I am so, so sorry that happened to you.
Also: my apologies to anyone upset by this reply. I could not leave it unanswered, but I am not a professional and I am a super flawed person, so my answer may be awful in many ways. I have tried to make it as not-awful as I could.
I am so sorry that happened to you, and I am so sorry that you feel guilty about it, and I am so sorry that the world’s attitude about women’s actions have inflicted further hurt on you.
You did not let down womenkind: you did not signal that his behaviour was okay. I don’t want to tell you how to feel. Any way that you feel is all right. But I am sorry that the world is set up in such a way that women, when something wrong is done to them, are trained to respond by wondering what they did wrong themselves.
You did nothing wrong.
Women are conditioned not to be violent, to act nicely–they’re also taught to fear the violence of men.
This post really speaks to me:
‘For anybody who has ever watched the gendered social interactions of women — watched a woman get browbeaten into accepting attention she doesn’t want, watched a woman get interrupted while speaking, watched a woman deny she is upset at being insulted in public, watched a woman get grabbed because of what she was wearing, watched a woman stop arguing — and said and done nothing, you never have the right to ever ask, “Why didn’t she fight back?”
She didn’t fight back because you told her not to. Ever. Ever. You told her that was okay, and necessary, and right.’
I have been seriously violent, in nearly thirty years of life, exactly twice, and both times people reacted with shock and horror that I would behave in such a way. I have been extremely outspoken many times, and people have reacted negatively. I have also been in situations where I felt uncomfortable/endangered and put up with it without either physical or verbal protest, and people carried on as if all was well.
All was not well. All is not well. The expectations laid on women to behave are contradictory and cruel–they’re a trap to make women feel like they’ve done something wrong.
If a woman knows how to fight–well, great. (But she shouldn’t have to know how to fight. Nobody should have to. I sure don’t.) Many a woman who does know how to fight still doesn’t fight in these situations, because we are not used to a situation turning violent, because we are taught not to react violently, because we trust that our lives are not battlegrounds.
You shouldn’t have to know how to fight.
You shouldn’t have to fight, even if you do know how.
You shouldn’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.
Being robbed is in no way comparable to having your body violated, but I do think it’s telling that we don’t have anything like as many tutorials on how to defend yourself against muggers, that people do not say 'Oh, but why didn’t you fight back?’ 'Did you make yourself super CLEAR that you didn’t want your stuff taken?’ 'What were you wearing?’ 'Surely this situation could have been avoided with a ninja chop.’ 'Why were you walking alone after dark anyway? PRIME ROBBING TIME.’ 'In what way might you have encouraged the taking of your stuff?’
People say: oh my god, that’s awful, I’m really sorry. People implicitly recognise other people’s right to NOT be robbed.
People do not show the same implicit respect for women’s right not to be assaulted.
And it is that lack of respect that leads to criticism of how women act, that leads to a prescriptive attitude: she didn’t behave in the right way beforehand, at the time, afterwards, she wasn’t upset enough, she was overly dramatic, she this or that.
Women are people, not machines. There is a right way to programme a microwave to defrost. There is no right way for a woman to behave–and the focus should be on the behaviour of the person who did the wrong thing, who committed the assault. They are the ones who behaved in the wrong way. Not you. Never you.
Nobody should get to dictate how survivors of trauma feel or how they react. That’s piling trauma on top of trauma. That’s saying the survivor isn’t an individual, who gets to respond in their own individual way. That should be a given.
As if there is one 'right way.'
The idea of the 'right way’ comes back to women being seen as having to earn the right to not be hurt, earn the right to be heard, earn the right to exist at all. It is terrible and harmful rubbish.
Telling women that they should act a certain way is terrible and harmful. That is the problem. You, and the way you act and react, are not the problem. The fact that the world tries to tell you that you are the problem is the world being messed up.
You have already had one great wrong done to you. It is massively unfair that another is being done.
These truths should be self-evident. This wasn’t your fault, you have a right to be here and to be heard.
I’m sorry. That’s all anyone should have ever said to you.
it's been....god, 4 years thereabouts since I sent this ask. And I dunno if you'll see this comment, but your response was what i needed that day. So thank you.
