Speaking for Peng Shuai is a new height and challenge for Mitu Sports

*This article is a summary of the speeches in the discussion activities on the Peng Shuai incident on Clubhouse (the speaker is not indicated separately). The article uses "Mitu" to refer to the #MeToo movement in China.

After learning that Peng Shuai had posted such a post on Weibo, many friends were shocked at the beginning, especially when they saw the name of Zhang Gaoli, a former member of China's top leadership group, written in such a form. It quickly felt that everyone had very strong concerns and fears. Many people were afraid to discuss this matter, and indeed we had almost no room for discussion.

We hope to create a space for everyone to discuss this matter from the perspective of feminism. It is also hoped that through this discussion, the psychological burden that our community feels when witnessing this incident. And I want to discuss with you what we can do in this event.

Fear Comes From Witnessing a Black Hole

The day after Peng Shuai released his self-report, she was no longer searchable on Weibo. People who care about this matter rarely talk about this information publicly, and more often share screenshots, or write "I hope she is safe" and "Come on", and support her in the circle of friends in a very indirect way.

Maybe many people feel the same way as me. When I woke up, Peng Shuai's self-reported post had disappeared. I frantically searched for the word "Peng Shuai" on Weibo, and all the words that popped up were "Peng Yuyan". Then I saw someone cryptically say "Sister Peng, come on" in the circle of friends. Only through some feminist groups can I see the full text of her statement. This is the Mitu case with the most severe and rapid information blocking in my impression.

Sometimes in China, I don’t even know that the censorship is happening. When I read related foreign news, I realized that not only “Peng Shuai” and “Prime Minister”, but also some sentences in Peng Shuai’s original text, such as “the universe is very big”, were published on domestic platforms. Up is also the key word being censored. Under such circumstances, it is difficult for the general public to obtain more information about the incident.

The information on Twitter will be more and more complicated. There are many people who support Peng Shuai, but at the same time, many people do not focus on the fact that a woman stands up to fight and speak out, breaking away from the discourse of patriarchy Tell her story, but put her in the framework of old pornographic news, high-level leaders' sex scandals, and even wrap gender issues in the discourse of partisan struggle and international political issues. Or treat Peng Shuai as a mistress and regard the whole incident as a palace fight drama. Someone left a message under a post introducing the incident: "I didn't expect the aesthetics of Chinese leaders to look like this." They humiliated Peng Shuai's appearance.

Peng Shuai's self-report was censored inside the wall and could not be published, but suffered many distortions outside the wall, and her voice as a female subject was constantly erased. Between censorship and distortion, we can discuss how to build a feminist, empathetic reading of her as a victim of sexual assault.

At that time, seeing the screenshot of Peng Shuai’s original self-reporting, it was very sad and felt very real—when she said she had no evidence, her evidence was herself, and seeing the distortion, pain, and even shame and self-blame between the lines in her words. There is a sentence in which I was very impressed. She wrote, "I was afraid and panicked, and I agreed with my feelings for you 7 years ago."

What hit me very much at the time was that first of all, what she testified was a person with an "unspeakable" status and an "untouchable" thing, which required great courage and made me feel that her words were more true. Secondly, her explanation of "love" pushed Mitu to a new position. Mitu encouraged everyone to speak out from the beginning, then emphasized "imperfect victims", and now Peng Shuai's narration has more directly hit the hypocritical essence of "love": the process of its construction, The violence, power inequality and forced sex behind it. I think she opened up a new space for discourse.

The third point is that she clearly knew how much pressure she was facing, but she still stood up. Although she didn't use a word like Mitu. We all know that in a place with such a concentration of power, there must be sexual abuse, but it is still surprising that she can speak out. I saw countless people calling her "run" in Weibo messages, hoping that she would be safe. At that time, I used the topic #望她安安# on Weibo. But this label will soon no longer be available. I think these five words are like a code, how humble it is to face a powerful perpetrator in a sexual assault incident, but it is also our most sincere desire.

