Women Need Allies

By Jean Claire Dy

First published in Mega Fashion Magazine, 2018. Revised and rewritten from Melbourne.

I am writing this from Melbourne, years after I first wrote a version of this piece for Mega Magazine in 2018, in the early days of the #MeToo movement. I no longer want this to be a piece about one country, or about a movement that had its moment years ago and then moved on. What I want to write about now is something larger and still unresolved: what happens to women and survivors like me, across borders, and how far the law still sits from actual safety, wherever you happen to live.

I remember when I was in college, a professor of Physics who was very well known and well liked, made leering comments about how I looked in class because I was wearing a sleeveless top. After whispering something sexual to my ear while we were doing a class assignment, he stood in front of the class and commented that women who dress like me are “unchristianly” because “slutty” dressing makes one a "temptress". I was humiliated and caught in the wit of the staircase, so I did not say anything. I remained silent because I also felt like I would be seen as someone who could not “man up” and take things in stride if I had answered back.

After that incident, I asked the dean to take action against the teacher. What she did was to move me to another class with another male professor who was a really good one. But that decision did not take the sting out of the trauma I felt after. My former classmates told me I took things too seriously and that I missed out on some good education about physics.

Until now, I do not know if that was the right thing to do. The Philippines has Republic Act 7877, otherwise known as the Anti-Sexual Harassment Act, that penalises individuals who commit sexual harassment in schools and workplaces. But it is still behind in terms of implementation, especially in providing safe places for women who file cases. Some universities have a gender committee, and other cities have women’s desks. But in my experience, it is difficult to move cases because the women and girls who report are always in fear of backlash.

Since then, more scaffolding has been built around this problem worldwide, on paper at least. The United Nations set out women’s right to protection from discrimination and violence in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women back in 1979. In 2019 the International Labour Organisation adopted Convention 190, the first international treaty to name violence and harassment in the world of work as a human rights issue. Australia, where I have lived for several years now, only introduced a positive duty on employers to actively prevent workplace sexual harassment in December 2023, through changes to the Sex Discrimination Act. That is decades after CEDAW and years after ILO Convention 190. Laws like these matter. But I have since lived on both sides of the gap between what a law says and what a workplace actually does, and I can tell you that gap is wide.

Sometimes I find myself thinking about what would have happened if I had pursued a case against that particular professor. I would not have graduated. The usual reaction in this kind of case in a university is to mitigate the effects of the crisis and let the erring professor save face.

Over the years, like most women I know, I have been harassed many times. I have lost count. But one thing I had not talked about for a long time is my being a survivor of gang rape. For years I said nothing about it. It was only recently, when I finally trusted someone I love enough to speak about it, that things began to settle. Saying it out loud was what let the pieces fall into place, not the other way around. But how I reacted, by staying silent about my rape, is not an isolated case.

Just recently, social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook were buzzing with the #metoo campaign that tries to encourage women to post their experiences of sexual harassment and sexual assault and to motivate other women to become allies of survivors. This came after many Hollywood actresses wrote about their experiences with sexual harassment and assault at the hands of top Hollywood executives like Harvey Weinstein. Even in my own Facebook echo chamber, I saw far more posts by women about their experiences with either sexual harassment or sexual assault than I expected.

When I saw the campaign online and how women were sharing their own stories of sexual assault and sexual harassment, I felt like I was not alone. And it is important to point out that there are many who have had to live through far worse than I have.

I felt like I needed to share my story. But I had to think about posting my own #metoo post because some of my female friends on Facebook said it was problematic to make women relive their experiences and double the burden of victimhood. Do we as women have to share our experiences to convince society that we live in a predatory patriarchal world? Some women assert that it is time for men to admit their transgressions. The #metoo campaign should turn the tables and let men admit they have at some point committed sexual harassment or sexual assault, or have been complicit in making these misogynistic behaviors possible.

The campaign focuses on women because the number of cases of sexual harassment and sexual violence experienced by women is high, and that is true almost everywhere. The World Health Organisation estimates that nearly one in three women worldwide, around 840 million women and girls, have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, a figure that has barely moved in two decades. UN Women reports that while 151 countries now have laws against sexual harassment in the workplace, only 39 have laws covering harassment in public spaces, and more than sixty percent of countries still lack rape laws built on the principle of consent. To steer any campaign away from this focus is to deny patriarchy’s power over women in general, wherever those women happen to live.

This is not to say that women do not need allies. We do. However, it is not enough for men to like posts tagged #metoo on social media. We need men to be real allies. But unfortunately it is hard to find men as allies in addressing the problem of sexual assault, abuse, and violence against women in general because most of the time, even progressive men find it difficult to understand why there is a need to speak up and advocate for women. The burden falls on women themselves to make noise, when in the larger scheme of things men need to advocate for women too. Take the burden off our backs, speak up, and do something. Move away from the notion that women who assert themselves and complain are immediately labelled 'difficult'. Complaining about sexual harassment, or even rape, should never be trivialised as an annoyance.

There should be more dialogue among men. Allies of women cannot just speak within an echo chamber. They need to speak to their fellow men. Those are the difficult conversations that have to happen if we genuinely want things to change.

For decades, women have been screaming our lungs out. That is the history of feminism. We have spoken. We have marched. We have shared our stories over and over again. I was eighteen when I volunteered at a women’s crisis centre, listening to women tell their stories. That was in 1999, before Y2K, when we thought the world might end, or perhaps change for the better. Instead, in many ways, things have gradually worsened. Violence against women remains one of the leading human rights crises of our time.

