macavitykitsune:
timemachineyeah:
Is anyone else ever a little baffled by the cis women who consider women’s restrooms and locker rooms these safe havens from abuse and sexual harassment?
Like I feel like there are two options here:
1. They did not have mean girls in their school
2. They were the mean girls in their school and didn’t realize all the shit they were doing to the other girls in the locker room was absolutely sexual harassment and sometimes assault
I would only nuance this with two other possibilities that work in tandem with these:
3. They’re probably skinny and able-bodied with no significant scarring on their bodies
4. They didn’t grow boobs as a preteen
I will add:
5. They were lucky. (It actually does happen!) and
6. None of the above apply but they have been as adults able for one reason or another to align their understanding and experience and even memory of Women’s Bathrooms to be a) that this is the case and b) that even if very occasionally it’s not it SHOULD be and those times were mere errata that will get Horribly Worse if anyone is allowed to even question the idea of the sanctity of the space.
The latter one is important because it’s genuinely important to remember that people edit their memories, and also that with time memories fade and don’t leap to mind, and that beliefs strongly held can sometimes overwhelm them, especially if they’re not stopping to question the immediate surface recall.
And I bring both these options because I’ve seen them happen - I’ve both met women who were just genuinely the kind of lucky where their year at their school didn’t suck even THOUGH they developed boobs at 11 and quite literally had constantly visible scarring due to spilling coffee all over the side of their face and shoulder as a small child*.
And I’ve also met the people who have one set of superficial memory-beliefs about a lot of these things where they’ll say a thing and then you ask them some friendly, interested questions, and they suddenly are going “ … wait, well, I guess not - ”
(Remember how that happens for toxic childhoods? Where people are like “oh my childhood was fine, x never affected me, I never had bad times” and then for one reason or another this gets prodded at and there is the realization that eg “mom throwing out all my toys because I backtalked her one day, screaming at me while she did so” actually isn’t fine, and wasn’t fine, and is still having affects? etc? That applies to peer shit in school too. Same process.)
*she was also just That Person Everyone Loved. Statistical minority! But extant.