When she said this, we immediately saw that this was a confrontation with a huge "monster", and immediately realized that this incident exceeded the "safety line" . It turned out that we always knew that the safety line was there , but now we witness a person cross the safety line and enter a black hole. It was a terrible experience.

At that time, a friend asked me: "What to do, I think this matter is true." I kept thinking why he asked "What to do", and then I realized that Peng Shuai's narration impacted many ordinary people's understanding of the political environment. And the imagination of high-level authorities , so everyone's first reaction will be very flustered. To fight the fear, we need to empower ourselves and think about how we can help her.

When Peng Shuai said this incident, I suddenly realized that the "pornographic news" about many officials and state leaders I had heard before involved some of the top and most concerned women in the arts and other industries. There may also be coercion of power in these relationships, but we have never realized it, because everyone treats them as stories and scandals.

Many friends said: "I didn't expect that such a woman, who strives to become the top in the industry and become a world champion, can't escape becoming a plaything of power." The emotional impact brought to us by this point is very intense. The reason why conspiracy theories like "partisan fighting" are needed is because of the refusal to admit that someone is going through this. I don't believe that Peng Shuai's courage will be dispelled by the conspiracy theory narrative. Hope to see more speeches that truly respect Peng Shuai's voice.

For many victims and survivors, what sometimes takes the courage to speak out is that we believe this matter is bigger than our lives, that we long for recognition and for the justice we believe to be done. Many of Mitu's stories are stories of blood and tears, but the tenacious vitality of women can also be seen behind it.

In the past three years that Mitu has been in China, we have witnessed the exposure of sexual assaults in universities, media, and public welfare industries. At the same time, we have always imagined the existence of sexual assaults by high-level power in the system, and we look forward to Mitu's ability to tear apart the system at some point Inside that black box of power. This time, Mitu has finally hit such a high place, which is inseparable from the energy savings of the past three years. Even with all the worries and unknowns, we can still be heartened that this moment has come, that someone has finally ripped a corner of the black box.

How Imperfect Victims Are 'Created'

Peng Shuai's self-report is a text full of burdens and difficulties. For those who don't know about Mitu and sexual assault, her self-report will cause a great reading obstacle-of course, this in itself is also a guarantee of the authenticity of her story. . Peng Shuai has a lot of moral self-examination as a woman, and the narrations of many Mitu parties have such consistency.

The deprivation of language itself is one of the violence against women in society. The mainstream language in this society is always dominated by the patriarchal society. In the patriarchal society, the truly perfect language is the language of "Zhang Gaoli" , which is a series of clichés, a series of fixed words, in which there will be no human beings. Sensibility and vulnerability are captured by everyone. Victims have no way to tell their stories in a patriarchal language full of attacks on women and rationalizations of violence. So we always see the stories they tell are very messy, imperfect, with all kinds of flaws. But this kind of almost incoherent expression is very precious when our language is almost completely hijacked. At least it reminds us that this language system cannot be used by them. It is precisely this imperfect language that is real and important to be aware of before we can build up a feminine language to speak about.

We can interpret Peng Shuai's story: what she wrote, and what kind of experience we can see from her narration. Many people are repeating a sentence in her self-report: "Even if I hit a stone with an egg, and a moth to the flame, I will tell the truth about you." Seeing this sentence, everyone can understand more deeply. to where she is. She said "seven years ago" and "more than ten years ago", when Zhang Gaoli had not retired and was at the most powerful time, facing young people in their teens and twenties - no one was in that position Dare to say no to Zhang Gaoli. This incident made Peng Shuai meet, and she later interpreted their relationship as "love". And when she wanted to leave, she found that she had no initiative to get out of this relationship at all. I believe that many people will think of "Fang Siqi's First Love Paradise" and understand Peng Shuai's feelings at that time, and this relationship full of huge inequality.

