On a November night in 2022, I rode a very long escalator up to a movie theatre in Toronto. Always on the lookout for metaphors, I thought the elevator provided a lovely one: it was long and very slow, much like the progress of women’s equality in this world. But it was still going somewhere.
Listening, talking, silence, shame. These were all themes of the film we were about to see, She Said. It hadn’t even hit theatres yet, but every woman in the audience was familiar with the story it would tell: the explosive investigation by New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey into the reign of assault and terror conducted by Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein. Like a kick to a chessboard, the #MeToo movement that followed upended the polite game of complicity.
