The number of examples I have seen of people being told to shut up about their lived experiences with sexual abuse in the past 24 hours on this platform is deeply disturbing.
I am calling on y’all to take a deep breath and listen to women for once. There is a time and place for tone policing and it’s never the very minute a woman speaks up.
And that is the patriarchy in a nutshell: a system that is advantageous to men, and then teaches men to consider any critique of that system as a whole, rather than of individuals, a threat or insult to be stamped out with vehemence. The people who do this shit genuinely believe that it’s unfair to be treated this way, never realizing that their attitude provides the infrastructure that allows thereally bad people to continue doing what they do.
It’s like ACAB; it doesn’t necessarily mean that every cop will abuse a minority given the chance, but that nearly every cop actively participates in a system that enables and protects the abuse of minorities, and that it is impossible to distinguish who the select few truly “good” cops are.