#IAmNotAfraidToSayIt – Reaction and Results

In my previous post about #iamnotafraidtosayit (#янебоюсьсказати), I shared reasons why I supported the campaign and told my personal story. 

In this article, I want to analyze reaction to the campaign by reviewing some comments I personally came across. They don’t represent a whole spectrum of responses by any means, but they represent common opinions, in my view.

Every public action like #iamnotafraidtosayit is a test for a society. From a big picture perspective what happened was that many members of a society came together and shared evidences of injustice, violence, and humiliation they experienced as members of this society. In a brave and open public act that deserves respect and attention, these people, mostly women, stated a problem, showed its systematic nature, and asked for a solution (in a well-articulated, organized, and non-violent manner, mind you). Now, how can a society respond to this? There are two general ways: (1) to focus on victims of the problem or (2) to focus on the problem itself. And this is where the test comes into play. If a society addresses the problem, it’s a good sign – it means that the society is ready to face the problem and deal with it. If a society focuses on victims, – by blaming them, judging their personalities, speculating about their motives to speak up, trying to “fix” them, or even simply pitying them – well, such society will never solve the problem obviously.

From this simple framework, I’m going to analyze comments I saw and consider representative of a public opinion.

Comment #1. “Ok, we’ve read all your “sex stories” and, honestly, they sound like baby talks if we compare them to stories about real sexual violence and real sexual slavery that are happening in the USA and countries of the EU. How can you write about sexual abuse when you live in one of the safest for women countries in the world?” (Ukraine in this case.)

Perception that you live in “one of the safest for women countries” can be illusory. The fact that you don’t hear much about sexual abuse in your country doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Yes, we hear about incidents of sexual abuse in Germany more often than we hear about them in Ukraine or Russia (my first country), or the USA (my second country), or … (add your own country here). But it’s not because level of sexual violence in Germany is necessarily higher, but because women in Germany report incidents of sexual abuse more often than in other places, and they do so because they feel more confident and safe and because they believe that reporting the abuse will actually lead to prosecuting of the abuser and restoring justice. We live in a world where official statistics of sexual violence can’t possibly be representative of the real scale of gender abuse that’s why there is no point to make any conclusion based on these numbers. The only thing we know for sure about reporting of sexual abuse is that we want these numbers to go up. It’ll be an indicator of a positive cultural change when we finally stopped silenced the problem and started actually dealing with it instead.

Overall this comment focuses on victims and thus failed to address the problem.

Comment #2. “What’s the point to talk about it now? It won’t help you.”

Above all, it’s never late to restore justice. The fact that violence happened decades ago doesn’t make it less violent and less of a crime and doesn’t make an abuser less guilty. Even though these abusers can’t be prosecuted officially according to our current idea of prosecuting sexual assault, making their deeds and their names public is a big step forward toward a social order where sexual abuse won’t be tolerated and where every abuser will be punished.

And secondly, yes, I agree that talking about being sexually abused when she was 10 won’t help a woman to go back in time and get “unabused”. Of course, not. But it will help girls who are 10 years old now or will be in the future to avoid this fate.

Again, the comment focuses on victims and thus failed to address the problem.

Comment #3. “It’s useless to talk about it. It’s better to help these women by providing them with psychological and financial help.”

This position is apparently an official position of the Russian Orthodox Church whose spokesman “urged Russians not to participate in the initiative, but turn to the church instead for consolation.”

Helping victims of sexual abuse is undoubtedly very important. Yes, we need more funds and institutions from where victims of sexual abuse, – men, women, kids, – can get help they need. But again, this suggestion addresses the victims, not the problem. Even if one fine day we helped all victims of sexual abuse, it wouldn’t solve the overall problem because the very next day same people might be abused again. It’s like carrying water in a sieve. #iamnotafraidtosayit is not about helping current victims, there are other great initiatives dedicated to this goal. #iamnotafraidtosayit is about changing the system, changing the culture so we can eradicate sexual abuse in the future.

Needless to say, this comment also focuses on victims and thus failed to address the problem.

Comment #4 is an aggregated comment that contains all sorts of replies like “it’s your sexual fantasy and wishful thinking”, “stop washing your dirty underwear in public”, “it seems like you didn’t have enough and ask for more”, or “you were fooled into telling your story and now you look stupid”. I have no comments on such comments. They are below any level of respect, dignity, or understanding what’s going on. These people obviously are not with us in 21st century.

On the positive side, I saw many comments where men thanked women for sharing their stories because, as men said, they had no idea how much violence women experienced on an everyday basis. This is good because it shows that one of the goals of #iamnotafraidtosayit campaign, namely increasing awareness of the problem, has been achieved.

Comments I haven’t seen but would love to:

1. I’m a CEO of a large (medium, small, startup) organization. I’m sharing information about #iamnotafraidtosayit campaign with all my employees right now. We, as a company, will have discussions and I’ll make sure we will introduce a working and efficient sexual abuse zero-tolerance policy.
2. I’m an educator. I’ll encourage my students to learn more about sexual abuse. I promise to make myself available to guide their learning process and facilitate healthy discussions on this topic.
3. I’m a parent. I’ll talk to my kids about sexual abuse using a language they can understand. I promise to keep my relationship with my kids open and trusting so they can always come to me if they feel any threat.
4. I’m just a person. I don’t see much of sexual abuse in my everyday life and I haven’t been concerned with this problem up to this point. But I have many friends and followers on social media and I’m sharing #iamnotafraidtosayit with all of them because I understand that increasing awareness of the problem will help to solve it and consequently reduce a total amount of violence in the world. Even though I’m not a victim of this particular type of violence, I know that the less violent our world is in general, the safer we all are.