In what way did Peng Shuai make violent testimony in his self-report? What can become a violent testimony includes her accusation, including how she said the other party persecuted her, how she suffered humiliation, and how she finally found out that the other party was just playing tricks on her, as well as her mention of "he is a good person" and "he is really good to me." It's fine," "We're all set," "I'm open to my love," and "Fame Matters." I feel that all these descriptions of love and longing for so-called formal relationships are also testimonies of violence in her texts, in an unconscious way. She shows how violence can distort a victim's perception that even if the victim is such a strong and brilliant woman, her self-esteem can still be crushed to dust.

The victim thus participates in the denial of the violence, she struggles between two poles, her body and mind are aware that what she has encountered is deeply injustice, predatory and abusive, but on the other hand she is constantly confronting Say "love" to yourself. And the "unfair" side of this relationship is all borne by her. She is a "bad girl", the one who bears the secret that cannot be made public and must be kept from her mother. She may have been in such a struggle in the past few years.

Of course in the end she made a decision to tell everything. For her final decisive step, my feeling is that she finally complied with her inner desire: this matter should not be like this, she should not be treated like this. None of this is right. Her strength lies in her determination to destroy this violent lie in the name of love.

To what extent is her narration seeking justice from society? In her situation, she may not believe that this society can give her justice for such unspeakable things. I believe that speaking out is a decision she made herself, and it is her own judgment on Zhang Gaoli and what happened in the past few years. Similar to many Mitu victims, it was her inner self-esteem that could not be wiped out that made her resist. It may be a cry of despair, but the client may have passed her own verdict on the crime before it was silenced by society.

I want to focus on what else can be done after this incident, and how she was manipulated in the self-report, but I don't want our discussion to focus on "how she can do better", because this is also a kind of The perfect expectation of the victim. In fact, most people are unable to make a perfect balance in the face of infringement, or to be a female warrior to resist on the spot.

When Peng Shuai blamed himself for falling into this relationship, he wrote, "I left home early since I was a child, and my heart is extremely lacking in love." The "lack of love" here may refer to her lack of confidence in being treated equally, including in intimate relationships. How to make women gain self-confidence? The key is to see how many choices this society gives her, and how many choices she can have when facing violence. And the answer given to us by this society is very pessimistic.

We cannot discuss violence in isolation from social structures. Our society is extremely conniving towards rich and powerful men, and it is taken for granted that they commit sexual violence, even as a gift to women. This is an aspect of the violent structure of our society itself. Especially people like Zhang Gaoli, they are almost completely outside the law and morality, their rape and violence are completely invisible, and only when the political struggle is defeated, they will use a kind of "power-sex transaction" "with Multiple women having sex" were told, and their punishment was not punishment for sexual violence.

We can analyze how the structure of violence produces imperfect victims , how it prevents victims from resisting, how it prevents victims from verbalizing what happened, how they cannot get social support, and how it forces victims to rationalize everything and put themselves in the position of love. The state of mixed hate, guilt, and entanglement, how did such a mechanism happen.

The concentrated outbreak of the Mitu incident began in 2018, but the sexual harassment certainly did not start at this time, but many previous victims did not speak out. Moreover, some victims narrated what happened more than ten years ago. They have been in a state of tolerance for more than ten years, and they may continue to maintain a certain relationship with the perpetrator. Sexual harassment and assault are essentially about power . Under such circumstances, if women who encounter these situations find ways to deal with themselves and try to make themselves feel better, there may be a lot of cognitive dissonance and self-deception. We have to try to understand the state of women in it.

In 2019, we launched the advocacy of #我也不是非常者条件#, because we observed that many people had the assumption of a "perfect victim" for the Mitu client who first stood up. This hypothetical construct is related to rape culture, which holds that if a woman does not meet the indicators of "pure" and "innocent", she is not a victim. And when this assumption pervades our lives, our homeschooling, our sex education, we ourselves can tell the story as imperfect victims.

"Bad girls" appear in Peng Shuai's self-report and Lin Yihan's description of Fang Siqi. This kind of differentiation between "good girls" and "bad girls" is also a kind of slut humiliation. As long as you are a bad girl, your resistance, your feelings, and your grievances will also become inaudible and incomprehensible. As long as it exists, it is difficult for us to break through the label of imperfect victim.

