By then I was divorced from my first husband who treated me, not with physical violence, but with all the behaviours (no independent finances, all main decisions made by him, stalking) that are now being labelled as “coercive control”; all while he kept up a relationship with his mistress. As a divorcee, still young, I was clearly on the market and desperate for a new sexual partner. Here is a piece of news for all Australian men reading this: no, I wasn’t. And neither are most other women who you think are deserving of your special brand of sexual aggression.
If you have any group of five or 10 women talking together and you raise the subject of sexual abuse, you will hear over and again of similar incidents, from unwanted physical or verbal advances to rape. And that is the point of my story: all women are still held to be desirous of this sort of attention. And if they are not, well they ought to be.
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You would think the time for reckoning is well past. Brittany Higgins and all women in her situation deserve every encouragement and all the physical, emotional and legal support they need to bring their abusers into the light of day, so they can face the judgment they so richly deserve. Their courage inspires not only my admiration, but my love. There will be many in our community who feel the same.
You blokes – and I’m looking at you Prime Minister, for a start – need to take a long, hard look at yourselves and start a real conversation about changes in the way we raise our young men to treat the other half of the population with the care, respect and decency they deserve, and have always deserved. You guys are not entitled to anything until you change the way you look at, think about, and act towards the women in your lives.
