What began with the tale of a sexually abusive Hollywood producer gathered energy—the energy of thousands of stories, long suppressed—and roared through industry after industry. The media, finance, Silicon Valley, and the restaurant industry all had their own MeToo movements. While women’s stories were at the forefront, men came forward too, accusing conductor James Levine, among others, of assault. Historically, men have underreported their experiences with sexual assault (just as women have), and the men who spoke up braved a system that was hostile to them as well.

  Looking back at the stories, I marvel at the outpouring of rage and pain. It was like some new law of physics: injustice times secrecy times power imbalance equals one impressive shitstorm. The seven years since the Times investigation—which was bolstered by Ronan Farrow’s reporting in the New Yorker—have produced as many questions as answers: What were the secrets that the movement exposed? Who was left out? Who was harmed, and who was rehabilitated? Who got caught in the backlash? How far do we still have to go? What are the mechanisms of change, and who gets to operate those levers?

  And, finally, a question that torments an individual soul when the world wants to put a hand over her mouth: What is the cost of speaking up?

  At first, I watched the geyser blow with a sense of wonder, and fury, and pain of my own. I wrote the first of several columns about Canada’s long-simmering sexual harassment scandals, which affected thousands of women, and which had been dragging through institutional channels and the courts at a painfully slow pace.

  The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian military were just two of the mighty institutions being torn apart by such scandals. The RCMP and the military had been trying to attract more women members—and instead had crushed them inside hostile, sexist, and violent cultures. (A new report in late 2023 showed that allegations of sexual offences in the Canadian military are actually on the rise.)

  It wasn’t a question of bad apples; it was a question of the barrel being constructed with wood that everyone knew was rotten. As I wrote in my very first MeToo column, “looking at this strictly as a problem perpetrated by individuals does not acknowledge that workplace harassment of women is a failure of culture and power structures, and it’s ongoing. You can pull one weed and the whole garden will still be rank.”

  Different metaphor, same idea. Complicity, silencing, and institutional ass-covering were central themes in the waves of reporting that followed. “Sixteen former and current executives at Weinstein’s companies told me that they witnessed or had knowledge of unwanted sexual advances and touching at events associated with Weinstein films and in the workplace,” Ronan Farrow wrote in the New Yorker. The same complicity would reveal itself, time after time; the scaffolds that had been constructed to conceal and abet abusers in various industries reached to the moon.

  This became clear in the emails that started to arrive in my inbox. For the next year or so, because I was writing columns about the movement, I was deluged with heart-wrenching messages. Many were from older women who just wanted to share the crap they’d had to put up with over the years. They didn’t want me to write about them, they just wanted someone to know. Some hadn’t told anyone before. Others had reported the harassment, and been told to shut up about it. Some of them had lost their jobs. One woman told me that she’d been cornered and raped at university by a quite famous Canadian television performer. She was telling me because she couldn’t bear to keep the secret any longer. I wrote back to these women offering the tiny spoonful of cold comfort that I could: I’m so sorry this happened to you. I hear you. I believe you.

  Around that time, all of our geysers spewed open. I felt like I was in some weird movie where every manhole cover on the street suddenly went flying into the air. On October 15, 2017, the actress Alyssa Milano posted on Twitter: “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted, write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.”

  It would be easier to ask who hadn’t, I thought. Part of me felt cynical about the exercise. How to sum up a life of being groped, followed, demeaned, ogled, and pinned up against various pieces of equipment? All the terrible things I’d told one friend about, or no one. Not wanting to relive it. Not wanting anyone to worry. Not wanting to explain. But why was I the one who was ashamed? And if I, a professional loudmouth, was shamed into silence, how much worse would it be for other women?

  Thousands of little fires blazed all around me. Friends shared stories I hadn’t heard before. “You’ve never told me that,” I said to one friend as she remembered a blow job she’d been forced to deliver in a park. (I had just told her about the boyfriend I’d tried to break up with who physically prevented me from leaving the room till I had sex with him one last time.) She gave me a sad shrug. “I haven’t told anyone before.” Underneath that, unspoken: It wasn’t worth it.

  One night after a party, drunkenly flopped across couches, a girlfriend and I told our husbands about some of it. Not the worst of it, because some things are hidden under trap doors that would take a team of elephants (or therapists) to lift. But some of it. The more trivial end, if there is such a thing. Being followed home from a bar. Having our asses and breasts grabbed on the subway. Being groped at work events. Being groped everywhere. We told them why our mothers had taught us to walk with our keys between our knuckles, why we always parked under streetlights and checked the back seat anyway. Even though stranger danger wasn’t the real threat. The real threat was your boss, your ex-boyfriend, the guy who couldn’t believe you didn’t want a Slippery Nipple at the bar.

  Our husbands listened, mouths agape. I remember feeling irritated at their shock. How could they possibly not know that this was the way of the world? Imagine not having to listen for footsteps behind you when the moon was overhead. Imagine not weighing the cost of taking your distress to HR.

