Coincidentally saw this today:
In September of 2017, if you had asked men in the United States “what percentage of the women that you personally know have experienced sexual assault?” most of them would have likely said a fairly low number.
In October of 2017, the hashtag #MeToo went viral.
In November of 2017, if you had asked men in the United States “what percentage of the women that you personally know have experienced sexual assault?” most of them would have given a much higher number than before.
(It’s difficult, for many people, to remember that they would have said a number that we now know to be outrageously low; by default most of us tend to project our present knowledge back onto our past selves. But the #MeToo movement was sufficiently recent, and the collective shock sufficiently well-documented, that we can, with a little bit of conscientious effort, resist the mass memory rewrite. Most of us were wrong. That’s true even if you specifically were, in fact, right.)