I apologize for telling you to shut up. It was uncivil even in the face of such extreme provocation. I had just gotten done quoting to you from an Amnesty International report about how even women in the most gender equal countries are treated by their cultures when they report rape or other sexual violence - noting that this is so harmful that many women wish they had never reported because it was so much worse for them.
“Social stigma and a lack of trust in the justice system often mean that women and girls fail to report attacks, and those that do, are frequently failed by callous and prejudiced justice systems or outdated laws. One survivor told us she would never have reported her rape if she had known how she would have been treated, and her story is typical in justice systems which are stacked against rape survivors.”
Amnesty International thinks this is a huge issue and a problem that needs to be spoken about and redressed, but you don't. You decided instead to victim blame before going on to act like women should also not talk about what they are subject to because it makes men look bad. That it's misandrist to speak the actual statistics out loud. Do you even hear yourself? Don't be so fragile... This isn't about you.
If you are not a rapist or a sexual abuser, then women are not talking about you. You need to grow up. If your neighbor's house was on fire, you (hopefully) wouldn't stand there and say, "I didn't do it" - you would grab a hose or a bucket and help to put it out. If you want women to stop talking about their pervasive experience of sexual violence then how about grabbing a bucket and becoming an ally in helping to create a society where that is not necessary because it's not happening. Women's experiences should make you uncomfortable, but the solution to that is not to minimize them and victim blame.
Stop centering yourself in these stories, and focusing on how it makes you feel to have to hear about them. These are real people's real life traumatic experiences we are talking about here. They are not theoretical political musings for you to quibble over. Pretty much every women you know, including your mother and grandmother, has a long history of being followed and frightened and groped and coerced and many of them have also been attacked and raped. I encourage you to ask them about their stories, because just because they've never talked about them doesn't mean they don't have any.
You are, of course, entitled to your opinion about the appropriateness of bringing up topics that have never been broached by the author or the commenters and introducing them. I find it lazy debate and nothing more than a pretext to evade dealing with the topic at hand.
And, on the day that women's rights over their own body autonomy just got taken away in my country for you to essentially say that it's women's faults if they don't report attacks - even when they know that it will more than likely just make things worse for them - was too much for me to bear. It was an incredibly insensitive thing for you to say on any day, but it really hit me wrong that day. I edited my comment to you because, even so, it was not who I want to be.
Edit: Mostly what I write about is how the social system of patriarchy harms us all, men included. Here are a couple of stories on the off chance you are interested.
“This means, among other things, that women grow up and live with a persistent level of ongoing fear and misogyny as a part of the culture, from young childhood on. It does not require every single man to be actively behaving in anti-social ways in order for that to be the case. It’s the ocean that we swim in and the one that is normalized in our societies. Saying something like, “It’s not fair for women to lump all men together under the same umbrella” willfully ignores that the true umbrella is not men as a demographic but masculinity as a culture as it is defined in this country (and others).”
