#10

One way I've seen the internet create change recently has been the #MeToo movement. This one is tough because it has been used in both good and bad (to me) ways, both of which I will talk about here. The movement was really simple; people would post on social media with the hashtag #metoo as a way of identifying themselves as victims of sexual assault, abuse, or harassment. The movement intended to show the world, men in particular, that nearly every woman has experienced these in some way. It was a powerful image, and it lead to powerful solidarity. Women in Hollywood began fighting against and exposing the harassment and unequal treatment of their workplaces, and the conversation has been generally brought out into the open.

I can see the #MeToo movement working similarly to Elliot's ideas about apotemnophilia. This movement did not create more survivors of various crimes, instead, it created a space and, more importantly, language to allow women and others to categorize those experiences. Women who might previously lacked the words to describe their experiences heard similar stories and were finally able to put a name to it. It allowed them to feel validated in their emotions about these events because they were acknowledged and named as bad rather than ignored and lumped into normal life. For many women, the movement has helped them to name their experiences and find solidarity in their feelings, which can be extremely healing for many.

The #MeToo movement has also worked in the opposite way that Elliot proposed as a possibility-- that the naming and popularizing of a term or idea might make people decide to identify with it where they wouldn't have done so previously. The other side of all these women coming forward are the people, often men, who have hurt them. At some point, some men decided that the #MeToo movement was full of women overreacting, and rather than work on respecting women more, they expressed fear of having women around them at all. A few people set forth the idea that these woman might be overreacting to simple, everyday business and personal relationships. Many more men, especially in business, then jumped onboard with this idea, identifying any contact with women as the dangerous to them personally and therefore further excluding women from fields where they are trying to gain more access. In this case, once the idea that "men being around women in a professional setting is dangerous to the men" was spread on the internet, more and more men began fitting their previous experiences into this model and reacting accordingly. The presence of this new idea let them ignore the potential truth--that they might have treated women poorly--and focus on the new problem with which they newly identified themselves.

This movement has sparked both positive and negative reactions, and it shows nicely how identifying an issue on the internet can quickly lead others to follow, for better or for worse.