There can be power in being a victim

Recently, Sharon emailed. ‘‘Your latest article is nothing more [than] rubbish,’’ she wrote. ‘‘Stop being such a ‘‘victim’’ and go back to writing journalism. Not all women feel like victims.’’ At that point I was huddled in the corner of a darkened room, cradling myself while rocking back and forth and wailing loudly. Because that’s what victims do, right? We just sit around feeling sorry for ourselves, lamenting our weak excuses for lives and, in my case, getting paid to write about our pathetic existences in national news outlets.

But with Shazza’s words, it was like a lightbulb went off. It didn’t have to be like this. Instead of spending so much time writing about the pain caused to generations of women through systematically sanctioned sexual violence, I could simply forget about it. It was as simple as putting a cork in my own self-pity, manning up, and starting to write real journalism, which presumably doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable.

There’s been a lot of talk of victims lately. In the States, psychology professor Dr Christine Blasey Ford was the alleged victim of sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh, who has now been confirmed as a judge to the Supreme Court.

After her testimony, American President Donald Trump managed to both disparage Blasey Ford and paint Kavanaugh, and by extension all men, as the real victims here. Kavanaugh had been ‘‘brutally treated’’, Trump said. ‘‘It’s a very scary time for young men in America, where you can be guilty of something that you may not be guilty of . . . now, you’re guilty until proven innocent.’’

As The Daily Show host Trevor Noah later opined, he knows many men feel like this. They think the #MeToo movement has ‘‘gone too far’’, and that men are being unjustly targeted.

Trump’s most powerful tool, Noah said, was that ‘‘he knows how to wield victimhood, he knows how to offer victimhood to the people who have the least claim to it.’’ (Never mind that the number of men who have been targeted at all for sexual misconduct remains tiny, and the majority of rape continues to go unreported.)

Let’s just take a minute to consider how being a victim is framed here. American conservatives rendered Blasey Ford’s victimhood as unreliable, flakey, pitiable, performative. Kavanaugh, on the other hand, was a victim to be lauded – stoic, innocent, brave in the face of an unfair attack. He was simply more worthy of our sympathy.

Flipping the script to make the man the hero, even in an alleged sexual assault, is almost too easy. Society doesn’t really like looking at a victim; it makes us uncomfortable. It means we might have to face up to things that we could otherwise continue to pretend don’t exist.

Considering the man to be the victim, however, is much more comforting. Instead of doing anything to challenge the status quo, other men can pat each other on the back, shaking their heads and muttering about how to protect their sons from crazy harpies.

Noah was right to highlight the power of victimhood. In fact, the real strength in the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and assault has been in allowing women, for the first time, to understand it’s OK to own what has happened to them. To see it for what it is.

In the victim-blaming culture we continue to live in, being a victim – especially when you’re a woman – has traditionally held connotations of weakness, of complicity. Of not being strong enough to fight back.

In her book Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape, Auckland University psychologist Dr Nicola Gavey interviews women who still do not conceptualise their rape as ‘‘real’’ rape – because for some, admitting it would also mean having to start considering themselves a ‘‘victim’’, with everything that entails.

Essentially, we are contending with the strength of a patriarchal narrative that would have us deny our sexual assaults to ourselves.

For many of my friends, one of the hardest things about #MeToo has been revisiting moments throughout their lives and realising those incidents – the ones they tried to forget or shrug off as bad sex, as a date being too friendly, as a workmate being a flirt – were actually really, really not OK. That they may have even been criminal.

So what would the Sharons of the world have us do? Go back to pretending none of this happens, to just laughing off an arse grab, to being polite to men who leer at us in public? To being ‘‘one of the boys’’, engaging in sexist banter? To have scary, unwanted sex, to stop making things so awkward?

Hell no, Shazza. I’d rather be a victim. That way, I’m much more powerful.