As I’m sitting down to write this article, I find myself feeling incredibly tired. More than tired, I’m exhausted. My bones are tired, my voice is tired, my skin is tired. I am tired of the walls that I have to put up when walking down the street and getting catcalled on my way to class, I’m tired of being told to smile by men I just don’t exist for, I’m tired of comments like the one Eric Trump, the son of a presidential candidate, made when he proudly declared that his sister was too strong to allow anyone to sexually harass her. And I’m really, really tired of hearing people invalidate women who come forward with their stories. I’m tired of people like Blake Wentworth who abuse their power and continue to try to silence women when they speak out.
Worst of all, I’m tired of the fact that Blake Wentworth, the accused harasser, isn’t the root of the problem. I’m tired of the culture that Blake Wentworth allegedly bought into, the culture that gave him the false sense that he could inappropriately touch his pupils and call them by sexualized pet names. I’m tired of the fact that from the time women are just young girls, they are taught that if they show too much of their shoulders, they will be a distraction. I’m tired of the female body - the beautiful, natural, life-creating female body - being turned into a sexual object.
The idea that a woman (or a group of women) must be lying about any form of sexually charged trauma is not a new one. The invalidation, the victim blaming – it’s a familiar narrative that we’ve all heard before. With the “great athletes” and the “good students”, suddenly the descriptors of the perpetrators become more important than the hurt they caused the survivors. We surround ourselves in this myth of the good person, the idea that sexual assault and harassment is only perpetrated by the evil stranger lurking in the night, and not by the Average Joe. We tell ourselves this, and then when women speak out, when they use the voice that was previously robbed from them, they are met with distain, disgust, and disbelief. They are told they are just doing it for attention, as if anyone would do this for attention.
No, I take that back. I am always reminded by “devil’s advocates” of the fact that every once in a while, someone will come forward with a false story. The public statistic is 2-8% of reported sexual assault cases are, in fact, false. But this percentage has a dark little secret: the truth is, in some counties in the United States, including our very own Alameda County, if a survivor speaks out and then decides that she cannot go through with the case – that it is too painful, too drawn out, too not on her side – then the only way for her to exit the situation is to falsify her own claim.
Let that sink in for a moment.
We live in a society where survivors of sexual trauma who are not being adequately supported by the system that is supposed to protect them must invalidate their own experiences just to escape another potential trauma.
Blake Wentworth was a professor at one of the most prestigious public universities in the world. He was supposed to help women like Kathleen Gutierrez, Erin Bennett, and Nicole Hemenway thrive in academia. He was supposed to foster their passions, inspire their academic goals, and help them grow as students and as people. Instead, he is accused of violating that trust, trying to take away their autonomy, and now is punishing them for using their voice, the voice that he was supposed to be encouraging them to use to change the world.
There is so much sad irony in this whole disgusting ordeal. Sometimes I get so tired I can almost convince myself that the structures that we surround ourselves with are too absurd to be truth. I tell myself that the cat-callers are voices in my head and not figures on the street. I convince myself that ignorant comments are just fictional tales that no one takes seriously. I get myself to hope that one day people won’t call them the “great athletes” and the “prestigious professors” but respect the implications of the hurt that they caused, regardless of the other qualities they may decorate themselves with.
But no matter how incredibly tired I am, I wake myself up. I remind myself the realities of the world in which I live, and I push myself to continue to work to deconstruct the institutions that threaten the safety of the female body and the validity of the female voice. Kathleen Gutierrez, Erin Bennett, and Nicole Hemenway are continuing to fight in the face of legal abuse by their alleged harasser. That is because this system, the one which has delegitimized the right of women to exist safely, has turned women into warriors. It's turned our skin into armor from fighting off the unwelcome gazes we don’t ask for; it's coated our throats in steel after years of going unheard. I am tired, but I will not let that stop me from trying to create change. I will not let that stop me from speaking out about the people like the accused Blake Wentworth, people who cause so much hurt because they genuinely believe that it is their right to do so. It is not. It never was, and it never will be.
