Struisvogelpolitiek – Dutch, n. – Literally, “ostrich politics.” Acting like you don’t notice when something bad happens and continuing on regardless as you normally would. Lost in Translation, Ella Frances Sanders.
Continuing on regardless…
Shake it off. Forgive and forget. Let bygones be bygones. Get over it. You can’t change the past. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Don’t cry over split milk. The more serious the predicament, the more earnest the recital of this cheesy, pointless litany.
I wouldn’t exactly tattoo any of these sayings, but I know their common underlying theme of Struisvogelpolitiek intimately. When I notice something bad has happened to someone else, when something bad has happened to me. I do everything in my power to avoid absorbing the bad, to deflect sympathy, empathy, vulnerability, as if doing so expands the limits of the human condition for me even the slightest bit. Of course, it doesn’t. But the key to practicing Struisvogelpolitiek is to accept the fact that one is merely pretending to continue on as you normally would in the face of the badness, despite it. It is an act, a delicate, volatile, and suppressive act. I’ve seen recently how many of us (many!) have mastered it. Me, too.
One midnight, we drove by a dimly lit corner of the Lincoln Tunnel’s mouth and I saw a man beating a woman in front of their still running SUV. I called the police.
“I’m not going to tell you my name,” I told the police officer who stood over the driver’s window sternly. I leaned into his eye contact and over my husband, who sat nervously in the driver’s seat.
“I said I’m going to need your name and phone number, ma’am,” the officer insisted.
“Well, you aren’t getting either of those things. You can’t keep me here and I’m going home.”
“Fine. Hang on just another minute and you can go,” he said. “Just a minute.”
He talked into his radio a few times, walked to the front of my Mini Cooper and wrote down the formula to my full name and address, walked to the back of the car to confirm it, and dismissed us.
While we waited for the police to arrive, the woman had managed to fight off her attacker. She’d run into the SUV and sped off as he clung to the door handle. The passenger side door was still open by the time she was too far down the road to see. Left there on that corner where someone else was the victim just a moment ago, the man rolled on the floor and held his head in his hands.
But I didn’t want to be involved. I’d seen a bad thing, a terrible thing, and I wanted the police to know it, but I also wanted to go on with my night as I normally would. A steamy shower before bed, begging my husband to make me a cup of tea that I won’t drink before falling asleep. The spoils of Struisvogelpolitiek. That woman was hurt and was likely still in danger. But I insisted outwardly that watching her get flung like a Barbie had no impact on me whatsoever. Of course, it did.
I think about that woman often and whether she found a way out, rather than just a way to get away. I wonder if her home is a place of safety, if it will ever be, and what I would do if the safety in my home ever flipped on me too. When I drive past that corner, I’m only pretending to be calm, cool, and collected.
Lately, on social media, in conversation written and spoken, it has become fashionable to address a level of violence against women that is even less settling to me. Harvey Weinstein hides somewhere in the world, “finding treatment” hoping that the world will soon resume its collective Struisvogelpolitiek. But, like so many scenes before, he has set this one in my mind, in yours, in hers too.
First his grip is firm, then unyielding. He is in control of everything in this room but himself. He is explicit. He is pushing. He finds a way that feels pleasurable to him. He drills his head forward and sprays, “Just a little more.” His shoulder is pinning. His legs are constricting. The pace of his breathing is the measure of time.
All this while no one is there with him. She/You/I say no. She/You/I cry no. But there is no sound to be made, let alone heard, by a no one. She/you/I fight back or don’t, it doesn’t matter. There is no place to go for the nobody in the room.
Afterwards, when she/you/I are someone again, there is still no sound to be made loud enough to be heard. There is still no place to go.
Her/Your/My head is beneath the sand, but with the days the sand moves away and the head stays still until it reaches the surface. She/You/I gasp for air that is putrid and cold, but take enough in to stay alive. She/You/I dig harder each time to reach a new depth in the sand, to fall into numb comfort. To follow the pulse of normalcy when the badness throbs. To pretend.
I am bold enough to claim that this is true for each woman who participated in the Me, Too movement in these last days. It is likewise the case for many women who did not participate, but watched others. All of these ostrich politic-tocking heads have come up at once, stirred by the unavoidable wind gusts out of Hollywood, and this time they are looking around instead of to themselves. And they ask, is this it? Is this the sound of someone who was once a no one that will be finally heard? The answer, it seems, may be me, too.