Michaela Coel called out over comments on 'responsibility' and sexual assault

[stumbledin]

Quote:

It doesn’t mean that Arabella [the protagonist of IMDY] is responsible for what happened to her. But she can find, within that scene of when her drink was spiked, she can find herself not being powerless.

When you dare to face that, for me personally, I gained some sort of power. I don’t know why. But when I allowed myself to just look and go ‘And there was the minute when perhaps I was looking somewhere else [...] and that’s when it happened’.

It doesn’t place any blame on me. But to shield me [...], to shield anyone from that moment is to keep someone as an infant.

You’re making them only see it from a two-dimensional view, where there is a victim and a criminal, and the criminal did everything and you did nothing, everything happened to you.

But that is such a powerless way of seeing life. And I don’t know how much we can grow, I don’t know how much we can find our power if we’re only seeing things that way.

www.indy100.com/article/michaela-coel-i-may-destroy-you-sexual-assault-responsibility-9615436

(I haven't watched the series as I just thought it was going to be another tv drama relying on a sexploitation plot, though understand that it now being said to be a feminist / me too drama)

Well, it's what happens when some survivor's explanations of our coping mechanisms get misapplied to broader things like rape prevention - which is entirely down to stopping men, any men, believing they are ever entitled to a woman's body in the first place and scaring the living shit out of them with serious sentences and genuine social oppobrium for raping.

It's a category error, but like fuck will I be blaming women for talking about how we cope with rape. I will blame the men who rape and those excuse, minimise and act as rape apologists.

If I heard this from anybody else I would be compassionate, caring. But I cant be that way to myself. I blame myself, maybe not so much for it, but for my reaction.

Same here I blamed myself for a long time. I had to forgive myself, and accept that it wasn't my fault.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Something awful happened to me at work a while ago, to do with my female biology, nothing that was in my control, and I didn't feel bad about that, but I was cross with myself for feeling ashamed afterwards and not being able to shrug it off as nothing, like I felt I should be 'stronger'. We feel how we feel. We react how we react.

@KatyaZamolodchikova

I see it as if we are entirely powerless, this could happen any and every time we leave the house. Or at home. All the time. We are never ever safe. And while I haven’t experienced rape I have experienced a very scary sexual assault, and understand as FloralBunting put it, the dark terror that you are always utterly vulnerable. If I can tell myself that there was something I could do, pinpoint where it went wrong, other than he is a rapist I can give myself the power to be confident enough to go out again and live life without the debilitating knowledge that it could happen again at any time and there’s nothing I can do about it

That’s how I see it.

This is a good way of putting it, I think.

We do. We beat ourselves up over what we could have done in a way I don't think men often really do.

Sorry that was meant to be in reply to Floral

If I can tell myself that there was something I could do, pinpoint where it went wrong, other than he is a rapist I can give myself the power to be confident enough to go out again and live life without the debilitating knowledge that it could happen again at any time and there’s nothing I can do about it

I understand that and, yeah, who am I (or anyone else) to criticize how a woman copes with an attack on herself. I did not intend to criticize this as an individual's coping strategy. (I might adopt it, too, in case of an assault.)

At the same time I feel, instilling this consciousness into women systematically (by assaulting them pretty much systematically, as happens across cultures, apparently as a corner stone of patriarchy), results in a culture, where the behaviour of women is heavily policed and self-policed.
It is like the social contract that women have with society is blatantly broken on a regular basis, and women still try to renegotiate the contract and act like under the new terms it will be upheld, because acknowledging the alternative is too horrific to contemplate...