TIME’s editor-in-chief on why the Silence Breakers are the Person of the Year
It became a hashtag, a movement, a reckoning. But it began, as great social change nearly always does, with individual acts of courage. The actor who went public with the story of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s “coercive bargaining” in a Beverly Hills hotel suite two decades earlier. The strawberry picker who heard that story and decided to tell her own. The young engineer whose blog post about the frat-boy culture at Silicon Valley’s highest-flying startup prompted the firing of its founder and 20 other employees. The California lobbyist whose letter campaign spurred more than 140 women in politics to demand that state government “no longer tolerate the perpetrators or enablers” of sexual misconduct. A music superstar’s raw, defiant court testimony about the disc jockey who groped her.
The galvanizing actions of the women on our cover —Ashley Judd, Susan Fowler, Adama Iwu, Taylor Swift and Isabel Pascual—along with those of hundreds of others, and of many men as well, have unleashed one of the highest-velocity shifts in our culture since the 1960s. Social media acted as a powerful accelerant; the hashtag #MeToo has now been used millions of times in at least 85 countries. “I woke up and there were 32,000 replies in 24 hours,” says actor Alyssa Milano, who, after the first Weinstein story broke, helped popularize the phrase coined years before by Tarana Burke. “And I thought, My God, what just happened? I think it’s opening the floodgates.” To imagine Rosa Parks with a Twitter account is to wonder how much faster civil rights might have progressed.
The year, at its outset, did not seem to be a particularly auspicious one for women. A man who had bragged on tape about sexual assault took the oath of the highest office in the land, having defeated the first woman of either party to be nominated for that office, as she sat beside a former President with his own troubling history of sexual misconduct. While polls from the 2016 campaign revealed the predictable divisions in American society, large majorities—including women who supported Donald Trump—said Trump had little respect for women. “I remember feeling powerless,” says Fowler, the former Uber engineer who called out the company’s toxic culture, “like even the government wasn’t looking out for us.”
Nor did 2017 appear to be especially promising for journalists, who—alongside the ongoing financial upheaval in the media business—feared a fallout from the President’s cries of “fake news” and verbal attacks on reporters. And yet it was a year of phenomenal reporting. Determined journalists—including Emily Steel and Michael Schmidt , Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey , Ronan Farrow , Brett Anderson , Oliver Darcy , and Irin Carmon and Amy Brittain , among many others—picked up where so many human-resources departments, government committees and district attorneys had clearly failed, proving the truth of rumors that had circulated across whisper networks for years.
We are in the middle of the beginning of this upheaval. There is so much that we still don’t know about its ultimate impact. How far-reaching will it be? How deep into the country? How far down the organizational chart? Will there be a backlash? Hollywood and the media—the industries that have thus far been home to most of the prominent cases—live in a coastal, co-dependent bubble. That it popped first isn’t terribly surprising and surely doesn’t mean that the behavior of a Louis CK or a Charlie Rose is any less prevalent in the suites of corporate America. Or the trading floors of Wall Street. Or the backrooms of restaurants, factories and small businesses across the country. Indeed, the biggest test of this movement will be the extent to which it changes the realities of people for whom telling the truth simply threatens too much.
The roots of TIME’s annual franchise—singling out the person or persons who most influenced the events of the year—lie in the so-called great man theory of history, a phrasing that sounds particularly anachronistic at this moment. But the idea that influential, inspirational individuals shape the world could not be more apt this year. “I want to show [my 11-year-old daughter] that it’s O.K. to stand up for yourself, even though you feel like the world is against you,” says Dana Lewis, a hotel hospitality coordinator who is suing her employer over the actions of a serial groper. “If you keep fighting, eventually you’ll see the sun on the other side.” Or as artist and activist Rose McGowan put it, “Why not fight back? What else are we doing?”
For giving voice to open secrets, for moving whisper networks onto social networks, for pushing us all to stop accepting the unacceptable, the Silence Breakers are the 2017 Person of the Year.
katieames on December 6th, 2017 at 14:09 UTC »
My favorite quotes from Taylor Swift's testimony:
Swift was asked by Mr Mueller’s lawyers if he had groped her more than once. “Other than grabbing my ass against my will, underneath my skirt, and refusing to let go, he did not otherwise touch me inappropriately.”
“I am not going to allow your client to make me feel like it is in any way my fault because it isn’t.”
“I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are a product of his decisions. Not mine."
And when asked if she criticized her bodyguards for not stepping in sooner...
*For those of you who are unaware, a DJ sued Swift for "ruining his career" after she complained about the groping. In response, she counter-sued him for assault and battery, demanding damages of $1 to make her point.
EDIT; correcting some embarrassing grammatical errors.
EDIT #2; Thanks, and I'm glad y'all enjoyed the comment! I pledge to pay it forward this week, since all humorous Swift quotes aside, harassment of any kind is a serious issue and takes a communal effort to tackle.
If you feel moved to throw in some dollars as well, every little bit counts. Find out where your local organizations are. See what's out there. Check out RAINN's website for support lines and suggestions on how to get involved. Sexual violence isn't always "just" a skeezy grope by a frosted tip DJ.
And finally, remember that children are perhaps the most vulnerable in all of this. Child and adolescent boys and girls make up a huge portion of abuse victims. The website above has some good talking points if you need help starting the conversation. Tell your daughters that their body is their own, and tell your sons that they can be victims too (and that speaking up doesn't make less manly.)
hatramroany on December 6th, 2017 at 13:28 UTC »
The cover is Adama Iwu (Activist), Ashley Judd (Actress and the main person to come forward about Weinstein for the NYT article), Taylor Swift (musician), Isabel Pascual (strawberry picker), and Susan Fowler (former Uber engineer).
Edit:
That’s the elbow on the right of the cover.
Procrastinare on December 6th, 2017 at 13:06 UTC »
It's not common. But it's not entirely uncommon either. They do give "Person of the Year" to groups of people, and sometimes even things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Person_of_the_Year
1950: "The American Fighting Man" 1956: "The Hungarian Freedom Fighter" 1960: "The Scientists" 1966: "The inheritor" 1968: "The Apollo 8 Astronauts" 1969: "The Middle Americans" 1975: "American Women" 1982: "The Computer" 1988: "The Endangered Earth" 1993: "The Peacemakers" 2002: "The Whistleblowers" 2003: "The Soldiers" 2005: "The Good Samaritans" 2006: "You" 2011: "The Protestor" 2014: "The Ebola Fighters" 2017: The Silence BreakersEdits: Grammar mistakes and omissions have been fixed. 2017 was added to Wikipedia so I included it.