Tell us how its 2021 and sexual assault is still casual. Being groped unwontedly at a club? Casual conversation at breakfast. Being wolf whistled when you’re walking on the pavement in the dark? casual conversation with your co-workers at 4:00.
We don’t know about you, but it’s always the same story; we drop these things in because we think nothing of them. Besides, we think twice about making a big deal of it because guaranteed at the back of our minds is the ever-presence of ‘to be fair, my bum was accentuated in those Nike leggings’, and ‘my boobs were out’.
We won’t repeat the line about what you wear and consent because it’s just standard practise now. We don’t want to repeat anything, actually. We assume you know all the conversations and dialogues around consent and assault.
What we want is to see the faces of its survival.
I survived, he survived, she survived, they survived, we survived- it doesn’t matter who the subject of the sentence is, what matters is the shared verb- to survive- seemingly simple in its lack of abstraction, but hidden beneath it yield layers and layers of stuff. Stuff that just won’t budge. Maybe it never will. Maybe it will over time and you’ll never notice.
Either way, never underestimate the power of shared stuff.
Because to share means more than just to tell a story. To share is, quite literally, to ‘have a portion of something with another’. And never has this made more sense than it does in this conversation. Although we cannot take the burden of this stuff, we can all hold it up together.
Imagine one person holding up a light. Then imagine a thousand people holding up the same colour light, at the same time, in different places but with one, powerful, indestructible, undeniable force.
One cannot compare catastrophe. But, we can sure as hell share its burden. Come and add your light to our sexual assault and sexual violence reel on Stitcht. #bereel. #sexualassaultandsexualviolenceawareness #itsoknottobeok #metoo #sexualassault #nomeansno #itsnotok