Women/non-men are under assault before any one person decides to sexually abuse them. Women and non-men are taught their entire lives to modify their behavior to avoid a sexually violent experience. We are told not to wear revealing clothes, to go to the restroom with friends, or to avoid excessive drinking. There may be legitimate health concerns with some of these warnings, but overall our bodies are constantly regulated and scrutinized under the guise of keeping us safe. And yet, time after time after time, our bodies continue to be trampled. We are reminded on the trains, on the streets, in schools, by our family and friends, that our bodies are a commodity to be exchanged and we are alienated by its value. We do not get to decide what our bodies are worth, but these are predetermined by the intersecting identities they form part. We are told that parts of who we are—our race, gender, sexuality, physical and cognitive ability, class—determine our worthiness to access crucial resources like food and housing, but even things like love, care, and compassion when bad things happen to us. All of these cultivate a culture of fear, low self-esteem, and confusion. Our bodies are always under assault, even when they are not being assaulted.
One of the biggest challenges to admitting that we are a victim of sexual assault is sometimes not what other will say, but what we say to ourselves. Carrying the guilt and the shame of being assaulted, blaming ourselves as society has taught us to blame ourselves for what happened to us, all the while feeling powerless to stop the attack on our body from occurring and realizing that many of the things we have experienced simultaneously with the things men have seen or heard, have set us both up for this volatile encounter. That is the contradiction: the expectation on women/non-men to have the autonomy to stop an assault from occurring, while also sending the consistent message that our bodies can be accessed, especially by men, with little to no punishment. We are expected to be autonomous enough to stop an abuse, but also are pressured to modify our bodies for the pleasure of men: to shave, to do our makeup, to lighten our skin tones, and we are punished when we decide to be autonomous.
We continue to struggle, gaslighted, because we feel like such failures, and because we never got the option to blame anyone but ourselves. We failed at that one thing everyone always told us not to have done to us. We feel trapped. Trapped to navigate a world of contradictions where no decision we ever make could possibly be the right one. And we feel silenced, because few will ever understand our pain even though they should because they too have been stripped of their agency.
But you are absolutely not a failure. Your ability to read through the pain on this article is a strength. Your very existence is a breath of fire. You are a burning spirit that shines defiantly. You are a survivor. You have survived the assault on your dignity and you have continued to survive a world that has refused to make space for your pain. But I see you. I hold you close to my heart; your pain is mine and mine is yours. Through this shared pain, our community will grow and our wounds scar. Our shared pain like wildfire will consume all the trunks of ignorance and bigotry, and make space for new buds of hope to grow.