On Sunday night, American actress Alyssa Milano asked women on Twitter to share whether they had ever experienced sexual assault or harassment.
Unsurprisingly, Twitter exploded.
Milano, a co-star of Rose McGowan - the woman behind the recent Twitter boycott against the silencing of women - asked women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted to simply write ‘me too’ in reply to her tweet.
She explained that this might ‘give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem’, and overnight, there has been an incredible outpouring of personal experiences, with over 30,000 responses from both women and men sharing all kinds of stories of harassment.
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A lot of people simply wrote 'me too', but many others shared experiences of sexual harassment in the workplace and at school - kneeling down to stock shop shelves and hearing ‘while you’re down there…’, being told to laugh it off after being groped by classmates, and so on and so forth. There have been so many people speaking out, and others reminding victims that it's never their fault.
Anna Paquin, Debra Messing from Will & Grace and Glee star Laura Dreyfuss are among the famous actresses who replied, and Javier Muñoz from Hamilton also replied, saying that he’d experienced sexual harassment ‘multiple times’.
Other celebrities who responded include YouTuber and musician, Dodie, Lady Gaga, and Moldy Peaches singer, Kimya Dawson. UK Labour MP, Stella Creasy also tweeted ‘me too’, and when she was tweeted about admitting this, she said she wasn’t ‘admitting’ anything, and that the shame is on the attackers, not her:
This viral social media campaign comes in the aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein allegations last week, which opened up a much wider conversation about sexual harassment in the film industry, in Hollywood, and in society as a whole. If you didn't hear about it, Emma Thompson spoke a lot of truth about the endemic sexual abuse and gender crisis in Hollywood on Newsnight last week.
Milano, who starred in the sitcom Who’s the Boss, has also spoken out about Harvey Weinstein and has said that she is ‘ecstatic’ that the allegations have opened up a dialogue about ‘the sexual harassment, objectification and degradation of women’. Her campaign has unveiled just how widespread the problem is, and having spread to Facebook and Instagram, the campaign's still going strong.
Quite rightly, many people have made the point that it’s hard to find a woman who hasn’t experienced some kind of sexual harassment - that every single woman has a 'me too' story. Young women, older women, trans women, gay women, cis women, women of colour all have a story to tell.
Two simple words, 'me too' have become a rallying cry against sexual assault and harassment. Thousands of tweets, Facebook and Instagram posts later, Milano’s attempt to educate the masses is definitely working. After the allegations of last week, it seems we're beginning to move towards a world in which we never 'laugh it off'.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.