Read on Twitter
The dissonance between #ReadTheReport and #BUTstandards is stunning, but not surprising. It is much easier to reconcile and talk about the report if Sexual Harassment and Sexual Assault in the ranks are evidence of BAD people and BAD decisions
And not fundamentally part of the same conversation about how women are treated within military organizations. If you don’t think women speaking up about how they EXPERIENCE something as simple as a haircut regulation,
Then why on earth would they trust you to listen to their EXPERIENCES of harassment and assault?
If a uniform regulation cannot be seriously reconsidered and modified to support the physical needs of service members; if it is impossible to procure gear that fits; if it is unimaginable that an organization might have to BEND itself to meet needs of actual people
If it remains acceptable to denigrate the idea of women’s military service, to tell women that have no place in the military, to threaten and diminish women in online spaces and in in/person spaces
Then how can you even begin to tackle the problem of Sexual Harassment and Sexual Assault. When you expect women to conform to imagined “male” spaces, and expect nothing from men or organizations to move toward women,
Then you have NO IDEA how to tackle the much more spectacular problem of SH/SA. It’s not that not knowing the women’s hair regs or not understanding why they are problematic is the equivalent of sexually harassing or assaulting a woman. They are obviously different,
But the dissonance evident in many circles right now is stunning, and really depressing. We are begging you, listen to women when they tell you how they experience the world and make suggestions about what might make it better.
Until women are *FULLY* part of the team — and remember, that might mean changing the culture of the team, not changing women — the SH/SA shitshow is going to seem intractable and unsolvable. It is neither. It IS hard.
