I’m Not ‘Brave’; You’re Just a P—y

Dr. Naomi Wolf is a bestselling author, columnist, and professor; she is a graduate of Yale University and received a doctorate from Oxford. She is cofounder and CEO of DailyClout.io, a successful civic tech company.

Reprinted with permission from NaomiWolf.substack.com.

Some people who love me advised me not to write this essay, and not to use its current title. “Take the high road,” I was advised.

Usually that is a good idea, but not in this case — not at this moment. In this essay I need to talk about some people — mainly privileged people, people who could make a difference in areas where most can’t — who are trying to justify their monumental, world-changing cowardice, at a time when we all need to be at least somewhat brave.

I am done with tolerating this quietly.

For a year and a half now, after it became clear that this crisis was never about “the virus” but rather about a global bid to kill off our free world and suppress all of our freedoms — since I and many others have been publicly vocal about this danger and doing all we can to alert our community — that is to say, humanity — I’ve been getting direct messages (“DMs”). And they are all kind of similar. And they gross me out. Here’s why.

In the DMs, people whom I know socially or professionally — people from journalism, from politics, from medicine, from science (most of them upper-middle- class ‘men in suits’) — say something like: “Naomi, I really respect your actions right now. I totally agree with what you are saying. But of course I can’t say anything publicly because [fill in the nonsensical, craven reason].”

The nonsensical and craven reason that follows this shameful message is typically something along the lines of, “My boss will get mad at me” or “My professional peers will have a problem with my speaking up.” It’s never even, “I have bills to pay.”

Your boss will get mad at you, O you who DM?

Do you understand what is at stake? If you continue to comply and collude with what has become a tyrannical oligopoly, your kids will live as slaves and as serfs forever.

The DMs insist that I am “brave.” But I am not “brave”; you’re just a p—-y.

Don’t get me wrong. I know the gender politics around ever using the epithet above. Everyone who has read my work knows that, being a woman, I have great respect for women, and for their bodies, and I understand that one does not throw around this epithet lightly or ignorantly or in a misogynist way.

But truly in such a moment of historic-level cowardice among some privileged and influential people, no other epithet will do.

I was initially baffled by these messages. Why would I be getting these? What do these people want? Why do they think I need their excuses? So I asked other, braver people WTF this was.

They laughed and said, “They want you to tell them that it is ok.”

So I am saying publicly: this is not ok.

I am exasperated by those who stay in the shadows, agreeing with the risktaking of others, who talk about their “courage.” I feel that this is a form of othering that dehumanizes and exploits those speaking out.

It casts the people who do take risks for the wellbeing of others, as being somehow naturally better-fitted for this difficult job than is the speaker. It’s a form of offloading one’s own responsibility guiltlessly onto a subgroup which is assigned the status of somehow liking the battle, or somehow fitted better for combat, by nature, than is the speaker himself.

It’s like all those guys I knew in college who never did the dishes after dinner, because they said they were really bad at it.

I don’t know anyone truly heroic who likes the current battle. But I think that most could not live with themselves if they walked away from doing what they know they can do to help — in a moment in which obvious right and wrong have not been clearer since 1941.

Read the Whole Article Here…

h/t WRSA

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