#MeToo maybe

The thing about #metoo movement is…I feel like I can’t contribute to it. I mean…haven’t all of us has experienced micro sexual assault? No?

It’s just so difficult to perceive it as being abnormal.

I vividly remember when I was groped by an older boy in school. Just once, on the stairs. The stairs lead to the first floor of the languages department. He made a conscious decision to place his disgusting hand …on a young girl’s arse and squeeze it. I do remember the shock and embarrassment. This humiliation.

Or that time I was wearing my favourite strawberry and cherry patterned dress and a guy on the street did that to me. I kicked him. He nearly kicked me back. How dare I fight?

It’s just so hard. Because these insignificant…they were violations for sure, but they weren’t…they weren’t I don’t know…they weren’t enough for me to…Yes, it was horrible and embarrassing and infuriating at the time, but what could I do? What could I do? Say to someone? What can they say to me? It’s not like I would remember their faces. What would someone say? ‘your personal boundaries have been breached by an arsehole, I’m really sorry’ That doesn’t *do* anything. That doesn’t change society.

And, anyway, nothing much happened. I wasn’t raped. I wasn’t tortured, or injured. And there are women out there who had worse – much worse, whom I think people need to listen to.

We went out to a gay club (mostly male) one night, during uni life, ‘we’ being 7 girls and 1 guy, and it so happened that girls had a good time, but the guy got groped. I remember him being shocked. STUNNED. He couldn’t believe, he simply couldn’t comprehend that someone would do that to him. He talked about it for days after. He refused to go that place ever again. And my reaction to it was…why are you surprised by this? Not because it’s socially accepted, not because I approve of this, not because I don’t like the guy, not because it’s appropriate behaviour, not because…because it’s just something that happens. It is something I’ve already dealt with… what’s the big deal?

You have to…just…you can’t stop, you can’t dwell on it, you have to move on, you can’t question your self-worth, you can’t rationalise, you can’t analyse your behaviour because any assault on your boundaries is an assault, it is unacceptable. Since you can’t spend any time thinking about it to preserve your psyche…that’s why you can’t talk about it.

I’ve read somewhere that people blame victims because they want to distance themselves from the fear of ending up being a victim, themselves. Distance themselves from the fear that empathy creates.

You can’t talk about it, you need to move on with your life. In a way you simply have to… accept it. Put it in your “just another shitty thing men do” folder and move on. That’s the fucked up thing, not what happened physically to me, no, it’s is how I have accepted it as “manageable personal space violation of sexual nature”. “Manageable humiliation”. How utterly fucked up is that.

#MeToo