So long as I have to live in fear, I will live as a feminist.

Aimee Pavitt - 20 Oct 17

I’ve been thinking a lot about #MeToo. In fact, it has been keeping me awake at night. It has dredged up incidents that I had made insignificant and made me realise how conditioned I must be to have filed them under “Moments Best Forgotten” and moved on. More power to me for having done so, of course. I showed resilience, I bounced back, and I didn’t “make a fuss”. Nevertheless, if #MeToo as shown me that I am not alone, it has also revealed how my complicit silence has enabled this behaviour and made it a leitmotif in all of our lives. So maybe it’s time to speak up and out.

Over lunch with my partner, who is a film maker and actor, we discussed the Weinstein case, and he told me about his own experience with harassment in the film industry. Then I started telling him about mine in the less glamorous setting of everyday life:

1) The time I was running (in broad daylight) along the Canal St. Martin in Paris and a man grabbed me and then he and his three friends pushed me back and forth between them for a laugh, I suppose. I was wearing a hoodie and jogging bottoms at the time, and the very fact I feel compelled to mention this is a testament to how a victim’s first concern is that she’ll be asked if she “deserved it.”

2) Then there was the doctor who told me to remove my bra and felt my breasts when I went to see him about a sore throat.

3) The time in Portugal, when a friend and I were surrounded by men who wouldn’t take ‘no’ (actually “fuck off!”) for answer.

4) The time my date got annoyed because I spoke to another man and literally knocked me (with a blow to my face) from the table in front of a room of wedding guests, none of whom did anything to help me.

5) The time at a party, when I was asleep in a bed, and some guy came in and put his hand down my pants, and was then disgusted to see I had my period and so wiped my menstrual blood all over me (I was too terrified to move the whole time and will never know who it was).

6) The gynaecologist who violently inserted, what felt like, half his arm and refused to stop when I told him he was hurting me before announcing that I “should expect some pain or shouldn’t get pregnant.”

7) The obstetrician who used to kiss my hand after giving me an internal examination.

8) The anaesthetist who told me to “stop whining” as I sobbed and shrieked in pain during a miscarriage.

9) The university date that wouldn’t take no for an answer, so in the end, I gave in.

10) The politician for whom I once interpreted, who put his hand down my bra and asked me to dinner when we were alone in a lift.

11) The man who cornered me on a family holiday in Morocco (I was 13)  and told me at length how he could marry me and “give me babies” because I had breasts” (barely!).

12) The man who followed me up the stairs to my apartment, only to turn and run when he was (thankfully) met by my boyfriend.

13) The man who changed pavements and directions to follow me at three o’clock in the morning down the Boulevard Voltaire (and the taxi driver who pulled up and saved me just as my attacker grabbed the back of my shirt).

14) The man in the metro who told me I was “tasty” and asked for my number, and then spat at me and shouted “Whore!” when I didn’t give him the time of day…

This list is non-exhaustive and does not include the gratuitous cat-calling and “Smile, luv!” comments that I -and every other woman on the planet – get daily, sometimes several times a day.

Yeah, no wonder I’ve been awake at night, it’s like list of macabre Friends episodes “The one where she is abused” (again!).

It occurred to my partner then, that #MeToo isn’t about that one time something happened (though once is enough!); it’s about all the times.

There has been some discussion about whether or not #MeToo is forcing women to reveal private and intimate facts about their lives. Maybe. I don’t think that by listing them I will feel better or worse, but I do think that by listing them, I can illustrate my point here, which is this: I feel really strongly, that while men do get harassed, and while men are subject to abuse, I would argue that they are not subject to the insidious, normalised, everyday (and I mean EVERY DAY) abuse that women are: the “mundane” kind that we don’t can’t talk about, and don’t even mention because it has become so normal that it isn’t even considered “a thing.”

I want to make this point so badly, because when I, and many of my friends, shared the status that said “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote “Me too” as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem”, several men in my life reacted with incensed superiority, so unaware are they of this reality. And, I can only assume they are unaware of it because I never told them.