  I was thrown into the past. In the late 1990s I’d been sent to New York to write a couple of stories, one of which involved a gala dinner celebrating a famous—and feminist—Canadian novelist. I still remember what I wore: a silky bronze Calvin Klein dress, printed with witchy bare tree branches. As I left the hotel room where my future husband lay reading on the bed, I felt beautiful. I felt nervous. My little tape recorder and notebook in my purse. Inadequate weapons, but all I had.

  At the reception before the dinner, I circulated, gathered quotes. One jocular older man, an executive at a publishing company, brought me into his circle of peers. Always at these events I felt like an outsider, the girl who’d grown up in assisted housing. Too smart for my own good; my tongue getting me into trouble at every turn. But this pillar of the community seemed to enjoy the sass.

  It was a relief, then, to see his place card next to mine. His wife sat on his far side. To this day, I can’t conjure his face; it’s a smeared thumbprint, a pink blur. But I can remember what his hand felt like as it crept up my leg toward my lap. I remember my own shame, and humiliation, and anger. The famous feminist writer stood at the front of the room, speaking off the cuff, in no need of notes, fully in her power. What would she have done if I’d stood up and shrieked?

  I sat, frozen. I didn’t look at the man next to me, but reached below the table to push his hand away from my crotch. He never even bothered to glance my way. That hand, I realized, had visited countless strangers’ crotches. In hopes of an invitation? Years later, when I was a dishevelled middle-aged mother heading to the corner store to buy toothpaste, a teenaged boy leaned out of a car window to scream “I want to fuck you raw!” I actually burst into laughter as he sped by. It was a moment of absurdist theatre. I was the target, but not the audience. His audience was the other testosterone-bags in the car.

  That night in New York, I wondered what the goal was. Did this publishing executive think I was going to fling up my dress and let him bang me between the bread rolls and the salmon carpaccio while his wife looked on? Or was it strictly about reminding me that I had no power and he had all of it, and that I was bug-sized, inconsequential? He must have smelled my insecurity. All predators do. He hadn’t thought I was charming, or clever, or funny. Just flesh, existing to service.

  Did I mention any of this to my boss when I got back to Toronto? No, I did not. It wasn’t worth it. Or maybe I was a coward. Or maybe, as with most complicated things, the answer was a bit of both.

  * * *

  —

  About ten years ago I was sitting in a hotel bar that smelled of lemon and expense accounts, talking to a young Crown attorney who had prosecuted numerous sexual assault cases. The cocktails had made us best friends for the night, as cocktails sometimes do. There was a famous assault case winding its way through the Canadian courts, the female witnesses flayed alive each day for the delectation of the public. Everyone in the city was talking about it.

  The Crown attorney told me she’d never successfully prosecuted an assault trial; never brought a perpetrator to justice. The way she described the criminal justice system reminded me of the way I viewed the filter in my dishwasher: dirty, clumsily effective on good days, but indiscriminately destructive to everything caught in it.

  She told me that, if she were raped, she’d never report it to the police. “Really?” I said, leaning forward in drunken intimacy. “Never?” Not only that, she said; if she ever had a daughter, and her daughter were raped, she’d advise her not to report. Admittedly, we were in the realm of hypotheticals here. Hypothetical daughters. A doubly hypothetical rape, seeing as it’s a crime that no longer exists in the Canadian criminal justice system, having been replaced by the broader category of sexual assault.

  I stumbled home with her words in my ears. I looked in at my little girl, curled up with her stuffies in her bed. Surely we were failing girls if we told them to hide the harms that befell them? But I also knew that lawyer was right. No one was there to protect them if they did “the right thing.” The justice system had not nearly caught up to victims’ need for justice.

  It does not surprise me when I think of all the women I know who have never reported the crimes against them. They’re in good company: in Canada, between 5 and 6 per cent of sexual assaults are reported to police. The vast majority of those assaults are committed on women by men that they know. Young women are by far the largest group of victims. The decision to report is fraught, it is a barbed path into the future. No one can know, at the outset, where it will lead.

  * * *

  —

  Tarana Burke brought the phrase “me too” into wider use decades after her own sexual violation as a child—decades during which she’d kept silent because of fear, shame, guilt, and all the other emotions that survivors carry as burdens.

  In her memoir Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement, Burke writes with beautiful candour about how she was at first unable to reveal her own history when a Black girl named Heaven confided that she’d been sexually abused. Burke wanted to speak up, to share her own past, but couldn’t. Years later, after hearing other girls’ stories, she had a painful epiphany, and wrote on a piece of paper the words she’d been unable to speak aloud: “Me too.”

  After that, she could counsel other Black women and girls who were being violated. She held workshops and told them that they didn’t have to speak up if they didn’t want to; they could simply write “me too” on a piece of paper and know that they weren’t alone. These were girls whose stories would otherwise have been unheard. Not so much untold, but unheard. No one wanted to hear.

  “Sexual violence doesn’t discriminate, but the response to it does,” Burke writes. “In some ways, it is the great equalizer—no demographic or group is exempt—but the reactions to different people telling their stories are far from equal. That is why my work has always centred Black and Brown folks—particularly women and girls. The response to our trauma and our truths is wildly different than the white women’s.”

