Fight Like A Girl

by Clementine Ford

  The actions outlined in ’Code of Silence’ were angrily defended by numerous fans as being little more than ‘group sex’, while producers and critics of the behaviour were (frighteningly) declared ‘prudes’. But the following statement from Clare, evidently ignored by the aforementioned self-fancying libertines, really spoke to the heart of why this sort of coercive pack incident is closer to assault than the consensual group sex people explained it away as. Of the men who congregated either to fuck her or to enjoy watching each other fuck her, she said: ‘They never spoke to me, they spoke just to themselves, amongst themselves, laughing and thinking it was really funny. When you have sex with someone, it’s nice and you talk and you touch and this was awful. This was nothing like that.’

  If group sex of any kind was occurring in a New Zealand hotel room that day, it was between men who had been conditioned to view women like Clare as little more than dehumanised fuckholes for them to humiliate, degrade and ultimately bond over. That there can be a defence of this kind of behaviour at all is utterly appalling. That it occurs in a society whose citizens vehemently denounce references to rape culture as part of some kind of nefarious feminist plot to demonise men is infuriating.

  The rape apologists who thrive in a rape culture like to argue that there is no black and white when it comes to sexual assault, only shades of grey. And because of this, we’re expected to direct the majority of our care to ensuring men aren’t falsely accused or even punished for making ‘one little mistake’. (As an aside, consider how quickly dominant social narratives rush to excuse men from making ‘little mistakes’ like raping women, while insisting that women be forced to carry easily remedied pregnancies to term because we have to accept the consequences of our actions.)

  But shades of grey about consent can be very easily resolved by establishing whether or not your sexual partner is present in the situation, enjoying themselves and being afforded a dignity that recognises and respects their humanity. Coercive sex might not be exactly the same as perceptibly violent assault (and it’s certainly harder to punish, despite what people fear), but it still relies on one partner asserting control over the other and denying them the sense of respect and value that should be fundamental to any consensual sexual encounter (regardless of whether or not it involves strangers, whips, alcohol or football teams). Degrading someone against their consent is really easy to do if you’ve already dehumanised them in your head. Informed consent therefore needs to move above and beyond simply securing a ‘yes’ to a place where we constantly ask ourselves, ‘Am I treating my partner with dignity? Are they enjoying this? Are they present and equal? Are we experiencing this together?’ Contrary to popular opinion, this won’t wrap bedrooms in never-ending reams of bureaucratic red tape.

  Up to now, responsibility for preventing sexual assault has always fallen to women and girls. We are instructed on how to modify our behaviour to avoid attacks and danger, lectured about the clothes we wear, the social activities we participate in, the men we choose to speak with or flirt with or even be mildly cordial to, whether or not we drink alcohol and to what level, the streets we walk down, the houses we go into and even the sexual situations we opt to wade into. When a woman is sexually assaulted, a forensic examination of her actions commences almost immediately while the person who assaulted her is sidelined almost to the point of being considered a stationary object observing her demise rather than an active perpetrator causing it. He becomes little more than a fence post or low wall she was silly enough to walk into because she wasn’t paying proper attention to her surroundings. Even when some kind of cognitive awareness is ascribed to him, it’s never positioned in a way he has control over. She made it happen, with her short skirt and drunken flirting and long hair and suggestive breasts and the fact that she was breathing and alive. What else was he supposed to do? And what else did she expect?

  Of course, the truly audacious thing about this repetitive, condescending instruction is that girls and women already know how fucking unsafe the world is for us. We begin the long and painful process of knowing it sometime before we pass through the veil of childhood and into adolescence, before we’ve even begun to know ourselves. We learn it in the way we’re told to close our legs when we sit down, in how we’re suddenly not allowed to wear certain kinds of clothes, the ways we’re told that boys who pick on us ‘probably just have a crush’ so we shouldn’t fight back. We get an uncomfortable, creeping sense of it in the looks strange men start giving us on the street and the conversations we hear about how so-and-so ‘dresses like a slut’ and ‘should take more care’. We feel it – literally – in the ways our bodies end up being touched and handled and groped, and this is made worse when our complaints are met with suspicion or laughter or urges to ‘just ignore it’.

  And this is just the beginning. Eventually, we absorb this message of danger so completely that we start to accumulate a bag of tools to protect ourselves. We learn to carry our keys between our fingers when we walk to our cars or front doors at night-time. To listen to music with one ear and footsteps with the other. To cross the street to avoid walking past a man or a group of men, even if it’s just to prevent what soon becomes the inevitable expectation that they’ll say something about our bodies and what they want to do with them. We become stoic and stony-faced when these words are thrown at us, pretending we didn’t hear these men commanding us to show them our tits, suck their dicks, sit on their faces, lose some weight, stop being such a stuck-up fucking-cunt-bitch-didn’t-want-you-anyway-you-fat-whore, to go fuck ourselves, the laughter the laughter the laughter. Stare straight ahead, keep walking, cross the street, arrange your keys between your fingers. Notice as another small part of yourself is ground down.

