I’m deeply sick of women victim blaming other women.
I know Reddit especially has a ton of women with the most heinous monsters, swearing he’s a great guy, and reluctant to leave him. And maybe irl, we’ve met a few of those women. This post is NOT about that.
There are a lot of very obviously toxic people who don’t hide it, who are easy to avoid, and many people do. And then there’s the other toxic people who everyone thinks are absolutely wonderful, til they suddenly do something heinous like rape or assault. Too many people act like this last category doesn’t exist, because the first category of toxic people is so easy to spot and avoid. Even if you have read millions of lists of red flags, believe me, the more covert category can be a LOT harder to spot until it’s too late.
And a lot of us have done the work to be able to leave the moment a red flag drops. It’s just that the first red flag can be someone harming us, badly, in a way that wrecks our mental health for years. And I have not seen nearly enough compassion for the many with that experience, and instead a massive amount of constant victim blaming, for years and years.
And instead of any compassion, the overwhelming response is for everyone, especially other women, to assume there must have been red flags, when there only were a ton of green flags.
It’s easier to believe you’re wiser than that woman who got seriously hurt, and thus assume she got attacked due to her own ignorance, and therefore your insight or wisdom makes you invulnerable. That’s an easy stance to take, one that doesn’t entail facing hard truths. That easy stance causes a TON of victim blaming, that makes it massively harder for victims already struggling to be able to heal.
It’s a lot harder to realize that while it’s awesome to be able to spot red and yellow flags, nothing can ever make you 100% invulnerable. To face how bad it is to get seriously hurt, and still face the reality that you have no guaranteed protection from that awful pain. Yet that is the reality. No one person is omnipotent, and sadly some scary people are VERY good at wearing a mask until they do something heinous.
Expecting omnipotence of ourselves and others just makes healing – whether for ourselves, if the worst were to happen – or for others – unbearably harder.
Believe me, I was taught what red flags look like when I was 6 years old, and learned even more as a young woman, and despite always leaving as soon as a red flag appeared, I’ve been seriously harmed, because there’s a lot of scary assholes out there. To be honest, after years of healing, it’s hardest to deal with how the general public, especially other women, seem to utterly despise survivors. “We must be dumb, we must have bad boundaries.”
The first man who victim blamed me, revealed HIS red flag by saying I must have had bad boundaries in order to have been raped, when the entire gist of what rape is is that NO does not matter to a rapist. This guy went onto assault a friend of mine, so I don’t buy the idea that all victims must have bad boundaries, and instead I realize those making assumptions about victims are not exactly the most decent people out there.
It’s disturbing how people, especially other women – even those who claim to be feminists – make cruel assumptions about women just because they know a tiny bit about their life, the one crime they survived, and not their character, not the years of inner work they put in to do their best to keep themselves safe, not how discerning they are etc.
This has been pissing me off for the past decade, and in 2025 I wish this was at artifact of a more misogynistic era, but it’s all over the place every day unfortunately. We need to do better.