How might we turn a hashtag into lasting social change? The revelations keep coming, descriptions of sexual harassment and assault both disgusting and horrifyingly
Every time he left, I would feel all of my muscles shake out of a tense grip, as if I’d been holding on to the
I have procrastinated about writing this to you for 45 years. Even now, my heart is pounding and my foot is tapping. I am angry
I was two or three years old, and nice Mr. Rubinstein, our elderly neighbor from the next building, was my babysitter. I remember lying across
I do not think I belong with #MeToo. I do not have stories as deep and dark as these. I sheltered myself. I heard stories.
When I was a girl, I came late and without my assignment to the classroom Joane Katsiff kept in woodsy Pennsylvania. Back then, I was scared to open my mouth in case sounds might come out. I couldn’t seem to say or do anything normal. Strange longings and excitements beat in my chest, and I stayed up all night walking in the dark, and putting my fingers into candle flames. I ate my lunch alone in a bathroom stall. I didn’t know what kind of disease I had, only that it was one of isolation.
It’s easier to not be embarrassed by a body if you don’t consider it your own. In the hospital, my body became a body of work. I felt no shame about being undressed, because nothing was projected onto me. My body was a scientific body. A body of fact. It was unrelated to me.
I planted dozens of manuka (where that expensive honey comes from), kanuka, harakeke (flax) among other species as it rained ensuring I became a sufficiently muddy eco warrior woman that apparently pampers each tree too much. The earth is heavy and as I plant manuka in the rain I think about how it’s simple acts that have profound effects. This simple repetitive act is the slow regeneration of what has been lost through one of the world’s most pressing issues: deforestation.
But even following the June 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, I have encountered some pernicious examples of homophobia that shake my faith in progress, or at the very least, validate my fears of a conservative backlash following nationwide marriage equality.
