Girl, Assaulted.
– On how sexual violence is never consensual.
I am too nice.
Or rather, I am not too nice in a general sense but instead too nice to one particular sex, because apparently social, or should I say sexual, etiquette now requires that the pleasantries of daily life be applied only to members of one’s own gender. Well, cheers for the warning…
Yes it is true, whilst quietly ambling my smiley way along the path of life I appear to have unwittingly stumbled across the final frontier of sexual politics. Allow me to rewind: the year 2012 has seen me land myself in some rather sticky situations – and not the kind I (granted, optimistically) anticipated or desired. Contrary to my usual lot in love, i.e I’m planning the wedding and they still haven’t accepted my friend request, I have recently been on the receiving end of unrequited feelings; and pretty it ain’t.
So how did this terrible tragedy worthy of Ancient Greek theatrics come to pass? Well I happened to make myself some rather wonderful male friends. Sounds great so far, doesn’t it? We exchanged many a joyful smile, a happy tale, feelings of mutual understanding cemented over a pint here, or a cup of tea there. All appeared to be good with the world, until BAM, it all came falling down in epic catastrophe when they went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid like ‘I love you’ (relating me and them to the beautiful Robbie Williams and Nicole Kidman is a bit of a stretch but roll with it). Now, of course I totally understand that feelings cannot be controlled and I for one have always advocated honesty in all situations, however I was then made to feel guilty when such emotions were not reciprocated. Oh yes, I was charged with the most depraved crime of all: leading someone on. I, my friends, was a bitch. Ouch.
Now, forgive me if I’m missing something here, but this is surely less an issue of a ‘naïvely’ friendly girl like I and more the problem of some hitherto uncharacterised breed of man which appears to be platonically inept. A smile is not an invitation; a cup of tea is not a contract. If I were to interact in the same way with a woman not a question would be asked. A penis changes nothing.
In layman’s terms: I don’t want to sleep with you. I don’t want to marry you. I’m just being nice.
Jeez.
But, this is where things get serious… because such stories do not always end there, and as I have learnt the hard way these seemingly harmless situations can take a turn for the sinister. I was sexually assaulted just over a month ago, and the most ridiculous thing about it all is that it has taken me a month to convince myself that someone putting their hand down my leggings and ripping off my underwear constituted a sexual assault. Such is the peril of accepting casual sexism as ‘a part of life’. All I knew is that walking home that night I felt so ashamed; not ashamed of what had happened but ashamed of myself: that I was someone who invoked such behaviour, that I was she who was deemed the type of girl who would accept such infringement of my bodily agency.
Dazed and confused I couldn’t speak of what had happened to me, but I knew that I had to confide in someone. Alas, naïve little utopian me could never in a million centuries have foretold the response I would get:
‘You should have seen it coming, you’re just too friendly’
And so I shut up and boxed up, racked with self-doubt and even guilt, determined to never talk about it again. But I couldn’t forget, and suddenly in the abyss of the grey area I was awakened by the black and white that had been screaming at me all along. This act was NOT consensual.
‘You should have seen it coming, you’re just too friendly’.
‘She was wearing a short skirt, so she deserved to get raped’.
No matter how much a man argues that a woman was smiling at him, batting her eyelids or wearing revealing clothing this will never afford him the right to treat her body as his own, or to assume her desire for sexual contact. Our society’s craving for hurly-burly macho men has for too long been complicit in the validation of sexual violence; a sexual violence that is all too often concealed under the mask of ‘joking around’.
And herein lies the age-old conundrum: how can a woman stand against an issue that is so often dismissed as simply an – if slightly pervy – act of fooling around? How is a woman supposed to lambaste an institution which makes jokes of wolf-whistling, bra un-doing, arse groping and breast ogling and which defends itself against its discontents with a rather (un)colourful vocabulary of “frigid”, “slut”, “cock tease” and all those in between? Can such women really be blamed for their hesitation in seeking justice when a line so visible and logical is so frequently blurred on a patriarchal whim?
But we know that these men cannot be allowed to go unchallenged. We must hold them accountable for their actions if we are to hold any hope of pursuing a society where all are free, and where violence does not equal power.
So what to do of this problem? … Off with his balls? Hang him from the nearest bridge? Put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his days?
But somehow I feel uncomfortable with this course of action; I know that this brutality cannot be forgotten but I’m at a loss as to how I can regain peace of mind after such a violation of my sense of self.
And so instead I pick up my pen. It may not be the perfect solution, but it’s a start. One woman slapping a man round the face, however satisfying that may be, will only serve to scrape the surface of an issue which runs deep into the make-up of our society; a society which consistently opts to blame the female in order to deny the crimes of the male. I don’t have all the answers, I wish I did, but I do know that two wrongs can never make a right and that instead we must find a way together to confront this mentality which on a daily basis endorses the defilement of women in the name of the oldest alibi in the book: ‘banter’.
The wise and beautiful Kimya Dawson once sang:
‘I want to bash your head in with a crowbar, but the cycle of violence has to end somewhere’.
Charlotte Sefton
exeposedev 