I have a mantra: “Say what you mean, mean what you say and ask for what you want.” I started to think about these men and their disapproval of my #MeToo, and I wondered if all those times I was assaulted, harassed or molested, if I had put my mantra into practice, what would have happened? I’ll never know, but I do know why I didn’t risk it at the time; I didn’t risk it because “This man did X,Y,Z  to me, and I didn’t want him to, and now I want to bring him to justice” would have branded me a trouble maker, a hussy, or damaged goods, and I knew that. I knew that because of what happened to women like Monika Lewinsky, among many, many others.

Here’s an example: When I was in high school, I worked in a restaurant as a waitress and one night, the manager pushed me into the walk-in freezer and then pushed his lips against mine. I was horrified and walked out and never went back. He, however, had the nerve to call my parents’ house the very next day (they didn’t know him) and tell them how unreliable and irresponsible I was for not having turned up to work; It NEVER crossed my mind to tell my parents about this incident, because I assumed I was wrong, and I was grossed out and ashamed (#15).

So my mantra, aimed at maintaining honest and healthy relationships in all areas of my life, cannot be applied in a situation where one is physically, financially or socially weaker than one’s opponent (women are, as a rule, smaller and earn less – and men are often in leadership roles i.e. a position of power), because the weaker party will always lose. You can brandish David and Goliath fables all you like, but in nature its survival of the strongest. “But brains can beat brawn!” I hear you say. Well, that is why we sentient and wise beings developed the law, right? Maybe. In theory, but for those brave enough to step up to the bully, to go to the police, to call a lawyer, further trauma lies ahead: questioning, intrusive physical medical examinations, newspapers, people calling you a liar and threatening you…so in the end, it’s just not worth it. We conclude that WE are just not worth it. In every single one of the examples given above I had to consider the following:

1) Who saw it?

2) Why should anyone believe you?

3) Do you have the strength, time and money?

4) Was any harm really done?

5) Is it worth it, then?

Ah, worth. If we are to believe what Loréal (among others) tells us, we are worth shiny hair (but only on our heads, everywhere else it must be removed lest we look like a man); we are worth our childbearing features (breasts and hips); we are worth the lipstick that will draw attention to the orifice in our face, and the heels that reflect the curve of our spines when in the throes of orgasm. If we fail to comply with these rules of a woman’s worth, we are considered ugly, unkempt, unfashionable, undesirable, or worse still FEMINIST!

I suppose I shouldn’t have been so surprised to see that my #MeToo drew such hostility from some male friends, acquaintances and family members. Comments like: Why not men too? Why are you only talking about women? Surely you mean ‘If every PERSON…’? simply convey the reality, the very reason #MeToo exists: most men have no idea of the extent of this behaviour.

I did worry, though. Had my passion overridden the facts? Maybe I should rein it in.  I started to think that I had grossly underestimated the amount of men who get harassed and assaulted, and that I was wrong not to have seen my error. Had I got caught up in a hashtag and jumped on a bandwagon? Just because I feel strongly about something, doesn’t mean others can’t too, and it’s great if a hashtag can get everyone talking, right?  Then I read Jim Beaver’s tweet and I felt relief. Huge relief, because those digs about excluding men, about revoking their right to suffer out loud just didn’t sit right with me, and not because I was worried I was wrong, but because I felt that the point had been missed; that this is a gender issue and that this is why feminism is still a necessary movement, philosophy and mind-set.  Here’s a fact: No woman has ever committed any such crime against me. That is not to say that women do not commit such crimes, but they are definitely not in the majority. Beaver’s tweet articulated that which I could not:

 […what seems to have taken the world, at long last, by storm in the past few days is most prominently an issue for women, because while many men have been victimized in such manner, the painful truth is that we live in a world where women are *expected* to put up with such things, where it is so commonplace that we managed to elect a president who brags about such behavior. (The clear likelihood is that had the current occupant of the White House been caught bragging to a TV reporter about molesting men, he would never have become president. But since it was just women, well, boys will be boys.)]

Jim is right. We are expected to put up and shut up, so we do, for fear of being branded an annoying, whiny, trouble-making, attention-seeking feminist.  Well, if that’s what it takes to eradicate this oppressive and violent pattern, then so be it. So long as I have to live in fear, I will live as a feminist.

Image taken from @All_Womankind on Twitter

Aimee Pavitt

Writer, translator, conference interpreter, voice-over actor, student of psychology, and proud mother of Reuben-Miles.

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