  As she points out, this was evident in the response to three decades of allegations against R&B superstar R. Kelly. Even after he’d been charged with offences against a minor, and numerous women had detailed crimes he’d committed against them when they were minors, their claims were still dismissed. R. Kelly was a global star, and his victims were Black and Brown girls who had no claim to fame or power. The hashtag #MuteRKelly predated MeToo, but it was only after the devastating miniseries Surviving R. Kelly aired on Lifetime that charges were brought against him. (Kelly was convicted of racketeering and sex trafficking in a New York court in 2021, and of the production of child pornography and enticement of a minor in 2022, and is currently serving a thirty-year sentence in prison.)

  The post-2017 iteration of MeToo has been largely a white phenomenon, involving white women’s revolt against white male violence. For it to be a truly global and lasting movement, it needs to be a movement of justice for all women—racialized, poor, disabled, queer. Everyone.

  “Why is it that when I spoke out, no one listened?” That’s the question Erika Morales, a former night shift janitor, asked journalist Bernice Yeung—a question that the journalist could not answer. Morales, a single mother, had been repeatedly assaulted by her supervisor, who was a convicted sex offender, while working as a cleaner. She begged the supervisor to stop, telling him she needed the job to support her kids. He didn’t stop, and she finally quit when nothing changed.

  That’s just one of the many stories of marginalized women that Yeung relates in her book, In a Day’s Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers. The farm and factory and domestic workers that Yeung interviewed found themselves caught in a web of overlapping realities. They were afraid they wouldn’t be able to find another job. Some were undocumented workers. Some were worried about retaliation.

  “Low-wage immigrants labouring in isolation are at unique risk of sexual assault and harassment,” Yeung writes. Because of the precariousness of their labour, many are afraid to speak out. And yet we still ask them to speak out. Those most at risk are expected to take on the burden of yet more risk—with no guarantee of justice at the end.

  What’s amazing is that people have continued to speak out—and suffer the consequences. By January 2018, I was writing about the backlash to the MeToo movement. A backlash while the tendrils of righteous anger were still unfurling. It was quite a thing to witness, like the first blizzard of winter: not surprising, but chilling nonetheless.

  In 2019, the Harvard Business Review reported on an academic study conducted by American researchers, which polled nearly 500 male and female workers in a variety of industries. The initial survey, conducted in early 2018 soon after MeToo had become a movement, asked about the nature and experience of harassment (63 per cent of the female respondents said they’d been harassed, but only 20 per cent had reported it).

  About a year later, the researchers conducted a follow-up survey, which revealed a more pronounced backlash than they had expected. “For instance, 19% of men said they were reluctant to hire attractive women, 21% said they were reluctant to hire women for jobs involving close interpersonal interactions with men (jobs involving travel, say), and 27% said they avoided one-on-one meetings with female colleagues.” The researchers noted the “Mike Pence rule,” named after the then vice-president of the United States, who while happy to serve under a flagrant misogynist, said he would not have dinner alone with a woman who wasn’t his wife.

  I read about the backlash, and I witnessed it in my own email inbox. Alongside the messages from women desperately pouring out poison from their pasts, I was chided by readers—men and women—who just wanted me to move along. Hadn’t those poor abusers been through enough!

  In the United States, the National Women’s Law Center has documented more than seventy pieces of anti-harassment legislation passed in twenty-two states since the fall of 2017. But there’s something alarming in the centre’s assessment: “Even with these reforms, our workplace protections are still coming up short…Today, the very public backlash in response to momentum in gender and racial justice advocacy efforts is impacting women at work. Abortion bans and restrictions, state laws attacking trans students and prohibiting teaching about race, bans on workplace anti-discrimination and implicit bias trainings, and defamation lawsuits against survivors of sexual violence, for example, all feed gendered and racialized power dynamics at work that increase incidents of harassment.”

  Or, in less bureaucratic terms, women are being punished for their temerity in standing up to abuse. Maybe it’s most common, or most pronounced, in the United States, with its Republican-led war on abortion, women’s health care, and trans rights. But we’re seeing this blowback around the world. It’s the modern-day equivalent of the tyrannical poorhouse operator who bellows “What, more?” when tiny Oliver Twist asks for another ladle of gruel.

  Most alarming, to me, is the growing gender divide in young people. I’d always assumed that every new generation would be more progressive than the last, but you know what they say about people who assume. As it turns out, in many parts of the world, men aged 16–29 are not only less progressive than their female counterparts, but they hold much darker views of feminism and gender equality. There could be any number of reasons for this—the rise of the grievance-baited manosphere, economic stagnation, or just good old-fashioned backlash to the gains of MeToo.

  “Seven years on from the initial #MeToo explosion, the gender divergence in attitudes has become self-sustaining,” John Burn-Murdoch wrote in an analysis of new research for the Financial Times. “Survey data show that in many countries the ideological differences now extend beyond this issue. The clear progressive-vs-conservative divide on sexual harassment appears to have caused—or at least is part of—a broader realignment of young men and women into conservative and liberal camps respectively on other issues.’’