Disclaimer: I wrote these blogs a long time ago! I'm leaving them up as I don't want to delete my journey and I think showing growth is important. But it means that some of my views, and some language I use, is now different. Please be mindful of this, and that the content might be triggering, if you choose to read on.

Trigger warning: rape, sexual assault and suicide.
Contains season one spoilers.
 
I just finished watching 13 Reasons Why on Netflix. Oh. My. God. We need to talk about this show.

This is a really important series. It made me emotional. It made me cry. It made me feel down, but it was worth it. I was careful not to read anything about 13RW until I finished, so it was only then I discovered the backlash. I’d like to go through the negative comments and explain my take on them. Who am I? No expert, but I have a little insight. I work for a mental health organisation, am a screenwriter (a wannabe at least) and I was bullied at school (though it was before the days of social media so I guess I had it easy in comparison).

Here are some of the negative responses I’ve come across so far:

If this is truly the way you think, please read up a little bit about depression and mental health issues. This is a very uncompassionate, selfish view to take, anchored in your own limited perspective. Where is your empathy? This view belittles her feelings and defeats the main points of the show. Hannah became so isolated that she felt nobody could help her and her life was empty. This was the result of the behaviour of people at school, but also because of bigger issues in our society of rape culture, gender inequality and sexism.

13RW is a statement on how mental health in teenagers, teenage girls in this case, isn’t taken seriously. If you think Hannah was selfish you might be the sort of person that thinks girls lie about rape or suicidal thoughts ‘for attention’, in which case you are part of the problem. Even if someone takes their own life ‘for attention’, they still made that choice so it’s almost irrelevant. It’s a cry for help, often too late. To think that girls are overly sensitive and emotional proves our social issue around kindness and empathy being weak traits.

“The Australian youth mental health service for 12–25 year-olds, Headspace, issued a warning in late April 2017 over the graphic content featured in the series due to the increased number of calls to the service following the show's release in the country.” - Wikipedia

GOOD! If someone watches 13RW and makes a call to tell someone they were thinking about killing themselves, that’s one life that could be saved. If this show is making people speak out, how can that be a bad thing?

Writers are told to ‘show and don’t tell’. 13RW relies on the audience to be able to recognise that Hannah’s mental health problems without the writers having to spell it out. Sometimes certain words can put people off if it seems like buzzwords or jargon. For instance, saying rape culture, feminism, heteronormative, might alienate some audience members. Feminism has a bad reputation (I don’t agree with that, I’m just sharing what I see all the time online). To make a TV show which demonstrates feminist issues instead of using words which might put people off is a powerful and influential way of telling a story. After all, if you’re going to raise awareness and change minds, you need to write in a way your audience can understand.

Oh, like Trainspotting glamorised heroin? I was teenager when that came out and the last thing it made me want to do was take heroin. In fact, it put me off taking drugs altogether. That had more of an impact than any anti-drugs talks at school.
Often female suicide scenes in films are a little too beautiful, but Hannah’s death is realistic and painful, harsh and brutally permanent.

Some schools in the US have sent emails to parents warning them about the show. Do adults know nothing about young people? I’m not even that young any more but it’s pretty obvious if you make a big deal out of something and tell kids not to watch something, they will find a way. That’s what I did with Trainspotting. Just accept that they’re going to watch it, and talk about it.

Many of the characters blame themselves but that’s part of their grieving process. I think the show is saying that schools can do better. That we – society - can do better. As Clay says, we all need to be kinder, not necessarily in a make-everyone-a-cup-of-tea sort of way (though wouldn’t that be nice) but rather try to understand why other people feel the way they do. Step into their shoes. This is compassion. There’s no harm in giving it a try.

That's the point. Jocks, cheerleaders, nerds – as a screenwriter I’d be quick to point out stereotypical, overused characters in a high school drama. However, it was on purpose in 13RW to demonstrate how normalised their behaviour is. It holds a mirror up to society and shows us what we’ve become. The jocks rule the roost in American schools it seems, and we’ve got our equivalent in the UK. Everyone knows you need to at least try to be on the good side of the bullies or popular kids in order to survive school, which is why it’s hard to stand up to guys like Bryce. He’s the epitome of what our society sees as perfect masculinity – rich, white and powerful. Men like him grow up to be men like Donald Trump, and it’s clear there’s a lot of people who like him and his ‘locker room talk’. This has to change.