What is a "good girl" in a patriarchal society like? It may be Zhang Gaoli's wife. Maybe she also has an inner monologue: I do this because I love my husband. This is also a kind of construction, but she is more completely alienated because she and Zhang Gaoli are bound together through marriage.

Peng Shuai's description of Zhang Gaoli's wife was unconscious. She believed that Zhang Gaoli's wife abused her. In fact, Zhang's wife faced with his actions and the relationship between Zhang and Peng Shuai, how could she deal with herself? It was Zhang Gaoli who made these two women have no choice but to be in a relationship of extreme pain and deformity, mutual struggle and hostility , all of which were Zhang Gaoli's sins.

I also understand, from my own perspective, why patriarchy produces imperfect victims who ignore, distort, and make an unreal, painful account of their experience. For a long time, I lied about my experience, and even now it is difficult for me to say "sexual assault". I will deliberately write a fake diary. I feel that one thing is uncomfortable, but I will write it in another direction, writing "he is very good to me". I'm not sure if my experience can give an answer to this question, but such experience needs to be recognized and acknowledged, acknowledging that we choose to protect ourselves when we cannot bear the pain.

So it is important for women to find their own language. The word sexual harassment has been invented for at least 20 to 30 years, but it is still difficult to describe it in the Chinese context. Many people mentioned Fang Siqi in Peng Shuai's case. I think the great thing about Lin Yihan as a writer is that she has found a language that is very suitable for her own experience for people in the Chinese world. Many people were shocked by Fang Siqi's story because for a long time, it was difficult for ordinary people who have not been exposed to feminist literature to find an image like Fang Siqi for their own stories. Annotated.

Peng Shuai's article reveals many of her fragility, but this is not her complete image. She is not a person who absolutely obeys authority. In fact, she is one of the earliest athletes in our country who tried to break away from the system. She is very decisive and arranged for herself.

I am very glad that Peng Shuai chose to tell this story. Because you have to find your own language to tell your own story, even if the story is broken, in some ways incomplete, and a lot of times it reveals your own vulnerability and incompleteness, but when you tell it, The moment it is written, the moment it is seen by others, the process of "self-preservation" as a victim is truly completed.

The crisis of Mitu, or a new attempt?

Our discussions set up a premise that Peng Shuai's voice was part of the Mitu movement. Many people think that Peng Shuai's voice will bring crisis to Mitu, is this the case? If it does not bring about a crisis, what kind of impact will it bring to the development of Mitu?

I don't think it is the crisis of Mitu, but the crisis of the power holders. Mi Rabbit started from industries and fields with relatively loose power. It is not that other fields do not exist, on the contrary, there may be more. Judging from previous experience, the report of each Mitu party is a demonstration, and it is constantly accumulating energy. When Wu Yifan's incident was exposed a few months ago, we already felt that he was a relatively influential person that Mitu could touch, and now it has been pushed to a new height by Peng Shuai. This incident will definitely affect more people and involve more fields in the future. This is the energy of Mitu.

Peng Shuai's voice made us realize that it is possible for a woman to stand up and accuse a very high-ranking perpetrator. This not only broke the imagination of many of us about politics and power, but also broke the imagination of the Chinese rights movement in the Western society outside the wall. This is a breakthrough, and it brings a possibility, just like Mitu just started At the time, many people also thought it was impossible, but it happened.

At the same time, how do we understand the suppression and retaliation brought about every time the victims tell their experiences, no matter the price paid by the victims or their supporters? After every momentum builds, there are always some early movers to be specifically checked out. Every time Mitu is attacked, the most obvious impact is that the organization of Mitu is constantly being removed. Although Mitu was able to develop in a very unorganized situation, it was a huge loss.

Today Mitu no longer has a visible organizer, nor a visible agenda for collective action. If people want to ask what advocacy goals Mitu wants to achieve at this stage, I think there is no answer, because Mitu has no collective action agenda. There are no advocated goals and consensus strategies.

