Our instincts aren't bigoted — they're
essential
Feminists, when I was growing up, used to encourage girls to “get loud”
and rail against the social pressure to be compliant and “nice”. We were taught
to push back against the idea that women need to be appealing to men because
their comfort mattered more than ours.
Now, we live in a radically different world. A world in which a
generation of young women is being taught to disregard the fear they might feel
in a threatening situation. They are told not to trust their intuition. And
they are called bigots and sent death threats if they suggest that they feel
uncomfortable in their bathrooms and changing rooms — or even in shelters for
survivors of sexual abuse.
As a sexual assault survivor myself, I fought back tears while watching
Paula Scanlan testify before a House Judiciary subcommittee about her
experience of being on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swimming team —
with the transgender athlete Lia Thomas. “I know of women with sexual trauma
who are adversely impacted by having biological males in their locker room
without their consent. I know this because I am one of these women.”
I felt rage, too. How outrageous that Scanlan should have to defend her
desire to be free of biological males in a female changing room. How dare her
university send her to psychotherapy in an “attempt to reeducate [me] to become
comfortable with the idea of undressing in front of a male”? I find it hard to
believe that, five years ago, feminists’ rallying cry was #BelieveAllWomen.
Clearly, Scanlan does too. “Let us not forget the viral #MeToo movement that empowered female victims to speak
up,” she said. “It trained a spotlight on the widespread prevalence of sexual
assault and abuse, including in scholarly and educational institutions … many
policies pushed today completely ignore my experiences and many women like me.”
In the space of five years, we’ve gone from #BelieveAllWomen to: “Believe all
women, especially if they are men.”
How have we regressed so rapidly? Everyone from Oprah downwards preached
to my generation of women to listen to your gut; listen to your instinct;
listen to that voice whispering “Get out!” Back in 1997, she interviewed Gavin
de Becker, whose book The Gift of Fear — a guide to
understanding how your instincts about other people can keep you safe
— became a bestseller. During her show, he summed it up like this:
“Someone who doesn’t hear ‘no’ is trying to control you.”
Oprah looked out at the audience. “Did y’all hear that? Gavin, you need
to say it again.”
Such was the impact of the book that, in 2008, Oprah did an hour-long
show to commemorate its tenth anniversary. During it, de Becker repeated a line
from his book, distilled from a Margaret Atwood lecture: “At core, men are
afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill
them.”
I understood this. I was taught to get out of any threatening situation
as soon as possible. If you’re alone in a room and a man enters and you don’t
feel safe? Leave. If you’re walking at night and feel the instinct to escape?
Just run. It doesn’t matter if you’re wrong, because what if you’re right? I
was told to ignore that little voice at my peril. My mother raised me and my
sisters to scream and run like hell if a stranger asked us to get in their car.
“Because if you end up in a trunk, you’re dead.”
As de Becker says: “Can you imagine an animal in the wilderness
overtaken with fear and saying ‘Oh it’s probably nothing.’ But we do that every
day.” In his 1997 Oprah appearance, he argues that the real information we
should be giving women and children is: “Honour your own fear and teach them
that it’s important, that their own internal voice is important.”
Where is Oprah now?
The message today’s young women are getting is that if their inner voice
says it feels wrong when someone with a penis undresses in front of them, or is
present when they undress, in a space designated for women, there is something
wrong with them. Scanlan said in her testimony: “We, the women,
were the problem, not the victims. We were expected to conform, to move over
and shut up. Our feelings didn’t matter. The university was gaslighting and
fearmongering women to validate the feelings and identity of a male.”
It appears that institutions, politicians and progressives are happy to
sacrifice women at the altar of inclusivity. They demand we keep quiet when we
feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Ironically, instead of teaching us to keep
ourselves safe and fear violation, the women’s movement teaches us to fear
being labelled as bigots. Paula Scanlan and collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines
have been called transphobes for objecting to someone striding around with his
penis on show in a locker room designated for women.
We are setting a dangerous precedent. Think about the young women
watching the way that Scanlan and Gaines are being treated. They will surely
conclude that they must suffer to accommodate the small handful of males that
want to make everything about them. They are now being given access to female
prisons, domestic abuse shelters, rape centres, locker rooms, spas and public
toilets, as well as changing rooms.
It would be absurd to assume that all trans-identified male-bodied
people are looking for ways to abuse girls or women; it is equally absurd — and
naïve — to think that male predators won’t exploit this system. But what I find
particularly alarming is that it teaches women in general not to trust
themselves. It tells us to ignore the discomfort triggered at a subconscious
level. It encourages us to ignore our instincts. When a woman senses danger the
last thing she needs is for her judgment to be clouded by another fear: the
fear of social death if she acts to protect herself.
And all of us who witness the abuse that women who speak up are being subjected to are expected to remain silent. All of us whose little voices are telling us that there’s something wrong with prioritising men’s feelings over women’s safety are told we are wrong.
But my gift of fear is telling me to resist being intimidated into
submission. To teach young women and my own daughter to honour that voice, that
intuition. To stand behind women like Paula Scanlan who are also resisting. And
to say, “No.”
Why
women need to feel fear - UnHerd
