So Tired Of Harassment Stories…But Keep Them Coming

"We see that the men who have had the power to abuse women’s bodies and psyches throughout their careers are in many cases also the ones in charge of our political and cultural stories."

The person who gets to tell the story, to write the narrative, is the person with power over the moral of the story. As a society, Rebecca Traister argues in this essay, we have given up our stories to those most likely to abuse others. When men who exploit and abuse women are the ones in charge of our movies, newspapers, and publishing houses, we haven’t even had a chance to hear from the ones they’ve repressed.

Until now. And yet the stories of harassment that have been bottled up for so long are also, in too many cases, being told by the same people and platforms that kept them from coming to light until now.

"The media is breaking the news here; the media is also deeply implicated in this news and still shaping how the tale is getting told."

Traister goes through example after example of shamed men—Halperin, Wieseltier, O’Reilly—to show how the gendered narratives audiences (still) receive from the mouths of powerful white men have influenced our attitudes and our politics.

She laments the fact that we can’t go backward and see the art that was never made by those who were repressed, or live under the regime of the woman who was never elected. But we can hear their stories. And we can un-build the world that their oppressors have built.