Why Do We Require Perfect Victims?
Well, she went back to him, didn’t she?
I thought she was pretty rude in that interview.
The truth will come out. You’ll see. She gave as good as she got.
I have to preface this by saying, I don’t know Blake Lively, obviously not in person, but not on screen, either. I have never seen a series or a film with her in it to my recollection. It was the same thing with Amber Heard: I was familiar-ish with her name but not her body of work before her tribulations with her much more famous ex turned into clickbait fodder of the most grotesque kind. In terms of being a fan-girl of either, that’s not me.
I do know, though, how women, girls and people of color are required to be faultless to the point of a placid, warbling Snow White with her forest creature friends when they seek the correction of injustices, though.
I’m going to tell you why I don’t think this is about celebrities at all, and why we need to pay attention to when we demand that people who speak up against abuse and exploitation be perfect and pure before we can allot them our measure of empathy: It’s because it’s not just celebrities, it is reflective of a much more rampant and inimical mentality, an ingrained attitude we accept without digging too much, one that has real-world implications for all those who are trying to speak up for themselves and seek justice.
Here is a little of my background and why this matters to me: My mother was verbally and psychologically abused by my father virtually every day of their marriage, which ended with his death at 59. She was called stupid. She was called worthless. She was thundered at, embarrassed in public and demeaned in front of her friends and family. For the most part, my mother took it without much reaction, though you can only imagine how those words cut and harmed her. There were times, though, where she started the fights. Where she provoked. Where she lashed back with nearly the same venom. If you had her on video during these times, especially a supercut, you might think, “Well, I guess her husband’s a victim, too. Let’s call it even.”
That was not the case, though. She was abused for years, day-in and day-out, and sometimes even more docile people will hit their limit. They can also become so habituated to the relationship’s dynamic of conflict, and even fight/forgiveness, that this becomes their default style of communication and they feel anxious when it’s not in play. When people used the recording of Amber Heard arguing with her ex, seeming to mock and goad him as he is slurring and seemingly inebriated (perhaps she was as well), as evidence of the “it takes two to tango” of it all, honestly, all I could think of was my mother getting her occasional licks in. Could you blame either one? When I saw the video of him drunkenly slamming cabinets and kicking up their kitchen, the inference to me that this is what he could do to her, I recognized my father in that, too. Damaging property is a tactic of intimidation, especially when paired up with other forms of abuse, including verbal cruelty and degradation. Anyone claiming otherwise has not been in a household or intimate partner relationship where domestic abuse prevails.
Yes, Amber Heard had the agency to leave and also only take the high road with her drunk husband.
Yes, Blake Lively could have been less sarcastic in her interviews, too. She could also be less pretty, rich and fortunate.
Yes, George Floyd could have committed to his sobriety and never committed a crime.
Yes, Christine Blasey Ford could have come forward earlier. (For that matter, what was she doing at a party in a room with drunk boys when she was a minor herself? Didn’t she know better???)
And, yes, my mother could have left. She could have given a better example to her children, especially her daughter, by standing up for herself, but most importantly, gotten her self-esteem back in doing so. And didn’t she talk back sometimes? Didn’t she swear sometimes? Didn’t she goad him on sometimes?
YES. All the yeses. Are we happy now?
Do you all hear yourselves, though, demanding this perfection from victims of abuse and crimes? Do you hear how unfair, unjust, miserly and retrograde it is? I hope so. This is not about letting people off the hook for what they’ve done wrong. This is about ending the insistence that victims of crimes have unassailable behaviors, backgrounds and characters.
These people I mentioned are still deserving to be heard and stand up for themselves as part of the whole picture of standing up against abuse and injustice, and it should not require perfection. If our empathy is only afforded to the children who have experienced injustice because they are considered pure and faultless, what does that say about us as the self-appointed jury?
Nothing good. Are you perfect and void of fault? Have you always done everything right? Do you deserve justice when you have been wronged despite your faulty character, not just in your general life but in situations when the arbiters — with their detachment, distance and cool dispositions — determine that you brought it on yourself or you should have handled things in a different way?
Would you prefer to see a supercut or a point-by-point, frame-by-frame character assassination?
I am going through a bit of this now myself in a way that I cannot speak much to here because of an ongoing legal case (heh, google me), but I will say that when people wade in with their hot takes for clicks and relevance, with nothing personal at stake and the benefit of all that armchair hindsight, they get it wrong. Very wrong. And this not only harms those seeking justice, it ripples out as a warning call and silencing mechanism against anyone who dares to not accept the lie that one must be flawless and groveling to deserve fairness. This insistence on perfection is usually weaponized against girls, women and people of color because of our sexist and racist biases.
I’d ask you to consider that you, too, are imperfect, flawed and perhaps have even made some truly regrettable decisions — as I know I am and I have — but if you have been wronged, you still deserve justice, and I will fight for that for you, just as I do for myself. You are deserving of that, imperfect you, just as we all are.
Your imperfectness is immaterial to your deservingness of justice.
