My Marriage Struggled to Survive #MeToo
But we’re bringing it back from the dead.
Our culture has been reckoning with the “problem of women” for millennia. Depending on where you were born in the world, which century, what family, class, religion you were born into — and especially if you happened to be born female — the ideas about gender and sexuality and equality and human dignity that directed your lives varied greatly. In some countries still today, menstruating women and children are banished to “menstruation huts”; forced marriage and rape and the worst kinds of gendered violence and indignities are accomplished every single day.
So it was indeed a watershed moment in the United States a couple of years ago when women started telling their stories of abuse and harassment en masse. Fervor was stirred, and momentum built for resisting a culture that sanctioned anti-feminist behavior and beliefs for as long as it has endured.
Unless you were born yesterday, you witnessed this shift too with your very eyes. Many of you reading now were women who joined the chorus of stories. Many more, though, like me, have been struggling quietly with the effects, not in the public realm, not on display for anyone to see, but privately in my own home, in my own heart and body. And indeed in my marriage bed, too.
