Entry tags:

antiracism, fandom, fandom: wiscon, fandom: wiscon: 33, feminism

Safe and unsafe places

• cereta, On rape and men (Oh yes, I'm going there)
  
• rachelmanija, I genuinely like a whole lot of heterosexual men. But I do not believe that just because I like a man, he has the same ideas about rape that I do. In fact, the conversations I've had with straight men about rape and sexual harassment have been almost universally depressing.
  
• nestra, One of the things I've been seeing in the comments to [info]cereta's post about rape is a reiteration of "I don't know anyone who's been raped" or "I don't know anyone who would abuse a woman" or "I don't know anyone who makes those kind of jokes."
  
  Yes, you do.
  
• giandujakiss, I just keep coming back to this post
  

Cereta has 14 pages of comments now, mostly on topic, with a few concern trolls. A few of the accounts of assault and harassment shock me, but they don't surprise me. What surprises me and makes me cry are the comments where someone says, "I told someone about it and they believed me right away."

During the Open Source Boob Project, one prominent male blogger with a young daughter said he saw nothing wrong with theferrett's post. I went blind with rage. I never figured out how to say what I wanted to say as angry as it needed to be, without making it seem like a threat to his daughter: It could be distant to him, because it wouldn't happen to him, because he doesn't see it as happening to her, because he doesn't see it as happening to his wife or his mother or the women he knows. But it does. It has, it will, it does. The boys and men who call "compliments," who touch you, who look at you, who discount you, who see BREASTS and that's all. And you know what? If you're a [cis-gendered] man, you'll never know about it. Your daughter will not tell you about the guys who call her on the street, the boys who throw pebbles at her on the way to the schoolbus, the guy in her class who calls out for her in school and follows her everywhere and breathes on her neck, the guy who looks like he's exposing himself and then follows her for twelve blocks when she runs away until she can duck into a grocery store to lose him, the kids five fucking years younger than her who briefly surround her on the street in broad daylight and grab her breast and laugh and are gone before she can do anything but be afraid. Later on, she will not tell you about the many and varied cases of workplace sexual harassment.

She will not tell you because most of the time, she has no words for this. She will lock the things away in a box and put it in the dark, and it only comes out of the dark when she decides to walk an extra fifteen minutes to avoid the boys with the pebbles, an extra circuit around the school corridor to avoid the boy who touches her with clinging eyes, not to go out at all because it's too late at night. It comes out when she takes the short path anyway, goes out anyway, walks home anyway: as the feeling, unspeakable, and the words My own fault Should have known. She will not tell you because, even years later, even as a feminist, all she hears is everyone in the world telling her This isn't important, this doesn't count, this didn't happen. It's a misunderstanding It's not that bad It's harmless.

Everyone in the world. Especially you.

She will not tell you because nothing happened, after all, she's lucky, she knows what could have happened, she knows people it happened to. ("People." Women. Girls. Occasionally boys. But mostly women and girls.) This is lucky. Rage and shame and fear and pain and no one believing you, not even yourself, that's lucky.

I do wish, honestly, all the girls in the world, all the daughters of all the people reading this, could be lucky enough to be safe. But I already know they can only be as lucky as I've been.

Several people in her comments have accused cereta of hating men, which I think is pretty funny, all told, because she actually has enough faith in men to ask them to act. Me, I don't always have that faith in men. I usually have it in women. This is why I was infuriated by the comments of some audience members at the Safe(r) Space Panel at Wiscon, whose response to discussion of the OSBP was "I was on the Penguincon Concom, and it didn't spread," or "I was involved, it wasn't like that, it wasn't that bad." (This is the same response I keep seeing in white fans to people of color who say they've been harassed at cons or who say that they feel unsafe to speak honestly about racism in sf fandom.) It doesn't matter if it wasn't that bad for you, in your position of social privilege or contextual power. It doesn't matter if you feel safe in that situation. That doesn't make it okay for you to assume that everyone should share your feeling of safety, or to discount or marginalize the statements of others who did not.

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