Whose Story Is This

says in this book, that the reason women’s stories were able to be heard and generated consequences was because of what came before: the long, slow work of feminism to change consciousness and to put women—and men who regarded women as human beings endowed with inalienable rights and the capacity to say things that mattered—in positions of power. And the rise of new generations who were less bound by the old assumptions and denials. To change who tells the story, and who decides, is to change whose story this is.
The watershed called #MeToo in October 2017 was not that people spoke; it’s that other people listened. Many had spoken up before—the victims of the gymnastics doctor, the victims of R. Kelly—some over and over, and their testimony was ignored or disregarded. So #MeToo was not the beginning of women speaking up, but of people listening,