Stop calling women brave: call out those who harm us instead
Tags: Metoo, Me Too Movement

I was a young writer, moonlighting as a bartender at a jazz club for the extra cash. All I knew about Adam was that he was a hotshot lawyer and there for the same reason. Working together was fun. It felt like a game navigating around each other in the tiny bar when it got crowded, ducking the advances of drunk customers, sharing laughs at the drama each night.

I sensed his interest in me almost immediately, and I was flattered. Sure, he was my manager and seven years older, but I was regularly swatting away men much older than that at the bar. At first he seemed sweet, sincere in his interest. But when he only sent late-night texts, coerced me into sex, and then abruptly dropped me without notice for a coworker a couple years younger than me: I was told, ‘he’s a dog,’ and that was enough. I had already met men like him, who hinted at depth and complexity to draw women in, but then used their power and ‘issues’ as a shield and means of control. Yawn. The whole affair was brief, disappointing, and thankfully, I quickly moved on.

So when I got an email from an old friend almost ten years later, that linked to the blog post of a young woman who shared her own Adam Foss story, I wasn’t surprised. Her story was familiar, the themes were all there — younger woman, abuse of power, sexual boundaries pushed, emotional manipulation.

What I did gasp at weren’t the number of other women who shared this connection to him, but rather the organizations and communities which had long known about his behaviour and covered it up for years. He had been informally banned from some spaces, but mostly it stayed at the level of women warning other women. Mostly it remained unaddressed.

Now that safety in numbers has allowed more and more women to step forward with their experiences, his predation is slowly being exposed. It reveals that he used his power and position to gain access to young women, and that his public persona as ‘social justice hero’ protected him from scrutiny for many years.

I watch now as prestigious organizations quietly cut ties with Adam as the allegations pile up. His name is quickly being scrubbed from websites as more and more women share stories of predatory behavior, abuse, gaslighting, manipulation. One woman was only in high school at the time and afraid to report him. It’s clear, documented, and yet most of these institutions remain reluctant to take a public stand.

Many of those who are coming forward are well-connected, privileged, mostly white — exactly those who are most often allowed to be called ‘victim’ in situations of sexual assault or abuse. I wonder how different this would look if all the women had been Black, or if none of us had such cultural, economic or social capital. And what if Adam didn’t have anything to lose himself? His prominence in social justice spaces, the academic world, the Black community — these are spaces that both protected him and now enable his behaviour to be questioned at all.

At one famous institution the words ‘lynch mob’ have been used to describe his public call-in. People have asked why we need to ‘take down a hero,’ someone whose private behaviour has ‘nothing to do’ with his public persona. Adam has built a career off of the concept of being a civil rights advocate, a social justice warrior and feminist. Maybe it could be possible to separate the man from his work, so to speak. But not if he’s defining himself in the public space as an advocate for those who remain marginalized and unseen, while privately abusing the power that this identity affords him.

Before throwing around loaded and violent words like ‘lynch mob’ there needs to be learning, on why it’s both problematic but expected that white women are the ones shouting the loudest, and the ones who get the most sympathy and attention in these moments. We need to understand the difference between a group of women banding together against predatory behaviour that has long been ignored and dismissed by powerful institutions — and a group of white people out to literally hang a Black man for existing.

There is value in criticism of so-called ‘cancel-culture’ and the ‘me too’ movement for its gaps, but only if you can also acknowledge that right now, we’ve got nothing else. When it comes to addressing widespread abuse of power, outright racism, sexism, and otherwise violent situations and people, there are few established means to do this safely and with the assurance that these stories will be heard.

When there are no other means to protect other women from this too-familiar pain, when we are trapped in disempowering and abusive relationships, sharing our story is sometimes all we have. Many of us are silenced, mocked or face worse consequences when we do.

We need to collectively address rape culture, the normalization of the idea that ‘boys will be boys’, Black respectability politics, and the many other justifications used to discredit those who speak out. Men need to speak to other men about this. There needs to be a new public narrative that doesn’t strive to uphold false heroes above all else.

Change takes time, and requires support and the careful work of entire communities. It might not look perfect at first, and it might have its flaws. So let’s address that, and let’s work to find new ways of holding each other accountable. Til then, I support and stand with those who dare to speak their truths.