The disorganization and decentralization of Mitu is the result of being suppressed, and it is also a form of adaptation. When there are no activists and organizers to play a pivotal role in the movement, the Mitu we see now is a victim The vocalization is the core. Every time a victim comes forward to tell their story, and these stories touch unprecedented levels of power, Mitu participants and feminists will gather online, retweet, comment, and hope to form a huge public opinion pressure to foster public discussion and, hopefully, facilitate resolution of this individual case.

In this process, it is certain that the awareness of the people participating in the discussion has been greatly improved. The awareness of the earliest supporters has been greatly improved and more supporters have been involved. The public has been greatly shocked. Today's public opinion will be more strongly aware than three years ago that this is a situation that has to be responded to. The problem. As for the resolution of individual cases, there are successes and failures. If we can regard the Wu Yifan case as a success and the Xianzi case as a temporary failure, we are far from predicting that the public opinion of a case will be able to achieve a corresponding result. There is no direct relationship between the two.

And the movement's lack of organizers has also posed problems. It is difficult for many cases of Mitu to enter the legal process in China, and it is relatively limited to rely on individual cases to promote system changes when no one sets the agenda. There is also a concern that there is insufficient support for victims, which can also affect their voices. After some victims have attracted some social attention through their voices, they will be pressured by the public authorities and may be told not to continue to speak publicly on the incident on the platform. When the organizers no longer appear, it is difficult for the victims to establish contact with more supporters and gain social attention, and it is easier to be in an isolated situation.

Of course, there is another advantage of using the victim's voice as an organizational method, that is, it has a lot of legitimacy and the legitimacy of public opinion, which reduces the blow to Mitu to a certain extent, which is an advantage.

The movement, driven by the individual voices of all the victims and the impactful complaints, is itself very volatile, constantly experiencing highs and lows. Everyone should have experienced the depression we may fall into after a case fails, and how nervous we are when the next person files a complaint, hoping to participate in it. There is a lot of consumption in such a tortuous process.

This could be the shape of an unprecedented social movement. From case to case, Mitu is silent, which is very accidental, because people never know the possibility of the next occurrence.

At the beginning, Mitu developed in a decentralized form, and now it is an unorganized form and reorganized in response to the voices of victims, which may be a destined evolution. Part of the core of Mitu is the spontaneity of decentralization, which leads to it becoming more and more generalized. But what is more important about the Mitu movement may not be how far it has advanced, but that it has opened a new era. This era started with Mitu, but it may not end with Mitu.

In this era, we attacked the old discourse and tried to create a new, feminist discourse about sexual harassment and assault. Of course, we made some institutional breakthroughs in colleges and civil codes in the process, but the bigger The breakthrough is the cultural change from 2018 to now. This may be more difficult than the linear institutional breakthrough we can see, and it will be more durable. Because we are creating a new language, its goal is not limited to Mitu itself, but to break the entire language system full of rape culture , especially under the premise that the public expression space is constantly being compressed.

Under this premise, everyone is also very eager to have a space for discussion, and can't wait to share their thoughts and emotions whenever they have the opportunity. In a chronically repressive environment, there is a great need for new, safe spaces to discuss without censorship. On the surface, the public space is being suppressed, but this does not mean that individuals' desire for discussion is continuously declining. The question is how do we reserve and find some space.

I understand why some people want to teach women self-protection in this matter, at least one problem: everyone hopes that this matter will be effective, hope that it will leave something in the end, what we can do, and what we can get from it order something. After the cases of public welfare circles and colleges and universities were exposed in the past, we can see a goal, whether it can be realized or not. For example, we want to establish an anti-sexual harassment and anti-sexual assault system in colleges and universities. See there is a profile that can advance. But after this happened, we felt Peng Shuai's bravery, but we didn't know how to catch it. There is also a sense of anxiety: Mitu Movement has such people stepping up again and again, but we don’t know how to advance or where to go in the end. For us, the incident also provided a moment for reflection.

