A common sentiment expressed in user comments is that one person’s experience doesn’t amount to a trend. Anecdotes are irrelevant and you’re probably a lesbian anyway. I’m more inclined to see it the other way around: for every one person relating a story of sexism or harassment, there are countless others with similar stories going untold.
Statistics are helpful, but only insofar as they are supporting or informing some other type of evidence. Neither statistics nor science tells the stories of people’s lives as they are actually experienced – we need people to do that.
I think the duality of individual and collective identities presents a challenge to modern feminism, especially when their reconciliation requires us to break certain tenets. We speak in “I” statements, we listen, we abuse disclaimers and avoid generalizations. There is a fear of losing the nuance that makes these stories uniquely ours, and for good reason. The nuance keeps us individually wrapped, sealed and shielded against the messy suppositional goo that comprises “everyone else.” To generalize is to absorb someone else’s story into one’s own, and strip it of the personal detail that made it real and meaningful, so we police such transgressions within our own circles.
The incessant threat of hostility from outside our circles intensifies this code. We sanctify identity ownership as a defensive measure against those aggressively oversimplified replies that turn our sediment to straw and leave us standing in the mud. So much energy is wasted cleaning that mud off our faces: “No, not all men are rapists.” We desperately want credibility – an ever more precious commodity – and credibility starts with accountability. So we place even more value on the delineations between ourselves.
But our identities are inextricable from our place in society. Our experiences are formed within the context of a larger whole, a whole that we continually create and shape simply by existing within it.
Your experiences inform my identity; this is why I call myself a young women.
A Young Women 