If we can take our eyes off the individual women long enough to study the system around her. We might finally see who has been moving the walls.I
If we can take our eyes off the individual women long enough to study the system around her. We might finally see who has been moving the walls.
I don’t spend much time debating whether women’s rights activists, feminists, womanists, or women advocates should be in relationships with males.
Women have been told whom they may love, whom they should marry, whether they should marry, when they should marry, what kind of wife they should be, whether they should leave, whether they should stay, what they owe a husband, what they owe a family, what respectable women do, what liberated women do, and what good women would never do for longer than any of us have been alive.
Putting different wrapping paper around that package doesn’t make it liberation. There is nothing especially radical about creating another set of rules for women’s personal lives. Humanity has been remarkably creative at doing that already.
I am much more interested in what women have learned from surviving all that policing.
Because women, Survivors, advocates, counselors, researchers, organizers, and people working against domestic and sexual violence have spent decades becoming extraordinarily good at recognizing patterns of power inside relationships.
We know that control rarely introduces itself by saying, Hello, I am control.
It arrives with reasons.
It arrives explaining why this particular request is reasonable. This time. Why this particular boundary is selfish. Why this particular sacrifice is necessary. Why she should understand. Why she should be the bigger person. Why everybody would be happier if she would stop making such a fuss.
We have learned to look beyond the explanation and examine the pattern.
And I think we should do much more of that outside intimate relationships.
We Already Know These Patterns
When one person gradually separates a woman from people who support her, we recognize isolation.
But when an institution, organization, profession, movement, or community makes belonging increasingly difficult for women who dissent, somehow we can become reluctant to recognize the resemblance.
When a controlling partner interferes with a woman’s ability to earn, keep, or control money, we understand that economic dependence can make freedom theoretical. Yet when policies or institutional arrangements repeatedly leave women economically dependent upon decisions made by others, we often examine each policy separately instead of looking at the accumulated pattern.
We understand retaliation inside relationships, too. A woman learns that she technically can disagree, but disagreement comes with consequences. There will be rage, withdrawal, humiliation, threats, punishment, or some other price.
Systems can create their own versions of that bargain.
A woman can technically speak, but she may lose professional opportunities. She may be removed from organizations. She may be socially ostracized. Her reputation may suddenly become everybody’s favorite community project. People who once respected her may begin describing her as difficult, hateful, unstable, dangerous, selfish, or impossible to work with.
Eventually the message becomes clear even if nobody writes the rule down:
You may speak. You simply need to understand what speaking will cost you.
Women know that pattern. We also know something about boundaries that exist only until somebody dislikes them.
Inside unhealthy relationships, a woman’s privacy, time, body, friendships, labor, attention, or personal space may gradually become communal property. Her boundary is treated not as information about where she ends and another person begins, but as the opening position in a negotiation.
That can happen systemically, too.
Women’s privacy can become negotiable. Women’s spaces can become negotiable. Women’s language can become negotiable. Women’s time, labor, bodies, safety, and accommodations can become things other people gather around a table to discuss.
And somehow the woman who says, Actually, this isn’t available for negotiation, can become the problem.
We have seen this movie before.
The Moral Pressure May Be the Most Familiar Part
One of the oldest tools of interpersonal control is converting somebody else’s desire into your moral obligation.
If you loved me, you would…..
If you trusted me, you would…..
If you weren’t selfish, you would….
If you cared about this family, you would…..
All gratitude to the foremothers that built the educational foundation; we recognize the manipulation much more easily when it happens in a living room than when it happens through institutions, politics, religion, activism, workplaces, or social movements.
There, the words become more sophisticated.
If you were compassionate, you would…..
If you were truly inclusive, you would……
If you were committed to justice, you would……
If you were a good Christian (because do other faith believers get this call?), you would…..
If you cared about the movement, you would……
If you were really one of us, you would.
Different vocabulary. Familiar machinery.
That does not mean every disagreement is coercion. It does not mean every institution is abusive, every policy we dislike is violence, or every uncomfortable request is oppression. Precision matters, particularly to those of us who have worked with people experiencing actual violence and coercive control.
It means something simpler.
Pattern recognition travels.
The knowledge women have developed about power does not suddenly become useless when we walk outside the front door.
Beyond the Individual Incident
This may be one of the most important lessons Survivor advocacy has to offer the wider world.
People standing outside a harmful relationship often examine incidents one at a time.
That argument wasn’t so terrible.
That request sounded reasonable.
That restriction wasn’t enormous.
That insult wasn’t the worst thing anybody has ever said.
That financial decision could have had an innocent explanation.
And perhaps every single incident can be explained.
The woman living underneath the pattern experiences something entirely different.
She experiences the accumulation.
Systems deserve the same scrutiny.
One woman loses a position. One organization changes a rule. One professional is quietly pushed out. One women’s group disappears. One accommodation becomes expected. One objection gets characterized as cruelty. One boundary becomes negotiable. One woman decides that speaking simply isn’t worth what happened to the last woman who tried.
Look at each event individually and somebody can explain every one of them away.
Look at who repeatedly adjusts, who repeatedly loses, who repeatedly sacrifices, and who repeatedly gets punished for objecting, and suddenly there is something else to see.
Ask the Questions We Already Know How to Ask
We don’t need an entirely new intellectual toolbox for examining systemic power. Women have already built some remarkable tools.
♦We can ask: Who is expected to adjust?
Not once, but repeatedly.
♦We can ask who bears the consequences when competing interests collide. We can watch whose boundaries require elaborate justification and whose boundaries are simply accepted.
♦We can notice whose anger is treated as understandable and whose anger becomes evidence against her character.
♦We can examine who is continually asked to demonstrate kindness through sacrifice.
♦We can ask what happens to the woman who says no.
Does she remain a full member of the community after refusing? Can she disagree without losing access to employment, friendship, resources, reputation, professional networks, religious community, political belonging, or basic human regard?
♦Most importantly, we can ask whether the person with less power possesses a meaningful right of refusal.
Because “you are free to choose” means very little when only one choice allows you to remain safely inside the community.
Those are questions worth carrying everywhere.
Into our institutions.
Into political movements.
Into workplaces.
Into churches.
Into activist organizations.
Into professional associations.
Into families.
And yes, into feminism and women’s advocacy themselves.
No ideology becomes incapable of domination simply because it has learned the vocabulary of liberation.
And That Includes How We Treat Women
Which brings me right back to where I started.
I am not particularly interested in replacing one ancient form of policing women’s intimate choices with another.
Women have had enough people standing over their lives with clipboards.
A woman advocating for women’s freedom does not surrender her own freedom to choose whom she loves. She does not owe anybody ideological purity through her personal relationships. Women are capable of observing, thinking, learning, choosing, changing their minds, making mistakes, finding joy, leaving, staying, reconsidering, and directing their own lives.
That is part of the freedom.
I would rather spend our intellectual energy examining the larger patterns that become harder to recognize precisely because they are larger.
So perhaps the next frontier isn’t finding another reason to supervise women’s lives.
Perhaps it is trusting women with their own lives while taking everything we have learned about power, coercion, boundaries, retaliation, dependency, isolation, and meaningful consent and turning that knowledge outward.
Because sometimes what we learned while looking across the kitchen table can help us understand what is happening across an entire society.
And we are already there.
Misogynist Gaslighting: The Reversal That Keeps Women Unsafe – WE Survive Abuse