This is an absolutely brilliant piece, and will be required reading for my students in the fall. Victoria Smith, I remain one of your biggest fans for the stunningly insightful analysis of women's situation you offer us all. Thank you.
I look forward to the day -- not far off -- that the academics like Amia Srinivasan look around and realize the clapping has stopped and they just have to stand alone next to the things they wrote while the hissing starts.
Brilliant as ever. Fight and flight are always mentioned as instinctive ways to stay safe. Freeze and fawn not so much, maybe because they’re usually the ways women and those with less resources stay safe. This substack explains all the drawbacks of those tactics.
Indeed but there’s a difference - fight and flight is based on research with only male subjects - what you call freeze and fawn, is more naturally female I think - but I’m reminded of research (sorry I forget who - Swedish I think) where females when frightened will ‘gather and hide’ that is we are programmed to take our children to safety. Interesting.
Thank you for this. I'm reading 'Swimming Against the Current' by Riley Gaines, which is really excellent. Gaines talks about someone unplugging the sound (p54) as dead silence takes over what is usually a chattering female space. This is when male swimmer Lia Thomas enters the changing room for the women's NCAA Championship. An abusive situation yet no-one is supposed to challenge it. The NCAA even changed the changing rooms to unisex, a totally unecessary change if Thomas was actually a woman.
No one writes so insightfully, so clearly, so boldly, as Victoria. I was almost in tears reading this and thinking of Peggy's fortitude in what is very much an ordeal.
Thank you for articulating this so well. I've followed a lot of similar tribunals but found this one particularly distressing. Sandie Peggie's father died less than a month ago after a long illness and his funeral was held less than a week before she took the stand. I note, that despite this, she didn't have a support team behind the witness stand. He brought his wife, some friends and his parents -not just in the room but sitting directly behind him. It struck me as both pathetic and cruel at the same time.
Brilliantly incisive, thank you. "Nothingness work" is such a perfect term to describe this female erasure of the self in the face of what is like manspreading on the Tube, but it is male egospreading. However small we make ourselves, it is never enough, some men (not all but far too many) just happily expand themselves further. A cartoon in the early '80s in the Guardian by Posy Simmonds shows a woman smiling in apology when she walks into a door, smiling in apology as she makes a complaint to customer service over the phone. So well trained in the work of self-erasure. Then one day you look into the mirror and there is no one there.
What a brilliant article! And I'd like to add, I have just finished reading Unkind, and that's brilliant too. Thank you so much for saying all this so clearly.
This is an absolutely brilliant piece, and will be required reading for my students in the fall. Victoria Smith, I remain one of your biggest fans for the stunningly insightful analysis of women's situation you offer us all. Thank you.
Hear hear!
It is no accident that it is a nurse whose acquiescence is taken for granted. The emotional labour of nursing work is almost never recognised.
"She didn't say no.", "She didn't fight back." We are damned if we do and damned if we don't.
I look forward to the day -- not far off -- that the academics like Amia Srinivasan look around and realize the clapping has stopped and they just have to stand alone next to the things they wrote while the hissing starts.
Brilliant as ever. Fight and flight are always mentioned as instinctive ways to stay safe. Freeze and fawn not so much, maybe because they’re usually the ways women and those with less resources stay safe. This substack explains all the drawbacks of those tactics.
Indeed but there’s a difference - fight and flight is based on research with only male subjects - what you call freeze and fawn, is more naturally female I think - but I’m reminded of research (sorry I forget who - Swedish I think) where females when frightened will ‘gather and hide’ that is we are programmed to take our children to safety. Interesting.
Thank you for this. I'm reading 'Swimming Against the Current' by Riley Gaines, which is really excellent. Gaines talks about someone unplugging the sound (p54) as dead silence takes over what is usually a chattering female space. This is when male swimmer Lia Thomas enters the changing room for the women's NCAA Championship. An abusive situation yet no-one is supposed to challenge it. The NCAA even changed the changing rooms to unisex, a totally unecessary change if Thomas was actually a woman.
You're the best
No one writes so insightfully, so clearly, so boldly, as Victoria. I was almost in tears reading this and thinking of Peggy's fortitude in what is very much an ordeal.
Brilliant, Victoria!
Thank you. You are a phenomenal thinker and writer.
Just so you know, your new book is the talk of radfem tumblr.
Thank you for articulating this so well. I've followed a lot of similar tribunals but found this one particularly distressing. Sandie Peggie's father died less than a month ago after a long illness and his funeral was held less than a week before she took the stand. I note, that despite this, she didn't have a support team behind the witness stand. He brought his wife, some friends and his parents -not just in the room but sitting directly behind him. It struck me as both pathetic and cruel at the same time.
Brilliantly incisive, thank you. "Nothingness work" is such a perfect term to describe this female erasure of the self in the face of what is like manspreading on the Tube, but it is male egospreading. However small we make ourselves, it is never enough, some men (not all but far too many) just happily expand themselves further. A cartoon in the early '80s in the Guardian by Posy Simmonds shows a woman smiling in apology when she walks into a door, smiling in apology as she makes a complaint to customer service over the phone. So well trained in the work of self-erasure. Then one day you look into the mirror and there is no one there.
What a brilliant article! And I'd like to add, I have just finished reading Unkind, and that's brilliant too. Thank you so much for saying all this so clearly.
Loved this writing Victoria, and the clarity of your ideas, as also evidenced in your Andrea Dworkin quotes.
This is utterly brilliant, powerful and insightful. It's heartbreaking that in 2025, the ideas articulated here are still marginal.
Bookmarked to share, re-read and reference.
Thank you so much.