I've been wanting to say something about this for days.
Why, unlike male victims, do we tend to submit women victims to a kind of all-or-nothing, black-or-white "
/madonna" standard? The stories are almost all either "SS was a drug-running hard-partier who abandoned her family" OR "SS was a perfect mother and a saint who never drank, danced or had an untoward thought".
This is unrealistic. SS was a beautiful, complex, conflicted human being like any of us. I believe she should be remembered as such, regardless of the particulars of whatever happened to her.
We don't know what she was up to with the men she met on her travels, and we don't know what her primary relationship status was either. Maybe everything was great and they were deeply and exclusively committed to one another. Maybe they had an open relationship. Maybe her husband had cheated on her and she was dealing with that. None of us know.
We can't walk in her shoes because we don't know where she was in her emotional life. We may never know. We must, though, respect her journey, and whatever the truth was of her actions on her voyage through the world, accept her in all her complex contradictions as one of us.
That is my plea.
