Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke on Instagram Live for an hour and a half on Monday night about a deeply personal traumatic experience she recently had. The topic of her speech was the January 6 attack on the country’s Capitol, but the headlines about her remarks had a different focus: ‘Ocasio-Cortez Says She Is a Sexual Assault Survivor’, reports the New York Times. “When recounting riots in the Capitol, Ocasio-Cortez reveals that she is a survivor of sexual assault,” CBS News said. The headline of New York magazine was “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: ‘I’m a Survivor of Sexual Assault.’ CNN: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she is a survivor of sexual assault while describing the trauma of the Capitol uprising.
The above-mentioned report does not provide much more information outside the headlines about Ocasio-Cortez’s experience with sexual assault because she did not provide it. The reference to the experience was a relatively small part of her monologue – a minute or two of almost 90 minutes on the air. She explicitly said that she shared this fact because she wanted to talk about the trauma of what happened to her recently, and she understands that trauma is cumulative. She also made a striking comparison between the way abusers treated their victims and the way her Republican colleagues reacted to the events of January 6th. “These people are just trying to tell us, ‘This is not a big deal,’ and they ‘I’m trying to say,’ You’re making too much of an agreement about it, ” Ocasio-Cortez said of her Republican colleagues trying happened to limit. ‘It’s tactics of abusers, or rather, it’s the tactics that abusers use. When I saw it happen, it was how I felt and how I felt not again. ”
But anyone who watched the full Instagram Live could tell you that the purpose of the event was not for AOC to investigate her personal history of sexual trauma. It was for her to share her own play of the uprising, to explain why she had threatened her life several times throughout the day, and to express how her previous life experience informed her reaction to the event. So why did so many news organizations compile their stories about Ocasio-Cortez’s admission that she was sexually assaulted?
One possible reason is that Twitter can often seem like the associate editor for journalists writes big, and the response on social media after the hours to Ocasio-Cortez’s live stream was indeed focused on the comments on sexual assault. This makes sense for Twitter; Ocasio-Cortez is an incredibly popular and charismatic politician, so it’s not hard to see why her confession about the assault, which comes with a clear refusal to shame her about it, has supported support.
But the job of the media is not to send back the Twitter sentiment – it’s to report the news. And yet many of them opted for a framework that felt strange and even reductive because of the urgency and national importance of the story she actually wanted to share. Ocasio-Cortez was clearly aware that sharing the details of her history of sexual assault would get press, just as the assignment of editors may have been aware that the click of their stories would click on it. But this disproportionate focus a tendency to define women, coloreds, and especially women of color by their personal experiences and especially their personal traumas, rather than by their beliefs and opinions. This tendency gives rise to another assumption – that their beliefs and opinions are probably too much informed by these traumas, making it easier to dismiss as providers of pure emotion rather than informed thinking. The Times’ story on Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram Live comments even quoted her previous views on well-known political allegations of sexual abuse (against Brett Kavanaugh and Joe Biden) as if it would imply that we might have to take a different view now that we know that Ocasio-Cortez himself is a survivor of assault.
What Ocasio-Cortez tried to do on Instagram Live on Monday night was to explain that she was not OK after the attack on the US government. And that it is not right is a complete and rational response to the experiences she had. If we want to understand what is happening to our government and what has happened, if we are to understand what our legislators are being asked to do in the aftermath of January 6, we need to understand the role that trauma plays in our brains. to process these events. That’s why Ocasio-Cortez said she was a survivor of sexual assault on Monday night. She has noticed that she understands trauma, and that she understands the cycle of abuse, and it is this understanding that motivates her to take the actions she is taking now – of revealing what happened to her, even if it is clear painful, until Senator Ted Cruz says she does not want to cooperate with him after he refused to apologize for his role in the incitement. Ocasio-Cortez’s acknowledgment of her experience of sexual assault is a context for her story about the violence perpetrated by the IDP. It should not have been the headline.
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