  We know how unsafe the world is for us. We are like cliffs staring down at a raging sea, battered by winds and salt and spray and unable to wrench ourselves away from the supposed inevitability of it all. But though we may recede under the relentless thrashing, still we stand tall. The world and all its angry currents cannot break us, no matter how hard it tries.

  Still, this erosion of the spirit is a bitter pill to swallow. Because despite knowing the dangers that face us, we’re not allowed to talk about them. Patriarchy and the men favoured by it are empowered to tell women what we ‘must’ do in order to stop Bad Things from happening to us. When we take that narrative back for ourselves, we’re further victimised as troublemakers, man-haters and fantasists. We’re demonising men with stereotypes. We’re overreacting to perfectly normal and reasonable situations. We’re making it up to get attention. We’re destroying men’s lives with our false accusations and destructive attitudes. And worse, our storytelling makes them feel bad.

  The irony is almost too great. How many times have you shared an experience of harassment or abuse only to be told you’re being too sensitive? That the man or men involved were probably just trying to be nice to you? How many times have you been chided for talking about sexism because ‘not all men’ are like that? How many times have you had men straight up tell you you’re making something up, that your fanciful story needs to be filed in the Things That Never Happened box, that it just doesn’t even sound right because they’ve never seen anything like that happen or done it themselves and they would never be friends with men who behaved that way anyway?

  And, in light of all that, how many times have you decided to stay silent about your experiences because the thought of being disbelieved or ridiculed or told off is simply too heartbreaking on top of all the other pain you have to shoulder because you were born into a world that is unsafe for you, but only in the ways that men are trusted to define it?

  Yeah. Me too.

  But enough is enough. I won’t be silenced about this shit anymore. I’m sick and tired of men telling me that I don’t properly understand the world I live in – the same world that tells me I have to be careful and make sensible choices, but that rears its head in outrage whenever I make mention of the role that men play in making
this world unsafe for me. Men cannot have it both ways. They can’t instruct us on how to behave to avoid danger from Bad People and then get outraged when we decide that this might include them. They don’t get to pick and choose the folks and situations we have a responsibility to avoid while demanding we flatter them with our unquestioning trust. If men don’t like the idea of being treated with suspicion by women on the streets, they should be working with feminists to bring an end to the rape culture that assumes men can be provoked by something as harmless as a short skirt or a late-night kiss.

  The bandaid solution of making rape prevention the responsibility of women doesn’t address the core issue of how and why it keeps happening. Telling a woman to protect herself from rape doesn’t stop men from raping, especially not when the woman is also trained to doubt her own intuition and play nice at all times. Isn’t it amazing how fiercely the world will police women and our behaviour just to ensure men are allowed to grow as wild and free as they please?

  This is social law in action, and it is so pervasive and so rampant that many people still struggle even to see it. It’s how two boys in a football town like Steubenville, Ohio, who dragged an unconscious girl from party to party, sexually assaulting her and at one point even urinating on her while people watched, can go on to be defended by almost their entire community because their young victim was a ‘slut’ whose choice to get blackout drunk destroyed the promising lives of two young boys. Indeed, it’s why you can have a major news network refer to the shattering of those ‘promising lives’ when reporting on their sentencing – as if the real victims here were those boys forced to answer to their actions, and the real criminal the girl demanding they do.

  It’s how teenage boys in Auckland can start a group called the ‘Roast Busters’ in which they proudly and publicly boast of getting girls as young as thirteen drunk so they can sexually assault them. It’s how that same racket can go on for more than two years, despite the group being known to the police, because some of the boys involved were the sons of influential men.

  It’s how boys and men have no problem telling girls and women who piss them off that they deserve to be raped, that they should be raped, that they want to be raped, that they’re only angry because they’re too ugly to be raped.

  It’s how boys and men who say these things can then turn around and claim they were only joking, that women need to lighten up, that they’re just words and they don’t mean anything.

  It’s how, in the western world, the only time these particular white men seem to give a fuck about women is when violence against them is being perpetrated by men of colour. There is a deep and rich fucking irony in the fact that the same men who vilify Islam for ‘forcing’ women to wear hijab or demanding four male witnesses be present to prosecute a rape charge or consider women inherently less important or powerful will also turn around and tell women to stop dressing like sluts if they want to avoid being raped, demand that adequate ‘proof’ be provided if a woman ‘accuses’ an ordinary bloke of assault and ridicule women whenever they feel like it because hey, it’s just a joke.

