The Room Is Not Neutral

June 18, 2026

I’m sitting here scrolling through social media posts in the morning with my tea, as I usually do to start my day.

Tea. Phone. The usual little ritual before the day fully begins.

And then there it is.

Post after post about the UFC fight. The comments about Michelle Obama. The ongoing remarks and activity from the United States president. The reactions to it. The defences. The excuses. The people trying to decide whether public degradation should still count as public degradation when the person doing it has a platform.

It raises serious concerns for me.

Not only about one comment.

Not only about one event.

Not only about one person.

It concerns me because we are in 2026 and visibly regressing on fundamental issues we should not still be debating.

Women’s dignity.

Human rights.

Public safety.

Ethical leadership.

The responsibility that comes with power.

The basic understanding that being in the public eye, holding a title, having money, commanding an audience, or sitting close to power does not give anyone the right to violate the dignity of another person.

It should not need to be said.

And yet here we are, saying it again.

Being powerful does not make cruelty acceptable.

Being famous does not make degradation entertainment.

Being elected does not make someone exempt from ethical conduct.

Having a microphone does not turn harm into humour.

A platform is not a permission slip.

That is what concerns me most. Not just the remark itself, although the remark matters. What concerns me is the lowering of the bar for what society is willing to tolerate when enough power, money, politics, or public attention is involved.

Sensationalizing something should not lower the standard of what is acceptable.

And yet it seems to.

We used to at least pretend there were stronger safeguards for public conduct, ethical reporting, responsible leadership, and the way people were spoken about in public. Those safeguards were never perfect. Many people were still harmed. Many voices were still ignored. Many institutions still protected their own.

But there was at least a sense that public conduct mattered.

That facts mattered.

That ethics mattered.

That there were lines people were not supposed to cross without consequence.

Now, too often, the consequence is a fine, a headline cycle, a half-apology, a deflection, or silence from the very people who should know better.

And when consequences become merely the cost of doing business, ethics stop functioning as ethics.

They become accounting.

Pay the fine.

Absorb the criticism.

Move on.

The damage remains.

That is not accountability.

That is a receipt.

This is how regression happens.

Not always through one dramatic act.

Sometimes it happens through a thousand little permissions. A joke that should have been challenged. A headline designed to inflame instead of inform. A public figure rewarded for cruelty. A room that stays quiet. An institution that knows and does nothing.

One lowered standard at a time.

One silence at a time.

One person deciding that harm is acceptable as long as it produces attention.

That is the desensitized version of life we are being handed.

Less accountability.

More violence.

More systems that fail to act.

More leaders in political offices using their positions to divide, degrade, and destabilize.

More people treating it like another episode in the endless public spectacle.

This is not normal.

This is not leadership.

This is not public service.

This is not strength.

It is the misuse of power in plain view.

And it is too fucked.

All people are entitled to equal rights.

Safety.

Systems that act.

Period.

Not systems that ask for evidence and then go silent.

Not systems that perform concern and then protect power.

Not systems that treat harm as inconvenient paperwork.

Not systems that wait until the damage is impossible to ignore before pretending they were always paying attention.

I am a woman.

Most women have experienced some version of this at some point in their lives.

Not always in the same way. Not always in a way that leaves a visible mark. Not always inside a home.

Violence against women does not stay in the places society prefers to imagine it lives.

It moves into public life.

It moves into workplaces.

It moves into boardrooms.

It moves into institutions.

It moves onto stages.

It moves into media.

It moves into comment sections.

It moves into the mouths of men who know exactly what they are doing.

I know this because I have lived it.

I have sat in a room full of men while men used their power to call me stupid and uneducated.

They raised their voices.

They threatened.

They used intimidation in a room where power was already uneven.

And other men participated.

That is often how these situations work.

One man starts the degradation, and others step in like the floor has been opened.

They add to it.

They legitimize it.

They make the harm collective.

It is not always one person acting badly while everyone else sits there in quiet discomfort. Sometimes the room joins.

Sometimes the room becomes a chorus.

Sometimes the person being targeted is not facing one voice, but a pile-on dressed as process, professionalism, debate, leadership, humour, or concern.

That is the part people often want to soften.

There was no confusion about what was happening.

No one needed a policy manual to understand it.

No one needed a legal opinion to know the room had become unsafe.

The violence was in the raised voices.

The violence was in the threats.

The violence was in the reduction.

The violence was in the humiliation.

The violence was in the power imbalance.

And the violence was in the fact that other men understood what was happening and chose to participate, amplify, or allow it.

That is not neutrality.

That is complicity.

And when people join in, it becomes something even uglier.

It becomes permission with witnesses.

It becomes power proving to itself that no one will stop it.

Silence is not acceptable when harm is happening in front of you.

Participation is worse.

But both feed the same thing.

Both protect the person causing harm.

Both tell the person being harmed that their dignity is less important than everyone else’s comfort, status, or access to power.

Both allow the room to continue as though nothing has happened.

Silence becomes furniture.

Everyone walks around it.

Everyone knows it is there.

No one wants to admit who put it in the room.

And participation?

Participation is someone pulling up another chair.

I know this beyond one room.

Even when I reported my own experiences of violence to systems and people of influence, even when there was clear evidence, even when there were claims about safety, the result was still silence.

That silence teaches something.

It teaches the person harmed that systems may ask for evidence and still refuse to act.

It teaches people with power that they may be protected by delay, avoidance, and discomfort.

It teaches the next person watching that speaking up may cost them more than staying quiet.

And that is a dangerous lesson for any society to normalize.

