Yes. (At least, as far as they knew).

Not that it makes it any better.

It’s great for people who don’t need to use resources, whether its an elevator, or anti-bullying messages, and all the other resources at conferences or colleges. But, it’s tiring to explain to people that others do need these things. And it has nothing to do with “strength” and everything to do with personal circumstance. You pulled yourself up by your bootstraps? Fantastic. But not everyone is born into the middle class with loving parents in a safe neighborhood. Realizing that shouldn’t be a shock. It’s called empathy, understanding, and recognizing there are circumstances outside one’s own.

Thank you for this piece. And I appreciated you pointing out it’s for both genders.

Wny the hell should a woman be expected to just put up with abuse or assault? Does anyone tell a man, well, at any rate a straight white Christian cis man, to just put up with it?

That “strength,” whatever that is, is a quality that everyone ought to have, regardless of personal circumstance, and having it makes you clearly superior to those who don’t.

I think this is probably the main thing- at least amongst good-faith dissenters as opposed to trolls- and it’s just a derivation of bootstraps and the american dream and all that fallacious debunked crap. As the ur-narrative goes, we are all dropped into the same Earth with the same opportunities, and we are thus are fully responsible for creating our own success and happiness through hard work and a can-do attitude and true grit; as a corollary to this, our competence can be objectively measured in terms of our position relative to others. Therefore, any talk of “special needs”- from welfare to harassment policies to antidepressants to helping kids who have been bullied- messes with this just-world fantasy, and is seen as essentially rewarding incompetence.

It’s all predicated on a bizarre notion of fairness, which would only make sense if we were all indistinguishable clones carefully raised in exactly the same circumstances. That is not the case.

The other problem is that some of these ‘strong people’ are really just either socialized not to complain and to resent people who complain. I don’t really get that, but I figure that is the explanation in many cases.

At the heart of the matter is the idea that harassment should be viewed as normal behavior.

I read this through tears in my eyes quite often… I had to stop reading and come back because it cut so deep… thank you.

“But as I mentioned, such protective measures are useful to anyone who experiences harassment or assault, regardless of gender. When you say that such measures are by default sexist against women, you are assuming that all potential victims are female, and ignoring all the ones who are not. Although I do so hate to play “You’re The Real _____,” it is actually quite sexist to assume that men cannot be victims of sexual harassment or assault, and quite cissexist to assume that non-female, non-male people don’t even exist, as victims or otherwise.”

All of it hit me, if removing the gendered speak but that just blew me away and sent the tears streaming… The idea of strength… and who can and cannot be a victim is so very tied to that… being seen as a “man” or when younger a “boy”… and the amount of times being told my experience could not have happened because I was strong… because I was a “man”… and how much it caused me to see how all survivors need things… I… I can’t make this make sense at the moment… I am still too emotionally overcome…

So I shall stop and again say, thank you.

As a survivor I am beyond grateful to have you out there speaking.

Yeah, I’ve written about the just-world hypothesis and how it relates to social justice a lot. It definitely helps explain why people both in oppressed groups and not often refuse to believe that oppression exists.