  Look at the way the conservative trolls crawled out from under their bridges to picket and protest groping attacks in Cologne on New Year's Eve in 2016 (attacks that, while horrifying, also turned out to be hyper-inflated and in service of perpetuating xenophobia against refugees). Many of these men suddenly outraged by street harassment and groping had documented histories of vehemently denying the problem of sexual assault on US college campuses, not to mention terrifying obsessions with violently trolling women on social media. These are the same men who claim false rape reports are a significant enough problem that we need to protect our sons against them, the same men who claim domestic violence is exaggerated and that the real victims are the men whose children are stolen from them by lying mothers. And we’re supposed to believe they give a shit about women’s safety on the streets? No. What they really mean is: get your filthy foreign hands off our property. Nothing spurs a bigot into false feminism quicker than the chance to flex their racism against men whose behaviour, were it being perpetrated by white men, would be dismissed as either a bit of a lark, the fault of alcohol or provocative women, or a fabrication entirely. Because women lie. And when they aren’t lying, they’re overreacting.

  The world is unsafe for us girls – but so is acknowledging that. And this is the final way that rape culture operates: by telling us to take definitive action and then providing us with zero options. We cannot win the game that they’re forcing us to play.

  Here’s the truth about Adrian Bayley and Jill Meagher.

  If he had decided it was simply too risky to pursue her down Hope Street that night, she might have ended up safely at home with the all-too-familiar sense of being shaken but not stirred. She would have questioned whether or not her fear was misplaced and unfair. She might even have felt a sense of guilt at being automatically suspicious of his intentions, so trained are women to give men the benefit of the doubt.

  But do you want to know what would invariably have happened later?

  If Jill had taken to social media to tell this story, or even shared it with a group of friends at the pub later – this story of the creepy man who’d stopped her on the street and insisted on talking to her, the man to whom she’d been polite because self-preservation and self-doubt make remarkably compatible bedfellows, the man whom she could have sworn doubled back to talk to her, although she couldn’t be sure and maybe she was just being paranoid – she would have been met with at least one person who chastised her for being too quick to judge. Someone who wasn’t there, but who decided anyway that her interpretation was wrong or irrational. That Adrian Bayley was just a lonely guy who was probably looking to pick up or talk to a pretty girl with a nice smile and can he really be blamed for that? Some guys can’t help it if they’re socially awkward, and they don’t deserve to be unfairly maligned just because they summoned up the courage to speak to a pretty girl on the street.

  And Jill, being a woman living in the world, would have absorbed that message, the millionth in a series of messages about how she couldn’t be trusted to interpret her own experiences, and she would have started to doubt it herself. Did it really happen like she remembered? Was he really that bad? Was she being unfair or unkind? The next time, she wouldn’t be so quick to judge. She’d deny her instincts, ignore the alarm bells ringing in her head and tell herself she was being silly. And she’d smile and act nice and try to protect the man in front of her from having to feel any of the discomfort that was currently coursing through her.

  Of course, that’s if it even happened at all. I mean, it kind of sounds like she’s making it up or exaggerating. Something about it just doesn’t make sense.

  You know?

  –

  14 –

  IT’S OKAY TO BE ANGRY

  Before you reach the end of this book, I need to tell you one of the most important things I’ve learned in my thirty-five years on earth as a human-being woman person. In fact, if you take just one message away from this book then I hope it’s this one, because it might just be the cornerstone of everything. This is one of the hardest lessons for us to learn, but I urge you to embrace it. May it fill your heart and soul, may it keep you warm at night and may it carve itself in letters large across the breadth of your whole mind.

  Are you ready?

  It is okay for you to be angry.

  I know. Revolutionary, right? All these years, people have been calling you ‘angry’ as if it’s a shameful thing, when what they really mean is ‘your refusal to be contained frightens me’.

  It is okay for you to be angry.

  It’s okay for you to be angry because you are a human being who lives in the world and you are goddamn allowed to be angry about some of the things that happen here. It’s okay for you to be angry because you have blood, bones and a beating heart and these things are messy and powerful and full of life. It’s okay for you to be angry because being angry
is not illegal, no matter how much it might make other people uncomfortable. It’s okay for you to be angry because you’re a woman and the world has given you a lot of fucking shit to be angry about.

  It is okay for you to be angry.

  To a world that instructs women to be passive and conciliatory, anger is a terrifying thing. Anger is unpredictable. It’s uncontrollable. People are afraid of women’s anger because they are afraid of confronting its source – inequality, violence, degradation, dehumanisation, misogyny. If you don’t want to accept that these things exist, you won’t want to accept the validity of women’s feelings of rage about them.

  And so it becomes much easier for those invested in the status quo to do what they’ve always done when faced with the ‘extremity’ of women’s emotions, and that’s pathologise them. Women who express anger are recast as mythically terrifying creatures. Hysterical banshees. Harpies. Fishmongers’ wives. Squawking, screeching, shrieking she-beasts making the world unpleasant for everyone around them. We are grotesque, monstrous mountains of rage, engorged and swollen with our own irrational delusions about the state of the world.