The activist who founded the Me Too movement talked about her exhaustion and how the movement she created over a decade ago has taken a different trajectory, during a riveting TED Talk at TEDWomen on Thursday in Palm Springs, California. Burke, a youth activist from New York City, discussed how she has seen her work take off this past year since the Me Too hashtag went viral, sparking a global movement to end sexual violence.
“The reality is,” Burke began her 16-minute talk, “after soldiering through the Supreme Court nomination process and attacks from the White House, gross mischaracterizations, internet trolls and the rallies and marches and heart-wrenching testimonies, I’m faced with my own hard truth: I am numb.”
The Me Too movement has made great strides, taking down Hollywood executives and uncovering systemic sexual abuse in different communities around the world. Still, Burke said, it’s hard to really feel the movement is progressing.
“To be clear, this is a movement about the 1 in 4 girls and the 1 in 6 boys who are sexually assaulted every year and who carry those wounds into adulthood. It’s about the 84 percent of trans women who will be sexually assaulted this year. And the indigenous women who are three and a half times more likely to be sexually assaulted than any other group. Or people with disabilities who are seven times more likely to be sexually abused. It’s about the 60 percent of black girls like me who will be experiencing sexual violence before they turn 18. And the thousands and thousands of low-wage workers who are being sexually harassed right now on jobs that they can’t afford to quit”
One of the huge cultural problems we have is we don’t delineate between sexuality, which is normal and healthy and unfolds over the life cycles, and sexualization, or the hypersexualization of our girls.
Oh my fucking god. Do you ever just have one of those moments where you read something that concisely explains in one sentence something you’ve been mulling about for years?
Alternate universe where Kal-El’s baby pod comes down behind Wayne Manor after the deaths of Bruce’s parents. Alternate universe where 15-year-old Bruce Wayne pulls an alien baby from the flaming wreckage and hikes across that big ass miserable lonely estate back to the house, listening to Kal cry the whole way, not sure if he would die in Earth’s atmo or not.
Imagine a young vigilante in the making having no idea what to do, but knowing – just knowing – that he can’t turn the kid over to anyone and then imagine Alfred realizing this after a few hours just… “You’re holding him incorrectly, Master Wayne.”
I’m just saying, there’s less moral ambiguity to bringing your bouncy/floaty adopted younger brother on patrol with you when he happens to be bulletproof.
Justice League meetings in this world would be interesting, to say the least.
Bruce is like 40 years old and Kal is like 25 and as set out on his own as Superman. It’s the same: the Justice League is headed by the world’s beloved Superman, Bats is funding it from the shadows. The world’s greatet hereos, lalala. The primary difference is just Batman says odd things to Superman sometimes like “Did you eat this morning or just pretend you don’t need caloric intake again?”
And instead of just chuckling magnanimously Supes gets all like: “I’m not having one of your gross protein shakes, Batso.”
*Batglare*
Supes drinks the fuckin shake but he does NOT enjoy it.
“I don’t care if you’re gay or brown or a woman, but I’ll gladly walk over your corpse to get my cut.”
i used to say i was financially conservative. then i found out it didn’t mean pouring money into proven investments like education, infrastructure, job education, and preventative medicine.
You just thought they meant conserving money (sensible and reasonable, also what the words mean and what a decent person would assume), not conserving power structures, the status quo, and systemic oppression (evil in a bucket). There’s no shame in it.
I’m pretty sure that when my parents were kids, that was a fairly common form of conservatism within the GOP. But everyone who believed that has now been ostracised from the GOP, so now it’s the Democrats who preach what used to be moderate right instead of painted as far left.
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