“To tell you honestly, I am a lot more hurt and upset by how Twitch handled it during and after the fact.”

Man, I hate how hard I relate to this. I’m so used to creepy guys that it often becomes part of the background noise of being in public. I remember the first time I went to a kink nightclub, I was startled by how infrequently I was randomly groped; being in such a consent aware space made me realise how many people in a regular nightclub will use the crowdedness as plausible deniability in trying to cop a feel. That stuff is honestly so prevalent that the individual instances hardly bother me anymore (though thinking about how often it happens and how powerless women are to stop it does get to me)

However, sometimes, something happens that goes beyond this, and makes me feel genuinely unsafe and violated. Often, it’s scary because it represents an escalation of harassment, such as a coworker who becomes increasingly invasive. There have been enough times where reporting harassment or an assault has gone ignored (or worse) that now when it happens, I feel desperately anxious in not knowing whether to report a thing.

Beyond the effect of the harassment on me, I feel that it’s my ethical duty to report things like this. It would obviously not be feasible to report everything that was sus, but some things cross the line and need to be reported. However, my greatest fear in reporting something is that it may reveal the organisation to be shitty. The betrayal hurts more than the harassment. Even if it’s a big company like Twitch, which you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be giving a fuck, there’s still the desperate hope that “the system” will respond to flagrant violations of codes of conduct (and also the law). It’s demoralising when those in power act like sexual harassment and sexual assault don’t have laws against them. This undermines the law, and makes it as though it isn’t even there.