Talk of the town

"I am a 28-year-old woman trying to make a living and a career. Harvey Weinstein is a 64-year-old, world-famous man and this is his company. The balance of power is me: 0, Harvey Weinstein: 10."

- Lauren O'Connor, former employee of The Weinstein Company, as seen by The New York Times

TO UNDERSTAND silence, listen to it at 4am. Then, the sky morphs into an unspeakable darkness. It swallows up the sleepiness and spits out a forceful exactness. With that backdrop, the hour's silence is the sort of roaring quiet that reverberates on a narrow band, one that envelopes you as you sit, stare, think, feel sorry - the things that generally keep you up in solitude. It is so singular, and thick with meaning, that you hear the silence rushing through the ears.

Soon, the sun will yawn and threaten the darkness with its lazy rising, summoning the irritations of life, as if the illumination of sunlight makes all things clearer than before. Sometimes, the sun only blinds.

As the alleged heinous crimes of sexual harassment and assault by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein hit the headlines this month, this world unravels this cloak of silence that weighs as heavy as that at 4am.

The silence of women is easy to understand. There were heartbreaking reports of shame, guilt, hopelessness, and episodes of Stockholm Syndrome. They whispered of the harassment to other women to prevent the same from happening to their kind, all the while trying to survive an industry that is clubby and pumped with testosterone.

For them, silence broke like torrential rain. They bid their painful, uncertain time for justice - this time, in the form of the press - to take their side. Their rage is now spilling over as thousands of women put out their #MeToo statements to show that sexual harassment is pervasive, that it is far from limited to Tinseltown.

But what bears scrutiny is that there are men who knew enough about such predatory behaviour, but who only began tweeting easy sympathies and sending out apologies when the issue blew up earlier this month.

It shows that powerful people in entrenched positions can consciously understate their power when it comes to the time to exert their very authority for good. Which part of the gender wage gap, the male dominance of the industry - any industry - or the stories of unsavoury couch interviews, did not carry the plot along for these male actors and directors? Sometimes, the sun only blinds.

Where silence be judged, the scales should fall on the powerful who sleep soundly amid the disquiet, not on those who stayed mum in the dead of the night, as they replayed their nightmares.

Yet even today, at least one female actress is being blamed for walking away after the alleged rape. And while the #MeToo movement is worthwhile, it does point again to how the onus has fallen mainly on female victims to raise awareness.

It's tragic that it must still be said, but in addressing sexual harassment today, workplaces should open effective whistle-blowing channels. It is a shame that in 2017, we are still discussing basic respect for women.

What complicates the power of social media is the risk of self-aggrandising by commentators from any corner. Once upon a decade ago, it was much easier to ignore the vexations of those who only spoke for sanctimonious vanity.

Today, everybody has a soapbox and their own brand of "snap polls". In tweets, on LinkedIn, with Facebook updates, in videos, with cat ears and vomit of rainbows.

Talk is no longer cheap - it's free. Yet the paradox is that while there is a rousing chorus on the Internet, the result is often cheapened and commoditised thinking, sharding into trigger-happy fragments. Debates have widened, but not deepened.

The endless streams of social media tend to only have real impact if channelled like a tide, pulled by a force as sure as gravity itself.

The #MeToo movement is proof that the Internet can be a mobilising energy. But it should also be said that when Twitter actively tuned out the voice of one female accuser in the Weinstein scandal, we must be sceptical that social media is not all of that moral, democratic force of good it hails itself to be.

Silence from victims - from me, from you, from us - is not what we want. But it is one darkly honest response.

Amid the casual online murmurs that can ring louder but ever so hollow, the raw silence at 4am consumes with a bleak question. Dawn chirps awake, but is it a new morning?