What Is "Survivor Privilege"? I Don't Know And Neither Does George Will

[Content note: sexual assault]

At the Daily Dot, I have an analysis of George Will’s useless Washington Post column and many (but not all) of the ways in which it is wrong:

George Will’s misunderstandings about sexual assault are numerous and astoundingly ignorant. He continually uses “sexual assault” in scare quotes as though its very existence is dubious to him. He insists that if a man continues having sex with a woman after she said “no” several times, it cannot be rape, because she had willingly had sex with him in the past. He calls definitions of sexual assault that include non-consensual touching as well as non-consensual penetration “capacious,” as though using someone else’s body sexually without their consent is somehow not assault and never traumatic just because it doesn’t involve both a penis and a vagina. He denies that intoxication renders one incapable of giving informed consent, even though it’s fairly well-known that people who are drunk don’t always know or understand what they’re doing.

He even refers to women as “females,” cementing my belief that he belongs in an episode of Star Trek and not in the real world, let alone on the staff of an award-winning newspaper.

But perhaps his most egregiously out-of-touch statement is that “when [universities] make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.” Will does not elaborate on what, exactly, is so “coveted” about being a victim of sexual assault, how exactly universities “confer privileges” upon students who come forward about their assaults, or how these privileges, supposing they exist, are what is driving the supposed “proliferation” of “victims.” Evidence is less of a priority than rhetoric, apparently.

Read the rest here.

What Is "Survivor Privilege"? I Don't Know And Neither Does George Will
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They Have To See It With Their Own Eyes: Men and Violence Against Women

[Content note: gendered violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment]

It’s been about a week and a half since Elliot Rodger shot six people and himself in Isla Vista, and the discussions are starting to die down. As they always do, as I knew they would. Plenty of men have authoritatively told me that misogyny is not the best explanation for this act of violence, that not all men are violent, that we need to reform the mental healthcare system, that autism makes people dangerous, that I have no reason to fear that something like this will happen to me, that I have no reason to fear men at all.

As I knew they would.

Then I read this piece on Jezebel by Madeleine Davies, and something clicked:

They don’t believe us. Hundreds of thousands of women from around the world can weigh in and tell their first hand experiences and there are men out there — seemingly reasonable and intelligent men — who still refuse to admit that maybe, just maybe, we have good reasons to be afraid. A 22-year-old kid spouts the same misogynist rhetoric that my coworkers and I receive in our inboxes on a daily basis and goes on a shooting rampage with the expressed purpose of punishing women for not giving him the sexual attention he felt entitled to and we’re still told that we have no right to be scared because #NotAllMen are like that.

Davies goes on to tell a story about her male college roommate and his persistent inability (or refusal) to internalize what Davies told him about women’s fear of and susceptibility to male violence:

In college, I had a male roommate who badgered me endlessly about my frequent choice to take a cab home from my restaurant job where I would — more often than not — clock out well after midnight. The walk from work to our house wasn’t long (maybe 20 minutes), but it was poorly lit and remote, taking you over railroad tracks and past warehouses. Honestly, it shouldn’t have mattered if the walk was 5 minutes and through the busiest part of town — I was paying for the taxi with my own money and it was my own business, but for some reason, it drove my otherwise decent roommate mad. He would call me lazy. He would imply that I was cowardly and weak. On multiple occasions, we got into shouting matches about it that left me feeling stupid, small and crazy.

While we were living together, a girl at our university was murdered by a stranger who broke into her on-campus apartment. They never caught the man who did it and still, my roommate couldn’t see why I would get mad when I came home to find our house unlocked and empty or why I’d be mildly nervous about being alone and vulnerable.

That was years ago, but recently, we met up for dinner.

“I’ve gotta apologize about something, Mads,” he said, pouring a glass of wine. “I know I used to give you a hard time about not wanting to walk alone at night, but a couple weeks ago around bar time, I saw a girl get attacked. It was crazy.”

