#metoo – a global response to sexual harassment

11 December 2017. When courageous women brought out their reports of sexual harassment and worse by the powerful Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein in late 2017, women around the world brought forth a tsunami of rage in response to the call to add their stories to the #metoo Twitter hashtag. So far women from more than 85 countries have spoken out about what they were once afraid to tell for fear of the humiliation and further physical violence they would face.

While the largest response came from the U.S., where the #metoo hashtag originated, huge numbers of women in Europe and India and many other places have also joined in. Indian women still seethe over the 2012 brutal gang rape of 23-year-old medical student Jyoti Singh in New Delhi, which ultimately led to her death, and the official culture that they hold responsible. Given the daily sexual harassment and threats Indian women face, #metoo is now part of the national conversation.

Under the tag #balancetonporc (rat out your pig) French women responded even before #metoo went global and viral. Sexual harassment of women is so institutionalized and normalized in France that even after the 2011 New York arrest on rape charges of Dominique Strauss Kahn, the Socialist Party candidate for the presidential elections that were coming up, he was defended or simply excused by most of the political and intellectual establishment – to the outrage of many French women. Now, encouraged by sisters around the world, French women are becoming a major part of the #metoo moment.

French: #BalanceTonPorc
 (rat out your pig) Italian: #QuellaVoltaChe
 Spanish: #YoTambién
Canadian: #MoiAussi 
 Hebrew: גםאנחנו Arabic: أنا_كمان #
 
Chinese: #我也是
South Korean: #나도
 Vietnamese: #TôiCũngVậy (Map from October 2017)

In parts of Africa, despite rampant domestic violence and strong cultural and religious taboos, many women broke the silence. "Sexual harassment is so endemic in society that it is almost a right for men in Nigeria," said 39-year-old Faustina Anyanwu, who posted on Twitter about harassment when she worked as a nurse. The treatment received from Indonesian authorities is so horrendous one woman said, "I wish I was murdered instead so nobody had to doubt whether or not I was really raped." Conditions liked these have severely undermined women's freedom to publicly protest, even on the Net.

A study by Thomson Reuters Foundation considered Cairo (after Delhi and Sao Paulo) one of the most dangerous mega-cities in the world for women. Some 43 percent of Egyptian men believe that women appreciate being sexually harassed. Describing what it is like to be on the streets of Cairo, one activist woman tweeted, "Some weeks are better than some, but some days really break you and it takes a lot of mending strength to face the streets again." It is common to hear reactionary voices like those of one Egyptian journalist who argued that in the Arab world, if women insist on talking openly about sexual violence, that will only open the floodgates to further vilifying the victims.

Women all around the world are deeply affected by the rotten cultural relations that promote sexual harassment and violence against women and the institutions that enable it. Those relations are deeply rooted in the patriarchal organization of society over thousands of years and the force of traditional ideas of women as the property of men and child breeders, all of which is institutionalized and perpetuated by the capitalist-imperialist system. This affects women of all ages, starting from before girl babies are even born (with the targeted abortion of female fetuses) to the stifling of intellectual pursuits in girls, pornography and the all-pervasive demeaning images of women that shut down their creative contributions and imprison them. Tenets of all the major religions uphold this oppression of women. It is an open wound that affects half of humanity and cannot be fully uprooted without uprooting the kind of society that breeds this oppression. Women can and must play a major role in this uprooting to gain complete liberation for themselves and all humanity.

We invite our readers to read and contribute to a new feature on this important question at revcom.us. Their aim is to "unleash the fury of women as a mighty force for revolution."
Go to http://revcom.us/a/519/a-righteous-upsurge-against-sexual-assault-en.html

A question of basic stand and orientation, by Bob Avakian
Support and spread the fury against sexual abuse

The phenomenon of sexual harassment and sexual assault – including (but not limited to) the sexual abuse of women by men who hold positions of power over them – is long-standing and widespread throughout this male supremacist society and is reinforced by the putrid culture it has spawned. The outpouring of outrage against this sexual abuse and the all too commonplace institutional cover-ups and complicity with it, and the demand for a radical change in the culture – which has made a major leap in relation to the accusations against Harvey Weinstein and has now spread far beyond that, involving millions of women, in sphere after sphere throughout this country and in other countries as well – is right, righteous, and long overdue, and should be supported, encouraged, spread, and defended against counter-attack.

In the context of such a long-suppressed outpouring of outrage, there are bound to be some negative aspects, including some excesses, where false or exaggerated accusations are made in particular cases; but these have been (and will almost certainly remain) a very secondary aspect of the phenomenon. If and when it may be necessary to point to some of these shortcomings, this must be done very judiciously, in a way that does not undermine the overwhelmingly positive character of this upsurge, and in fact helps to strengthen it.

This long-suppressed and thoroughly just outpouring of outrage is not the same as any particular accusation. Such particular accusations do have to be approached on the basis of scientifically evaluating the evidence, and this is especially important where the accusations not only allege misconduct but actual criminal action, such as rape or other sexual assault. But this distinction, between particular accusations and the overall phenomenon, should not be allowed to obscure or diminish the righteousness and importance of the massive upsurge against this widespread and deeply-rooted abuse and the tremendous injury it does to women and to humanity as a whole.

Bob Avakian on breaking all the chains
Look at all these beautiful children who are female in the world. And in addition to all the other outrages which I have referred to, in terms of children throughout the slums and shantytowns of the Third World, in addition to all the horrors that will be heaped on them – the actual living in garbage and human waste in the hundreds of millions as their fate, laid out before them, yes, even before they are born – there is, on top of this, for those children who are born female, the horror of everything that this will bring simply because they are female in a world of male domination. And this is true not only in the Third World. In "modern" countries like the U.S. as well, the statistics barely capture it: the millions who will be raped; the millions more who will be routinely demeaned, deceived, degraded, and all too often brutalized by those who are supposed to be their most intimate lovers; the way in which so many women will be shamed, hounded and harassed if they seek to exercise reproductive rights through abortion, or even birth control; the many who will be forced into prostitution and pornography; and all those who – if they do not have that particular fate, and even if they achieve some success in this "new world" where supposedly there are no barriers for women – will be surrounded on every side, and insulted at every moment, by a society and a culture which degrades women, on the streets, in the schools and workplaces, in the home, on a daily basis and in countless ways.
From BAsics 1:10, Bob Avakian, RCP Publications, 2011.