So, Are You a Bitch OR Are You a Victim?

Blake Lively's Abuse Reminds Us We Cannot be Both.

I think it’s fairly easy for the relationships between men and women (platonic or otherwise) to break down once we become in the habit of observing our victimhood.

Art by Jamie Rice

In one particular incident, I remember being around 18, coming to the end of my years in sixth form college before starting uni, and having this truth so clearly laid out in front of me.

Having been friends with both men and women, I considered myself lucky regarding the ways in which my male friendships had never crossed over into weird territory or that movie trope i’m personally sick of seeing, that ‘friends to lovers’. I had never been naïve to the reality that a lot of women weren’t ‘lucky’ in this way, and had found the best of their friendships had transformed seemingly overnight into something transactional, but nevertheless I had thought I’d simply lucked out in this way. My relationship with best friend at the time could only be most accurately described as mimicking that of the relationship you might have with your favourite cousin, and so of course trust had built there. The friendship group had consisted of around 7-12 of us, with few girls (maybe 3), and the rest boys. Still, the dynamic always appeared so blended, rather than constituting any kind of gender divide. This was of course until I had questions about that friend-cousin’s behaviour towards me of late. In the past few weeks, he’d been making all sorts of comments about my body, seemingly out of nowhere (perhaps he’d gotten bold since our time at college was coming to an end). Anyway, upon confronting him (already incredibly nervous to do so), he’d initially responded,

With laughter.

After this came screen-recording after screen-recording of my voice notes to him where I had been crying, not out of nerves like I mentioned before, but out of irritation and disgust as I saw my luck had ran out. After this he had posted our conversation on his public story to gain support from men our age throughout our town whether they went to our college or not, and of course they didn’t disappoint, and I saw their responses posted on his story after my recordings, and some of them were violent to say the least. But what’s worse were the responses (or lack thereof), from the boys in my friend group, the 9 to our 3. It’s safe to say that I’d lost almost very single one of my male friends come the following Monday, most of whom never actually confronted me with their opinions, but simply followed suit, as it had been clear their general had commanded some sort of kill order on me. So I had a couple female friends left at this point, who’s loyalty towards me no matter how grateful I was for it, was unable to drown out anxieties of being discussed by most of my peers. It was kindof like scene in the coming -of-age movie where you hallucinate whispers from all around, your name the focal point for discussion, only I wasn’t fortunate enough to convince myself I’d heard wrong, because people had come up to me to ask what had happened.

In what had become some of the worst weeks of my life, I hadn’t really expected any grace but for the fact we were breaking up from the term soon and uni would been a fresh start. But I began to notice the ways in which the women around me (many of whom I’d never met) would show up for me and continually offer me support. But most importantly, I noticed how the women I’d even fallen out with for various reasons in the past, those who in their heads probably had cause to loathe me, but in this instance, became some of my fiercest allies.

Coming out of this experience it had become clear to me that projection holds no place in the realm of ‘justice’, and that our personal grievances towards ‘victims’ couldn’t stand in the way of combatting demonstrations of rape culture as they played out in front of us. This isn’t to say that I was walking around previously completely unaware of that fact, but sometimes experiencing the thing pulls it all the way to the forefront of your mind.

I’m sure that most of you reading this are fully versed on the horrors suffered by now-72-year-old Giselle Pelicot following years of brutal rape and assault she had suffered at the hands of around 50 men whilst unconscious at the command of her husband. I was reading today that advocacy director for Austalia’s Older Women’s Network, 74-year-old Beverly Baker had sent Gisele a scarf in solidarity with her. She was quoted with a message to Gisele, saying

Look, you're not alone. Women across the world are backing you'.

Which was heartening to see, and I imagine one of the only sources for comfort to a woman who had been victimised and brutalised repeatedly because… her husband said so. It had been nice to witness the ways in which women were able to come together for a victim for once, because as we’re all so acutely aware, this is an unfortunate rarity. We’d all like to imagine ourselves empathetic and perceptive enough to sympathise with victims in every instance of abuse, but in reality, let our pre-disposed notions of the victim at hand get in the way of our vision. At least this time, we hadn’t witnessed the dissection of Giselle’s past or her character, because these things were entirely irrelevant in what was clearly a case of what is in my opinion tantamount to torture.

But unfortunately, the same can’t be said for victims whose qualities satisfy certain stereotypes that work to discount the validity of victimhood. For women, to find yourself unlucky enough to be labelled the whore or bitch practically silences you before you’d even began to tell your story, or before the incident in question had ever even occurred.

