He came, he saw, he said nothing

Some time ago now, I walked down the Groenplaats in Antwerp with my then-partner at my side. Out of nowhere, a man approached us and made a vile joke—the gist of it being that he wanted to fuck me. He said it so bluntly that I felt the urge to scrub my skin raw. I didn’t know then that he was being filmed by a friend of his. Only days later a friend of mine sent me the TikTok of that very moment. I wasn’t just harassed in the street—I had become material for someone’s ‘comedic’ routine, a prop for an audience of strangers. The comments beneath the video cut even deeper. I was objectified, reduced, and at the same time mocked as ugly. My ex was ridiculed too—not for standing beside me as a partner, but for failing to ‘defend his property’.

My body was shamed, my worth dissected, as though I were nothing more than an object. He was shamed for not protecting that object well enough. I cried that night with tears he couldn’t quite understand. They were bitter tears—the taste of misogyny made public. Although I do not identify as a woman, my body is typically read as female, and I experienced the same kinds of policing, objectification, and threat that women routinely endure. I will therefore speak of misogyny here, not as a claim about identity, but as a term for the structural and social dynamics of gendered harm that I know.

It struck me again: a layer of society men never have to carry, and so often cannot grasp. No matter how often he said he’d listen, how often he tried to be progressive, silent, supportive while I raged against misogyny—something was missing. He thought silence was solidarity. He thought letting me speak was enough. But what I kept wondering was this: why did he never raise his own voice? Why didn’t he already see the injustice, long before I forced it into his line of sight?

That’s the pattern, isn’t it? Men are blind until the women near them are screaming—hysterical, desperate, flaying our arms in pain—demanding recognition of discrimination and cruelty that has always been there.

More recently I came into contact with this very issue yet again, bringing the previous story back to my mind. Near Amsterdam a young girl called Lisa was found murdered, beaten to death. A night with friends turned into an actual horror story. A horror story girls everywhere have heard echo ever since they were able to leave their house. Because we all know it. The whispered warnings, the keys clutched between our fingers, the constant scanning of our surroundings on the way home. We are taught to live in anticipation of violence, long before it ever touches us. And when it does, the world calls it tragedy—as if it were a natural disaster rather than the predictable result of a culture that looks away until it is too late. What I am preaching here is nothing new, or at least it really shouldn’t be.  Lisa’s death was not an isolated eruption of violence. It was a continuation. A reminder. Each case that makes the news carries behind it the weight of all the times women were not believed, not protected, not valued. It is the same thread that runs from a street joke on the Groenplaats to the worst possible end in a deserted field near Amsterdam. And it leaves me wondering: how many more times will we have to scream, cry, and name our pain before the men who love us, the men who stand beside us, understand that silence is complicity? That progressiveness without action is just another form of comfort at our expense? Perhaps it is the comfort of the untroubled ground they can walk, a ground that women have never been able to trust.

Godhood is just like girlhood: a begging to be believed

(Chang Kristin,'Churching', published in 'Up The Staircase Quarterly') Simone de Beauvoir grasped this condition decades ago in Le Deuxième Sexe when she wrote: “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.” Otherness, she explained, is not an accident of history but a fundamental category of human thought. Every group names itself as the One by defining someone else as the Other. Women have struggled to unite against men, for they were always dispersed among them, folded into their families, bound in intimacy. Woman became the Other within the very heart of their own home. This is why, on the Groenplaats, I was never simply myself. I was a body through which the male Subject asserted his own centrality—by reducing me to a punchline, a prop, an object.The same structure echoes in the murder of Lisa in a much more fatal context: the annihilation of a woman’s subjectivity, her transformation into matter for male domination, erased of her own existence. And yet, just as disturbing is the passivity of those who consider themselves ‘good men’. They remain, in Beauvoir’s words, the Self, the Absolute, expecting recognition as allies merely by allowing us space to scream. But silence does not dissolve Otherness—it confirms it. If the Subject does not speak, the Other remains marked, marginal, reduced.

I also keep returning to Kate Manne’s claim that misogyny isn’t best understood as a hatred of women, but as a policing system: the informal law enforcement arm of patriarchy. Sexism is the ideology that rationalises women’s subordination, our supposed nature, our alleged roles. Misogyny is what kicks in to punish women when we step out of line, and to reward those who keep us in it.

Seen this way, what happened on the Groenplaats wasn’t an isolated vulgarity; it was an act of discipline. A stranger took possession of my body in public, linguistically and digitally, to remind me of the terms: you are here for our amusement, our appraisal, our access. The TikTok comments extended the same discipline with some calling me ugly (withholding approval), others blaming my ex for not “defending” me (reasserting that a woman should be under a man’s protection, not her own authority). Even the framing of him as a failed protector reveals the deeper script: women are objects to be guarded, not subjects to be respected. In Manne’s terms, that’s the moral economy of patriarchy at work: women are expected to provide deference, comfort, care; men are entitled to attention, admiration, sex, safety. When the expected goods aren’t delivered, punishment follows.

Manne also brings us a concept, “himpathy”, the culturally amplified sympathy extended to men who harm or endanger women, along with the ready suspicion cast on the woman harmed. I tasted himpathy in the replies that minimised the “joke,” that asked what I was wearing, that wondered why I didn’t laugh it off. Himpathy cushions the perpetrator and corrodes the credibility of the target; it makes discipline feel like “banter,” and resistance look like overreaction.

This framework clarifies why Lisa’s murder cannot be treated as a freakish rupture. It is the far end of the same enforcement continuum. When women claim public space, set boundaries, speak, say no, leave, report, walk home alone—misogyny is the system that seeks to push us “down, girl” until we are back within bounds. Sometimes the push is a jeer. Sometimes it is a blow. Sometimes it is fatal. The scale changes; the logic does not. None of this requires believing that all men are monsters, or drawing reckless historical equivalences. Manne’s point (and my point) is simpler and colder: you do not need monsters to maintain a system. You need norms, entitlements, and everyday agents willing to enforce them, actively or by silence.

Which is why the quiet of “good, progressive men” matters. Their non-intervention is not neutral; it leaves the policing to others and allows the punishments to proceed. Refusing that role means breaking with himpathy, believing women the first time, naming “jokes” as discipline, intervening in the moment, and treating women as subjects whose safety and speech are not conditional goods.If Beauvoir diagnosed woman as the Other, Manne shows how the Other is kept there: not only through ideology, but through ongoing, ordinary enforcement. And that is what I want men to see without our screaming: the structure is already in place. Your voice, used early and decisively, is part of dismantling it. Your silence is part of how it holds.