It Starts With Us.

You're probably wondering what else could possibly be said about the recent shootings at UCSB and the #YesAllWomen movement that has followed. It seems that the internet has blown up with it – for the past few days, women have been taking to Twitter and Facebook to lay bare their stories, bloggers on both side of the argument have been writing opinion pieces, and news outlets are picking out every nugget of a story they can about Eliot Rodgers and the women (and men) who had the misfortune of crossing his path. 

I don't want to focus on Eliot Rodgers at the moment. The lives he took and his heinous manifesto looms over our heads, of course, and colors the discussion, but the shooting at UCSB is only the most recent in a long list of crimes against women at the hands of men. So many of them got precious little coverage, if any at all. UCSB was the straw that broke the camel's back for most of us, because it isn't an isolated incident. A scan of the past couple of years brings scores of stories of women who have been raped, abused, beaten, harassed, bullied, and killed. These are literally just a tiny handful of the ones I saw this morning after a quick Google search: 

• This teenage girl was gang raped. Her classmates then decided to bully her about it, driving her to suicide. 
• This woman was drugged and raped by her own husband repeatedly for years. Her rapist will serve no jail time, and the judge actually told her in court to "forgive him".
• This young woman was stabbed to death after saying no to a guy who asked her to prom.
• These guys assaulted a 13 year old special needs child and were initially allowed to continue going to school with the girl they assaulted before serving jail time.
• This teenage girl sustained injuries from a beating by her own father after dancing with a black classmate at her quinceanera.
• Some popular high school guys raped a fellow student, and the entire town went out of their way to cover up evidence and defend their "promising" futures, while bullying and shaming the victim.
• This young woman was beaten to death with stones and bricks by her own family, in front of a crowd of onlookers, for marrying a man they did not approve of.
• Over 200 school girls in Nigeria were kidnapped and allegedly married off to rebels after daring to get an education.

These are literally just a tiny handful. A TINY handful. Just a small sliver of the reality that women face not only in this country, but everywhere in the world. This excellent post on Kinja talks about how so many women don't share their stories, or don't feel justified in talking about them, because "so many women have it worse". Society loves to reinforce that, too, because it keeps us from talking about what happens to us. It keeps us bottling it up inside, not confronting it, not making our abusers and attackers and harassers responsible for the way they treat us. It isn't always just fear that keeps us quiet. Sometimes it's survivor's guilt, sometimes shame, sometimes just the overwhelming fatigue of knowing you're fighting a losing battle. 

For my own part, I've experienced enough of this shit to write a hundred tweets. At my first job I was propositioned (at fifteen years old!) by my manager. He reprimanded me for a huge mistake I made and then suggested he'd "let it go" if I agreed to date him. I quit on the spot. At my next job at a big box store, I had a stalker. He came through my line multiple times per day and took my picture with a polaroid camera. Some days he'd give me the pictures. Other days he'd just make vulgar gestures. My own friends and family had to stand guard for me sometimes because my bosses didn't take it seriously. It was only after another customer saw him harassing me and called the police that they decided to take action. I was in an abusive relationship for years, and suffered horrendous mental and physical abuse by a partner I loved and trusted, who manipulated me into staying with him because he was mentally ill and "nobody else cares what I'm going through". After I finally wrenched myself free from him, I suffered from major depression for months because I felt so guilty for leaving him. Ten years later, that guilt still rears its ugly head from time to time. 

Those are just a few examples of my own reality, and honestly, they pale in comparison to so many other women. I'm just your average slice of the daily experience of being a woman. 

Enough has been written about MRAs and the Red Pill Movement and the new, dangerous #NotAllMen countermovement. I don't have anything to add to that discussion, except to throw my voice in with the chorus of people condemning it. It is ludicrous postulating, if you ask me. Yeah, guys, we know it isn't ALL men. We KNOW. Instead of trying to convince us that you aren't the big bad baddie we're talking about, why not instead take some time to educate yourself, and explore the reasons why these things happen to women. If you're a good guy, which I'm sure you are, then throw your voice in with ours and start helping us. Start condemning your fellow men for the rapes and beatings and murders they commit. Stop turning your head and pretending you don't see it. Stop making our stories about you. They aren't about you. 

That's where I stand on "not all men". But let's talk about women for a minute.

