No matter which side of the issues you fall on, there's no denying that belatedly in America, we are at something of a watershed moment when it comes to the issues of sexual assault and harassment.
From the #MeToo movement; to the Alabama Senate campaign of alleged pedophile Roy Moore; to the confirmation process of accused sexual predator Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh--not to mention the wealth of accusations against the President that came out during the 2016 election and since--we are and have been steeped in the issue, constantly, for literal years.
And yet, again and again, for so many Americans, women's experiences often end up swept under the rug in favor of a focus on the men in question--debating, and sometimes presuming their innocence, and assessing the perceived merit of the allegations against them. Indeed, even after watching Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's harrowing testimony to Congress about the incident she alleges occurred between she and Justice Kavanaugh, the discourse has since shifted in such a way that Dr. Ford is all but ignored.
Perhaps more important, the allegations against Kavanaugh continue to frequently be dismissed as high school demons that shouldn't be considered relevant all these years later. "Boys will be boys," after all, the thinking goes, and we shouldn't be judged in middle-age on whom we were as teenagers.
A New York Times opinion piece that dropped on Thursday seeks to put the lie to those assertions, using a sort of "can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach that puts men's perspectives front and center. The piece, titled "Eight Stories of Men's Regret," highlights men's experiences as perpetrators of sexual harassment and assault incidents during their high school years, which they themselves are haunted by.
The social media discourse about the piece and the process of creating it--much like the piece itself--brings into stark relief how common these incidents are during the teen years, and how profoundly the gravity of sexual assault and harassment incidents endures, no matter how many decades pass by.
A warning that the accounts excerpted and details provided below may be disturbing to some.
One of the men interviewed was 82 years old.
And if the incident endures for a perpetrator some 70 years later, imagine how deeply it endures for the victims.
H/T NYT,
@RapidResponse47/X
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