Your bag is empty.
There are people who make the world better by being very serious about making the world better. Kelly Oxford, a self-described “writer, director, and reluctant social media personality,” isn’t one of those people. Kelly Oxford is fucking funny.
She makes jokes. And then, every once in a while, she says something so simple and true that millions of people recognize themselves in it. In October 2016, hours after the Access Hollywood tape was released, Kelly asked women to share their first experiences of sexual assault. She went first: she was 12 years old, on a city bus.
“Women: tweet me your first assaults. they aren’t just stats. I’ll go first…”
By the next morning, Kelly said she was receiving at least 50 stories per minute. By Monday afternoon, the New York Times reported that nearly 27 million people had responded to or visited her Twitter page. Kelly sparked #NotOkay, a viral movement that made the scale of sexual assault impossible to ignore.
This was a full year before #MeToo became a global hashtag. But “me too” already existed as a movement. A decade earlier, activist Tarana Burke had founded it to support survivors of sexual violence, particularly Black women and girls.
What followed Kelly’s post took something we’d become used to discussing as a statistic and made it overwhelmingly personal: women sharing their experiences, in their own words, one after another after another. NPR called it a “collective unburdening.”
As women were telling their stories, millions of people were listening. Many of them were men—men who loved and respected women. Husbands, boyfriends, brothers, fathers and friends suddenly hearing experiences they may never have known the women in their lives were carrying. I remember watching it unfold.
So why is someone at Playboy telling this story? Not because our history gives us some moral high ground. It doesn’t. We haven’t always gotten it right, and sometimes that’s an understatement. But our history has never been only one thing.
At its best, Playboy has understood that sexual freedom depends on consent, autonomy and the ability to make our own choices about our bodies and our lives.
In 1973, the Playboy Foundation supported research into how rape victims were treated by hospitals, police and the courts. Later in the decade, the Foundation supported activist Marty Goddard’s work developing what became the first standardized sexual-assault evidence collection kit, commonly known as a rape kit. The Foundation provided critical early funding, helped design the packaging and organized the assembly of the first kits at Playboy’s Chicago offices. And in 2019, Playboy sat down with Tarana Burke for an extensive conversation about #MeToo, sexual violence, consent and the work still left to do.
Which brings me back to Kelly. Today, I’m lucky enough to call her a friend. She’s also a Playboy columnist writing about sex and relationships.
Being playful about sex doesn’t mean being reckless with other people’s boundaries. Being funny doesn’t mean failing to understand what’s serious. And believing women about the experiences they absolutely did not choose should sit alongside listening to them talk about the ones they very enthusiastically did. Kelly has always understood how to hold those things at once without losing sight of the power of humor. Sometimes funny people make something unbearable bearable long enough for us to actually look at it.
In recent weeks, a sexual assault investigation involving a former Cornell student known as Jane Doe has been reopened and has garnered national attention. As people have tried to expose her identity, women have begun posting #IAmJaneDoe in solidarity. Many have shared their own experiences, too.
#NotOkay is part of a much larger story. So is #MeToo. And now so is #IAmJaneDoe. Progress rarely has a single starting point. It happens because people fight for it for years before anyone notices. Because survivors speak when speaking costs them something. Because activists organize, journalists report, and people listen, learn and decide they want to be part of making things better. Because one person says something out loud and someone else realizes she can say it too.
What Kelly did wasn’t the beginning of the work, and it wasn’t the end of it, but it mattered.
Kelly told her story and asked other women to tell theirs. They did. And ten years later, they haven’t stopped.