Yes, All Women.

Even Tank Girl had guys treat her like an object.

#YesAllWomen is trending and I am tired of answering questions about gun laws in the States.

I am tired of reading these phrases and feeling not just empathy, but complete agreement and understanding.

I am tired of starting to write something about this here before considering who my audience might be and what this might mean for them. Not because I am concerned someone might say something intentionally cruel (I highly doubt I have the readership for that), but rather because I am worried that my words and experiences might hurt people I care about. And, terribly as it might sound, I am tired of that feeling too.

I am tired of there being a level of “acceptable violence”. That it doesn’t feel like a big deal when a stranger paws you over your clothes because after several people have slipped their hands under your shirt or down your pants (or once, danced up  being me and slid his dick under the back of my shirt), you have a different barometer of what is “okay”.

I am tired of being warned to be careful because men will take advantage, of being told to say I have a boyfriend if someone is hitting on me and I’m not interested, in being warned that if I dress a certain way or talk a certain way or drink a certain way or say hello to a male, then I am asking to be assaulted. Of having to figure out exactly what about my sexuality I can share.

I am weary from no longer being surprised.

I am sad because I realized recently that not being pressured or cajoled into sex is strange.

I knew a girl in college who once said someone had a nice husband because he didn’t force her to have sex when she didn’t want to. I’m tired of a world where people are nice simply because they don’t rape someone.

I don’t murder people, I don’t abuse children, I don’t torture animals. That doesn’t make me a nice person. The bar for “nice” shouldn’t be so low and it’s insulting to say otherwise.

I once apologized to someone because they were angry, not because I had done anything to make them angry. They bruised me anyway. Over ten years later, they still contact me because they don’t understand that what they did was not okay. I could not make them see this.

I know a girl who, given the chance, will remind me that I was stupid for taking a drink from someone at a party my first year at university. I “let” them drug me. Which implies, I think, that I knew it was happening, but I suppose everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I was considered lucky because my friends escorted me home, when another girl had been drugged by the same guy that month, and woke up along and confused and with no memory.

I am tired of excusing people by saying things like “everyone is entitled to their own opinion”. I wish I didn’t try so hard to see all the viewpoints and make things make sense, because some things don’t make sense and it took me years to come to peace with that.

When I was involved in a violent incident, people decided that it was my bad judgement of his character that allowed such a thing to happen. Or perhaps I had been out of line. Maybe I angered him. Maybe I should look at myself to see what made me so vulnerable for this attack.

Or maybe, just maybe – and this is pretty far out there, guys, so let me finish – maybe the man should just have not strangled me.

I was angrier, that time. I still didn’t call the police. Because I was so afraid of this person that I didn’t run screaming into the night, I went into survival mode and laughed at jokes and then left and told him to stop bothering me via text. I spent two weeks afraid that he would find where I worked.

Sometimes, I am still angry.

I am angry that for all the attention that violence against women is receiving right now, I don’t believe it will change. I am angry that I won’t tell a whole story because I know it will hurt people. Including myself when they turn around and say “I’m not trying to say this is your fault, but…”

I am angry that I will not ever be surprised again by someone blaming the victim, not the perpetrator, of violence. I am angry that this is not just the norm, but actually the acceptable method of coping with this sort of thing. We make excuses, we look for fault or reason, and I can understand the desperate desire for there to be a reason, for there to be logic and a measurable way to see when you are at risk. I understand this.

I understand this because I’ve done it too. I’ve desperately tried to work out if the problem really was in something I had done. I understand this because the need to blame myself for these things is insidious. The history of violence against me is long, stretches back, and is full of varying degrees. It influences more of my life than I am proud of, panic flaring up like an old injury, and I am not a unique snowflake. I am one of many.

A friend of mine telling me about how a guy at a party tried to force himself on her and she screamed and fought him and everyone told her that he was just joking – it was just how he played.

A girl I know saying that she’s said ‘yes’ sometimes just because she was afraid of what would happen if she said ‘no’.

And on and on it goes.

This is not to say that all men do this, of course they don’t. This is not to say that some of the women I have been involved with haven’t also done some abusive things, they have (and they had ‘their reasons’ and they also called me a whore and they also had our friends stick up for them, unwilling to hear the story because they liked them too much to want to lose them as a friend when they found out how things went down). This is not to say that men can not be survivors of abuse or violence.

This isn’t about exclusion. This is about joining together and saying that these experiences are not unique, they are not surprising, and they are happening to everyone of every age, background, ethnicity, orientation, weight, so on and so forth. Yes, all women have been told “don’t leave a drink on the table” and yes, all women have had a moment of fear. We grow up being told to be afraid.

Doesn’t that seem wrong to you?