Despite the backlash, there are a lot of reviewers and people on social media saying how much the show had moved them and how they can relate to Hannah, I certainly can and it’s been quite a long time since I was at school! When Hannah said ‘but you’ve never been a girl’, it really stuck with me. 13RW is a harsh but true depiction of what can happen to young women growing up in a culture of objectification, toxic masculinity and rape culture. There are unfortunately too many Bryce’s in the world – rich white men, often athletes - protected because they’re at the top of the power food chain.

True, but when Clay says ‘ we need to be kinder to each other’ I didn’t take that to mean ‘kindness can cure depression and stop people from killing themselves’ but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. People choose to take their own lives because of mental health issues, but there are factors in our society which are not helping. Rape culture ie normalised objectification, sexism, power over women, slut shaming, masculinity standards. We dismiss misogynistic behaviour as ‘boys will be boys’/’bro code’/’locker room talk’. We teach boys that being kind and compassion is weak, that they  must hide their emotions and ‘man up.’

If you look at most of the terrorists and mass shooters in the world, not a lot of them are women. With the message that emotion and empathy equal weakness, it’s not hard to see why.
 
Hannah is a demonstration of what could happen to girls growing up in a society of gender expectations and judgementalism. It’s a hard-hitting show because it has to be. People have been talking and writing about rape culture, consent and gender inequality for a long time but people weren’t listening. It’s taken a brutally harsh TV show to make the world sit up and take notice.

13RW was hard to watch because it’s talking about the very things we want to pretend don’t exist. It forces us to notice. This is the power of storytelling. It has started a dialogue and might help chip away at the shame and stigma we’ve built up around such subjects.

We need to listen to young people, many of them are loving the show. Instead of focussing on the suicide, focus on the reasons why – this is the point of the show after all. It makes no sense that everyone’s talking about the suicide, yet not about the gender inequalities which led to it. Instead of protecting people from seeing rape and suicide because it makes them feel uncomfortable, think about what we can do to address the issues which make girls like Hannah want to end their own lives.
13RW is a demonstration of the issues girls face simply for being female, and the expectation of boys to be more powerful, strong, and less emotional. For us to help, we need to not focus on protecting people from seeing suicide in a TV show, but rather break down gender rules and create a kinder, more balanced environment for everybody based on empathy and compassion.
 
If you or someone you know is feeling low, take steps to find help. I work for a mental health organisation and many people tell me ‘I can’t call Samaritans, that’s just for when you want to kill yourself’ but that’s not true. Don’t wait until it gets to crisis point. Everyone needs to ask for help in their lives. We need to be kind and have compassion for others, but for ourselves too.

Samaritans: phone 116 123


Recommended further reading - a brilliant article about gender equality by Natalie Bennett, one of the founders of TIGER Bristol. 
 

Disclaimer: I wrote these blogs a long time ago! I'm leaving them up as I don't want to delete my journey and I think showing growth is important. But it means that some of my views, and some language I use, is now different. Please be mindful of this, and that the content might be triggering, if you choose to read on.

Content warning: violence and abuse
I’m sure you’re aware that there’s been another mass shooting in America. Another. There's a big problem staring us in the face which nobody’s talking about. Hyper-masculinity.

People can argue all they want about who the shooter is, why he did it and which terrorist group he might be involved with, but doesn't seem very productive. It’s not stopping anything like this from happening again in the future.

A while ago I wrote a short story about a (fictitious) vulnerable man who drawn into the Men’s Right’s Activist Community following an emotional break-up with a girlfriend (I'll put a link to the story at the end of this post). I submitted it to a feminist magazine but they wouldn’t publish it. I got the impression it wasn’t their type of feminism, because it focuses on a man maybe? I wasn’t sure. It was quite a compassionate view towards him so maybe that was the problem, but I wanted to illustrate the dangers of men with mental health issues who don’t feel like it's acceptable to be weak, or ask for help. They don’t want to be seen to be ‘crazy’- they’re taught to be big strong men from a young age. Boys don’t cry. Boys don’t play with dolls, they play with Action Man.
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Of course I’m not saying that women can’t commit such crimes. People commit mass murder because they’re psychopaths and their brains work differently. This can happen to anyone of any gender. Yet when was the last time you heard of a female mass shooter, or a female terrorist? I set about finding some statistics at this point…

​It was proving hard to find statistics specifically about how many mass shootings were carried out by women, but then I found this…

I knew there weren’t many, but that’s shocking. And nobody seems to be talking about this. Feminists are labelled as angry or boring, or lesbians, or fat feminizai’s, or even terrorists, which considering the above, is almost ironic. Women are not storming into gay clubs and shooting people, or planning terrorist attacks, yet the power in our world is still in mainly in the hands of men. That is messed up.
 
