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I spent the better part of a month in 2022 in lower Manhattan on a wooden bench in the back of a courtroom, observing a rape trial. Early on, I'd concluded my testimony on behalf of the victim, but, emotionally invested and unable to shift my attention, I kept showing up. The plaintiff had sought psychotherapy with me in 2017 to address symptoms of anxiety and body loathing. In an initial session, I asked if she had ever experienced unwanted sexual contact. “Yes, that happened,” she told me in a forthright and detached manner. Like most victims who do not readily label their experiences as rape, she tried for years to put it behind her. That changed a few months into our work, when her assailant, a public figure, publicly condemned Harvey Weinstein. She was jolted by his hypocrisy amid the watershed #metoo movement.
Many people can recall when they first heard the hashtag #metoo. On October 16, 2017, one of my sisters penned on Facebook simply: “#metoo: 35 years to life worth”—the prison term the man who raped her is serving. Statistically, one in four women is likely to be sexually assaulted. Between my three sisters and me, we have survived not only a serial rapist but child molestation by a babysitter, a group assault in a country far from home that also warranted legal wrangling and a settlement, date rapes that wouldn't be named, and an attack from behind in broad daylight by a stranger in a baseball cap who didn't count on blood-curdling screams. These are only the most egregious incidents—like the 63 percent of sexual violations that go unreported, most of the gropes and intrusions we've endured are barely acknowledged even to ourselves. In her anthology Not That Bad, Roxane Gay asks, “What is it like to live in a culture where it often seems like it is a question of when, not if, a woman will encounter some kind of sexual violence?”