I read this post by Zuri Stevens , A Message From Black Women To White Women On The Epstein Files , and this passage made me think about grooming:
Don’t get me wrong, there are white women fighting to bring down the likes of Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump, and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, but there should be way more. Every single white woman should be raising their voice against the atrocities committed and the omertà of silence that allowed them to continue for decades. None should be keeping quiet. Where are the prominent white female voices out there? Why are so many on mute? Yes, I’m talking to you, J.K. Rowling, Taylor Swift, Reese Witherspoon, Scarlett Johansson, and Jennifer Aniston.
It was already on my mind (the personal is political) due to the ongoing scramble through the wastelands of a broken relationship, and bid for freedom and understanding. My son asked me the other day if I missed Andy, if a small and secret part of me wanted him back. Yes, and No respectively, the No got an embellishment. “He was always so good at this,” (universal hand signal for endless talking) but you’ve got to know someone by what they do, not what they say. The fact that he didn’t mean to do it (lazily he’s told my son that he didn’t mean to chuck me by phone call) makes it worse on all levels. It implies he’s not in control of himself nor willing to take responsibility for himself, and further, that the uncontrolled him is vicious. Call me old fashioned but isn’t that the, Men can’t help themselves plea?
Like so many others, he lumbers about convinced of his own niceness, all evidence to the contrary filed under, A woman made me do it.
Yesterday I pulled out a folder of the letters we exchanged over four months of seduction. Boy oh boy was he good at it. And what a fool I was to believe him. All the evidence I had at the time, screamed Don’t Do It. But he had me with, I’ve never felt this way before. The evidence now screams of grooming, not his, he was acting out in his usual way, but of the grooming of women to believe the words of men in the face of their contrary actions.
In the early months of unpacking what had happened to me as a child, I spoke to a woman who worked in social services. Many times she’d been called as expert witness in court and she told me this. “It’s not just the victim who is groomed. The perpetrator grooms everyone in the household, everyone in that child’s environment. Global collusion, that child’s entire world, is necessary for the abuse to carry on unabated. Everyone’s got to be in on it, whether they know it consciously, or not.”
In the aftermath of my relationship I notice that grooming in action, the learned impulse to find excuses for him, to make it all right, to let him off the hook. In the unpacking of Epstein I notice that grooming (and this is where Zuri Stevens’ essay comes in), and in the careful reassembling of my childhood I notice it too. It’s impossible that the adults around me didn’t know, and yet consciously, they didn’t know. I remember picking through the evidence carefully while my mother was alive, aware that she loved me, presupposing devastation had I made her face it. Yet when my memoir came out and my cousin gently tapped around it she said, No, read it to me. I want to know. The loaded nature of that sentence echoes knowing all along, like the women at Epstein’s parties, like all the people who called themselves his friends, and all the people who saw and said nothing, knew and did nothing. Like Starmer saying sorry for giving Mandelson a job, Sorry I was duped, yeah, yeah (international hand signal for talking). Not good enough.
Grooming goes deep. Cowardice goes deeper.
So yes, I stand with Zuri, where are the white women raising their voices? Where is the awakening to global grooming, the comfortable and violent status quo that We just have to keep them happy? How are men ever to grow up while we make it so easy to stay juvenile? There are some good, beautiful adult men out there, but not enough. It makes me press further into creating a world where we meet each other as humans first, and all other identifiable markers are secondary, no longer available as excuses to be used by themselves or others. We are humans, held to the same standards, equal under the sun. This is where I operate from, you and me, the same. Grooming is a trick. Wake up.
Eleanor
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