On Policing Survivor Stories: Line, Meet Sand

Going to leave this here before it gets lost on Facebook so I can come back to it whenever I need to.

What (the always amazing) Sneha R says:

"Nidhi Razdan and others who are minimizing some of the experiences related on Twitter are being myopic.

A "bad date", the gender neutralizing term used for the Aziz Ansari story, most often stems from the man's behavior. And it's not "unpleasant", as the words suggest, but weighted by inequality.

The man rarely feels unsafe no matter what the woman's behavior. This thinking, that draws a line down a page and divides "SH" and "not SH" into two columns, is as linear as it gets. And rather like the simplistic thinking men have on the subject. It completely fails to take millenia of inherited emotional trauma into account. And is incapable of the slight complexity of thought it requires to hold both criminal cases of rape+harassment and narrative cases inside the same head. This is a kind of masculine, black & white thinking that sees only externalities like the police, the law, physical force during a rape, or persistent molestation despite a loud "No".

Women have been brought up hearing a louder "No" when they try to say a loud "No". We live in two worlds: the external world that linear thinkers understand, and the underground inner world that we've been forced into by millenia of conditioning. If you wonder why we don't say no aloud, rest assured that we are shouting it in our underworld even when we have no voice above ground. What looks like a "bad date" to those who either have the privilege of living and speaking out above ground or have cut themselves off from their own underworlds as a coping mechanism, is anything but. There is a whole range of things that men can say and do that the law and the common understanding of SH would not recognize, but that create great ripples in the unseen world where we process our emotional trauma. Unless you are a woman who is in touch with her trauma, you can only understand this as empty words. Yes, most men wouldn't get this. But women who have cut themselves off from their own underground rivers are terrifying, because they are like a tree without roots and they cannot stop themselves from, in their perceptions and words, disconnecting other trees from their respective roots.

This is how internalized misogyny operates. Because the day a rootless tree acknowledges that "bad dates" are a misnomer, she will be forced to get in touch with her own traumatic underside. And so so many cases of lack of empathy for others boil down to lack of empathy for oneself. Each of us has a different ratio of underground living to above ground living, based on social privilege and emotional trauma. Some of us are finally able to make our voices and stories heard above ground, in the daylit world. How sad that we should be pushed back down by one of our own, in a symbolic attempt to push their own traumatized selves back down into silence.

Any idea of gender justice must stand the test of the internal, underground world that women have been forced to occupy because of trauma. Its laws and its language are paramount if we want to truly make the external world livable for women.”

By
Sneha Rajaram. Find more of her writing here. She's said to be unable to write badly, and so much is owed for this piece. ♥️