Following the Orlando attack, of course gun laws needed to be reviewed in the US, but it’s a wider issue in society which we need to start changing now. Do you have kids? You have the power to teach them to be a better person. Instead of teaching boys to play with toys with guns and fighting, or encouraging them to see men with guns as powerful or successful, or teaching them that they can’t live without fear unless you have a gun, or that they need to ‘protect their woman’ with a gun, can they not just be allowed to be a little more feminine? Is there anything wrong with that? Let the boys play with dolls or whatever they want to. Don’t tell them not to cry when they’re sisters are allowed too. There is no harm in men showing emotion. The harm is done by asking them to hold it all inside.

The Orlando shooter had apparently been to the gay club before and used gay dating apps. He is also said to have had mental health problems and had been abusive in his relationships. Considering we live in a society which praises monogamy and points shame at anyone who does anything outside the ‘norm’ ie man/woman/marriage/kids etc, we don’t take emotions and mental health within relationships very seriously. It can be a hard thing for people to seek therapeutic help, but especially for relationship counselling (I work for a relationship counselling charity) as a failed marriage is seen as a huge life failure, even if it lasted a long time.
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Following the Orlando shootings, people immediately questioned where the shooter was from and his religion, but people aren’t talking about the stigma attached to men with mental health issues and their reluctance to ask for help. Even if they do ask for help, it could be that adequate support isn’t available – there is never enough funding for mental health services (certainly here in the UK) and there probably won’t be unless there is a shift in the future to see mental health as being as important as physical health. Here, I see a man who possibly wasn’t able to be himself. To be living a life where his religion, community, possibly family too, didn’t allow him to be him. I’m willing to bet he had been encouraged not to cry, not to be emotional, or feminine, and to find a girl and get married and have babies. And I bet he’d grown up knowing that it wasn’t ‘manly’ for him to be upset, for him to ask for help, or to be emotional. Those things are feminine, and women are weak and only exist to be owned. This hetero-normative, patriarchal world is more damaging than we can imagine. I’m not saying we should feel sorry for him or justify what he did, it was horrific, but he’s dead. All we can do is take steps to try to support the people affected by this terrible tragedy and reduce the risk of it happening again. There will always be psychopaths in our world but we can help by not encouraging them by our rigid gender role expectations.
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​Boys can cry. Boys can ask for help. Boys can go for counselling. Men can love other men. It's 2016 for fucks sake - a man doesn't need to be 'a man' anymore. Anyone can be any gender or sexuality and they don't have to explain themselves to anyone else. Can't we let people just be? 

Women are not weak because they are emotional. We all have emotions because we are all human beings. We are people, not products of our genitalia or sexual orientation. Femininity does not mean weakness. Feminism isn’t just for women. We need this now more than ever. We all have the power to make small changes in our lives, to think about the messages we give to kids, to think about the messages about gender roles they’re getting from films, TV and games. This isn’t about censorship, it’s about letting people be themselves without growing up with subconscious biases.

I’ve known men who think it’s only acceptable to be emotional about football. They can cry if their team loses because football passes one of the ridiculous unspoken masculinity rules, but they’re not allowed to cry if they have a row with their girlfriend, God forbid him being as weak as a woman.

It’s time to face up to something. Maybe what we see as 'weakness' is actually compassion and empathy, and these are strengths. Maybe they're the things that stop us from committing mass shootings.
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Human beings have been around long enough now to know that we’re intelligent, emotional creatures. We are smart enough and adaptive enough to be able to change the way we think. We don’t need old fashioned traditions to govern how we act just because we were born into a particular gender or religion. We’re better than that. We can be whatever we want to be.

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