This is heavily inspired by an article by Rayne Fisher-Quann, The Pain Gap — on dating, maturity, & the benign psychohorror of womanhood. I saw a TikTok video sharing about it, and the quotes the creator highlighted hit so close to home I had to google and read it up.
The article highlights how “the problem with dating men is that there is often no smoking gun — no terrible crime, no obvious transgression, no moment that you can use to justify the enormity of what you feel to yourself and others”, and that the laws do not help with enforcing or reminding them of what’s moral, instead it has provided them with a line to toe on. The line helps to ensure most of them do not commit heinous deeds, but they have learned various “cheat codes” to make sure they will not get caught or punished for the ways they go about with getting what they want anyway. Quoting Rayne, “fuck her on the day of her eighteenth birthday, make sure she can sit up straight before you take her home, guilt her until you get the “yes” or only date girls too nervous and unsure to think of saying no in the first place.” Those… morally grey or wrong things, but not criminally prosecutable — that’s how they play the system. That’s how they get around it. They are clueless about why that is morally wrong or why they should not even do that, because it seems like to them, there is absolutely nothing wrong with getting what they want. It seems like they have convinced themselves that as long as the girl or woman was “willing”, regardless of how they got there, it was consensual… and that it was okay.
And this is the saddest quote from the article, the one which made me sit up, because I know exactly what she means by that:
sometimes, in the small, secret part of myself where i tuck away my worst impulses, i wished they had gone just a little further, wronged me just a little bit more clearly, because maybe then i wouldn’t feel quite so crazy about hurting so much. without laws broken or lines crossed, women’s pain is madness.
…“without laws broken or lines crossed, women’s pain is madness.” — this line is so fucking spot on and powerful, in my opinion. How many times have we been dismissed and gaslighted as being “overly sensitive”, “overthinking it”, “being too emotional”, and that “we are perceiving things wrongly” by men? And often times, when we face sexual harassments or assaults that are hard to prove, such as men walking near us and “accidentally” brushing their hands against our legs or arms, men pushing themselves against us on a crowded public transport, supposed friends touching us at places that make us uncomfortable, and it goes on and on… how many people will believe us, without gaslighting us and casting doubts on our experiences? Or rather, how many men will?
Usually, we get questions or comments like, “are you sure it was on purpose”, “I don’t think he meant it that way, you’re overthinking it”, “who would do that to you? come on”, “just let it go. don’t ruin the mood”, “he was just being nice, why must you think of it that way?”, “I know him, he’s not someone like that. Please don’t ruin his life with your paranoia”… and again, it goes on.
In my opinion, a lot of men are scared when they hear girls or women raising alarms about the wrongdoings that have been done to them, because they might have been guilty of similar wrongdoings or have thought about it. So they protect each other and silence the girls/women by discrediting our experiences and feelings. They avoid their guilt and avoid acknowledging that they have done something morally wrong too. They downplay it so they can collectively continue to get away with the behaviours in a society that had protected them for centuries. They make us doubt ourselves, our minds, and blame us for how we feel. We end up unsure or further convinced that, we will never “win” and our side of the stories will never be believed.
We don’t even have to always look at physical transgressions. Most of the time, it’s emotional and mental abuses that we receive from our partners or friends, or even at workplaces. Those non-tangible / unseen inflictions, never crossing the legal boundaries, are what we have to deal with all the time throughout our lives. And in this patriarchal society, girls and women, being the emotionally in-tuned species, get labelled as “irrational” or “not logical”, as if being highly evolved emotionally means one abandons all logical or critical thinking abilities. And that they are mutually exclusive.
With that flawed “logic” (haha), so very often, to the society… women’s pain is madness.
