• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, October 11, 2016

Social media comes in for a lot of criticism, including in the virtual pages of this blog, for a whole laundry list of reasons that I won’t rehash here. But at its best it can also serve as a forum for people to address and understand themselves collectively, revealing and explicating, working through and amending, achieving consensus or catharsis.

Those qualities were on full display in the wake of the Washington Post’s publication of an audio recording of comments made by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2005, in which he bragged about using his fame to sexually assault women with impunity. The remarks, which may safely be characterized as “beyond extremely vulgar,” triggered a firestorm of controversy across all forms of media – but the conversation in social media may prove the most significant and enduring.

Unsurprisingly, this national discourse has centered on the fraught issue of gender relations, with particular attention paid to the fact that many men remain skeptical about the prevalence of sexual assault, simply because they have never seen it. Perhaps the most powerful response began unfolding Friday night with author Kelly Oxford’s tweet inviting her followers to share the details of their first sexual assault (the specification of “first,” of course, making the point with devastating understatement); Oxford started things off with a brief account of an assault she experienced at the age of 12. The invitation went viral with the hashtag #notokay, generating an astounding 27 million responses and visits to her Twitter account by Monday afternoon.

It isn’t just the volume and speed of the response that make Oxford’s impromptu campaign so effective: it is the disturbing details of the accounts as well as their awful sameness, which together paint a portrait of beasts rampaging unchecked. Like Oxford, many of the victims were shockingly young at the time they were assaulted, and many of the attacks took place in public places, strongly suggesting that in some cases at least, onlookers remained passive (or more charitably, simply oblivious) – making the assailant’s sense of impunity all too justified.

On a happier note, social media also allowed men to reject Trump’s breezy dismissal of his remarks as “locker room talk.” Some of the most sensitive (and damning) comments came from athletes, understandably indignant at the implication that they are all plotting sexual assaults behind closed doors. One of the best response came from Chris Conley of the Kansas City Chiefs, who noted: “Just for reference. I work in a locker room (every day)… That is not locker room talk. Just so you know…” He added: “Have I been in every locker room? No. But the guys I know and respect don’t talk like that. They talk about girls but not like that. Period.”