Now, a big question I have is whether campaigns like #iamnotafraidtosayit will be able to solve the problem of gender violence on their own. My answer is unfortunately “No” because, despite being instrumental in promoting the change, they don’t address the root cause of gender violence that lies in gender inequality. There are of course things like impulsive lust, spontaneous aggression, or, after all, a pathological desire to inflict pain and humiliation on other people. But they alone won’t be able to explain such a universal and systematic nature of gender abuse.

Look, for example, at this picture which I found in a “Street Harassment Around the World” article written by Malaka Gharib (the picture was taken in Egypt, but could have been taken anywhere).

Do these boys look particularly lustful or aggressive to you? Do they appear mentally sick or psychologically unbalanced? No. But these boys grew up and live in a society where, if they want to get into “men’s club” and benefit from higher privileges and a better access to common resources available to the members of this club, they have to establish their “men’s status” and prove themselves to be superior to women which is exactly what gender inequality is about. I.e., men, being pushed by social norms and economic reasons, are motivated to maintain social order where one gender is treated as inferior to the the other. And the stronger the social norms and economic reasons are in a particular area, the more motivated men become to maintain the inequality. Violence is the most available tool to submit and degrade others. By abusing and humiliating women via violent sexual acts and assaults, men who don’t have any other resources to establish their men’s status, can still achieve it. Not all men are lustful, aggressive, or pathological rapists, but all men are pushed by existing social order to want to achieve superior to women social status which explains a universal and systematic spread of sexual assault as a means to accomplish it. 

Let’s look at the picture again. What do you see there? What I see is not a snapshot of an individual incident of a sexual harassment, but rather a portray of a whole society where an unhealthy social order makes abuse not only possible, but also encouraged. I see people on this picture not as abusers and abused, but as victims of the same system that doesn’t leave neither abusers not abused any chance to be somebody else. 

And what is the root cause of gender inequality? Well, it is obviously gender, an artificially created concept that we’ve been using for millennia to divide us into two opposing and strictly separated groups. It has to do only with how one of our organs, namely genitals, looked when we were born. Yet we’ve learned to see gender as an integral part of our personalities and believe in it as in an absolute law that governs our life. Meanwhile, a concept of “gender” was created by our ancestors who, facing a rapid population growth, were struggling with an exponentially increasing complexity required to regulate relationship among all these many people. Introducing “gender” that had only two values, “man” and “woman” (and that’s why it shouldn’t be confused with “sex” that has many), helped them to drastically reduce the complexity – instead of dealing with hundreds or thousands of different people, they now had to deal with only two types of them, or two “personas” if we use modern marketing terminology.

Why did our ancestors use genitals to assign people a particular “persona” and not any other organ or body feature like eye color or even a personality trait? I explore this question in “Gender Inequality: Past, Present, Future”.

For now let’s say that reducing all kinds of people to only two “personas” was an enormous oversimplification. Yet, millennia ago, it made sense and served its purpose for our ancestors who didn’t have any other means, like technology for example, to cope with mounting complexity. But now, when, thanks to the colossal progress in technology, we have moved not only beyond a world with only two types of people, but also beyond a world with hundreds and thousands of types of people (aka niche markets), to a world of individualized economy where every person is a person of his or her own type, continuing dividing people into only two groups doesn’t make any sense. Such outdated and unnecessary oversimplification makes us subjects to unproductive limitations and counterproductive opposition and destruction (like, for example, gender violence that equally destroys human potential of both abusers and abused). We are like people who live in a world full of colors but picture it with only black and white (no gray!), because centuries or millennia ago these were the only colors they happened to have and the only way they knew how to picture their world. Now these people have all possible colors and shades of colors in their possession, but, for no good reason, they still picture their world with only black and white (and no gray!) thus robbing themselves of the richness of the real world.

In conclusion, existence of gender as a dividing factor between people is a key enabler and a root cause of gender inequality which, in turn, is a key enabler and a root cause for gender violence. As long as we continue to center our life and our social order around gender, as long as we stick to a strict gender dichotomy and gender separation, and as long as we hold gender as an all important life-determining factor, we won’t solve the problem of gender inequality and gender violence.

What about #iamnotafraidtosayit? Even though campaigns like this one don’t directly address the root cause of gender violence, they are crucial first steps toward changing our culture.

Illustration. Many thanks to Erin Cone, an internationally recognized artist from the US, for giving me a permission to use images of her paintings in my blog. I stumbled across one of Erin’s paintings (which is now my cover photo) in one of the art magazines in a cafe where I was working on this post. What I saw in that painting was a woman who seemed to be hiding from the world, a woman who was only half present here. I think this woman on the painting represents millions of real women who are also hiding from the world and who are also only half present here because the world is still not safe for them.