If you have been paying attention to your social media feed over the last few days, you may have noticed this recent trend. People — frequently women — have been using #MeToo to say they, too have been victims of sexual harassment or assault. 

And yeah, me too. 

But I don’t want this column to be a discussion of my experience, or any other experience. The sad reality is that you can get any number of powerful accounts of sexual assault and harassment by Googling them — or by asking your friends and family. Still, individual experiences are not the main point of the trend. The point is to show just how common they are.  

We hear statistics that say one in four women on college campuses experience sexual assault. To a lot of men, this can seem abstract. When I was a freshman coming to college, I doubted the statistics, too. 

The brave survivors coming forward have hopefully made this issue less abstract. And trust me, there are many more brave survivors who haven’t come forward, for whatever reason. That’s OK, too. 

To the survivors, whether or not you have chosen to come forward, the people in your lives love you. We respect your beauty and resilience. We believe you. We believe in you. 

To weaponize this powerful moment against rape culture and the patriarchy, we now need to expand the discussion. Why is sexual assault and harassment so commonplace? How did this come about, and what people or groups benefit from it? 

The sexual culture we live in objectifies all of us. It reduces us to the role we play — predator or prey. Male and masc-presenting people are considered powerful and emotionless machines while female and femme-presenting people are considered weak and emotional receptacles. This objectification harms our relationships with ourselves and those around us because we don’t view ourselves or those around us as full, autonomous people.  

I don’t believe this came out of biology, that we are somehow born like this or that this is just the way things are. But I do believe we live in a society that expects that of us. And it’s too easy to default to what’s expected. 

We can change society to drastically reduce the amount of sexual assault and harassment. To do that, we need to understand why society encourages these things.  

Society objectifies us because to the people holding power in society, we are objects they exploit for resources — namely, our bodies. Our worth is determined according to how useful we are in a given situation. In the sexual sphere, that means our bodies are the beginning and end of our value to those around us. 

Envisioning a better society is linguistically simple, but conceptually challenging. Imagine a society where people are simply not objectified. Such a society would require agency and respect based on a shared sense of community. It would require moving away from assigning value based on what you can produce or consume. It would require getting rid of our sense of entitlement, and instead, viewing people as autonomous and with needs just as important as our own. 

Such a society would be anarchist. 

Sam Norton is a senior advertising and psychology dual major. His column appears biweekly. He can be reached at sanorton@syr.edu.

Published on October 19, 2017 at 12:05 am