Michelle Quist Mumford: #MeToo

#MeToo.

I’ll spare you the details, but me too. The hard truth is, every woman who writes for this paper can probably say me too.

And yes, it happens to men as well.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, earlier this month the New York Times reported a story about movie mogul Harvey Weinstein sexually assaulting multiple women. The New Yorker followed it up with a report including even more women. Actress Alyssa Milano took to Twitter last weekend and called for women to use the hashtag #MeToo to illustrate and expose the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and assault. Millions of men and women have now posted their own experiences of sexual harassment and assault.

I wrote last week about the importance of women in leadership roles and one reader noted my exclusion of church roles. It was a valid point. Women today are often supported in their efforts to equalize the workplace or other opportunities for leadership. But push a religious congregation to equalize roles and you’ve lost much of that support. Because, well, that’s just too far. We can expect to have more women in executive positions and see company profits rise, and we can argue that more women in government results in better governing, but ask for a woman bishop in Utah and you have crossed a line wherein the smear of feminism will never be wiped clean. Sure, maybe we will switch the Sunday service order of speakers and allow a woman to speak last, or pray last, or pray at all. But don’t push it.

Our patriarchal culture emboldens sexual assault and harassment. Compare two polar-opposite cities: Hollywood and Provo. On the one hand, you have a money-loving, fame-seeking, sex-selling culture of excess, wealth, and lust. On the other hand, you have a patriarchal religious environment with an honor code to boot. Sex sells in Hollywood. Sex is sacred in Provo.

Yet in both places women are harassed, assaulted, raped, and told to keep quiet. Provo’s religiosity does not spare us the cesspool of cultural oppression.

Last week marked the beginning of the trial of Nasiru Seidu, a 39-year-old, married man on trial for the alleged rape of a 19-year-old, Brigham Young University student. Police have Seidu on tape saying, “You say that I raped you. I did and I want you to forgive me.” Circumstances surrounding the alleged rape include a police officer who, once he realized the suspect was a friend, took the police file to BYU to report the woman for honor code violations. This woman was victimized by not one man, but two.

A court recently ordered another man at Utah State University to stand trial for charges of rape and forcible sexual assault after a fraternity party in 2015. Police have him on tape saying, “I still feel so terrible that I took advantage of you while you were drunk.” Well, at least he feels terrible.

And don’t forget that time a Provo judge was sentencing a convicted rapist and told him he was “an extraordinary, good man,” and that “great men sometimes do bad things.”

Why is the treatment of women in two polar opposite communities – Utah and Hollywood – so similar? Because we let it happen. Both as victims and bystanders, we shrug it off, laugh it off, ignore it or hide it in shame. In the case of Weinstein, reports now indicate that everyone around him knew about his miscreant behavior. Everyone. For three decades.

It happens here, too. In Utah. Every day. The sexual harassment and abuse of women will not stop until people start standing up to every level of degradation, from the catcall on the street to the rape of a drunk girl at a party.

Perhaps you can easily dismiss this with a self-serving insistence that people don’t ignore these things; that you wouldn’t ignore such things. Consider the 1941 town in northeastern Poland, Jedwabne. After the small Polish town was captured by Germany, the Polish townspeople, not the Nazis, tortured and killed all 1,600 Jewish residents. They pushed the men into a barn and lit it on fire. They used hooks and butcher knives and wooden clubs. Jewish women drowned their children, and then themselves, to escape the ghastly torture. The entire town knew it was happening. As horrible as you can imagine, that’s what happened in Jedwabne as neighbors killed neighbors.

Why do men harass and assault women so frequently? In the words of George Will, “Because it [is] permitted. Because they [can].”

Michelle Quist Mumford is an editorial writer for the Salt Lake Tribune who wants her daughters, and her sons, to never have to say, #MeToo.