Today, I remind people that there is no purity test when it comes to victimhood.
This is “Just a Reminder,” a feature where I just point out some stuff, typically in relation to a recent controversy in the world of pop culture.
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the first place to do this concept, but the one that I found in an internet search was “What Were You Wearing?”, an installation that ran at Texas A&M’s Memorial Student Center from November-December 2019 (Here is the article about the installation from Texas A&M. That’s where I got the featured image from). The idea for the installation was to take statements from people who were victims of sexual assault and display clothes matching the described outfits to demonstrate, plainly, that the idea of “she was asking for it” (which is already clearly an offensive idea) is also just plain foolish, since women are assaulted wearing ALL different sorts of clothing.
However, even after seeing this over and over again, people clearly DO buy into that notion, that there are some victims who “deserve it” or who were “asking for it.” It’s just nonsense.
Being a victim of abuse is not something reserved for good people. Being a victim of abuse simply means that you were a victim of abuse.
Total jerks can still be victims of abuse. You can be a selfish, ignorant person and still be abused. There is no correlation between “goodness” and abuse. And yet, again and again, people and the media and juries fall into the trap of basically doing “purity traps” for victimhood. “Okay, yes, you may have been abused, but you’re a jerk, so we don’t care.”
Heck, I’m not even saying that you have to CARE, but you simply have to not suggest that someone isn’t a victim because they are not “pure” enough of a person. It’s total nonsense.
Well said, sir.