How Not to Think About Sexual Abuse Every Minute of Every Day
I can’t talk about sexual assault every day.
I say this as someone who 100% believes in and supports the #MeToo movement, who wants to participate, listen and learn. Who wants to have open and chaotic conversations about sex and power dynamics and the calculations we need.
But now I don’t know what else I can say or read without fatigue. I want this conversation, but now I’m so, so tired. There is hypocrisy in this. Shock, horror, but obvious. Boredom with accounts of “just” creepiness, inappropriate kissing, everything that is not illegal, with a capital letter . Firing someone else before you hear what they have to say. There are disagreements with people you admire. Women (and men) misreport and defend themselves to intercede for the victims and potentially do more harm than good in the eyes of people who are not inclined to believe women anyway . And by this metric we judge it? The reporter’s age is used as a way to fire her, not because her arguments are flimsy, but because she doesn’t do it the way we do (and because she made mistakes, of course she was wrong, but she won’t admit those mistakes). And I’m a bad feminist if I disagree with the way she wrote the email? And in general, who else can care about my opinion on this matter?
Reluctance to say something out of fear that you are saying the wrong thing, and suddenly your tweet ends up in an article intended to be ridiculed. They say nothing and consider themselves friendly to sexual rapists. There are memories of men who grabbed you in bars, cornered you on the streets in broad daylight and told you that you “look good in an apron” in front of everyone. colleagues, and even more so physical events when no one is around. And laugh at it all, except that you don’t laugh anymore. Your mother needs to understand why you cringe when she says that she was just transferred to another department at work when it happened to her at your age, and you should do it too. About anonymous men who advise you to get a new profession if you can’t stand a little hostility. Why can’t you just be tougher? You go through it all as a “survivor”, but you hate the word, as a woman who just happened to very normal things, but who does not have the vocabulary for most of what she is experienced, despite reading about it for hours on end.
That you are stronger than these young women, because you would never allow yourself to be in such a situation . Throw it all away as a witch hunt because men have always been beautiful to you and women are now equal , don’t you know? Having the luxury of not wasting days, weeks, months, and years thinking about it, because it will never affect you in the same way. Your male friends demand that you explain what it is about and call you “intellectually dishonest” when you simply don’t have the energy to do it. The one asking for a drink, so what about Aziz Ansari? And you understand that he did not think about it at all, while you spent the last three days working out an appropriate answer so that you are not called intellectually dishonest. There is a friend who reminds you: “You are writing about the 529s”, not about attacks or gender politics. This is not your battle.
You are constantly worried about how much your opinion really matters in this conversation. Does #MeToo need another vote? Do you specifically need your vote? Do you really want to shoulder this burden? Does what happened when you were 19 negate all the privileges you had in your life, is it even worth mentioning when so many women have experienced and continue to experience much worse?
Is Larry Nassar worse than Matt Lauer ? But no, like, if you had to choose?
And there are so many other issues that deserve your attention right now, and they are just as important, don’t you think? And will people misunderstand the first sentence of this article and think that I don’t think we should be talking about sexual harassment at all?
Can some things remain confidential? Don’t you want that?
And if you are the victim enough to have an open page New York Times – the newspaper that started the conversation with the reports of Bill O’Reilly and Harvey Weinstein and published the damn ads, “he said, she said,” but not cleared the house of your alleged perpetrator – do you think your story is worth the movement?
There is a desire to say something, but I have no idea what to say.
What we can do? We can switch off for a while. We can negotiate a moratorium on talk of an attack until we finish the next project . We can say that we really do not want to talk about it now. We can be kind to each other and acknowledge that not everyone has answers to all questions. We can admit that we are so tired.