[Content note: sexual violence]
I wasn’t going to comment on this Julien Blanc thing because it wouldn’t be anything I haven’t already said many times. However, I was catching up on my saved articles and found this bit from a piece about Blanc being denied entry into Great Britain:
For now he has canceled the remainder of his tour. Describing himself as the “most-hated man in the world,” a nervous-looking Mr. Blanc apologized “for everything” on Monday in a CNN interview. He said he had not been choking the women in the photographs but merely had his hands around their throats. It was all “a horrible, horrible attempt at humor” that had been “taken out of context in a way,” he said.
“I just want to apologize, you know, to anybody I’ve offended in any way,” Mr. Blanc said.
This made me see red. This word “offense” gets thrown around whenever something like this happens and someone apologizes for it, as if “offense” was ever the problem. As though my desire to go about my day without having a strange man run up to me, put his hands around my neck, and force my face into his genitals has anything to do with “offense.”
Then I remembered a recent interaction I had on Facebook with a man who had made extremely inappropriate comments on my posts months ago and been roundly rebuked for it by me and my friends. Last week he sent me a message apologizing and asking if we could be friends. I responded very calmly and formally, accepted the apology, and said that I am not interested in being friends at this time. He wrote back, accepting my answer but adding, “I feel bad that I hurt you so much that you’d prefer not to be friends.”
This statement was the only part of all of this that made me feel any emotion at all–namely, anger. I had never been “hurt” by this man. I was not upset. I was not “offended.” I simply didn’t want anything to do with someone who would say and do the things he had proven himself to be willing to say and do. My choice not to interact with him further was informed by my knowledge of his willingness to cross boundaries, and even if he had changed significantly as a person since that incident, I wasn’t interested in taking that risk.
I was angry that he presumed my emotional state, as men so often do. I was angry that I was given no space to reject his offer of friendship except as a consequence of my feelings. I was angry that he thought that he, one of dozens of men who have disrespected me, crossed my boundaries, and hurled sexual harassment at me in the past year alone, actually thought that he had the power to substantially influence my emotions.
I am not comparing this particular man to Julien Blanc. Not even at all. Rather, I’m illustrating the belief that people (women) choose who to avoid or cut out of their lives or protest against solely on the basis of their feelings. I declined this man’s friendship because I was “upset.” Women protested against Blanc entering Great Britain because they were “offended.”
The NYT article echoed this in a different way in its lede: “This week, Julien Blanc became possibly the first man ever denied a visa on grounds of sexism.”
Attention-grabbing exaggerations aside, this is inaccurate. Blanc was not denied a visa because he holds sexist beliefs. He was denied a visa because he was threatening to assault people and encouraging others to do the same. Later in the article:
But as women’s rights and antiviolence campaigners point out, videos and photos of Mr. Blanc explicitly encourage men to harass women and lower their self-confidence in order to have sex with them. One tip suggests that men make derogatory comments about other women’s bodies to flatter their prey. Others recommend pretending to grieve over the recent death of a girlfriend or threatening suicide.
[…] The video clip that caused the most outrage was filmed in Tokyo and shows Mr. Blanc pulling women’s faces into his crotch on the street. In one scene, he harasses a visibly distressed Japanese cashier by kissing her neck and ear.
It is abundantly clear why Blanc presents a danger to women. Yet he, as many other men do, used language like “offended” to describe what he perceives as the backlash against him.
Pay attention to this. This is one of many ways people delegitimize our demands to be free from harassment, assault, and abuse. “Offense” is subjective. “Offense” can be caused by “thin skin,” “weakness,” “intolerance of dissenting views,” and so on. “Offense” is a reaction to a claim or idea with which you disagree.
I am, in fact, offended by Julien Blanc’s views on women, but that’s not why I want him to stay far away from me. I want him to stay far away from me because he has a record of harassing, assaulting, and abusing women, and I do not want to be harassed, assaulted, and abused. It is my right as a human being to be free from these things. It is reasonable for a country to deny a visa to a traveler who intends to enter that country in order to harass, assault, and abuse its citizens.
I have had strange men put their hands on me both in public and in private enough times to know the terror of not knowing–not knowing what will happen next, what someone who delights in making women uncomfortable will be willing to do. I no longer have the luxury of merely being “offended” at the idea that someone might do such a thing. It has happened enough times for the thought of sharing physical space with Julien Blanc to be terrifying, not offensive.
Julien Blanc imagines–or, more likely, pretends–that he is “the most-hated man in the world” because his ideas offend people. The only reason I care about the contents of his mind is because those seem to correlate quite strongly with violent, abusive behavior that harms me and people I care about.
And by the way, you cannot take sexual assault “out of context.” There is no context that makes it no longer assault, unless there was consent given and it was never assault in any context to begin with.
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As a small sidenote, I’m annoyed by how many of the articles about Julien Blanc, including ones from writers I really respect, took space to insult his physical appearance. As someone who has written for publication before, I know that word limits are almost always in effect, and taking valuable space to make childish and irrelevant insults to someone’s looks means that much less space to use on actual points. It’s not just that insulting someone’s appearance is mean and pointless, though–it also makes you come across like you don’t have a better argument against them (even if you do). We should stop doing it. I say this not because I care about Julien Blanc’s feelings, but because I care about ethical consistency and good writing.
(Remember, too, that the problem with men like Blanc is not that they are “lonely” or “pathetic” or “desperate for female attention.” Many men are lonely and pathetic and desperate for female (or male) attention, and so are many women. That’s not what makes them creepy predators. Many people manage to be lonely and pathetic and desperate for sex without ever harassing or assaulting anyone.)
