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Drop everything you’re doing and go see this movie right now. Seriously. Stop even reading this blog post, and go to that movie.
Okay, so mild spoiler alert for this first bit. And I’ll give you a bigger spoiler alert later.
Tonya Harding.
I really didn’t know anything about her. I just sort of vaguely knew, “Oh, wasn’t that the girl who clubbed some other girl or something?” But NO.
She had so little to do with it. (I mean, according to the movie. Who knows the real truth for sure? But the movie shattered my heart.)
I feel like this movie is especially relevant in 2017 because we are really having a reckoning with sexism and women who’ve suffered abuse – and what that means, and how that’s held many women back, and intrinsically changed their lives and careers. And Tonya Harding is a quintessential example of how abuse changed her life. (Major spoiler alerts ahead.)
It was her abusive husband who started the whole scheme in the first place, and I think he got her involved with her bodyguard who escalated the scheme and without Jeff in her life, Tonya could’ve ruled the world. She’s one of the very best figure skaters of all time, and she does not have an Olympic medal.
It takes an abused woman an average of 7 times to leave, before she leaves for good. And every time she left him in the movie, it was so great. “Maybe this’ll be the one,” I hoped. But I knew it probably wouldn’t ever be. And also, it never was – until he’d already ruined her life. (And now I’m already crying again because holy goodness, this movie was devastatingly good.
Not to make this move about me or anything (eeesh, who am I, Trump?), but having been in an abusive relationship, I’ve had people ask me so many times why I’d stay – sometimes after things that seemed… not innocuous but innocuous enough (e.g. throwing such a tantrum that he’d break things around me, but he didn’t actually hurt me – being scary and being violent, but not ultimately physically hurting me… (and more examples of various things along those lines – that cross a line for most people (esp in a repeated pattern), but become something you just deal with when you’re in it).
And I just know how exhausting it’s been to try to answer those questions when they’ve come up – not that there’s not merit to them. But I guess weirdly I just never realized how odd being in an abusive relationship seems to people outside of one, until I started loudly talking about it.