#MeToo: Cri de Coeur and Cri de Corps (A Cry from the Heart and Body of a Woman)

The international era of #MeToo brings powerful narratives of predatory behaviors, deception, abuse, and rape to the daily news across the West, especially in the United States where the movement, founded in 2006 by Tarana Burke, erupted in the fall of 2017, a year after the pussy-grabbing president was elected despite revelations of gross misconduct based in presumptive misogyny. Finally, some men, including Donald Trump, are being named and held accountable. Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Brett Kavanaugh, and Larry Nassar, among many others, stand accused or guilty as charged.

What gave them their sense of entitlement and ownership of girls and women in the first place? How did the ideas they used to legitimate their behavior originate? What provided the basis for their relentless coercion? Why did "lock her up" remain the phrase that pays years after the 2016 election put it to such abhorrent use? There are multiple, complex answers to these questions, but one of them lies in folk narrative analysis of the kind found in this special issue of Narrative Culture on women's containment.

The woman seduced me, she was drunk, she asked for it, I pursued her, she refused me, I stalked her, I abducted her, I held her captive in my car, my apartment, my office, our home. I commanded her. I made her do what I wanted her to do. She loved it. She wanted it. She needed it. She said no. She didn't refuse. She hated it. She is better off in her place. The place I make her take. The place I made her want or forced her to want.

These are all fragments of recently reported stories, and they are also motifs, not just echoes of personal, individual experience narratives. They are more deeply, and more disturbingly, the refrains heard in the telling of the old stories of our folklore enterprise. In fairy tales, myths, folktales, legends, the narrative culture of women's subjugation and subjection to sexual violence is forged in the ignoble fires of tradition—the insidious carrying on of what has gone before. Telling it like it was …

Here's a familiar one. Taken by surprise as she gathers narcissus on a beautiful day, the young goddess Persephone is engulfed by a chasm and thrown into the underworld, where she is forced into marriage with Hades. This exploit, arranged for Hades by his brother Zeus, exemplifies the casual (because established) barter of women for the pleasure of men. Such violent bride capture plays out in prenuptial rituals still practiced in parts of the Mediterranean, acts that raise any groom's hypermasculine profile, at least momentarily, and solidifies his claim on the woman who will be his wife and domestic servant. Ownership by capture, stories made into rites of passage, narratives given social and cultural imprimatur by virtue of being imprinted on the bodies of performers in prescribed ritual acts.

Activated by women telling their personal experience narratives of assault by powerful men, #MeToo cracked open one of patriarchy's most cherished vaults, one filled with a precious trove of stories that assume and perpetuate privileges of male over female and men over women, including (but not limited to) sexual, economic, domestic, and political privileges. What individual women had suffered silently as victims of their own histories of domestic violence, stalking, abduction, and rape was now revealed as common cause and effect. Many women told and continue to tell their stories. Thousands came forward to correct a legacy of silence and condemn the well-known chronicle of male sexual advantage largely framed by deeply embedded cultural ideas—pernicious ideals—of conquest and possession. Written on the female body, asserted in the male voice, a multimillennial Greco-Judeo-Christian mythology of women's ownership by men was implanted in the West so long ago you'll never find it on Ancestry.com. You'll just feel it in your womb of one's own.

Quite simply, to interrupt and ultimately discredit the elemental story of male...