You Can’t Write That!
I hear it all the time, either straight to my face or in writing or via third parties by people who wish to avoid engaging with me. It’s a phrase that appears in many disguises—concern, caution, morality, protection, even politeness—but it always carries the same message: be quiet, vulgar woman! When survivors write about consent, coercion, grooming, institutional abuse, and the complicated emotional textures of those experiences, the resistance is rarely about literature. It is about power: who is allowed to speak, what kind of story is permitted, and how much truth a culture can tolerate. The pushback often arrives as advice (and is generally received with an eyeroll by me), but it functions as containment—an attempt to keep certain histories sealed, certain institutions unexamined, and certain survivors acceptable.
The You Can’t Write That Pushback Against Writing a Book About Institutional Abuse:
“It will bring shame on other victims.”
Concern that messy or sexualized experiences might reflect badly on other survivors.
“The past is in the past; it was so long ago.”
Assumes trauma expires with time.
Encourages silence instead of reclaiming narrative.
“Just shut up and go away.”
Blunt silencing meant to suppress your story.
A form of gaslighting to invalidate your reality.
Fear of judgment or blame.
People worry others will criticize your actions or character.
Exposure of institutional failure.
Publishing could highlight schools, communities, or organizations that enabled abuse.
Belief that consent excuses harm.
Misconception that partial or coerced consent nullifies abuse.
Legal or social fears.
Worries about lawsuits, defamation, or reputational damage.
Cultural myths about teenage girls.
Ideas that girls are “precocious” or “knew what they were doing.”
Reinforces victim-blaming narratives.
Avoidance of uncomfortable truths.
Your story forces people to confront systemic abuse or complicity.
Silencing sexual complexity in survivors.
Discomfort with survivors expressing desire, ambivalence, or agency.
Fear of reopening wounds.
People may think writing will “re-traumatize” you.
Often a way to control whether and how survivors process trauma.
Perceived lack of audience or relevance.
Some think your story is “too niche” or “won’t resonate.”
Often a cover for their discomfort with the content.
Protecting the abuser’s reputation.
Especially relevant if the perpetrator is still alive or socially connected.
Fear of societal backlash.
People worry your book will attract online harassment or victim-blaming responses.
Misunderstanding of “healing.”
Belief that survivors should only heal privately and not publicly.
Fear that it will be “too controversial.”
Especially true with sexualized abuse or teacher/student dynamics.
Belief that it will “inspire copycats.”
Misguided fear that your story could somehow normalize abuse.
Desire to maintain family/community privacy.
Concern that publishing could expose secrets, even indirectly.
Pressure to conform to the “perfect victim” myth.
Society often expects victims to be quiet, morally “pure,” and remorseful, not complex or sexualized.
Fear that it will complicate public conversations on consent.
Some prefer simplified narratives where “yes = okay, no = not okay,” instead of nuanced realities.
Belief that it might harm your future opportunities.
People may think publishing about sexualized abuse could affect career, relationships, or social standing.
Discomfort with female anger or outrage.
Women expressing justified anger at abuse is often framed as “too much” or “unfeminine.”
Fear it will provoke others’ guilt.
Friends, family, or bystanders who ignored warning signs may react defensively.
Pressure to “forgive and forget.”
Social expectation that survivors should reconcile with the past quietly.
Belief that your story challenges dominant narratives of morality.
Honest depictions of desire, contradiction, or power dynamics disrupt socially comfortable moral stories.
Worry that it will trigger other survivors.
People often assume they are “protecting” others, even when exposure could be validating.
Fear that it will be seen as “attention-seeking.”
Survivors speaking publicly are sometimes dismissed as trying to exploit trauma for attention.
Resistance to confronting systemic abuse.
Institutional, cultural, or legal systems prefer invisibility over accountability.
Jealousy or competitiveness in trauma narratives.
Some people feel threatened if your story gets attention, as though their suffering is “less valid.”
Concern it will make people uncomfortable in general.
Some are uncomfortable with topics of sex, power, and trauma and prefer silence.
Seen together, these objections form a pattern. Some responses are designed to silence me outright; others claim to protect me while policing what kind of victim I am allowed to be. Many are driven by fear—fear of controversy, fear of legal consequences, fear of reputational damage, fear of the uncomfortable knowledge that consent is not always clean or freely given. Threaded through all of them is a deeper cultural investment in keeping abuse stories simple, digestible, and morally reassuring. But the persistence of these warnings is also evidence of my book’s significance: it threatens myths, not because it is sensational, but because it is honest. The phrase you can’t write that is not a neutral opinion—it is a boundary being enforced. And writing anyway is my way of refusing that boundary.
