They Said This Would Be Fun

by Eternity Martis

  We let abusive men get away with violence against women because society has enabled it. These men believe they’re entitled to women, and turn to violation when that entitlement is met with rejection. So they rape us, hit us, ridicule us, shoot us, stab us, kill us—for not acknowledging their whistle or a “hey baby.” For refusing to give out our number, for not smiling. For saying no. In the past few years, thousands of women have been killed or injured for saying no. Girls have been killed or injured by their classmates for saying no. These boys and men use aggression and intimidation to scare us, stalk and blackmail us, sending our intimate photos out for the world to see. They send threatening messages and texts to keep us in line. They try to loosen us up with spiked drinks and date-rape drugs so we’re too helpless to say no when they pry our weakened knees apart. And if we do give in to sex, if we do consent to any of it, then we’re bitches. Sluts. Whores. So, whose lives are actually ruined in the process?

  Trying to speak out about rape culture, about violence against women, only begets more violence against women: doxing women for speaking up on social media. Sending death and rape threats to women and their children. Harassing their families. Stalking them. As we protect boys and men, they protect themselves behind the anonymity of the internet, in the space our excuses have created. And we dare say to women is that they must have done something to deserve it.

  This is rape culture, and this culture has created monsters.

  We teach children that there is a world that lurks in the darkness under their beds at night—the gap between humanity and unspeakable horrors. We tell them it isn’t real. But it exists. We live it every day.

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  The best part about our weekly V-Day meetings was seeing each other. We had a little nook in the lower level of the University Student Centre, a colourful room full of inspirational quotes by powerful feminists and queer activists, rainbow flags, anti-racist handouts, and information on sex, consent, and sexuality. We hung out there in between classes, or to enjoy a quiet place to study.

  On one occasion, a group of us were waiting for our third-year Women and Violence course. This week’s topic was sexual assault and the legal system. As we sat on the grey L-shaped couch, we talked about rape and reporting.

  It’s not easy to get your case to court.

  There are so many factors.

  I wouldn’t even try.

  I did try—they didn’t believe me.

  We all spoke about the complexity of being a woman and being believed; about the ways that sexual assault always seemed to be our fault. Then one of the women interrupted.

  “Who here has been sexually assaulted?” she asked.

  One by one, nearly every woman in the room raised her hand. I looked around, my heart racing as I contemplated raising my hand too. For so long, I felt that I didn’t deserve to talk about it, that I should’ve known better, that I would be judged because it happened in the context of a relationship. I felt I didn’t have the right to seek support in the aftermath, despite the assault sinking in and destroying my self-esteem and relationships for many years to come; despite it creating a legacy of self-destructive coping mechanisms I would later seek therapy for. But these brave women were also—some for the first time—speaking out despite their fear. I slowly lifted my arm, my fingers curling weakly into my palm, the last woman to raise her hand.

  The women started to share their stories. It was a cousin, a guy she had just met, a soph, a friend, a stranger, a boyfriend. It happened in their beds, in their homes, in their dorms, at a party. It had been weeks, months, years. For some it went along with other forms of abuse. Many blamed themselves for not saying no, for being too drunk, for being in love. They commiserated about the black-and-white nature of sexual assault, the shades of grey they tried to make sense of. Many felt worried that the police wouldn’t take them seriously, that the people around them wouldn’t know how to react, that his life would be ruined if they told.

  We cried for one another and for ourselves, for the ways we had all internalized this guilt, the way it had changed us, ripped away our trust and replaced it with terror and betrayal. It was a shame we carried with us, a heavy burden on the wrong backs, and yet there was no one able to help lighten the weight—until now. We told each other it wasn’t our fault. And when the women had all finished speaking they looked at me, their eyes still wet. It was my turn.

  It had been two years since I left my secret behind in my dorm room, a stain in the carpet for the next unsuspecting woman to walk on—negative energy that a first-year would try to clear away with the rest. But now it was no longer my secret, or my shame. Like the women in this circle, I had paid for the protection of my abuser, and the cost of that silence had ravaged my health, my sense of self, and my peace.

  “I was raped in my dorm room by my boyfriend. But it didn’t start then.”

  In this tiny concrete room of unspeakable tragedies, I had never felt more safe.

  The Necessary Survival Guide for Token Students

  The Token Mall-Goer

  WHAT TO EXPECT: Department Store Susan will follow you around, and so will her henchmen security guards. And if you don’t buy something, you will do your damnedest not to look guilty when you exit. You will have an irrational fear that the alarm will go off from something you’ve worn 262 times already, and you will make sure you don’t put your hands in your pockets for any reason, not even to answer that phone call from your mama. White employees will play uncensored versions of their favourite hip-hop songs when their manager’s away, but will turn it off when they see you. The store clerk will immediately direct you to the excellent sales on the rack at the back of the store. Lucky you.

