As I watched Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s gripping Instagram account of the January 6th terrorist attack on the Capitol, while in awe of her strength, moved by her candor, and sickened by the details—I began to feel an unsettling sense of déjà vu, as if I’d been there before.
I later realized that I had.
As a 25-year minister and caregiver, much of that working as a trusted student pastor, I’ve been often given what I consider sacred access to people’s pain, invited by them into proximity with a trauma they often felt they couldn’t share with anyone else.
Many times, I was the first person to hear horror stories that up until that time had been held solely inside the head of the person sharing it (often times girls and young women) out of fear that they would not be believed or wounded again when at their most vulnerable—fears that sadly, were often justified. They were human beings first injured and then forced to carry that burden alone and in silence, rather than being hurt a second time.
At one point in her account of a day few of us could imagine, Representative Ocasio-Cortez said with unadorned directness, “I am a survivor of sexual assault.” It was what seemed to be an unplanned and spontaneous revelation. She admitted that it was not a revelation she’d shared with many previously, yet here in an act of breathtaking honesty and genuine vulnerability, her words were there for hundreds of thousands to do with those words what they wanted.
And I knew what was coming next: unrepentant mansplaining.
The comments began flying in almost immediately on social media: dismissive instructions by anonymous Twitter users to “get over it and move on,” sarcastic quips declaring AOC’s response an emotional overreaction, and general arrogance offered without a scintilla of empathy by men who in a rush to malign her, exposed themselves.
In the hours and day that followed, male journalists, podcast hosts, and lawmakers across the aisle lined up to do what men often do to women at times like these: minimize trauma, invalidate pain, and analyze events they were not present for—not because they believe she is lying but because they fear she is telling a truth that implicates them. They aren’t just demonizing a survivor of abuse, they are in some ways defending themselves.
Representative Ocasio-Cortez is a fierce warrior who is where she is precisely because she has an extraordinary inner resolve and an ability to transform her pain into purpose that not many people have. No stranger to this kind of reckless cruelty, she is as tough and capable as human beings come. She doesn’t need me to defend her, so I won’t.
But she is a human being who has endured profound trauma, and as someone who has sat opposite hundreds of women as they revealed the places of their deepest pain despite how invasive the act, I wanted to thank her for her vulnerability, honor the story she told and the courage she showed in telling it—and the humanity she allowed us all to see because we all need to see it.
Because the story here, isn’t just a public servant baring her soul to hundreds of thousands of strangers, and being wounded a second time by men whose unresolved insecurities, feelings of inferiority, and toxic masculinity make them feel empowered to dismiss her experience or to define what is and isn’t worthy to be named trauma.
The bigger story, is that right now millions of girls and women of every age and life experience are carrying the weight of secret pain they feel they cannot unburden themselves from because they see what happens to those who do.
Right now, millions of men are exacerbating the damage done because they lack the emotional maturity and simple decency to sit with other people’s pain (especially that of women) and allow it to call them to a place of deeper humanity, introspection, and change.
In this moment, there are millions of women experiencing two acts of violence:
first, an event or person who injures them in a single moment or one season,
second, those who force them to relive it repeatedly.
Over the past few years, I’ve heard a lot of conversation about what a “real man” is. That terminology explains the problem.
I don’t know what a real man is, but I do know that a mature, confident, well-adjusted adult human man doesn’t minimize the trauma of women, doesn’t trivialize their suffering, and doesn’t tell them they aren’t in pain when they say that they are.
I hope more men aspire to be that kind of humanity.
It will be a better world if we do.
