I’ve developed a Pavlovian response to talking to men I don’t know on Facebook. As soon as the little red notification pops up, my jaw clenches. Most of the time, it’s a man insulting me (“shrill and hysterical”), mansplaining to me about what it’s really like to be a woman (“see, what you don’t understand about your own experience...”) or reminding me that it’s actually men who are oppressed (“men usually pay for first dates, and often don’t get sex. OPPRESSION! OPPRESSION! ALERT! ALERT!”).
But sometimes, especially lately, I get a notification from a woman that sets my jaw on edge. I don’t understand them. Or, at least, I didn’t until I considered that victim-blaming among women may be the result of our collective desire to believe in a just world.
Who Believes Christine Blasey Ford?
More Americans believe Christine Blasey Ford than Brett Kavanaugh. That’s progress. Back in 1991, just 17% of Americans opposed Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court. When Anita Hill came forward with her allegations, the proportion of Americans who supported Thomas actually rose. In both cases, men were more likely to believe the perpetrator than the accuser. In a patriarchal society in which 31% of men say they’d rape a woman if they could get away with it, that’s unsurprising.
What I find more disconcerting is that a lot of women don’t believe victims. Earlier this week, a mother tweeted a photo of her adult son with the hash tag #himtoo. Women on social media are now routinely sharing a meme suggesting that their sons aren’t safe. They’re doing this even though an allegation of sexual assault most certainly did not ruin Brett Kavanaugh’s life. He’s on the Supreme Court now, for God’s sake.
Why Women Don’t Believe Survivors
If you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, the fact that women—most of whom have experienced some form of sexual violence—don’t believe survivors is mind-boggling. Are they dumb? Do they think women deserve sexual violence? Just...why?
I didn’t understand it until a few months ago, when a burglar broke into my neighbors’ house while they were sleeping. Nothing terrible happened, but my neighbors didn’t wake up during the burglary. It was unnerving to the entire neighborhood that someone would break into an occupied house and steal things while the family slept. I immediately began generating a list of reasons it wouldn’t happen to me: I’m a light sleeper, and could never sleep through something like that; I’ve made my house unattractive to burglars; we have a loud dog; it would be difficult to break into my house; we keep odds hours, so anyone who watched the house wouldn’t know when to break in.
In short, I was victim-blaming. I stopped short of denying that the burglary happened, because the fact that my neighbors’ car was later found by police with the burglar sleeping in it was undeniable.
We engage in victim-blaming because we want to believe it won’t happen to us. If we’re good enough, smart enough, careful enough, we’ll be safe. We would never dress that way, go to that place, interact with those people. We’d come forward. We’d tell the police. We’d be brave. We’d be perfect victims whom no one could disbelieve.
Put simply, victim-blaming comes from our desire to believe the world is just.
Women disbelieve other women because they don’t want to believe it will happen to them. And sometimes, they disbelieve other women because it did happen to them. Believing other women means coming to terms with the horror of their own experiences. Life is easier when you think that sexual assault isn’t common, is always prosecuted, or just isn’t a big deal.
Believing Women is About More Than Sexual Assault
We’ve seen the phenomenon of not believing women play out for decades in another arena: the abortion debate. That’s really what the debate over choice boils down to—whether we can believe women’s motives for seeking abortions, or whether we should let lawmakers decide when women get to have abortions and what criteria they must meet to be believed.
Here, too, we see that most people who don’t believe women are men. But a significant minority are women. Thirty-eight percent of women say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. After all, if they believe abortion is something that only bad women do for illegitimate reasons, then they remove themselves from the debate. Yet abortion clinics across the country routinely treat women who say they are pro-life. Some even treat women who have protested outside of the very abortion clinic from which they now seek help.
It’s testament to the fact that what you believe won’t change what happens to you. You can disbelieve Christine Blasey Ford and still be a victim of sexual assault. You can think only bad people seek abortions, and still be a good person who eventually needs one.
Those of us who believe women—about sexual assault, about abortion, about the lived reality of being female in a patriarchal society—aren’t just standing up for feminist women, other women who believe women, or Democrats. We’re standing up for all women. That Republican woman you’re debating on Facebook about sexual assault may be a victim tomorrow. Your Christian conservative friend may eventually need a life-saving abortion when the men in her life think she should die instead. Even if these women can’t stand up for their gender and unite with other women right now, the rest of us can do it for them.
We do that by voting. In every election, but especially in this one. The people who don’t believe women are going to show up. Those of us who know women are fully human and capable of telling the truth have to show up, too. Women across the country need your vote. Those who don’t believe women might be the ones who need it most. There are important elections happening in every state, and what happens in November will determine the composition of Congress. To see a sample ballot for your district, click here.