  HOW TO DEAL WITH IT: Tell Sue that if she’d like a more satisfying career following you around as your personal assistant, you’d be happy to let her manager know. Learn your rights in case police or security try to pull some unlawful BS. Afraid of the alarm? Wait for someone else to walk out at the same time. Channel your inner Oprah—you will not let anyone take you to the rack of shame, even if that’s all you can afford (nobody puts Baby in the back rack!).

  the

  end

  of

  the

  rainbow

  Fourth year had just begun when Zadie told me she was thinking of transferring out of Western.

  “I just can’t take it anymore,” she said. Her body caved in like a deflated balloon.

  Zadie was tired of all of it. The drunk white girls who followed her around bars asking to touch her hair; the white guys who harassed her and the men who wanted to “experience” her; the stares of curious people and the anti-Black slurs it seemed she heard more often than her own name. She dreaded the racially inappropriate comments from students who claimed they meant no harm, and the uncomfortable whiteness of her Ph.D. program. Her health was suffering too: she was so depressed and anxious about living in London and being a student at Western that she couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning.

  I told her to just hold on; it seemed more tragic to uproot herself in the final year of her degree. She had met some amazing people, women who were going through it with her—we would support her. Was it so bad that she couldn’t wait a few more months?

  Though I knew better than to defend staying here a minute longer, I didn’t want to acknowledge that this place had the power, after everything we had already been through, to claim a Black woman’s university career. But Zadie was gone before the end of the school year.

  On numerous occasions, I had also considered leaving Western. I had weighed all the pros and cons: the hardships that I experienced on a daily basis and the new and possibly more challenging discomforts of switching schools. I had told myself that it wasn’t that bad, even as tears of dread filled my eyes at the sound of my morning alarm. I tried all kinds of remedies to comfort myself—eating, drinking
, watching movies, taking long baths, working out, writing—in the feeble hope that I’d find some interest and enjoyment in life again. Yet, like Zadie, I walked through campus hunched over in invisible pain, unsmiling and unhappy, in a constant daze of misery. I had made several great Black female friends over the past few years, whose presence helped me keep my sanity, but I missed Malcolm. Over text, he told me he was thriving at his new school. As a Black man in his new environment, he was feeling pretty good about his choice to leave Western.

  Following the move out of the home that Taz and I shared, I threw myself into whatever I could: performing in and directing plays produced by V-Day, writing more on the weekends, and improving my grades so that I could graduate on time and apply to Master’s programs.

  Towards the end of third year, I walked by a flyer in the Women’s Studies department advertising a new course called Black Women’s History in Canada. It was the first time it was being offered in years—like many Afrocentric electives at the school, the department hadn’t been able to fill the minimum seats needed to move it forward. This course was a deliberate and significant attempt to introduce more knowledge about Black women’s history into the curriculum. I signed up, hoping it wouldn’t get cancelled again, and waited for the class list to fill up.

  On the first day, I walked into a room full of Black women and other women of colour. I looked at their faces—excited, nervous, relieved. They smiled at me as I took a seat. My muscles slowly untightened, my jaw unclenched. My sharp edges, the ones I carried as protection, that refused to let anyone get close, blurred into unfamiliar smoothness. A gentle yet rapid stream of emotion flowed through me: I was home.

  The course was the meeting spot we had been desperately searching for. We laughed and cried and shook our heads and eye-rolled at stories of each other’s experiences of racism, sexism, and student life. We bonded over our mutual exotification stories—the dreaded “I never _____ with a Black girl before”—and other Black-girl woes that plagued us while living in London: online dating, sexually racist pickup lines, nightlife, classroom politics.

  We talked about ourselves, our relationships, our identities, our homelands. We were angry for one another and we cheered on each other’s successes. Our experiences of objectification and exotification were alarmingly similar, as were our responses: rage, sadness, humiliation, distress, shame, depression, resilience. There was no one here to tell us we were exaggerating, that we were just bitter, that our anger and pain was unjustified. For three hours every Wednesday, we were finally able to put down the heavy burden that we had been carrying on our backs throughout the week; and just be in good company.

  The consensus was that we weren’t getting what we needed at Western—academically, emotionally, spiritually. The class was a quiet place to vent and a site of communal encouragement and commiseration. We were shoulders to weep on, bodyguards for one another, voices of reason, familiar faces on campus.

