Laura Coates is a CNN legal analyst. She is a former assistant US attorney for the District of Columbia and trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. She is the host of the daily "Laura Coates Show" on SiriusXM. Follow her @thelauracoates. The views expressed in this commentary are her own.

(CNN) There is a misconception by some that women of the #MeToo movement relish their characterization as victims. This thinking goes that they were waiting for their chance to board the proverbial bandwagon for 15 minutes of fame -- an approach that is patronizing at best. The truth of the matter is, women acknowledging their membership in this undesirable club is nothing more than an acknowledgment of how deep the roots of oppression can run in a country whose historical soil is fertilized with inequality.

Sadly, I was not surprised when I learned of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's membership in this club, which she made public in remarks during an interview at the Sundance Film Festival.

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"Every woman of my vintage knows about sexual harassment, but we didn't have a name for it," she said before recounting an instance in which a professor gave her a practice exam, which turned out to be identical to the real exam. "I knew exactly what he wanted in return." But Justice Ginsburg's experiences with attempted exploitation didn't end with graduation. Even as a professor, she experienced sexism, gender pay inequity and workplace discrimination.

Harassment, gender pay gaps, objectification, and sexual predation are hardly novel nor reserved for millennials. Climbing the professional ladder, whether as the first tenured woman at Columbia Law School or a Supreme Court justice, doesn't elevate you beyond the reach of bigotry. It merely gives you a better vantage point from which to observe the problems below. And from where Ginsburg sits, the problem is incremental progress in the area of civil rights and subjective determinations by the powerful of whose lives, bodies, aspirations, or rights matter.

The #MeToo movement has obvious parallels to -- and distinctions from -- the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Both movements are rooted in absolute truth. Both involve the exploitation of power and the unavailability of legal recourse. Both are replete with tales ranging on the horror spectrum from eyebrow-raising to downright diabolical.

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