50 Shades of Grey: on silence and complicity

For weeks I’ve been meaning to write something wholesome and inspiring about community. The last couple of months have been a roller coaster ride; I’ve stretched myself in directions I didn’t know I could reach for, learned from mistakes I didn’t realise I was making until someone gently pointed them out to me and had wins that left me double checking the numbers on my ticket to make sure they were mine. Throughout it all I’ve been loved, supported and held by the most inspiring, insightful and gutsy peeps I know. When I think about how hard I am loved I get all teared up and have to put my sunglasses on to hide my sentimentalism.

As grateful as I am for all of this and more this is not that post.
This post is about something else entirely.

I’ve spent the last couple of days with my nose in Anna Kriens ‘Night Games’, a critical exploration of sex and power through the lens of sport, predominantly AFL. It’s delves into all sorts of uncomfortable arenas, most notably what Krien refers to as ‘the grey area’ of sexual consent. She walks a fine line above a lions pit, at times with her heart on her sleeve and still manages to remain a moving target. “If I tell you where I stand you can walk away from me.” was her response when pressed about her personal position by a facilitator at a recent writers festival ” I think it’s this ability she has to call the game without showing her cards that makes her such a damn good investigative journalist. She leaves room for us to fill in our experience, she wants us to make up our own minds.

I’ve spent a lot of time lately, filling in my own experience. See, these ‘night games’ are eerily familiar, and they’re not just played by sport stars.

I belong to a number of different communities. Pretty much all of them would self identify as being progressive, left wing, liberal and pretty much all of them have in some way or other been complicit in maintaining a silence when violence against women, including the sort of ‘night games’ that Krien writes about occurs within their ranks.

 
“Oh look, he doesn’t mean any harm. He was just drunk”
“Everyone was wasted.”
“Yeah, but she’s not easy to be around either.”
“She seemed up for it”
“It wasn’t that bad”
“That was ages ago. Holding onto stuff just gives you cancer.”
“It was just a joke, you don’t have to make such a big deal out of it”

Sound familiar?
No?
Let me make it a little clearer;

I’m talking about the complicit silence when a guy repeatedly gropes women on the dancefloor, the people at a party who turn away from the really wasted girl getting fucked in the pool, the relegating of serious and repeated verbal abuse to ‘a relationship issue’, the lovers who’ve humbugged me until I’ve relented to having sex when I’m just not up for it.

Yeah, that stuff. Call it a ‘grey area’, call it ‘sleazy’, call it ‘abuse’ …but for chrisakes call it out.

Maybe he’s a nice guy, perhaps he just shouted you a beer, a joint or a line. Maybe you don’t like the woman who is on the receiving end of his bad behavior. It doesn’t matter. To maintain silence is to enter into a complicity with the kind of power that underlies rape culture.

I’ll say that again, real slow;

To MAINTAIN SILENCE is to enter into COMPLICITY with the kind of power that underlies RAPE CULTURE.

Brothers, we need you. We can’t fight this battle on our own. At worst the men who act this way towards women don’t really respect them – in their eyes women like me are just mouthy femmo bitches. At best, you’re mate needs to know that he’s acting like a perverted arsehole and that kind of behavior isn’t cool.

In both case it helps if the hear that it’s not OK from someone they respect.

I know, its’ not easy, none of us likes conflict. None of us likes admitting that maybe we fucked up. But we need to start talking about this stuff and find ways to emasculate being silent and being sleazy.

If you want to talk to some one confidentially about any of the issues in this article call or visit http://www.1800respect.org.au