With a slew of sexual assault allegations surfacing all over the country and on social media and the news, the ‘Believe All Women’/‘Me Too’ movements have arisen like a phoenix from the ashes. Inspired by this movement, journalist Bari Weiss responded with “The Limits of ‘Believe All Women’,” published by the New York Times on Nov. 28, 2017.
For those of you who are out of the loop, ‘Believe All Women’ is a movement that encourages the public to put their faith in the women who have come forth about sexual assault incidents, as opposed to questioning them. One of the major reasons this movement came about is that it has taken tens of years for people everywhere to recognize the magnitude of sexual assault. The movement entails some level of trust in that it expects the full truth from victims when they attempt to come out to the public about the incident.
The ‘Believe All Women’ movement has done a lot of good; it has made many positive changes. For example, it has created a community full of women everywhere who share love and support; it has created a platform through which women who have gone through similar experiences can tell their stories. It takes a lot of courage to talk about sensitive, traumatizing experiences; but what happens when your listeners dismiss you and the validity of your trauma? The movement is finally exposing all of those who committed these assaults, dragging them out of the dark by their collars. Let me be the first to say that there’s nowhere to hide now, because this is just the start of an extremely long domino effect.
Weiss makes a well aimed point: every couple of minutes or so, more and more victims of sexual assault will be making their cases for rightly deserved justice. The most empowering part of her article is when she talks about women correcting history, saying, “the huntresses’ war cry — “believe all women” — has felt like a bracing corrective to a historic injustice. It has felt like a justifiable response to a system in which the crimes perpetrated against women — so intimate, so humiliating and so unlike any other — are so very difficult to prove” and my goodness, what a justifiable response it is.
Weiss’ main idea is that she doesn’t want her readers to regard the ‘Believe All Women’ movement with 100-percent, full-fledged faith. “‘Trust but verify’ may not have the same ring as ‘believe all women.’ But it’s a far better policy,” she writes. Weiss talks about how she thinks that every woman’s story should be taken with a grain of salt before being fully investigated; she suspects that there are some women out there who are fabricating stories simply for media recognition and attention. “I believe that the ‘believe all women’ vision of feminism unintentionally fetishizes women. Women are no longer human and flawed,” she continued. “They are Truth personified. They are above reproach.” Weiss makes a great point: now that women are starting to break through the barrier that has been standing in their way for what has appeared to be forever — the barrier of an unwanted desire to believe that sexual assault exists — we are on this high, this idea that nothing we say or do could possibly be wronged.
You know what they say, with great power comes great responsibility. It’s time to let the truth flow free and far for everyone to hear. But, stories devised on lies will only place us back to the beginning of where we started. These women’s stories are powerful. It shook me to the core one afternoon to go on Facebook and to see that almost every status was that of my dearest friends and family members posting ‘#MeToo.’ So, what is the next plan of action, you might ask. The forthcoming of assault incidents has put the press and social media in a bit of a tizzy; they have all of this information, but aren’t quite sure what to do with it but publish to it into stories. That’s all fine and dandy for the time being, but it’s time to take action upon those who are convicted.
Take a moment to think about the pain and suffering that women who have been sexually assaulted have had to deal with and learn to overcome — all because someone else thought that they had the right to touch another person’s body. Well guess what: you have no right to any other person’s body but your own!
As a student at a school where my fellows are numb to cases of sexual assault because of its frequency, I take this movement quite seriously. If you’ve been sexually assaulted, report it when you’re ready. It’s the first step in correcting what has been unlawfully wronged. There are women everywhere who have your back.
Me three.