I have so many stories.
I have so many stories about people crossing my boundaries.
And I have so many stories about myself, allowing those boundaries to be crossed.
I am afraid to tell these stories. I am afraid of the wrath, certainly, but I am more afraid I’ll be dismissed. I fear that I’ll be blamed or I’ll seem weak. Just read The Humiliation of Aziz Ansari in The Atlantic, and tell me a reaction like that wouldn’t discourage you from sharing your story. And, this feels ridiculous to say, I fear that my experiences aren’t “bad” enough to tell. Because some stories are considered “important additions to the present conversation” and some stories are “just regrettable interactions”.
Humans, by nature, categorize things (ST Fiske, SE Taylor, Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture, 2013). It is a natural tool that our brains use to store huge amounts of information in an efficient and effective way. Take our understanding of sexuality, for example. First, there was “homosexual” and “heterosexual”, you were one or the other, and of course, one of them was considered more acceptable than the other for a variety of unfounded reasons, so they were placed on a vertical hierarchy. Then Kinsey came along and suggested a spectrum, ranging from “heterosexual” to “homosexual” (Kinsey Reports). Many people that learned about this could integrate it into their understanding, because it’s still a simple categorization with a nice visual, and the vertical hierarchy remained. Now, we have expanded our understanding of sexuality by applying more and more labels outside of that spectrum: asexual, demisexual, pansexual, etc. I can tell people that I am a queer sapiosexual and that seems to provide them some comfort: it may be vague and broad, but it’s certainly better than no category at all, because it still places me somewhere on our vertical and horizontal scales.
So, of course, we categorize our traumas. There is sweeping trauma, like historical trauma, war, natural disasters, and there is individual trauma like military trauma, sexual trauma, neglect. These labels are necessary, for legal and scientific reasons. I do not deny that we need them.
However.
We have placed our traumas on a vertical hierarchy. We have decided that some traumas are more traumatic than other traumas. We have done this because we can’t help it, and because we must cope somehow; the world’s atrocities cannot be measured, and so we set about trying to measure them.
Long before #metoo, there has been a hierarchy of sexual trauma. Some traumas are “rape”, some are “assault”, some are “harassment”, some are “murder”. You don’t need me to tell you which ones are “better” or “worse” than others, you already know. When I list our current monsters – Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, Aziz Ansari, Louis CK, etc. – you’ve already decided which are “the worst”.
I can hear your retorts: this is what a justice system requires. And yes, you’re right, the law requires precision. But this is not about the law. The law should not dictate our ability to empathize, grieve, and resist – if anything, these should be dictating the law.
This is about our perceptions of and reactions to the stories that we are hearing. This is about our inability to hear these stories without grading them on a scale of “trivial” to “catastrophic”. But, we do not all experience our traumas on this scale, based on their “objectively” perceived magnitude (K.E. Cherry & S Galea, Resilience After Trauma, 2015).
By sheer dumb luck, I have not encountered any Weinsteins, but I have encountered a thousand CKs and Ansaris. For me, the hundreds of tiny interactions that, each time merely left me feeling a little icky, have snowballed into a monstrous psychic cataclysm. Another person may react differently. It took almost ten years of dating for me to realize that those unpleasant interactions should not be happening, that my body, my time, and my space are, in fact, mine. It’s taken even longer to understand that my pain, my trauma, is real. Trauma does not require a certified “catastrophe” in order to plague us.
Grace’s encounter with Ansari may seem like “just bad sex”, but it’s far more complicated than that, and we cannot measure what one violation feels like in comparison to another. Some of us feel more deeply than others. Some of us are more capable of speaking out than others. Some of us know what we want more than others.
All our stories are painful. All our stories are worth telling. Quieting some stories because they are “not as bad”, and shouting other stories because they are particularly horrific, restricts our ability to empathize with each other and move forward. All monsters are worth identifying. George Wickham’s petty manipulation (Pride and Prejudice) and Voldemort’s sinister cruelty (Harry Potter) are both important insights into humanity’s capacity for cruelty. Every single one of the #metoo stories we hear now are important facets of the behemoth that is Patriarchy. None of these stories depict women as meek or unable to defend themselves, they paint a sweeping picture of socialized docility versus socialized aggression. None of these stories ought to erase any others, they all expand upon the same story, and it is a story that needs to change.
It is certainly easier to fall into our categories – to ignore the pain that comes with acknowledging and processing our own traumas – than it is to feel each other’s pain, collectively. It is easy to blame myself for ending up in potentially dangerous situations. It is easy to tell myself that the things I’ve experienced were insignificant, that there’s nothing to question, that unwelcome fingers and tongues inside me is “just bad sex”. That is all easy. That is what we have been doing for centuries. But this is not going to be easy. If we want systemic change, it is going to be uncomfortable. It’s going to force us to reckon with ourselves – our own biases, our own flaws – first. We are going to have to empathize with all the stories, no matter where they rank on our hierarchy, and that means we’ll also have to share the hurt.