The film She Said, by Maria Schrader, has just been released. I went there thinking of thinking about the Weinstein affair: I came out of it full of thoughts about the Julien Lacroix affair.
She Said brilliantly recounts the investigation carried out by two journalists from the New York Times. Even though in this story, we are dealing with a sickly predator, who has erected a whole system to maintain his scheme for more than 15 years, I believe that we can learn lessons from this film for our own cases of sexual violence.
The strength of the movie She Said I believe lies in its ability to show the diversity of reactions of victims of sexual violence. Their reaction to events and how they will deal with them for the rest of their lives. No scene of aggression is shown in She Said. I cannot praise this artistic choice enough, which forces us to listen, to imagine, to feel differently. And that’s what we need, we women who live with their collection of events of harassment, touching, aggression.
A myth to deconstruct
The film is therefore based on several scenes of conversations between the victims of Weinstein and the journalists. Pieces of telephone discussions, meetings, messages exchanged. Through these stories, the diversity of reactions to sexual assault unfolds.
I’m thinking of this character who tells how, when Weinstein was attacking him, he froze, stop, nothing. Not only did the woman not struggle, but she told the journalist that she had even faked an orgasm. This scene is important. It contributes to shattering the still tenacious myth of the “real victim”.
You can never predict a person’s reaction to a sexual assault. You will surely be mistaken in imagining your own reaction to a potential aggression… The body deploys mechanisms and strategies that are specific to it and impossible to control or predict. Stunning, dissociation, trivialization: all these mechanisms are possible and valid. And so it is with the ways in which we will live the rest of our lives. More or less severe trauma, anger, denial, trivialization, and sometimes all of that. These feelings fluctuate with the rhythm of the passing years.
This myth of the “real victim”, that is to say the one who struggles, who runs to the police and who especially does not speak to her attacker again, continues to pollute our legal system and our imaginations. We have internalized these representations of reactions to sexual assault and are only beginning to move away from them. I hope the movie She Said will be seen by a large audience in order to broaden our conception of ways of living and to explain the sexual violence that we have suffered.
I hope that this public conversation around whistleblowing brings us back to the basic facts: a staggering number of women have experienced and continue to experience sexual violence. We would be wrong to “classify” them according to their feeling of being a victim or not, according to their way of continuing to live with these events. I don’t always feel like a victim, but I have been a victim of sexual assault. This is a fact that no one, not even me, can dispute. It’s not a matter of feelings.