When your community fights for the people who terrorized you, it means your pain is not a priority. --- #MeToo is triggering memories of that corner that I’ve tucked away for 20 years because I’ve been taught there are greater needs in the community. Perhaps this is part of the reason studies indicate only one in 15 African-American women report being raped. We’ve seen the unchecked power of white men ravish our communities, and we carry the message of “not right now” when it comes to addressing our pain if the offender is black.

Touching people is not a personality or a style. Insisting on the freedom to do so would mean prioritizing your way of being over other people’s experience of you.

Here in late capitalism, our only real power is as consumers, en masse. We need organizing forces like #MuteRKelly. But can a company that is still making money off the person they are protesting ever really play that role?

Not all of the damage he did was dramatic; not every life was ruined. But in every case, he left behind a new increment of self-doubt and regret, a story arc sent somewhat askew. None of the women in his wake were granted closure or redemption. Listening to them tell their own stories -- Hazen was not the first or only manipulative man they had encountered -- made me think about how, for women, these little incidents just pile up, and pile up, and pile up, creating an extra weight they must lug everywhere. If we valued women as individual human beings, autonomous and freestanding, with their own talents and stories, due the basic respect all humans are due -- not as caricatures & archetypes in men's heroic journeys -- we would see this accumulation as an ancient and ongoing tragedy, an enormous squandering of human potential stretched out over generations and generations, still underway as we speak. We would be horrified. That we still think of these stories as men's stories, think of men as the protagonists, worry over men's jobs and reputations, shows that we do not. We say we do, but we do not.