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While we’re here, let’s talk about some intersecting issues: (a) asking if a woman slept with a notorious professor for gossip or to diminish her, (b) pretending that asking = making a joke, (c) deploying the generic rhetoric of ‘the kind of girl who’d sleep with a professor.’ /1
These are all part of the same deflecting phenomenon. They all seek to rhetorically center the female student [real or imagined] in the equation, her agency, her choices. /2
And they all rely on the power of (c) to mock women and diminish their accomplishments and perhaps even their character. Because what else can the goal be when you say things like that? /3
They’re an old and tired rhetorical playbook used by men and women almost reflexively. Through it we turn victims into vixens, and we can do better than that. /4
This is the same drive through which women might say ‘I can’t believe X thought I was that kind of person!’ when confronted with (a) or (b). Again, the conjuring of a stereotype that is harmful in its distorted lens. /5
We need instead to do a few things: center the abusive professor and their agency/tactics/patterns and reframe how we think of the targets of these tactics/patterns; /6
by decentering female victims of predation and outdated stereotypes, we can give them space as individuals to feel their feelings without our judgment or intrusion. /7
J clearly didn’t want to tell her story. Others did want to tell theirs. Both responses are okay. We are owed nothing from victims. But we are owed more by those with power who see but don’t act. /8
and by "decentering the victim" I mean, simply, to remove the scrutinizing spotlight that makes it so hard for people who experience this kind of abuse not just to come forward but to recognize it as abuse and have the space to breathe.
There's a reason people prefer to come forward anonymously. Eidolon and the SCS survey showed that. It isn't all abt power of the abuser. It's also the judgment inherent in the "that kind of girl" talk that gets thrown around so often even by allies. I'm trying to do better.
