Tracey's take was horrible, and it's worth noting that the underlying sentiment isn't uncommon. It's a kind of misogyny that says the pain of women can only be ratified by men, and as such, any demonstration of it must be inherently manipulative. https://twitter.com/jbenmenachem/status/1356697788080398340

There are men who view their experience of the world as men as the central human experience (women are essentially NPCs you can have sex with) they don't even realize that they do, it's so heavily ingrained in their worldview.

So a woman talking about her sexual assault must be *in some way* about them. They resent it. It's inconvenient. It makes them uncomfortable. They don't want to empathize. Tracey is particularly uncomfortable because he loathes AOC and resents that this is part of her humanity.

The tweet immediately reminded me of a guy I dated in my 20s who used to tell me approvingly that he liked that I had a lot of emotional control and rarely got upset about things. (Red flag, I know now.) My Stoic GirlfriendTM.

When, finally, inevitably, I got upset about something and burst into tears in front of him, he was ENRAGED. Like I had broken some unspoken contract we had that I would never show him that I felt pain or had been hurt by anything. It was inconvenient for him and he resented it.

And he used the same language. I was "emotionally manipulating" him, by having the temerity to be sad in his presence. So my reaction to Tracey is the same as it was to that guy: this is not about YOU, you dick.

The pain of women is not an inconvenient plot line in the grand narrative of the lives of men. It does not exist to manipulate other people and talking about it is not a manipulative act.