We need to be better. So I am calling on men, especially those who tell me they are my allies, to stand with us. Peacefully. Strategically. Have those conversations with your friends, your brothers, your fathers, your sons, your colleagues. Do not leave the work of changing men to women alone. I believe in strategy wholeheartedly. If you can change one mind at a time, you are already on the right path.

I am sorry if this is uncomfortable to read. But I encourage you to sit with that discomfort. That is where learning begins. Men, in general, are not my enemies. I recognise the socialisation, the conditioning, and the systems that have shaped many of them. That is exactly why these conversations matter so much. We have to understand where these behaviours come from if we are going to change them, because I would like to believe that, deep down, most of us simply want to become better human beings.

To be born female and to live as a woman in this country is to be born into a world that immediately sexualises us. Growing up an adolescent, I remember learning to feel ashamed of my body because of comments considered normal among older men, about how I had grown into a pretty "lady", comments that made it easier for them to objectify me. Going to the beach, I wore a shirt and shorts instead of a swimmers because I was told I might be ogled at by older men. The burden was placed on me, not on how these men should learn to comport themselves in the presence of girls and women wearing swimmers at the beach. To complain about these unwanted advances was always met with the accusation that I was not able to take a joke. Men and women around me were complicit in enabling this kind of behaviour.

Women too can be complicit accessories. Surveys in multiple countries have found that a real share of women themselves believe survivors are partly to blame for what happened to them, and that belief helps explain why so many witnesses stay silent when they see harassment happen in front of them. This is true in the accounts described in a New Yorker article about the Harvey Weinstein case, where female employees who knew he was a sexual predator and who had lured actresses into his office so he could do what he wanted did not stop what was happening or even complain about it.

What makes me say that? Because, as I mentioned above, sexual harassment and sexual violence are symptoms of patriarchy, and patriarchy is where power politics come into play. While we say that rape, for instance, is about power and not about gender, we also have to recognise that in a patriarchal society, those who hold power and dominance are mostly men. It is a structural problem too, one where systems are in place to perpetuate the oppression of women in general. This is why, when the former president of the Philippine Republic, jokes about rape, he is rarely held accountable for it. He holds power, and what he says about women, according to most of his followers, has no direct link to the policies he supports, even though many studies have shown that language plays a real role in shaping how people think.

We need allies outside of our own circles. As women, we can be allies to other women too. In a sense, I felt the need to speak up and be part of the #metoo campaign at the time because it created a kind of sisterhood that reached beyond race and class. In the end, years ago, I posted this on Facebook for all women to read and for all men and other genders to think about: “I see you. I promise to speak up and do something about it when I see it happen to you. #metoo”

Epilogue: Melbourne, years later

Early this year, right before my birthday, I experienced sexual assault at work, here in Melbourne. I will not go into detail about what happened. What I want to write about is something that happened afterwards, inside my own head: how much energy I spent blaming myself, specifically for freezing.

This happened in a country that now has some of the clearest laws on paper, the positive duty I mentioned earlier, the training modules, and the reporting channels. None of it stopped what happened, and none of it made it easier to come forward afterwards. A law can exist and a workplace can still fail a woman inside it. I know that now from the inside, not just from reading about it.

I did not fight. I did not run. I stayed still and I stayed quiet, and for a long time afterwards, I turned that stillness over in my mind like it was evidence against me. Therapists and other women working in this space were the ones who first named for me what fight and flight leave out. Alongside those two, there is freeze, and there is a fourth response that gets far less attention than the others: fawn, where a person under threat becomes agreeable and compliant, trying to defuse danger by making themselves easy to be around rather than by resisting or running.

The research backs this up more than most people realize. Studies on tonic immobility, the clinical term for the freeze response, have found that a majority of sexual assault survivors experience some degree of involuntary paralysis during an attack. Some studies put the figure as high as seventy percent, with close to half reporting an extreme version of it. Freezing and fawning are not rare exceptions to fight or flight. For a great many survivors, they are the default.

Knowing this did not undo the self-blame overnight, but it gave me language for what my body did and why. My body was not failing me on that day. It was running a programme built to keep me alive, the same programme that runs in most survivors, whether or not they ever say so out loud. There is no perfect victim. There never was one. We respond however our nervous system decides will keep us breathing, and none of those responses need defending.

I was lucky. I had one man who showed up for me as an ally, and one woman too, and neither of them shared my race. I did not expect that. Being a woman of colour in this country already makes me feel like a target some days, so having two people who were not obligated by shared background choose to stand with me anyway meant something I am still working out how to name.

Reporting was not simple. Reporting here could affect my visa status, and that fear alone kept me quiet longer than the assault itself did. But I was lucky in another way too. There are services here, like CASA, built specifically for survivors like me, and a mental health clinic that gave me an actual case management team, not just a hotline number and a shrug. I know that is not the reality for survivors in the Philippines, where I am from, or in a great deal of the world. That contrast sits heavy with me. It is a sobering thing to realise that luck, and not need, is often what decides whether a survivor gets real support.

I am adding this to a piece I wrote years ago because the throughline has not moved. Women are still expected to prove that we resisted correctly in order to be believed. I would like that expectation to end in my lifetime.

About the author

Jean Claire Dy is a Filipino-Chinese writer, documentary filmmaker, and educator based in Melbourne. She is the founder of Stories Beyond (www.stories-beyond.com), an organisation that tells restorative and transformative narratives of people and communities, always beyond what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the single story". Her documentary A House in Pieces has screened at more than fifty international festivals. She is completing a PhD in documentary filmmaking and remains an avowed feminist.