Don’t make a scene.

Learn to take a joke.

Notice that not one of those sentences was addressed to the man who had just assaulted a woman’s dignity in public.

Every one was addressed to the victim, and every one carried the same message: your pain is an inconvenience, and expressing it is the true crime here.

That is how a scapegoat is manufactured and maintained across decades.

You are not only hurt; you are then made responsible for the disruption your hurt causes, until you learn — as I had learned, for thirty-two years — to swallow the pain preemptively, to absorb the cruelty in silence, to make yourself small and quiet and undisturbing, because you have been taught that your suffering is a burden you are imposing on everyone else.