change reality right now?" Kelly acknowledges
that this still feels more like a promise than a certainty. But for the moment,
the world is listening.
—With
reporting by Charlotte Alter and Susanna Schrobsdorff/New York, Sam Lansky/Los
Angeles, Kate Samuelson/London, Maya Rhodan/Washington and Katy Steinmetz/San
Francisco
