author & journalist
Malcolm X and Maya Angelou in Ghana, 1964
If we teach women that there are only certain ways they may acceptably behave, we should not be surprised when they behave in those ways.
And we should not be surprised when they behave these ways during attempted or completed rapes.
Women who are taught not to speak up too loudly or too forcefully or too adamantly or too demandingly are not going to shout “NO” at the top of their goddamn lungs just because some guy is getting uncomfortably close.
Women who are taught not to keep arguing are not going to keep saying “NO.”
Women who are taught that their needs and desires are not to be trusted, are fickle and wrong and are not to be interpreted by the woman herself, are not going to know how to argue with “but you liked kissing, I just thought…”
Women who are taught that physical confrontations make them look crazy will not start hitting, kicking, and screaming until it’s too late, if they do at all.
Women who are taught that a display of their emotional state will have them labeled hysterical and crazy (which is how their perception of events will be discounted) will not be willing to run from a room disheveled and screaming and crying.
Women who are taught that certain established boundaries are frowned upon as too rigid and unnecessary are going to find themselves in situations that move further faster before they realize that their first impression was right, and they are in a dangerous room with a dangerous person.
Women who are taught that refusing to flirt back results in an immediately hostile environment will continue to unwillingly and unhappily flirt with somebody who is invading their space and giving them creep alerts.
People wonder why women don’t “fight back,” but they don’t wonder about it when women back down in arguments, are interrupted, purposefully lower and modulate their voices to express less emotion, make obvious signals that they are uninterested in conversation or being in closer physical proximity and are ignored. They don’t wonder about all those daily social interactions in which women are quieter, ignored, or invisible, because those social interactions seem normal. They seem normal to women, and they seem normal to men, because we were all raised in the same cultural pond, drinking the same Kool-Aid.
And then, all of a sudden, when women are raped, all these natural and invisible social interactions become evidence that the woman wasn’t truly raped. Because she didn’t fight back, or yell loudly, or run, or kick, or punch. She let him into her room when it was obvious what he wanted. She flirted with him, she kissed him. She stopped saying no, after a while.
—Harriet J on Another post about rape (via archenemies)
Oh my god, this. All of this.
(via one-bite-at-a-time)
Oh look, another way in which women are royally fucked by constructs of femininity.
(via whynotshesaid)
(via jessicavalenti)
Color Blind: A Memoir
By Precious Williams
Bloomsbury, 241 pp., $24British journalist Precious Williams upends every expectation about race, class, gender and ambition in her startlingly powerful memoir. It opens in 1971, when, at the age of 10 weeks, the author is deposited by her tall, aristocratic Nigerian mother into the arms of “Nanny,” a tiny 57-year-old white woman in Sussex. (Upwardly mobile Africans often privately boarded their children with rural U.K. whites.) Though loved by Nanny and her family, Williams spent an odd, unsettled childhood in a white housing project, always struggling to find her place as a black woman and to understand her absent, glamorous mother in London. Of note: Williams’ subtle, devastating depiction of early sexual abuse. — Deirdre Donahue
