On being too clever to pick a side
“Men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them.”
“Women have no idea how much men hate them.”
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
What do these quotations have in common?
1. They’re all by women.
2. They’re all depressing.
3. They are all, let’s face it, a bit bloody crass.
Catchy though they are, such slogans are sorely lacking in nuance. Come on, Atwood, Greer, Angelou — don’t you want to sound a bit more mysterious? You don’t see Judith Butler or Julia Kristeva coming out with lines like this. Anyone would think you actually believed we live in a world of massive power disparities, in which dominant groups actually want to see vulnerable groups dead. Whereas, if you put your mind to being more humble and thoughtful (and ignored all the real-life slaughter), you’d see that — <strokes perimenopausal beard portentously> — things are a BIT more complicated than that.
Or — <strokes burgeoning moustache even more portentously> — ARE they?
One of the problems feminists have to deal with, time and again, is the sheer in-your-faceness of patriarchy. There’s nothing very subtle about rape, domestic abuse, child sexual exploitation, murder. At first glance, you might think this works to our advantage, at least in terms of making the case for why patriarchy is bad. Alas, it turns out, again, that it’s a bit more complicated than that. When male violence is so prevalent, yet also so everyday, so normalised, so excused in so many ways, it’s very hard to be the person who keeps on pointing out it’s happening at all.
I mean, yeah? We know, it’s obvious. Millions of baby girls missing, rape virtually decriminalised, 830 needless maternal deaths per day. Your point?
“Men keep threatening to kill — and in fact killing — women and girls” is just not very interesting or complex. On the contrary, it all sounds terribly basic. Aren’t there more fascinating debates to be had about language and symbols and whether in fact — hear me out on this, it’s counter-intuitive hence super-clever — female people are in fact complicit or even to blame for their own deaths, what with them weaponising their pain by performing being murdered within the cisheteronormative capitalist economy? Makes you think, doesn’t it? Whereas a plain, boring feminism that says “no, I don’t think you threatening to kill me with a machete offers us all a unique opportunity to explore why I am in fact The Man” doesn’t make you think at all. It sounds so painfully obvious it’s hard not to suspect there’s something you must have missed.
Herein lies the road to opportunistic both sides-ism. A close relation to victim blaming, it relieves us of the moral responsibility of bearing witness to the hurt done to others. It tells us we are too clever, too humble, too conscious of nuance, to fall for anything so simplistic as a straightforward victim-perpetrator narrative. On the contrary, it makes a virtue of our bystanding. Those women who are begging you to intervene? They lack your heightened sensitivity, your intellectual discernement, your ability to see shades of grey in a fist to the face.
We do not want to think very hard about the things men do to women and children. At some point, it all acquires the status of myth. Does anyone really believe in the prevalence of child sexual abuse? Or is it in fact some pearl-clutching, what-about-the-children moral panic concocted by radicalised Mumsnet witches? I know which story would play best on social media. I know which one would make me look like some daft hag who gets in a tizz about child protection because her brain has been turned to porridge by years of childcare, rendering her incapable of thinking the very hard thoughts in which her Brass Eye-loving student self once revelled. And I know how powerful the desire not to look stupid is, matched only by the desire not to recognise and challenge those who could really do us harm.
As Judith Herman wrote in Trauma and Recovery, “it is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator”:
“All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.”
The victim is rarely an appealing person. Anger, fear and hurt do not a winning disposition make, a situation which lends itself easily to the “both sides” narrative. The practical, rational desire not to intervene, because it is risky and upsetting, because it aligns one with the messy, disruptive victim, creates a need to see complexity where there is none. If you can position yourself as morally and intellectually superior to those basic types who still “take sides” (how childish!), then you have not only saved yourself the work of serious political engagement, but you can kid yourself that your conscience is clear. And — added bonus — it’s because you’re cleverer and kinder than everyone else!
Asking others for help, or even just validation, in the face of abuse becomes impossible when people perceive it to be an attack on their precious neutrality. The more proof you provide, the more you are seen to be demonstrating your aggression and lack of subtlety. Actual bruises are viewed as a kind of trump card that you shouldn’t be wielding. You are cheating by suggesting you have it worse, by bringing out all that unsubtle, uncomplicated evidence. You are making the people you turn to uncomfortable, bullying them with your infantile requests that they take sides while they — poor, innocent neutrals! — are caught in the middle. Even writing this feels immature. The mature view, the rational view, the nuanced view, is that no one can ever really say what really went on. Deny a person their nuance, and you are launching at attack on a person’s sense of themselves as a good person, as someone who most definitely would intervene if it were needed (but it wasn’t, otherwise they would have done so). How could you be so cruel?
I don’t want to be thought of as a simple, unthinking person who can’t approach topics in a nuanced way. I, too, want to be the clever person who indulges in impressive intellectual acrobatics, especially if it grants me the added bonus of never having to fall on the wrong side of the people I fear the most. I don’t want to be seen as a bully by people who consider themselves too fragile and intellectually refined to take cries for help at face value, instead translating them into personal attacks. I, too, would like us all to get along, but not at the expense of hearing and validating women’s testimonies. I am simply tired of not taking a particular position on an issue — especially, somehow, an issue relating to women’s rights — being treated as synonymous with being more intelligent, compassionate and thoughtful.
It is not hard to over-complicate that which is straightforward, not that intellectually taxing to make an abusive relationship look like some muddy, confusing, overwhelming mess that only a complete idiot would be arrogant enough to claim to understand. Often it is far more difficult and requires far more compassion not to be a bystander at all.