A flash fire of spontaneous combustion has become a firestorm, allowing an unspoken trauma to finally scratch its way out of seared psyches.
I don’t know about you, but I have been flabbergasted by the tidal wave of sexual harassment allegations against men.
The enormity in number of outed culprits has been astonishing and extremely likely to extrapolate exponentially in the coming months.
It’s a wonder that women could keep their anger bottled up until recently when the hashtag movement of #MeToo ignited a social revolution, with social media and television the accelerants in this stunning cultural change.
Shared pain is a remarkably strong adhesive and now an army of assaulted women stands bravely together so that their sisters and daughters will not be subjected to similar indignity and torment.
This tsunami started with a gigantic wave that drowned Harvey Weinstein and then opened the floodgates.
We all knew that boys could be boys but, as a member of the male species, it’s damning, sickening, embarrassing, disheartening and utterly depressing that so many men among us have been such total pigs wallowing in such vulgarity.
Apparently, there has been an epidemic of broken moral compasses for decades.
Would any of these predators want their mothers, wives and girlfriends to be sexually assaulted, to suffer such degradation, humiliation and pain? Of course not.
So why treat other women as sexual objects?
No longer will women accept the unacceptable, swallowing their pain in silence now that courageous women have given a voice to open secrets.
In the midst of all this tumult, it must be said that there is a whole range of sexual misconduct and obviously some transgressions are more despicable than others. Having said that, sexual misconduct of all kinds is blatantly wrong.
The #MeToo movement won’t entirely eradicate sexual harassment by men, but it should be a powerful deterrent in helping caulk the sexual divide between predator and prey, putting a filter on certain men who used to stalk the earth unfiltered.
Nothing stabs so straight at what is vulnerable in a woman, and bleeds her so pale, as an absence of hope.
Women now have hope that they are less likely to be a victim.
