During my life as a girl and a woman, I had the experience of being defended by a man. It was a mixture of unease in the face of violence from all sides and a feeling of ego, exacerbated in a system that values this so-called very instinctive man-woman relationship, but which is very much constructed.
I had not yet read about this experience at the time, except the one given to me and conveyed. It was a gesture of defense that demonstrates the other’s love for oneself, and that. We defend honor where there is lack of respect, to put it simply and use the integrated causal explanations. So busy with this task and this role that one no longer distinguishes his person from the defended person. Smaller than yourself, it goes without saying.
I didn’t see how he could have done anything other than use his strength and his stature because I didn’t see how we could extricate ourselves from the system or, at least, rethink it and review our reflexes and our truths. When things are so concrete, it becomes difficult not to become a definition other than the one written by others.
Then, I also experienced its opposite. The experience of not being defended. Left to myself in this same system of determined interactions. To be at the side of someone who, instead of awkwardly and unconsciously thinking of being an ally, hides in his most comfortable entrenchments and takes sides in his non-action.
I did not feel in either of them a real defense of what really oppresses.
This posture, this politicized and public life, this small-print social contract of being a woman in a world that requires protection from both the defender and the aggressor.
Although the cowardice seems blatant in the behavior of the man who remains in his ranks and who does not support his partner, I see the courage not in the staging of his privileges which raises fear much more than respect, but in the accompaniment of women on the ground of wholeness. Which means questioning. Which requires that we review who is defending women and, also, who and what we are really defending.
It is neither by the fear generated by the chivalrous bearing nor by the fear of displeasing one’s bases of an avoidant partner that one obtains respect and dignity.
Maybe it’s in a world where we don’t necessarily need more light in the streets, but in our beings.
More broadly, women, and particularly black and racialized women, should not, in a system that fully recognizes them, need to be defended. Point.