I observed but didn’t jump into the recent social media discourse around violence against women, linked to the murder of 33-year-old Sarah Everard in London and the mass murders of six Asian women and two others in the Atlanta area. An inescapable desire to semi-check-out creeps up on me when horrific, violent acts against women dominate the news cycle, or flood it with #MeToo coverage. It’s something about the way some cis men flock in to center themselves.
They’ll declare their shock and condemn the perpetrator in smugly crafted tweets, peacocking to let us all know they’re in the “good guy” camp. If we’re lucky (we usually are), they’ll bounce around online discussions with itchy fingers, before pulling the trigger on a pointless anecdote about being related to a woman or girl.
On a day when discussions around violence against women rank most popular, these men wear their daughters and wives like armor. It’s a silencing tactic to escape from an uncomfortable truth. All men are part of a patriarchal system that stamps all over women — willingly or unwillingly — and they’re all somebody’s brother, son, husband or father.
Last month Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrisson boldly claimed he found empathy for a colleague that says she was sexually assaulted in a government building, only after “speaking to his wife.” Men needing their wives to feed them the empathy they can’t muster themselves is a terrifying phenomenon. Actor Matt Damon said while he didn’t condone sexual coercion and assault before, having four daughters means it now “keeps him up at night” in the wake of revelations about disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein.
He described it as a “great fear” that had only hit him since becoming a father, the same fear that’s been inside women since we were teens, if not earlier. Kanye West said living with the Kardashian women had “taught him to respect women.” That “respect” didn’t stop him from slut shaming his soon-to-be-ex-wife publicly and eventually asking her to dress more modestly.
There’s a scene in Emerald Fenell’s ”Promising Young Woman” where protagonist Cassie — played by Carey Mulligan — has stopped her car in the middle of the road with her face in the steering wheel. An angry driver beeps and shouts behind her, while she’s crushed under the weight of her friend’s sexual assault. That’s how the last two weeks have felt for me.
My desire to escape these narratives online also comes from a place of self-preservation. If I indulge in all the truths being spoken by women, and the heavy, collective hopelessness we all feel, it might shake the foundations that I’ve built for myself.
The aftermath of being on the receiving end of male violence is deafeningly silent. Everything just carries on, except it also doesn’t. You will brush your teeth, stand in the shower, laugh in Zoom meetings all with this slow-moving, sticky sense of unease underpinning it all. If you lean into the unease fully, you might never escape, like quicksand.
There is something dissociatively violent about your own body being treated as if it doesn’t belong to you, like it exists for public consumption, and then as if it never happened. This is too often the case with men we know and trust, who treat their casual violence toward our bodies as impossible, like it magically self-erases. Because you’ve had consensual sex with them before. Because they’re related to you. Because they’re your best friend. Because they’re a close family acquaintance. Because it’s “them” and they’re “not capable” of what you both know has happened.
Women collectively deciding that we won’t downplay the constant threat of violence — emotional or physical — we face everyday any longer is both a leveling up of the “strong woman” trope, and a rejection of it altogether. Male violence breaks us, sometimes in unrecoverable ways. Shana Brice was murdered by her boyfriend at 19 after reporting him to the police for stalking her five times. She was fined each time for “wasting police time.”
We don’t owe you tales of survivorship, so you can feel better and admire our relentless tenacity “to overcome.” Some of us do not survive, and others exist in a constant state of teetering on the edge. The myth of the strong woman has been flipped, once again, to absolve men of the severity of their harm.
This time around in the discourse, there’s a sense of women brazenly refusing to sugarcoat the reality to protect fragile male egos, and a shedding of the mythical veneer of superwoman rising from the ashes of assault, all at once. The real truth is much harder for men, fathers or not, to look at.
I watched my own dad scream at the TV and call Christine Blasey Ford a liar as she alleged the now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh assaulted her at a school party. This is the same man that swears he’d react with blind rage toward any man he knew had laid a finger on me or my three sisters.
The cognitive dissonance fathers and husbands willingly wrap themselves in, where violence happens to other women, is destroying their wives and daughters. And all the women that mean nothing to them, too. The last time my dad told me I was “getting too irate” while explaining all the ways in which women fear men, I snapped and recounted my worst sexual assault experience through gritted teeth and salty tears, nearly a decade after the fact. It was Mother’s Day.
He sat in stunned silence and never mentioned it again. But the realization that it’s not me, and then them, that violent misogyny can and will hurt me, too, had hit him.
Violent attacks on women by men are not just something that happens to nameless women on the news. They have most likely happened to your daughters and wives too, overtly or covertly. If this wasn’t the case, it matters anyway. Our humanity should be recognized as individuals, not through the lens of how we’re interlinked with men as daughters, wives, sisters and mothers.
According to RAINN, nine out of 10 teenage victims of sexual violence are women. A notable 59% of attackers are acquaintances of the victim, while 34% are family members. Some fathers and husbands are the very violence in question for the women in their lives. The insightful “Allen v. Farrow” documentary — that looks back at the allegations against Woody Allen by his ex partner Mia Farrow and adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow — illuminates how family dynamics play into misogyny and abuse by fathers.
Men who commit these acts are not a small, deranged minority that exist on the outskirts of masculinity. They are your friends, family, colleagues and even yourselves. We elect these men into the highest government offices. As our fathers, husbands, sons and brothers, when you deflect, silence and see the issue as something other men do, you suffocate us in that erasure, leaving us more unsafe than before.
We’re autonomous beings that exist in spite of you, not for you.
Until men can sit and marinate in these uncomfortable truths, any contribution they offer to the discourse is just painful, infuriating noise.
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