So I'm sure you've seen the news: Everyone you know and love is a savage gropemonster. There's a camp for people who believe the accusers, and a camp for those who don't. I'm in the former. But I'm actually not here to talk about that. I wanna talk about what it's like to be the perpetrator.
When I was in Middle School, there was a girl in my class with a really nice butt. If I'd had more self-awareness or confidence, I might've also learned that she had a really nice personality, but again, I was in middle school. I obsessed over her body from afar, and in one class, I even sat behind her. She always wore snug shorts, and it drove me crazy. After about three weeks of being in the same class, far in the back, I ever so subtly started groping her. With me knee. Through the hole in the back of the school chair.
This went on for a week. Until finally, with a mix of fear and anger and frustration, she took me aside and said "I, am sick and tired, of your knee."
It was like waking up from a stupor. I felt like I'd been gut-punched. Why had I done this? Why didn't I just talk to her, and get to know her better? This was one of what would become hundreds of times that the sheer force of my hormones would convince me to do something completely out of character for me- I would never again touch someone against their will, but the list of foolish things I'd do would grow and grow.
I want to point out that at this point I had already undergone education about sexual harassment. I'd been told why it was bad and not to do it, and I intended not to. Why, then, did I still do it? It comes down to three reasons:
1. I didn't understand the female experience enough. I had no idea what it was like to be a girl, or the inherent barrage of attention, positive and negative, that being one entails- especially if you're pretty. Had I understood this, I might have been able to empathize with this girl better. I might have had that one extra step there to stop me. But also:
2. I was completely unprepared for how strong hormones are. This is probably the most important thing that we could be explaining to men and boys across the globe. For a certain portion of us- and it is a much larger portion than we might think- the desire to actualize our sexual feelings is overwhelmingly strong- and I use that word without exaggeration. The trope of boys tripping over their words isn't some dumb, unfounded trope- it's an unwitting admission to this exact phenomenon. And,
3. Sexual harassment gets monsterized way too much. People who commit this are always, without fail, portrayed as devious, monstrous sex perverts, shady figures that lurk in the shadows or leather-jacketed jackasses made to be the foils in our nice guy fantasies. As a result, we never believe that we could be the one to do it. That a regular person who just didn't understand their own impulses, might do something stupid and bad and humiliating like grope someone or make an aggressive advance based on green lights they'd imagined in their head.
So Is it any wonder the response to being accused, especially publicly, is to panic? To try and say that it didn't happen? To insist that they couldn't have done those things? It's more than just worrying about consequences: it's that they can't admit it to themselves, because to do so would be admitting that they, indeed, did the thing that we all agreed only inhuman monsters do.
That's why this whole conversation around it is so unhelpful. It's just an unending crescendo of "I can't believe ____ would do that!" No, it's not unbelievable. It's really common, and we need to treat it that way. Because "very common" doesn't equal "acceptable," it means "easy to believe" and "able to be talked about without tones of immense cataclysm."
TL;DR - I've done sexual harassment; if we can't stop being hysterical and disbelieving about it, we'll never be able to address it.
EDIT: Nope, I'm deleting all the irrelevant "But muh due process" comments. They're not what this journal's about and they amount to willful ignorance.
EDIT 2:
*pinches the bridge of his nose*
... Oh my fucking god.
People. Look.
"Believing the victim" doesn't mean believing that their account of the situation is 100% infallibly true and cannot be false.
It means giving them even and equal consideration as the accused, which the law and society writ large does not.
If you somehow didn't know this, then fine. But I am 100% done talking about it.
If you'd like to talk about the actual content of the journal then fantastic.
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6 years, 4 months ago
05 Dec 2017 10:55 CET
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