The ‘Whore’

Lily Philips was host to a whole range of reactions upon initially revealing plans to sleep with 100 men in a single day. I’m sure that a lot of us were caught between wondering whether this had been a trauma response and wondering whether that first assumption was an internalised, instinctive and misogynistic one. Once again, the discourse surrounding the needed or unnecessary protection of sex workers came around, and the hate train had naturally begun. Sentiments ranging from ‘I’m scared for her’ to ‘She’s a whore’ and everything in between had flooded the comment sections on all of her Tiktok’s, and were not necessarily divided between men and women either. But a few weeks later, she had released a documentary on Youtube detailing the ways in which those 101 encounters weren’t exactly consensual in the traditional sense. She reported abuse from her management team (which included her own mother), the exploitation she had faced, and the complete disregard for boundaries she had put in place for the men she was ‘sleeping’ with regarding time limits and any physical boundaries. The tone of the documentary seemed to accurately portray the mindset of any victim, whereby the cameraman often picked up on instances of abuse throughout her storytelling that even she had become desensitised to, or had disassociated from. Even though she would have been within her right to ask for sympathy, she didn’t necessarily frame the documentary through that lens, and yet, she outrage towards her was waiting there at the ready, to remind her that she was in fact a sex worker and not a victim, as if the two were mutually exclusive.

The ‘Bitch’

More recently, we’ve heard news that Blake Lively has accused her It Ends With Us director and co-star, Justin Baldoni, of sexual harassment on set, as well as a subsequent effort to destroy her reputation. In a legal complaint filed with the California Civil Rights Department, she alleges that after raising concerns with Baldoni and the studio about inappropriate behaviour by Baldoni and a producer, a coordinated retaliation campaign was launched to damage her credibility, and as predicted, we came to rip her apart. Suddenly we were exposed to clip after clip portraying Lively for being vapid, shallow, and altogether bitchy, (we all saw that one interview). But behind the scenes, Lively had made several demands to address the hostile work environment, such as banning nude videos and discussions about pornography on set, ensuring an intimacy coordinator for her scenes with Baldoni, and restricting Baldoni's access to her trailer.

We have to admit that she embodies the kind of woman deemed acceptable to hate, in the way that she is beautiful and successful, but hardly perfect. For the black community and our allies, our general disdain towards her and her husband lies in their decision to get married on an old but well-known plantation site. But for others who had previously just been indifferent, perhaps it was Baldoni’s team who had orchestrated the resentment towards her. If a plantation wedding didn’t disable her entire fanbase, it’s interesting how accusations of her general… bitchy-ness constituted a last straw. But both those reasons valid or invalid for hating the actress, she appears a victim nonetheless and we’ve made the mistake of thinking otherwise before.

In an exclusive statement to NBC News, Amber Heard, the designated ‘bitch’ back in 2022, expressed her frustration with social media, calling it the "personification of the classic saying ‘A lie travels halfway around the world before truth can get its boots on,’" noting how it was both "horrifying and destructive." She reflected on the defamation trial where a jury unanimously found her guilty of defaming Johnny Depp, where people made memes of her crying recounting the assault she’d suffered, and ignored confessions of desires to violently rape her to Depp’s own admission. While Depp stated that the verdict gave him his life back, Heard argued saw that it set back progress for women who speak out, paving the streets for them to be publicly shamed and humiliated like they had been historically. Before getting into the details of the case, I remember hearing that she had lied about her abuse and felt disappointment at the millions of women who wouldn’t be believed now, because she had embodied the horror that was ‘women who lie about their assault’. But it didn’t take long to quickly see where the entire thing had been engineered by a man with far more cultural and social capital, his manhood and his privilege, who had simply refused to take accountability. It is far too late to offer Heard her apologies now. The women in question had failed the simple task of believing the victim, no matter how many times we emphasised this necessity. We know now that people tend to pick and choose when this applies, dependent on how much they see themselves in said victim, or dependent on who their abuser is. But most importantly, those labels or stains, ‘Bitch’ or ‘Whore’, ensured that they almost suffered two instances of abuse; the initial incident or incidences, and then the pain felt by pitchforks she could only hope and pray wouldn’t show up.

Having wrestled with the notion of luck a fair amount today, I’ll leave one ending note.

As the women who face assault wait to receive the reactions from her peers or large audiences after she discloses her trauma, she’ll flip a coin in her mind waiting to discover whether she’ll be the bitch or the whore, or wondering whether she’ll be believed, (one of the lucky ones). But there are no lucky victims, and luck as we often understand it, isn’t a neutral force, but is rather shaped by our ability to fulfil the most simple of duties, and force the winds to shift in her favour,

For next time.

Asisa