Who Gets To Be 'Us'?

For a week bookended by International Women’s Day and Mother’s Day, it was a stressful one. Instances of the public abuse of Meghan Markle came to a head and a young woman was abducted and murdered, it seems, by someone who vowed to serve and protect. With the timelines on every social media platform flooded with experiences of abuse, it’s all been overwhelming, even when hanging out on the podcast accounts in a vain attempt to build community. 

It’s an atrocity that should never happen. We should all feel safe to head home at any time and not have to be wary that the unthinkable will happen. But we are because it does. The conversation around this becomes polarised when men who’ve experienced abuse or been attacked ask, ‘what about me?’ only to be told, ‘this is about us; go and start your own thread.’ I empathise with both positions here, and with trans and non-binary victims who fall through the gaps. I think I lean most to the question of who gets to be part of ‘us’. 

The emphasis fell on how ‘she did everything right’ and still the worst possible thing happened. As with so many of you, I’ve been on the receiving end of the usual questions: ‘Did they think you were up for it? Why didn’t you leave? Are you sure they meant it like that?’ It also hasn’t been exclusively men who’ve imposed themselves on me. It feels ten times worse when a woman abuses the automatic trust because we expect men to treat us like trash and it’s a blessed relief when they don’t, but it’s shocking when a woman does it because we’re meant to look out for each other. 

The truth is, a lot of women don’t. If we’re white, we’ll find it easy to not engage if it’s not another white woman. We won’t examine our own behaviours because it couldn’t possibly be us at fault. How many women propped up the public abuse of Markle or Leslie Jones or Kelly Marie Tran? How many ask disarming questions of someone trying to make sense of a traumatic experience? How many perpetrate some form of abuse in the first place? In my experience, it has not been far off the amount of men who’ve done these things. 

I could outline endless examples of these experiences but I’ve done so in the past and I try to find my own form of justice in not giving up on trying to live a good life. The point of this exercise is to say without saying because I’ve been saying for a long time and it feels like no one listens. I know that is not true, and people have good reasons for their silence, often involving their own survival, and when people are outspoken it can be purely performative. I’ve seen enough publicly visible declarations of solidarity from people I once sought quiet help from to worse than no avail to have learned not to trust what I read on Twitter anymore.

I hope anyone who has recently found the ability to share publicly that which they have held inside for so long, finds peace and the support they need. I’m someone who’s been doing that for years, it feels, into the void. I can’t say with certainty of any correlation, but I am also someone who struggles to get work even though I’ve ‘done everything right’, but that’s another story. I guess I just want to acknowledge anyone else who’s feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. Carrying on every day is hard enough and you do not owe your soul to social media.

Unrelated beach scene, North Wales, April 2018