Photo: BEImages/Henry Lamb/Photowire.In the wake of last Friday's University of California, Santa Barbara shooting, the #YesAllWomen social-media campaign has gathered stories and confessions from both women and men highlighting the everyday misogyny women face. Lena Dunham joined the conversation this weekend.
The actress and writer explained that she, too, has been a victim of male harassment. "In high school a very disturbed boy told me if I didn't choose to love him he would make me," she tweeted. Thankfully, her school "handled it quickly and never questioned how [she] 'provoked' him." It's not a groundbreaking confession, but one that shows harassment does not merely affect the women who Rodger so frequently idealized as "beautiful, tall blonde-‐haired (sic) girl" in his manifesto, but all women, point blank. Like all contributions to the campaign, it advances the conversation by creating a relatively safe space for women to share their own stories.
Dunham then went on to defend the campaign and her use of Elliot Rodger's name to a user who called her out for mentioning the shooter's name in a tweet. "Publicity isn't the problem," she shared. "The abject terror this instilled in women is." Which exactly why we need the #YesAllWomen campaign. (BuzzFeed)