Listening tells you so much about where we really are as a society. A WNBA player spoke about her experience with sexual violence. The comments were n
Listening tells you so much about where we really are as a society. A WNBA player spoke about her experience with sexual violence. The comments were not kind.
There is also something particular about women who are perceived as strong. An elite athlete can be physically powerful, wealthy, accomplished, competitive, famous, outspoken, and still have been frightened, controlled, injured, sexually violated, emotionally abused, or trapped. Yet disclosure from a woman perceived as powerful can provoke a peculiar disbelief or resentment: You? How could you let that happen? Why didn’t you fight? You’re bigger than him. You’re supposed to be tough.
That response tells us something important about the mythology surrounding “strong women.” Strength gets quietly transformed from something a woman possesses into something she owes everybody. If she is strong, people may decide she has surrendered the right to have been overwhelmed. Her strength gets used backward against her: Because I have seen you powerful, I refuse to believe you were ever powerless.
“She’s a professional athlete. How was she scared of him?” Listen for the assumption that physical strength makes someone immune to abuse, coercion, threats, psychological control, or fear.
- “She could have fought him off.” Listen for the expectation that a victim must successfully resist violence before other people will recognize what happened to her.
- “She’s supposed to be tough.” Listen for strength being turned into a requirement that a woman never be vulnerable.
- “Why didn’t she just leave?” Listen for the entire burden of stopping another person’s abusive behavior being transferred onto the person experiencing it.
- “She’s only talking about it now because…” Listen for suspicion being attached to disclosure itself before the speaker has seriously considered why Survivors may delay telling.
- “Everybody has problems.” Listen for minimization. The statement may technically be true while functioning to avoid engaging with what this particular woman experienced.
- “Here we go again.” Listen for fatigue or irritation directed at women for continuing to disclose violence rather than at the persistence of the violence being disclosed.
- “I have a mother/sister/daughter, so of course I care about women.” Listen for whether relationship to a particular woman is being substituted for the harder question of how the speaker regards women he does not know, love, desire, or feel responsible for.
How people respond to sexual violence can reveal their threshold for what they expect women to tolerate. That becomes relevant whenever we are debating privacy, boundaries, safeguarding, vulnerability, or access to spaces where women may undress, sleep, receive intimate care, recover from violence, or otherwise be physically exposed.
Someone may say they oppose sexual assault while simultaneously expecting women to accept conditions that some women experience as frightening, humiliating, exposing, or unsafe.
One of the questions becomes: How much discomfort, fear, exposure, or risk do we believe women should reasonably be expected to bear for somebody else’s benefit?
That question shows up repeatedly in discussions about sexual violence. Why couldn’t she tolerate this? Why didn’t she handle that differently? Why was she frightened? Why didn’t she simply leave? Why does she need this boundary?
And then something very similar can appear in arguments about female spaces: Why can’t she just change beside him? Why does his presence bother her? Why can’t she be more accepting? Why can’t she simply use a stall? Why should her previous trauma affect everybody else?
There is an important difference between saying, “This person intends to harm you,” and saying, “You are entitled to boundaries even when nobody has proven an intention to harm you.” Women do not ordinarily establish privacy by proving that every person excluded from an intimate setting is dangerous. Privacy itself can be a legitimate interest. So can dignity, bodily autonomy, safeguarding, and trauma-informed accommodation.
Women are repeatedly praised for resilience and then sometimes handed another burden precisely because we have decided “they can bear it.” Women have survived worse. Women are strong. She’ll adjust.
But women’s capacity to endure something is not, by itself, an argument that they should be required to endure it.
If Stereotypes About Women Became Law, What Would Those Laws Look Like? – WE Survive Abuse
Misogynist Gaslighting: The Reversal That Keeps Women Unsafe – WE Survive Abuse
Where Coercion Is the Law, Truth Cannot Live – WE Survive Abuse
No Predator Has the Authority to Rename Violence As a “Right.” – WE Survive Abuse