After Peng Shuai's Weibo was deleted, everyone continued to give her other Weibo likes, and every like was an acknowledgment of what she said. The current environment is to obliterate the existence of this matter and prevent everyone from discussing it. Many people may feel powerless and don't know what to do. But one thing we can really do right now is not deny its existence. Peng Shuai has told her story, and it is up to us feminists to discuss it, to speak out, and to spread the word. As long as there is still a little space, we have to keep expressing, telling about our feelings, why we believe in Peng Shuai, and why we think this is wrong. Originally, this was the way the Mitu movement developed, creating ripples through narration. In the current environment, we can still do such things.

We accept that Mitu is a spontaneous and unpredictable form, and accept that it will be unpredictable in the future, even tomorrow. This may be different from our previous expectations. We always expect a linear change from today to tomorrow, a change from quantitative change to qualitative change. Sexual assault victims establish a reliable institutional safeguard, but in practice this is all uncertain. And as the example of Peng Shuai suggests, Mitu’s ceiling also exists. When Mitu’s influence reaches a certain level, it may be when it hits the iron plate.

At the same time, the entire public space in China is collapsing, and the space for people’s activities has been greatly reduced. Mitu has already bucked the trend. How can we expect Mitu to continue to rise when the whole society is going down. Our movement itself is a very impoverished and fragile movement, the only advantage we have is that we have a large and of course increasingly repressed community, our movement is broad and fragile at the same time. If Mitu is allowed to be the last visible protest-type social movement in China, and to support the entire society, it may be something we cannot afford.

Mitu has been fighting against internet blocking since 2018. There was a time when the words "sexual harassment" weren't allowed. Mitu is constantly looking for gaps to escape from censorship, and it is also in this process that we develop our language. In the process of the movement being continuously disbanded and eliminated, the movement's coping form is to develop different micro-organizations, such as passing information and expressing opinions through official accounts and podcasts. This format has been maintained because each of them has their own commitments and they realize that it is their responsibility to have a voice, develop all kinds of ideas for it, and they invest their own resources because The Movement itself has few resources to allocate. Even if the amount of reading is not high, or some platform views are repeated, it is still contributing to the formation of Mitu's overall potential and maintaining hope.

What happened to Peng Shuai and the fact that she stood up is complex and huge, and there are many distortions in it. Those of us, including those who just saw this incident, were shocked and distorted by the power carried by Zhang Gaoli .

We don't know Peng Shuai before, and we don't even expect her to be a feminist. If we want to speak out for the movement, why do we still have the responsibility to express our support for her? Because if a speaking individual does not feel the assistance of others to her, this will also be a negative news for the latecomers. Whether we want all women's issues to be resolved is a matter of whether we show our allies to everyone who comes forward.

We are witnessing a living, vibrant woman being thrown into a black hole, we are witnessing the social death of a person, so is it possible for us to bring her back? This is an unprecedented task facing feminists. I don't know what we can do, but now we have a chance to try.

Some friends are in contact with international female tennis players, hoping that they will pay attention to and publicly express their support for Peng Shuai, which may be able to create some protection for Peng Shuai. It can be regarded as a small attempt made in the situation of "I don't know what to do".

A friend said that every time I think about what else to do and what will happen in the future, I feel powerless. But at the same time, I also feel that in the follow-up of incidents one after another, I have met many friends, many of whom I have never met in life, and created a real connection in the attention of incidents. There may not be an actual organization, but at least there is a common feeling and purpose. Even if you can't immediately see what has changed in reality, you can at least follow up on what has happened one at a time . Even though it is difficult for most ordinary people to pay attention to the Peng Shuai incident, there are other cases that require our continuous attention.

Each of us can think about what we can do more and tell more when we see an event, and these may expand some space . Every utterance counts, and every discussion leaves traces. Even if it is not a public narration on the Internet, it is just an offline one-on-one communication, which may bring about some changes. At the same time, thinking about sports and paying attention to each party may not give us a clear answer immediately, but it can push us to move forward and find more possibilities.