To my friend’s credit, he didn’t stand by and simply watch the attack happen. He tried his best to help, but I still left the conversation with a sour taste in my mouth. I tried so many times to tell him about the scary realities of existing while female and he, like all of those dudes on Twitter, refused to believe me. He had to see someone undergo traumatic assault with his own eyes before he would recognize what we women know inherently.

And I remembered something else that I’ve observed and written about myself:

I’m tired of men getting attention for saying things that women have been saying for ages. I’m tired of the fact that men don’t believe women’s experiences unless they find a way to have those same experiences for themselves. I’m tired of the fact that women’s experiences are constantly being dismissed as overreactions or distortions or outright lies–until a man comes along to validate them. I’m tired of the fact that these men can then delete their online dating accounts or take the women’s outfit off, but I can’t stop moving through the world as a woman.

Probably any woman who has discussed sexism publicly has experienced a man showing up and demanding citations to “prove” that her individual experiences really happened. But even when the proof is there–Davies’ college roommate presumably knew about the girl at their university who was murdered, as that tends to make front-page news, and most men realize on some level that women get lots of sexual harassment both offline and on dating websites (or other websites)–these men are unable to convert that knowledge into an understanding of phenomena such as women being afraid to walk alone at night, demanding that the door to the apartment remain locked at all times, or quitting dating sites in frustration at the disgusting messages they receive. They still see these things happening and read them as “women are so irrational and overemotional B” as opposed to, “Wow, this is a sad but totally rational response to the unacceptable reality that these women face.”

That it was not enough for Davies’ college roommate to know that their classmate had been murdered by an intruder to understand Davies’ fears honestly terrifies me. That a woman had to get attacked right in front of him in order for that to sink in is horrifying. And as Davies points out, he was not some anomaly. This is common.

I’m going to go out on a limb a little here and then solidify that limb as much as possible. Men who refuse to take violence against women seriously until it happens right the fuck in front of their faces are as complicit in this injustice as men who commit violence against women. This is not to say that they are as individuals just as bad or just as sexist or whatever. It just means that, without their silence, their ignorance, their shrugging shoulders, this situation could not continue as it is. It cannot continue without the participation of men who commit violence, and it cannot continue without the participation of men who shrug it off or blame the victims or accuse them of “overreacting.” Both of these are gears have to turn in order for it to continue.

If you have to watch a woman be harassed or beaten or raped or almost raped in order to care, that means that even more women must be harassed or beaten or raped or almost raped in order for you to join in the fight against violence against women. If you have to watch a woman be harassed or beaten or raped or almost raped in order to care, that means that women’s personal accounts of violence–which they have little reason to lie about but many reasons to keep silent about–aren’t enough for you. If you have to watch a woman be harassed or beaten or raped or almost raped in order to care, that means that on some level–even if you won’t admit it–you think that there’s some level of “bad enough” that this shit needs to get before you’ll even acknowledge it as a problem, let alone actually do something about it.

Keep in mind, Davies hasn’t indicated that her former roommate has become some sort of anti-sexist crusader as a result of what he saw. He apologized to her, which is nice. He tried to help the woman who was being attacked, which is a good thing to do (although I hesitate to demand that men do it, because for all sorts of intersectional reasons, that may not be safe or possible for them).

But what’s it going to take for more men to actively, assertively challenge male violence against women? To shut down other men who excuse it or attempt to exonerate themselves by chanting “Not all men!” as though it were a magic spell? To refuse to support a type of masculinity that glorifies dominance and violence?

If what it takes is personally watching women being victimized by that type of masculinity, we’ve got a huge problem.

~~~

Moderation note: No, I did not discuss violence against men in this blog post. That was a deliberate choice. It is not the subject of this blog post. Do not turn the conversation in the comments section into a conversation about violence against men. Do not insist on reminding me that men can also be the victims of violence.

You are, however, welcome (as always) to draw analogies to other axes of oppression, because these dynamics play out in all of them.

They Have To See It With Their Own Eyes: Men and Violence Against Women