Your partner's family's wedding and a tongue forcibly shoved into your throat while a hand clutches at your hair and grapples you down to the ground. You're shrugging it off as drunken tomfoolery because there are 5 people watching and they're certainly laughing instead of showing concern.
There have been seemingly endless #metoo scenarios in our lifetimes, ones that eclipse the above by magnitudes. But the dialogue has allowed for new dark suppressed memories to squirm their way out. The ones you would have never considered, the ones that have likely affected you in ways you're only now just comprehending.
#metoo isn't about male vs. female, it's about a person doing harm against someone's body, psyche, soul...and the added silence, or god forbid audible acceptance, of an audience makes certain you'll lock it away and not speak of it again.
I remember saying "if she had been a man, I would have considered it an assault". Hair missing and a bruised limb, surely it's something we would sort out in the morning.
My anger isn't with the act itself, we all do regrettable things, it's with what didn't happen in the morning, the following week, months, years...
"Yeah, I know you weren't too happy about that night." Was all that said to me, on my own wedding day—insinuating that my safety didn't matter to the people to whom I just tied myself.
The silence of my partner, her sibling, of her, and of their family. The dedicated avoidance of any attempt at a conversation when I brought up the topic. Self-labeled feminists who are otherwise seemingly caring people, uninterested in learning the details. Uninterested in apologizing.
I cannot imagine how this one moment of confusion and silence fueled my solitude and dissociation from this family, and eventually partner—I truly wish I had been more aware of how much this, likely innocent, act of violence affected me. I wish I knew to have pushed the topic harder. But that's exactly the problem with these scenarios. We are social creatures—when we lack our own stamina to put up a fight, physical or verbal, we look to our peers to measure the integrity of a situation. And, unfortunately, silence is applause.