Women make up 51% of the population. We aren't the minority anymore, despite still being treated as such. We participate, whether we realize it or not, in the patriarchal culture that allows these travesties to happen. You do, and I do. We are brought up from little girls to actively participate in our own subjugation. 

Found this on Pinterest. Love it. 

Have you ever called a woman a slut or a whore? Have you ever judged a fellow woman for the way she dresses or behaves around men? Have you ever scoffed at an abused woman and wondered why she stays with that guy? Have you ever judged a parent for the way they allow their daughter to dress? Have you ever joked about getting out a shotgun when your daughter starts dating? Have you ever made fun of a friend's weight gain, or told her she was "too skinny"? Have you ever automatically assumed a woman "trapped" a man when she became pregnant? Have you ever blamed "the other woman" when a man was cheating? We don't even think twice about these behaviors, but they all contribute to misogynist culture, and we participate in it just as actively as men do. 

When I was in high school, I had a close friend who was a little more dating-savvy than my other friends and I. We were kind of in awe of her, because she was dating regularly and having sex and seemed to draw guys in like a magnet. We were envious of her, and it wasn't always pretty. I can still remember certain friends who would call her a "ho" behind her back, or joke with guys she had slept with about how she was "loose". I never participated in making fun of her, because she was a closer friend to me than she was to the others. But I was still complicit because I never spoke up for her, I never defended her. I stayed quiet and conflicted, because I didn't want the vitriol to be aimed at me. 

Our senior year, my friend went to a party with her ex-boyfriend, who she was still on friendly terms with. She trusted him and felt comfortable around his friends, all of whom were guys and girls she knew well. She told me she was going to the party with him because she was hoping they might get back together. She drank too much because she was nervous. At some point her drink was spiked. Her ex-boyfriend led her, stumbling and barely coherent, into a bedroom and placed her face down on the bed. She was then gang raped by him and several of his friends while unconscious. Witnesses at the party said that several girls were present, and stood around laughing while it happened. After it was over, they stole all her clothes and left her lying in filth on the bed by herself, while they all went out to another party. She woke up alone, drugged, with only a vague idea of the violence that had been done to her. She had to drive herself home at 3 a.m. wrapped in a bed sheet. Her parents punished her for going out. 

As for my friends? They weren't horrified as you would imagine. They scoffed. "What did she expect?" One of them said to me. "You act like a slut, you get treated like a slut."

Still, I stayed quiet. Because I was a coward. 

You may not have a story like this, but undoubtedly you have a story about a woman you've slut-shamed, maybe without meaning to. Someone you've made fun of, someone you've judged or criticized for her choices. Someone you've blamed for her own abuse, or someone you've looked down on for her circumstances. It would be a challenge to find a woman who hasn't done this at one time or another. It doesn't mean we're bad people. It just means we're victims in another way - victims of our own conditioning. 

I once ran into an old friend at a bar, and asked her how her best friend was doing. "She's dating some guy," she told me over drinks. "But it won't last, because she's such a whore. She fucks guys to get love and then they don't love her and she's single again." She was talking about her own best friend. This is the way we talk about each other. This is the way we view each other. 

We aren't responsible for our own rapes, our own abuse at the hands of our partners, or the way society treats us. It isn't our fault that we get paid less, or are expected to handle all the domestic duties, or have to keep up with an impossible standard of beauty and fitness to "keep a man". It isn't our fault that the second we come into the world in possession of a vagina, we're viewed as "lesser". That is not our fault, and I would never suggest it is. 

But we can do something. While taking charge of this movement, while breaking off our chains, we can also break off the chains of other women. The women who might not be strong enough to do it themselves. The women who may not realize they are imprisoned. The women who we've written off, "othered", looked down upon for their choices. 

Tina Fey said it best in the movie Mean Girls. 

Let's keep having the #YesAllWomen conversation. I hope it continues on forever. I hope we never go back to sitting complacent while these atrocities continue. The time has come for us to all stand up and say "No, I do not accept this. I will not be a casualty anymore." 

Let's remember, though, as we fight the good fight, that "charity begins at home", so to speak. We have to be good to our sisters. We have to be inclusive of their needs, open to their truths, and willing to embrace their differences. No two experiences are alike, and nobody is better or worse than another. A unified front is so much more likely to succeed than a divided one. It starts with us.