31 Quotes About Metoo

Standing behind predators makes prey of us all.

It’s one thing to deconstruct and analyze and condemn the institutions of patriarchy and their flaws. It’s another one to feel their bruises on your skin, and their grasping hands pulling your hair and covering your mouth as you scream.

I want to write a thinkpiece about what you did to me. I want to write a critical analysis about the way you put your hands to my throat, the way you threw me against the partition wall. I want to extract a dose of worldly wisdom for all women to sap the power from that pain and into abstraction so we can all live again; I want what you did to be a statistic, I want you to be a memory, I don’t want you to be those hands on my throat.

Violence against women is a pivot for the intersecting systems of heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism and colonialism. It results from the tussle for material and emotional resources, between commodity production and the reproduction of human life.

We want Harvey Weinstein in prison. We want Brock Turner to have a longer sentence. We want Judge Aquilina to sign Nassar’s death warrant. We rely on a third party to take these ‘bad men’ away, usually in the form of an institution or the state. And this White Knight or Angry Dad is patriarchy personified. This is how our outraged activism fails to dismantle the intersecting systems of heteropatriarchy and racial capitalism that produce sexual violence – and strengthens them instead.

Political whiteness is the systematic privileging of bourgeois white women’s wounds at the expense of others. Its obsession with threat is both sexualised and racialised, because of the role of colonialism in co-constructing race and sexuality.

The response to naming and shaming is often what I call ‘institutional airbrushing’: neoliberal institutions and organisations obsessed with how things look rather than how they are merely remove the ‘blemish’ that has been exposed.

Deconstructed, I find its bits and pieces everywhere around me in the architecture of my social world. I find components of its violence in the sexism of your comments. I find it in the way you touch me without asking. I find it in the way you call that girl a whore. I find its bits and pieces of violence, the building blocks of sexual assault, in the psyches and vocabularies of my boyfriend, my professors, and my friends.

Anywhere can be dangerous. Get yourself a vagina for a day, B, and then we can talk.