…Or How I Accidentally Started My Biggest Twitter Fight To Date
I have this strange impulse to say that it’s a shitty time to be a woman, as if it hasn’t been shitty for a long time, as if our society isn’t founded at least in part on the subjugation of women, as if we haven’t been fighting for hundreds of years for our inherent humanity to be recognized. Still, I’m more afraid of my breaking news alerts these days than I have been at any other point during the Trump administration, let alone my time owning an iPhone.
It’s a good thing, that we’re having this conversation. And that we are exposing powerful men who have abused that power and the people around them, and that many of them are facing consequences for their actions. And while I empathize with and admire the women who can watch this onslaught with the vindictive joy of the victorious, I’m just not there yet. I’m tired. I don’t want the next alert to be about someone whose work means something to me, who has helped create me.
I know I am the product of a misogynist world, that the art and the stories and the lessons that have built me come from a world that also tears us down. Perhaps it isn’t a bad thing that this now confronts us almost daily, but it is also a painful thing, a hard thing. With every revelation is another thread to unwind, another piece of the knot where you wonder if it’s better to just cut the damn thing off rather than spend days and weeks untangling it. To be a woman is to never really be one hundred percent sure whether your complicated feelings are nuance or internalized misogyny. Like this:
Last week, someone yelled at me on Twitter for trivializing their sexual assault.
After Al Franken resigned, I came across this statement:
And from this blog’s twitter account, I responded:
It seemed a fairly uncontroversial statement in the moment, and I honestly didn’t think anything of it until I saw the first reply:
I don’t know this woman, and she doesn’t know me. And while I’m usually the one behind our blog twitter because I have a problem, it could have easily been one of four women, each with our own experiences, so it seems like quite an assumption she’s making. But I understand how you get there. Without knowing this woman’s story, I can only imagine how hard it was for her to come forward about the assault she experienced, what kind of backlash she faced, or questions she got. I don’t know if her attacker faced legal consequences, and I don’t know if it was a pattern or a single incident. I do know that she’s in therapy for PTSD because she told me.
Throughout the course of the conversation, her point was that going after what she called the “small” stuff allows more violent crimes to slip through. I think she’s wrong. I think that a culture which tells men that women’s bodies are up for grabs, that an unwanted hand on the ass or a forced kiss aren’t that big of a deal, is the culture that allows all kinds of violations, manipulative, violent, or otherwise. Men who grab at women without thinking about it, who don’t see through uncomfortable laughter and weak smiles to the paralyzing fear behind them, support a culture that says if you want it, you should take it. Confronting those incidents makes the point that women’s bodies are our own. We get to make the decisions about when and how we are touched. And that covers the more violent assaults too. The smaller the holes in the sieve, the less escapes our notice.
And I think that dismissing those “smaller” violations is to trivialize a different kind of violence, the kind that reminds us daily that society doesn’t see our bodies as our own. Every day can be an exercise in giving up pieces of ourselves — to the catcallers on the street, to the guy who gives you a once over in the elevator, to the fear that the person brushing up against you on the train is doing it on purpose, and what will you say if he is? Will you just stand there? The oppression that girds our society, the racism, sexism, ableism that are part of our foundations doesn’t go away when we take care of the big stuff. We ended slavery, we won the right to vote, we passed the Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. But only the very delusional or the very cruel will tell you that any of those -isms have disappeared.
Still, I get where she comes from. We have been taught to dismiss our own humanity, sure, but we’ve been taught to dismiss other women’s too. And when you’re hurting and traumatized and angry, it’s not that big of a jump to think “if only he had just grabbed my ass, then maybe I wouldn’t have to live with this.” It’s not a fair thought, nor a kind one. Comparisons are odious, but we have been taught to make them. I don’t know how my hurt or my exhaustion stacks up to hers, but I have been unkind too. I have fallen into the traps they have laid for us and I have struggled to climb back out. Some days I’m not sure I have.
We went back and forth for a little while, and then eventually I stopped. Twitter is not the place for this kind of discussion. 280 characters doesn’t allow for nuance and the pace of the responses doesn’t allow for thoughtful consideration. Plus our notifications were blowing up and it was a lot to keep up with. And while Mel C. kept responding to people for a while, she never really came back to our thread. Other people were angrier — they too were less kind.
I don’t have any answers for this. I think I handled it okay, but nothing about our conversation makes me less likely to post something similar in the future. I suppose it’s worth noting that we never really know what scars people have until they show us. We can read the macro things — to be a woman is hard, to be a woman of color, a disabled woman, an undocumented woman, a trans woman or a queer woman is harder still. But we can know these things cause traumas without knowing each other’s stories, the specific shape of each other’s hurt. We can listen, and be kind, except when we can’t. And then we just have to hope that the next woman can.
TNP-TEMP 