Anita Hill was when I was in junior high, so I had already learned the lesson they wanted me to learn, which is that the good outcome of reporting harassment is that no one cares about you and the bad outcome is much, much worse. That the assaults I was dealing with in school would be the same later, but maybe more so. That I would never be the one getting the excuses, I would be the one getting called a whore. My school experience and this lesson from the news fit as neatly together as if someone had written a lesson plan.

So when Monica Lewinsky's story came out when I was in college, it...confirmed the worldview, that you couldn't expect anyone to give a damn, ever, that we were not important, that we never got to be the important ones, that if you tried to stick up for yourself you would be a sad, bad joke and anyway think of all the good he's done. I watched the people who had stuck up for Clarence Thomas scorning Bill Clinton and vice versa, and I learned not to trust either set.

And now every single week that I get on Twitter, there are people angry because people like me did not want a Senator with multiple harassment allegations. Because the stories that gave me flashbacks and made me want to throw up about my Senator could not possibly be important, because they happened to unimportant categories of people, people like me, people who are there in photo ops to have someone's hand on our asses, regardless of our accomplishments.

I hear things about mellowing with age sometimes but I don't really see it on the horizon for me any time soon. The rest of the world should not plan for that. No.