Conversations around women’s bodies and the idea of the ‘perfect victim’.
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Last week Sunday, a medical students’ association WhatsApp group I am on had a discussion about a video of a young woman who on dressing “indecently” was harassed by a group of men while one guy tried fending off her harassors and she was trying to defend her dressing choice. The moderator asked three questions and we were supposed to center our commentaries around them. The first was “Is there anything wrong with her dressing?” And the second was “Is her dressing harmful to society?” and the third; “What do you think of the men’s behaviour towards her in the video?”
Before I go on to discuss the conversation, I would love to say something about the filming of the video. In my opinion, when you watch the video, it’s quite easy to see that the video was meant to shame the lady and to subtly give a note of warning to those who dress like her —if they (i.e. the men) see a woman whose body or style of covering that body which does not fit their ideal of how it should be, this is what would befall them.
I found it asinine to only show the face of the victim of this harasment while she’s being defensive and trying to stave off these abusers and refuse to show the face of the men perpetrating this abuse. Even the atmosphere that the video seemed to be one where most people approved of this harasment. There is a way stories are being forged by who is put at the forefront and what position we craft them into occupying. The narrative of the video was not that she was a victim but a recalcitrant “woke” lady who doesn’t want to play by the edifying rules of society. And I think this point of view crafted by the person who took the video influenced the way the conversation proceeded.
Now, back to the three questions.
On the surface, these questions do not look harmful. But when you look at them again and reflect on the fact that we’re still having a discussion, trying to figure out whether abusing a woman for any reason is okay or not, it just jabs you in all the wrong places. This video is not supposed to come with a conversation, it’s supposed to come with rebuke, a statement from the association that they do not stand for any act like this in any shade. But here we are —having abstract conversations about what women have the right to or not to wear.
The problem with these discussions is how women’s bodies and their decision in relation to these bodies are transformed into an abstract thing, a pseudo-philosophical enquiry for us to poke, dictate, project our values unto and ask the real people to conform to these unrealistic or puritan ideals.
Women do not owe us an explanation for why they choose to dress the way they do. Men and other women should not get to control what women do with or put on their bodies. Isn’t it ironic that all these “indecent dressing” conversations are centred around women and not men? Are they not parts of men’s bodies that they leisurely display that arouse women? And don’t bring up the overused “Men are moved by what they see, women by what they hear” card because that argument is invalid to a large extent.
After the whole conversation where I said my opinion and questioned the legitimacy of the things other people said concerning the topic, some of which were she was indecently dressed, the men weren’t really trying to harass but to correct her but took it too far, indecent dressing causes rape etc., someone in my school actually confronted me over my ideas, the ones I shared during the conversation.
This guy had said that indecent dressing caused rape. He claimed that rape was caused by two things —the seductive “power” of women and men’s short-circuit self control. So, in his view, rape was an act whose responsibility should be borne by the abused and the abuser. I was really mad and I just wanted to shut the conversation down. But I felt probably if I showed him what was wrong with his viewpoint, how it silences victims and the untruth about the connection between rape and dressing, he would probably (if not change his mind totally) adopt a more progressive attitude towards women’s dressing. I made it known to him that in societies that placed less emphasis on “(in)decent dressing” and has robust sex education, women were less likely to experience sexual abuse than societies that emphasised and socially rewarded “decent dressing”. I also brought up the fact that the Middle East, the puritan capital of the world, has more prevalent cases of sexual violence cases than other nations with a more liberal stance on women’s dressing. Was I surprised he wasn’t swayed? I wasn’t, but I was just taken aback by the absurdity of all of this.
And then it made me think of how people reacted to the dozen of women who were killed, maimed or abused by yahoo boys in the yahoo plus frenzy of mid 2022. There wasn’t a grain of empathy for these women, or rage for the abuse and dehumanization they faced.
If someone wanted to really make her look like a victim, they would have to pull the strings of ‘she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time’ or that ‘she was a good girl who was just unfortunate’. For her to be a victim, she had to be pure, she had to be clean —at least by the moral standard set for her by society.
Alice Capelle, a YouTuber, intersectional feminist and author of Collapse Feminism shared her views on victimhood and societal standards in her video essay Anatomy of the Fall & The Imperfect Victim. In the essay, she talked about how women’s sexuality, their unhingedness in expressing it, is used to downplay if not completely erase their victimhood and silence them. We see this manifest in the ways we discuss women’s bodies and rape or domestic violence. We only perceive the victimhood of a woman if we are convinced that she has played by all the rules but was unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of an abusive person. It’s as though the society creates who can be victims and then tries using its flawed system to give them justice rather than seeking justice for all who have been victimised. Sometimes, you even hear how people would say it’s ‘baddies’ or ‘longer-throat girls’ that encounter these things. So, duh, they can go to hell.
I remember in 2022 the Ekuweme singer who was murdered by her husband and the outrage that followed and the plethora of “if he hits you, even just playfully, leave him Queens” messages. I recall asking;
What if she was a”worldly” musician? What if she wasn’t a very humble wife? What if she had had affairs? What if she was a sex-worker? Would we be this outraged?
And from everything I’ve noticed about the way we relate victimhood to the ideal of womanhood, the answer is NO! The best we could have got would be, “Eh-yah, she should have left before it got this bad”. And you know the worst, you know the vitrol that Nigerians can vomit on you if a bad thing happens to someone whose lifestyle they do not approve of.
We, as a society, need to come to the realisation that a victim is a victim, a person we should seek justice for no matter imperfect (according to our standards) we feel they are. Because won’t we want this grace to be extended to us if we become a victim too?
Written by Erastus Adekunle.