  There is something life-changing about Black female friendship, especially during a dark time. We know pain, but we also know it won’t last forever. We know the transformative power of joy and laughter, the strength of sisterhood, the support of a good “mhmm” or an empathetic head nod. We know that Black female friendship can keep you alive, that sisterhood is essential to survival. But sisterhood is not just about building an unbreakable support system of boss bitches; it’s possibly the only space where Black women are allowed to safely be the opposite—soft, emotional, vulnerable. It’s also a space to celebrate our successes and triumphs, and to admit that the burden of acting the part of the unbreakable Black woman is crushing us.

  “Black Girl Magic” is a term that was popularized in 2013 by CaShawn Thompson to celebrate all the dopeness, beauty and strength, that encompasses Black women and womanhood. Yet however glorious Black Girl Magic may be, it can trap us—once again labelling Black women as superhuman and impervious to pain. Black Girl Magic should be about celebrating our resilience—but also about admitting when things aren’t right. Sisterhood gives us a place to talk about both.

  We also need sisterhood because our collective reality is, at times, grim. Some research shows that Black women are the most likely group to be unarmed when killed by police. We are more likely than white women to experience sexual assault and inter-partner violence. Black trans women face disproportionate rates of violence and homicide. Black mothers are more likely to die in childbirth.

  While Black women are leading or founding social justice movements around the world—from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter—that also uplift white women and Black men, Black women rarely get the same support for our causes in return. This is why sisterhood is essential for Black women’s survival: irrespective of physical or digital space, it’s a place for Black women, for once, to be for and about ourselves.

  Others depend on our anger to move their causes forward, yet when we are angry for ourselves, our anger is unjustified. So often, Black women’s anger is weaponized against us. From TV and film tropes to politics, the legacy of the Angry Black Woman has trivialized Black women’s rage, painting our expression of pain as aggressive, hostile, unwomanly—or worse, as comic relief. While being an angry or emotional woman is trivialized as hysteria, for Black women it’s dangerous.

  Black women have to hold it all together for everyone else and ourselves—an expectation based on the historic misconception that we can handle taxing physical and emotional labour. Yet if the weight becomes too much, if we try to seek out emotional support like therapy, we’re weak. If we talk about it publicly, we’re entitled. Unlike our white female counterparts, being righteously angry can cost us our jobs and relationships, and possibly our lives. And unlike white women, our tears get us nowhere. Despite systemic and institutional oppression and discrimination, Black women are never allowed the chance to feel our anger, even when it stems from pain and sadness, even when working through it can be transformative and healing.

  The past few years have been marked by women’s rage, stemming from the #MeToo movement, which was started by Tarana Burke, a Black civil rights activist who used the term almost a decade before actor Alyssa Milano. Women are standing up against a patriarchal system that reinforces that women are inferior, deserving of being violated, left out, paid less, pushed out. But who is afforded rage? Who are the voices on the front lines who are praised and uplifted, and whose voices are still on the margins, scolded and shamed for also wanting their moment to be angry?

  Black women’s expressions of rage have been stifled for more than a century, from the first-wave feminist movement that cast aside the work of Black women for a mainstream white women’s campaign. They secured property and voting rights for themselves while Black women were banned from demonstrations or forced to walk behind white women. Even today, Black women who speak up to share their #MeToo stories have been met with silence and skepticism from white female survivors (Black women have been sexual assault activists for centuries). Stories about police violence and anti-Black racism against female-identified people don’t get the same kind of virality or outrage as their male counterparts, sparking the hashtag #SayHerName. We use our rage to push forward the causes of everyone else—uplifting other women, standing up for the rights of Black men—but in return, who’s angry for us?

  Society calls Black women bitter for expressing rage over social, political, economic, reproductive, and gender discrimination, but celebrates white women’s rage as iconic and inspiring. Where white men are entitled to their rage—which is still considered non-threatening, even as it has caused some of the worst tragedies in North America in the past few years—Black women are punished for thinking they have a right to it. So we internalize it, leaving that rage with nowhere to go but darting around inside us until our health and well-being are destroyed in the chaos.

  Internalizing rage can be detrimental, but vocalizing it can be transformative. Women’s collective rage is both a healing and a politic
al tool, and it’s one that’s brought attention to the actions of powerful men like Brett Kavanaugh, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Jeffrey Epstein. It’s birthed new movements and protests: Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, SlutWalk. For Black women, coming together with other Black women and voicing that rage can change the world.

  Professor Brittney C. Cooper talks about this at length in her book Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. She details how institutions, from law enforcement to churches to the family unit to the White House, have played a role in limiting Black women politically, sexually, and economically, and how that has caused us good reason to feel angry. She encourages Black women to strategically express their anger and rage over their own oppression in order to make a change. Most of all, Cooper says, when Black women express their rage—their superpower—it benefits everyone.