Demure by necessity: Kamala, emotional abuse, and the self-preservation of restraint

Very cutesy, very survival.

There are habits that I notice, now, after leaving an emotionally abusive relationship, subtleties I observe in women that register not as personality quirks, but carefully honed skills. Someone has been a force acting upon her in a closed system, someone has been a prolonged and harmful presence, I think; someone unkind, consciously or not, has altered her composition, shaved down the space she can safely inhabit, curtailed her range of motion until she is a collection of very slightly less-than-human behaviors. I watched the Harris/Trump Presidential Debate and the way Kamala held herself straight, without a hair on her head vibrating in error, and it felt familiar.

The day of the Harris/Trump Presidential Debate, we went over to a friend’s house where we made chicken curry bowls and four of us laid askew across her comfy sectional. That was a few weeks ago. But what I saw that night in the debate has since taken some shape; after all the political commentary and cultural buzz quieted, something of Kamala’s unflinching silhouette was left over for me, boiled down.

This point has been argued often in recent years: women in politics are held to a higher standard than men. Since women have begun to occupy more prominent roles in politics, a conversation has grown around the severe demands that they behave, dress, speak, and respond scrupulously, or else suffer intense verbal violence. I won’t go into the often-graphic nature of the vitriol. Conversely, we see their male counterparts are quickly forgiven gross injustices and flat-out crimes. If you watched the debate, you saw Kamala Harris demonstrating a level of self-restraint that inspired some of the most committed conservatives I know to raise eyebrows in admiration.

I remember the way she held her body so still, shaped her mouth into a pleasant but neutral position, moved her hands deliberately. She never made a sudden move, never raised her voice. Never once did I see exasperation or fear in her eyes. Imagine the cascade of cortisol — the stress hormone — coursing through her physical body, signaling her brain, triggering repeated fight or flight messages. But she suppressed every sign of distress like a professional.

And like an abused wife.

The dots started to connect as I recognized how much was required of her, and how little of her humanity was permitted on that stage. She wasn’t allowed to feel, to hurt, to be vulnerable in any way. She wasn’t allowed to show pain on her face, or even frustration. Softly smiling, pleasant Kamala, who put every ounce of her energy into keeping calm, was the only acceptable version she could safely present. She knew that her reputation’s survival hinged, at the very least, on a perfect performance, and perfect performers are those who become machine-like, running on an algorithm coded by the most violent among us.

If you’ve ever had to become machine-like in your own home, or perhaps in your church, stripped of the freedom to use a fleshy heart, of your autonomy, of your wildness, I see you. It is the slowest of fades, panels quietly screwed around our softness, many self-constructed as a matter of scrambling survival. Someone unkind was a prolonged presence, threatening us so badly and so consistently that what I’m describing sounds safe and normal. For a lot of years, it was my normal. I thought all my friends were doing the same thing, in the name of “love” or compromise or martyrdom. They weren’t. But the ones who were and still are — well it’s not like you can see the armor. It’s probably true that it takes one to know one. I might see the signs if we talked, but only you know what goes on behind your closed doors.

This essay isn’t a place where I’ll explore what to do about it, once you’ve had to become a person pulling on this kind of armor, a defense that promises to protect you at the expense of your freedom. I work with people one-on-one and in small groups around these very things in my SoulCare sessions. And I speak from personal experience: the armor serves you until it doesn’t. Until the costs are too high, the weight is too heavy, and you’ve completely forgotten how you used to occupy space in the world.

I’m simply here naming the signs, because naming matters. When we see one another holding still in the face of danger, statuesque, I think it helps to explain what we see. I see a woman running for president who doesn’t want to be attacked, is made of flesh and blood, and who also cannot avoid the most horrifying verbal assaults because of her position. I see myself freeze on a date when my survival mechanisms tell me to smile and laugh, instead of confronting a man who just said something completely sexist or racist or mean. We do what it takes and what our bodies instruct.

Singer Chappel Roan recently spoke up about holding personal boundaries with fans, and then a lot of people told her she should expect and tolerate her boundaries being crossed simply for being well-known. They accused her of being ungrateful unless she did. And so yes, this is what we’re dealing with: people who believe notoriety and personal violation are inexorably intertwined, and when well-known women speak up, the social executioners line up. These very public lessons teach the rest of us to keep quiet. We learn to control ourselves and brace for impact anyway.

Virtually overnight, the term “demure” became popular and then annoying. But it feels like a sickish, sneaky way to glamorize smallness. It’s yet another whisper for women to shut up, or as Harrison Butker put it, to step aside. But some of us have learned to be demure by necessity, and it isn’t at all cutesy. It’s a well-practiced adaptation to abuse, a deep-seated coping mechanism formed from years of living under threat.

I love that Chappel Roan embodies the opposite of what demure has come to mean. And the look in Kamala’s eyes, though she holds her body still in the face of threat, tells me she owns a dignity that no one can take from her. Very fire. Very presidential. If you missed it, please listen to this interview Kamala did with Alex from the Call Her Daddy podcast. It was the first time I’ve ever felt alignment, personally, with a presidential candidate. It was the first time, in my 30+ years of being a registered voter, that I could relate. It’s not as simple as “because she’s a woman.” It’s because she’s speaking a language that I speak.

I don’t talk about politics often in my public spaces. But the content around Kamala’s running folds into a lot of the same kinds of conversations I do regularly discuss. Whether you side with her or not, the practice of you taking up space in the world, as much as is humanly possible, as much as your divine and wild glory demands, is something I’ll always vote for.

You are the Beloved,

Leslie