#metoo

Yeah, this is decades late. The delay is part of my journey, and I'm not proud of not standing up for others and myself earlier and more vocally. 

So #metoo has made it really clear that women are universally subject to inappropriate sexual behavior and abuse and violence involving sex.  And more than a few men have chimed in as well, because inappropriate sexual behavior can occur to a man as well. If you grab my ass or my crotch, and I don't want you to, it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman: get your fucking hands off my junk is a perfectly acceptable response.  And yes, that’s coming from a position of privilege, I know.  

There's a different variation on this that's not overtly sexual harassment (but may involve sexual contact), and that is the abuse and violence that is perceived as "consensual" or "appropriate", involves denying control to the abused individual, and is at the heart of the issue. Hazing as "bonding" is one example; any relationship where there's a power disparity that requires the less powerful party to consent (or not) to something against their interest is another. 

I've had a colleague exploit their relationship to my organization's leadership to behave unprofessionally and un-collegially to me, and to refuse to accept my authority as a technology professional. I've had said colleague threaten me in veiled and coded language, and usurped my authority to direct work on technology for their business-- not because it made their work any easier (it didn't) but because they could.  And they were explicit: no one will listen to you, because I have the power to tell the story to a person who can take away your livelihood.

I was told by others that I couldn't complain about this because "that's just how it goes." 

It hurt when it happened, and it still hurts now. #metoo.

It also sounds a lot like what the women who were abused by Harvey Weinstein reported, only without the sex. Sounds even more like what business associates of Weinstein report as the cost of doing business with Weinstein. And yeah, it happens to everyone -- we all have to suck it up.

No. We don't. 

It's all abuse. And we countenance it by saying that it's what successful people do, as the price of business, as the cost of social acceptance. But it's not: it's our culture's inherent, implicit, and explicit respect for people who have the will and ability to take agency and control from others. Writ large, it's slavery. Writ small, it's cage fighting. in between, it's what has led tens of millions of people to write #metoo. 

I know, tl:dr and tmi.  Guess what: it’s time to accept that we need to cauterize the suppurating wound that’s eating away at our culture and civil society.  

Postscript: I first wrote this in 2017. I should have left my job at HHS and ACL at that time, because the abuse I experienced continued until I was forced to retire in 2023. My mental health spiraled downward, leading to a major depression disorder and anxiety episode that I’ve been treated for from 2020 until now. Because of the events that took place at ACL, the consequent interference in professional opportunities I sought, and the traumas I experienced I’m unlikely to ever work again as a technology professional, and my personal life has been permanently affected by the workplace abuse.  

I lost years of my professional life, and between millions and hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential income because of workplace abuse. I will never get that back.

As a nation and as a culture, the casual acceptance of abuse and the disempowerment and theft of agency, of the usurpation of the rule of law through accepting the impunity of action of wealthy and powerful people, most often white men, has continued to erode our democratic and egalitarian institutions. And while those institutions and the government they supported were imperfect, the idea that they were improvable, that we could work together to make life better for everyone, but importantly for the people who had the least and the most to overcome was always there. 

The idea that we, together, can make a better world remains. But we need to acknowledge the threat that abuse and loss of agency represents to all of us and that in a better future, the causes and effects of #metoo are radically reduce, and those who abuse and act with impunity face the full weight of justice.