Unfortunately, I also know that people close to me watched what reporting and having a voice cost.

They watched the threats.

They watched the allegations.

They watched my reputation get attacked.

They watched my health and safety become part of the price.

And that teaches people something too.

It teaches them that speaking up is dangerous.

It teaches them that naming harm can make you the target.

It teaches them that systems may ask people to report wrongdoing, but when they do, the cost may still land on the person who had the courage to say it out loud.

I understand fear.

I understand why people worry about being targeted.

I understand why people do not want to be identified.

I understand why people watch what happened to someone else and think, I cannot afford to become next.

But I do not accept that silence is the answer.

I do not truly understand silence as the choice we keep making.

Not when harm survives because too many people are waiting for someone else to be brave first.

Not when the consequences of speaking would be so much harder to isolate if more people spoke at once.

Not when silence keeps giving power to men acting in ways they should not.

If everyone named it, there would be less room for the consequences we experience now.

There would be less protection for intimidation.

Less room for degradation to keep performing as leadership.

Less space for threats to be treated as process.

Less oxygen for people who misuse power and then rely on the room to stay quiet.

Silence does not make people safer in the long run.

It makes the room safer for the person causing harm.

Silence is how power keeps the room.

Silence is how consequences get transferred onto the person who spoke instead of the person who caused the harm.

Silence is how systems learn they can fail to act and still keep their reputations intact.

And silence is how the next woman walks into the same room with the same furniture arranged slightly differently.

Women are not responsible for fixing men.

Men are responsible for their own conduct. Their own violence. Their own entitlement. Their own misuse of power. Their own degradation of others.

But women should support women.

Especially women with power.

Especially women who know.

Some of the people I have reported to are women.

Some of the people who know my situation are women.

Some of those women have power.

Some have platforms.

Some have influence.

Some claim to stand for safety, accountability, equity, leadership, and human rights.

And still, none have acted.

That is its own kind of harm.

Not because women are responsible for the actions of men.

They are not.

But because knowing and doing nothing keeps the same broken room intact.

Because a value that disappears when it becomes inconvenient was never a value.

It was branding.

And I am tired of women being asked to clap for other women’s leadership while watching that leadership go quiet when another woman actually needs the protection those words promised.

But if I am asked whether I regret having a voice, the answer is no.

None of this made me regret speaking.

If anything, it made my voice sharper.

Not duller.

I would do it again.

And again.

And again.

Because change does not happen because people quietly hope harm becomes embarrassed enough to leave the room.

Change happens when we are willing to name what happened.

Change happens when we hold people accountable for their actions.

Change happens when silence stops being the safest place in the room.

Even when it costs us.

Especially then.

That is why the comments about Michelle Obama concern me beyond the single moment.

Because when a powerful woman is degraded publicly and people treat it as entertainment, women everywhere understand the message.

We understand the room.

We are always watching the room.

We are watching who laughs.

We are watching who looks away.

We are watching who says nothing.

We are watching who joins in.

We are watching who later claims they were uncomfortable but somehow never uncomfortable enough to interrupt the harm.

Michelle Obama does not need to earn basic respect through her résumé.

She does not need Princeton.

She does not need Harvard.

She does not need public service.

She does not need authorship, advocacy, grace, discipline, or global influence to qualify for dignity.

She was already owed that.

Every woman is.

Every Black woman is.

Every person is.

The list of accomplishments only exposes the absurdity of the attack. It shows how committed some people are to reducing women they cannot control.

No amount of excellence protects a woman from being dragged into someone else’s need to humiliate her.

That is what makes this so dangerous.

The target is never just one woman.

The target is the idea that a woman can be powerful, visible, accomplished, and still belong fully to herself.

The target is dignity.

The target is progress.

The target is the right to exist without being reduced for sport.

And at 51, I have to say it honestly.

I do not think things are getting better.

In many ways, I think they are getting worse.

We have become too comfortable watching harm in real time. Too comfortable calling degradation content. Too comfortable letting powerful people create unsafe conditions and then expecting everyone else to absorb the impact quietly.

That is not the world I want passed forward.

Not polished up.

Not renamed.

Not softened into some inspirational little sentence that sounds good on a graphic.

I mean it plainly.

I do not want the next generation inheriting this mess.

I do not want them inheriting rooms where everyone knows something is wrong and nobody says a word.

I do not want them inheriting systems that fail to act while calling themselves protective.

I do not want them inheriting leaders who use their position to divide, degrade, and destabilize.

I do not want them inheriting a world where men feel entitled to humiliate others and then watch society bend itself into excuses around them.

That entitlement is creating a real lack of safety, and it reaches far beyond private spaces. It follows women into public life, workplaces, leadership, online spaces, and every place a woman is expected to keep functioning while the room decides whether her dignity is worth defending.

This has to stop.

And it does not stop through silence.

It does not stop through polite discomfort.

It does not stop through people waiting to see whether it is safe to have values.

It stops when witnesses understand that silence is not neutral.

It stops when people with platforms stop treating degradation as content.

It stops when leadership remembers that power is not a toy.

It stops when institutions stop confusing fines with accountability and silence with resolution.

It stops when people stop sitting there and watching.

It stops when people stop pulling up chairs.

Because that is the part I keep coming back to.

People are sitting and watching.

Watching degradation.

Watching regression.

Watching systems fail.

Watching leaders lower the bar.

Watching women absorb the harm.

Watching safety become negotiable.

And some are not just watching.

Some are joining.

At some point, the room becomes part of the act.

And I do not want the next generation inheriting rooms that still choose the wrong side.