Why I felt like I didn't deserve to get involved with #MeToo

I wasn't raped or beaten up or left permanently traumatised. And everyone knows that this sort of low level incident is just the price you pay for occupying a space marked female – it happens to everyone. It’s no big deal, right?

Harvey Weinstein with his wife, designer Georgina Chapman. Following the allegations made against him, she announced she was going to leave him (Reuters)

When I first saw #MeToo, I thought it didn’t apply to me.

Don’t get me wrong – when I noticed the statuses – designed to raise people’s awareness of just how common sexual harassment and assault really are – falling like rain drops on Facebook and Twitter I thoroughly approved of the idea.

But I thought it would be dishonest for me to post my own.

I mean, yes, obviously I’ve been catcalled more times than I can count at this stage in my life... I’ve heard “bitch” and “slut” and “prick tease” at parties and had numbers rating my appearance out of 10 shouted behind me as I’ve hurried, crimson cheeked, down the road.

Yes, the first time a stranger asked me for a kiss I was eleven and in school uniform and totally terrified and embarrassed by the attention. Yes, I’ve had below-the-line comments on articles discussing not my ideas but by my fundamental f***ability.

And yes, there was that one time at a festival when a man who had been hovering around all evening watched my friends send me drunkenly to bed and then unzipped my tent and came in, uninvited and unasked, and refused to leave until I threatened to shout and awaken everyone sleeping in the tents around us.

But those things don’t count, right? I wasn’t raped or beaten up or left permanently traumatised. And everyone knows (all those who identify as women at least) that this sort of low level incident is just the price you pay for occupying a space marked female – it happens to everyone. It’s no big deal.

Because it’s no big deal, when I started speaking to my friends about it I found that some of them were similarly questioning whether their experiences were bad enough to count, whether the abuse they’d faced mattered enough to be worth mentioning, whether they had any right to even name their experiences as harassment or assault.

I can’t help but wonder if some of the women who came into contact with Harvey Weinstein over the last three decades felt something similar – it’s just one of those things – don’t make a fuss – don’t get a reputation as someone who is “difficult”.

Obviously when you see it in its starkest terms, this is all ridiculous. The very idea that harassment has to reach some minimum standard to count, that somehow below a certain level we should just put up and shut up is, of course, part of the problem – where we’re conditioned to accept this sort of behaviour with a “could be a lot worse” shrug.

So while I applaud the aim of #metoo to make all of this much more visible, I do also worry slightly that visibility is only one facet of this. I’ve seen some people expressing shock and dismay as their newsfeeds burn with stories mostly untold up until this point, but just as many simply exhausted by the sheer, predictable volume of it. We know it happens. We know it happens a lot. Sexual harassment – if you’re a woman – is just as inevitable as death and taxes and on a similar scale of unpleasantness.

But we need to remember that commonplace doesn’t mean acceptable and that this idea that it happens to every woman doesn’t somehow make it any less shocking that it happens to any woman.

It’s also true that even the lowest level of harassment can be corrosive – a sort of drip-drip-drip of damage, making you feel a little less safe, a little less trusting, a little more aware of how suddenly things can change.

And as I ran through my own mental list of experiences yesterday, I began to realise that as much as I might tell myself these things are “minor”, thinking about them still has the power to make me angry and upset – when I recall the tent incident in particular my skin crawls and my heart starts to pound and dark thoughts creep in.

I don’t want to pretend that this is somehow OK.

So in the end I posted my #metoo. Since the men who shouted and leered and pushed and belittled almost certainly wouldn’t want me to call what happened harassment or assault, it’s even more important that I do. My experiences count and matter.

And so do yours.

Kate Townshend is a freelance travel, education and lifestyle journalist @_katetownshend