Being Nice

Apologies if this is a bit incoherent: English is my second language, and I wrote it after having a very bad panic episode and can’t bring myself to edit it.

I never met my great-aunt; she was murdered when my grandmother was child. Her boyfriend simply broke down the front gate, grabbed by the hair and shot her brains out. He claimed what was called “legitimate defense of one’s honor”, a legal device in Brazilian law that meant he was within his rights to kill her as she had soiled his reputation. There were no charges.

My sister was stalked by a former boyfriend. He took one picture of the front of our house every day for about six weeks, and then posted them on Instagram, no captions. He was never threatening or scary as far as I know. He didn’t have to. It was enough. My sister got bad grades that semester, and her mental health was affected. She was paranoid and nervous for a long time. He was a nice, middle class boy. There were no charges.

I was followed by a man once. I was at my university, and he was a visiting student with nothing to do. We struck a conversation, but I wasn’t interested. I expected him to leave eventually. Instead he stayed, and as I tried to go to class or talk to friends, he followed me, sat by my side, hands on my shoulders, a proximity I couldn’t bear. I remember his smell. It was awful, and it got everywhere. It followed me home after I managed to get away from him. I sat on the shower in a panic, trying to get the smell off me. He was a normal boy. I never saw him again. He probably did this to other women. That’s just what men do.

My family isn’t unfortunated or cursed; we are just women. All women in the world have gone through these things, or they know of women who have been stalked, harrassed or killed by men in their lives. Women learn to shrug these things off. And if you are a woman online, then you should learn to be absolutely nonchalant about men openly debating how it would be like to rape you. I think I usually do that fine. Today I couldn’t.

I had a panic attack today after seeing a prominent lefty twitter account tweet a picture of a female MP on a train. I don’t want to @ this account, or make this a point about them particularly. I am pretty sure nobody wants to actively harm such politician in a physical sense. And I understand there is a point about her having institutional power and he doesn’t. The problem is the wider context in which a man tweets a picture of a woman: it’s the context that the majority of women live in, where they have no power and men have all of it. I can’t pretend I enjoy the Labour Party forever war, and I find the talk of deselection depressing. But seeing a man tweet a picture of a woman in a train hit me. There’s a subtext there that I am sure this account did not mean to say, but they did. It reminded me of the experiences I go through as woman in the world. This account meant to hit out at political rival; it hit at me instead.

Likewise I’ve seen women on the left being constantly patronized and dismissed by daddy-knows-best centrists accounts. These men might think they are just dismissing specific women; what they are in fact doing is reminding women that they should not speak out, that they are clueless little girls, that as women they do not have the right to think.

I understand men might sincerely not know this, so I am asking as well as I can: be careful. You live in a context where you are seeing as fundamentally more of a person than most women. Online abuse isn’t targeted; it reverberates. Thousands of women with stories you can’t possibly imagine are online, and they will read your words, and they will get caught on the crossfire. It’s not just your faction of women; it’s all of us. All us get stalked, patronized, underpaid, vilified, mistreated, called cunts, threatened. Some of us are killed. I know you personally don’t mean to do this, I know you would never. But sexism still gives you the benefits of being considered more human than us. In any case, even if it were possible to just harm the bad women, that would be fundamentally wrong. It’s not worth being the man that centrist/leftist women fear.

I almost don’t want to publish this; I feel like ultimately it will lead to nothing. Twitter is in many ways a sick enviroment. We validate being rude and awful to each other. I am to blame too, I have done this many times. You don’t even have to look very hard to see it, I think, and I don’t really have anything else to say other than I am trying to do better. At some point though, someone somewhere has to try. This is me reaching out to men specifically, but maybe to other women too: Let’s try to be a little better.

I have to believe people do want to try.

Julia, from twitter

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Some may like a soft Brazilian singer; but I’ve given up all attempts at perfection.

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