I think, like a lot of women this week, I have been struggling with how to feel. I feel anger, I feel pain, but I also feel numb, because, like all women I know, this isn’t a one-off case. I think of the rugby associations whose initiations include spiking women. I think all the way back to high school, where I was given a number in association to my attractiveness, determining my value to the whole year group. I remember thinking at the time, ‘how is it that boys determined our social standing – popularity – based on our appearance alone’. I think of how sad I was at the time because I got a lower number than some of my friends. I remember later, after two years at a different school, being told by one of those boys: ‘Kate, you look great with tits and an arse’, like that was an acceptable comment, a praise even.
I think this highlights what went wrong at Cornell University; yes, the horrors those seven men are accused of committing are unspeakable. But what scares me more are the 43 men who stayed silent. The complicity. The unwillingness to break from the crowd, or, even more terrifyingly, thinking that it is normal. For every man who does something terrible to a woman, there will always be people who enable it to happen. The loud jokes that get more and more inappropriate; the less likely they are checked, the more they think it's acceptable.
Not all men, but it is always a man. Not all men, but every woman has a story to tell. Not all men do awful things, but there is always a man to defend them; if a man doesn’t, then the system will.
My rage grows by the day, and I don’t know where to put it. With every new story, with every new experience I have in my life, I wonder if we will ever have true equal rights, without a man flippantly saying equal fights in response.
I see and experience misogyny almost daily, and it's not the men who see it; it is the women who do. So I guess what I am asking, no begging, from men is to listen. Listen to the women in your life, listen to your friends, and learn. Learn to identify the signs, as all women do. Don’t ever let it escalate. Don’t be one of the 43. Don’t give these people power in your silence.
Written by Katherine Bradshaw