Your Experience Does/Does Not Matter

(Note: This is written from the perspective of a white, cis-het, woman. Your experiences may vary, of course.)

As a Feminist, I often read articles about the experience of a marginalized person/people.  This is normal because the people being marginalized need to have the discussions that they are, to bring awareness of the issues to the general public. 

Often, however, there are people that come back with, “but in my experience, I have never seen that”.  OK, I will give you the benefit of the doubt.  YOU have never seen that.

It does not mean that it doesn’t happen.

When a man says that he has never cat-called a woman, I believe him.  It was not him that chased me down the street, demanding my attention when I just wanted to get to my bus stop. 

When a man says that he would never try to get a woman drunk to take advantage of her, I believe him.  He specifically was not the one that insisted that we do shots and that I caught putting something in my drink.

When a man says that he would never try to rape a woman, I believe him. He was not the one that I woke up to, putting his fingers in my vagina while I was sleeping on the green room couch. 

When a man says that he would never consciously demean a woman for saying “No” to his advances, I believe him.  He was not the one that called me a bitch, a fat whore, and a cunt because I didn’t want to have dinner with him. 

These examples and others have happened to me, personally.  When I talk to other women, they have similar experiences.  They have men in their lives that they love, who would never try to hurt them.  Those men are good men, but they do not invalidate the ones who think that equality means “OK, that means I can hit women now, right?” The good men would stop, even in the middle of intercourse, if the woman suddenly needed them to, but it does not invalidate the ones that raped her. 

Here’s the thing.  On a very, very personal level, our experiences all matter – to us.  We are stuck in our personal meat space, and there is no way to get out of our heads (no matter what the Scientologists seem to think).  We are a summation of our biology and our experience.  We build our stories around the things that have happened to us, adding and subtracting to the narrative, depending on what we have learned to think and what conclusions we take from our experiences. 

This is part of what leads to confirmation bias – the tendency to believe something more if it conforms to your current worldview.

Growing up in the Kingdom Identity Movement, I was fed some very bad ideas (there will be a post about that too).  My experiences, therefore, were very different from marginalized groups.  I did not experience racism, or prejudice because I was a white girl. In addition, until I left home, I did not experience sexism.  Well, yes I did, but I did not realize it was at the time.

I remember a time when I had protected someone.  They were being picked on by a couple of teenage boys, and the kid was only about 10.  After seeing it start, I grabbed a large branch and went in, attacking the bullies bikes.  I broke the spokes on the tires, hit the bullies over the head (aiming directly for their faces), stomped on the bikes, bending the wheels and breaking the handles, landed a lot of blows on the bullies and their bikes, and basically did my best 12 year old imitation of a beserker, to protect the kid.  The bullies ran off because they did not expect the help.

I told my father what had happened, and the mother of one of the bullies called him to demand that he pay for the broken bike. My father laughed and told her that the next time her son bullied anyone, he would send his daughter to take care of it.  He also made a lot of commentary about what a shame it was that the boy had been beaten up by a girl.

I was uncomfortable with this, but I had defended a kid that was getting hurt, so I was still proud. After the call, my father turned to me and said, “If you had just been born with tassels, you would be perfect.”

I was 12 years old, but it hit me hard.  I had tried to be a good person. I had done something that I didn’t think that very many of my few friends would do.  I had done what I could to protect someone, and it was just not enough. I was flawed for being a girl.

When I tell that story, the man I am talking to will often tell me that he would never do that to his daughter.  I believe him.  He wouldn’t.

Thing is, your experience is viewed through your lenses, and as such, while it matters to you, it does not matter to the other person.  They are seeing the biases against them, feeling the negativity that it engenders, and working to make it so that it stops happening – or at least is reduced.

You would never cat-call a woman, but we get cat-called, and are tired of it. We want to be able to walk down the street, like you can, being left alone or at least admired from a distance.

You would never get a woman drunk or drug her to take advantage of her, but it happens all the time, and we are tired of having to assume it will happen, because there are a bunch of you that will do so. 

You would never rape a woman, but they are raped all the time, and you don’t want to believe it, because YOU would never do it.  We know someone who has been raped and we know that her rapist was believed before she was. 

You would never demean a woman for wanting her own autonomy, but we have had men call us things, and hit us, and take a knife out to intimidate us or even kill us, all because we did not want to spend time with them. 

We know that you are a good man, and we don’t hate you.  But this happens so often, that we have to go on our own experiences.

We don’t have anything else to use.

- MS