Patheos blog
January 23, 2019
By Beth Allison Barr
I am so pleased to welcome guest blogger Leslie Hahner, PhD, to The Anxious Bench today. Leslie is a brilliant thinker, writer, and professor. I know this because we have been in an interdisciplinary writing group together since 2011. She has two recently published books, To Become an American: Immigrants and Americanization Campaigns of the Early Twentieth Century and Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-right. Her current book project, which she is writing with fellow Baylor professor Scott Varda, focuses on how individuals deny the existence and pervasiveness of sexual assault. Today, Leslie Hahner offers her insights on what the church is called to consider.
In October 2017, actress and activist Alyssa Milano tweeted a note that asked those who had “been sexually harassed or assaulted” to reply “‘me too’” to her tweet. Within one day, the “post received more than 38,000 comments, 13,000 retweets and 27,000 likes.” The responses then spread from Twitter to Facebook and Instagram. The expanse of the problem, as Sophie Gilbert wrote in the New York Times, could be grasped once the public woke “up to a feed dominated by women discussing their experiences of harassment and assault.” Inspired by Tarana Burke, the hashtag had spawned a movement, a public insistence from thousands that sexual violence was pervasive, systematic, and unabated by current measures of justice. Sparked by the vicious actions of Harvey Weinstein and others, the #metoo movement began to demonstrate the expanse of rape within a culture that enabled the perpetuation of sexual violence.
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