How do you protest against sexual assault? Do you take to the streets, sign an e-petition, join a movement? Well, if you’re Ellie Cosgrave, who was rubbed up against by an anonymous man on the London underground last year and emerged with semen dripping down her leg, you do it through the medium of dance. Cosgrave returned to the scene of the crime on International Women’s Day this year, wearing a sign explaining that “On the 4th August 2011 a man ejaculated on me in this carriage. Today I’m standing up against sexual harassment everywhere”. She danced as a way of reclaiming and expressing her own bodily autonomy. In her own words, she couldn’t sing and she couldn’t shout very loudly, so she had to find her protest niche. Unorthodox? Sure. But this is a woman who spent the ten minutes before her Monday morning presentation wiping someone else’s bodily fluids off her tights. She’s probably in the best position to raise awareness of the issue, however the hell she chooses.
Which is why the response to her protest has been so disappointing. Comments on her descriptive piece in the Guardian kept coming back to “sure, but… interpretive dance? Really?” Even more common than these snarky haters who have clearly never seen the genius of Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” music video choreography are those who ask, “What stopped you shouting about it at the time?” Enter a whole world of speculation about embarrassed women, silly women, possibly-even-slightly-complicit women. “Why didn’t you hit him, rather make up a dance a year later?” whispered criticisms elsewhere. Not only had Cosgrave failed to make enough of a fuss at the first hurdle – she should have told him to “fuck off”, one commenter offered up helpfully – but she’d done something downright frivolous at the last. After all, what’s a dance got to do with sex crime?
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