Me Too is insufficient

There is a current trend on social media of women indicating that men have sexually harassed or assaulted them. Occasionally there’s a story, but most often it’s two tiny words: Me Too. It’s not enough.

It doesn’t capture the reality of what your feed full of “Me Too”s really means. The horror stories that most women have should infuriate you. But perhaps you don’t realize what the constant pervasive sexual harassment does to those of us living with it. It often takes more energy to confront the hand grope on public transportation or the demeaning replacement of one’s earned title with a comment on our appearance than it does to call it out. So I push it aside, I move on, I let it slide because there are other things vying for my attention and energy. These encounters become background noise. But it adds up. Let me show you.

If you know me well, you’ll know that my dreams are vivid and my way of processing and coping with the stress of living. Sometimes they make me wake up laughing, sometimes I run with dinosaurs and run from lava, and sometimes I get on a soapbox and pontificate on ideas that I have. They’re often pretty excellent entertainment.

The past three months I’ve had repeated dreams of men entering my apartment, watching me while I sleep, and only when I wake up (in the dream) and catch them do they leave. For three weeks in August/September I was so convinced that there was someone in my apartment, watching me or standing over my bed and touching my hair, that I was waking up at 2am every night full of adrenalin. I had to turn on every light and look in every cranny to make sure I was the only person in my apartment. And then to try and go back to sleep. It takes a toll.

Last night, I dreamt the following:

I woke up (in the dream) from a noise in my apartment and caught some white dude in my apartment, watching as I slept, browsing my journals and my things. In trying to get him out, I get tangled in my quilts leaving my bed. He laughs as I try to yell but have no voice to tell him to get the fuck out. I follow as he pelts down the stairs, outside, and into a police officer who stands outside my door. The police officer laughs and lets him outside to join his frat brothers. Finally finding my voice, I ask the (white male) officer why the guy isn’t being arrested: he broke into my apartment and was watching me sleep! The officer shrugs, and says no harm was done to my stuff or to me, so there’s no evidence that I didn’t let him in. I start screaming as the frat bros circle, taunting me and mocking my hysterical anger. It’s only when one of the dudes pulls a gun on me, and waves it at the officer that they decide to arrest him and take my own anger seriously. But the frat bros try to sneak into my apartment behind the officers who are now going to investigate. I have to stand in the doorway, hands on my hips confronting them, because the police won’t do that for me. Upstairs the cops find a nest of blankets right next to my bed where they were camped out. They find months worth of notes on my sleeping behaviors and patterns from dozens of men who have been watching me sleep. The comments about my sleeping behavior are almost entirely sexually explicit. And yet still this is not enough to get all of them arrested. I am beyond angry. I am violated and furious and raging because to do otherwise is to give into the visceral feelings that my house, my body, my identity are unsafe. I spend more time trying to lock my doors, my windows, the doggy door they initially used to get in, and yet still it requires me hitting them, shouting at them to keep them from again invading my house after the cops leave. One guy makes it in through an upstairs window and I find him eating months of their notes to destroy what meager evidence there is of their violation. I scream for help, to try and get him to stop, and yet no one else is there. I have to handle their laughter, taunts, and physical intimidation on my own.

When I finally managed to wake myself up around 4am, my heart was racing and adrenaline was coursing me. It’s a half-hour before I can go back to sleep, which is better than the past few variations on this dream. I’m getting better at repeating my mantra to get myself back to sleep: my apartment is secure, I am safe, I have friends I trust. I’m getting faster at shrugging off this nighttime processing of the stress in the world around me. But I’ve lost a night of restful sleep. I have to force myself to remember what is real and what is not. I have to go bed tonight and remind myself that these dreams happen only about once a week, so tonight will probably be a full night’s sleep. Probably.

But let’s break apart this dream.

• First there’s my lack of voice when I find a white guy who has broken into my safe place at the point when I am most vulnerable. I discover a threat of intimidation and I cannot say anything about it. I struggle to verbally respond and physically react. If you know me, that’s absurd because I always have something to say. Sexual harassment often feels ill-defined because it’s a threat of something more and it leaves little evidence of the implied threat.
• The police officer doesn’t believe me and is actually complicit in allowing the “boys to be boys”. My word, once I find my voice, means nothing. My voice is in fact mocked as being hysterical, like I’m overreacting. They are caught in the act of violating my safe space and the symbolic extension of the state laughs me off. The state sides with those who further hone their threat of violence. The boys learn that the state will ignore their behavior. The lack of repercussions encourages them to continue mocking me and further attempts to break into my apartment.
• It is only when a gun is pulled and only when it is turned on the police officer that a handful of the frat bros are arrested. The state only cares about threats to itself. (We could go into the racism embedded in the state’s response, but that’s not explicitly part of this particular dream). I am no threat to the state’s authority, and they have no reason to respond.
• Even after the cops begin to take my fury seriously, they do not protect me while they search for evidence. They do not become alarmed when the evidence shows that this invasion has been going on for months. They leave evidence in a place where it can be destroyed. The state has zero vested interest in pursing a case against this threat of violence. And I am alone fending off the same behavior.
• There’s no reason in the dream they chose my house, why they chose to intimidate and harass me except that I was female.

This dream represents the pattern for those of us who choose to fight one instance – or the problem at large.

This dream, and its many variations I’ve been having the past few months, is just one effect of living in a culture of pervasive sexual harassment. When the cheeto-in-chief is tacitly (and explicitly) exonerated from accusations of sexual assault, it increases this background noise. It’s more fuel that I have to process and cope with. I have to balance a poor night’s sleep and spiked anxiety with whatever else goes on in my day.

When women speak up “Me Too” it brings to the fore the pervasiveness of sexual harassment in which I have to live my life. I just spent an hour writing this rather than get ready for work and enjoy the beautiful rosy-colored dawn. I did because I think one of the tools at addressing sexual harassment and assault is telling personal stories. I at least have the capacity to do this. It takes effort. Me Too is insufficient a response.