Johnny Depp-Amber Heard Saga: Is Feminism Only for ‘Perfect Survivors’ Now?

The story is a classic case of male entitlement, which we’ll keep enabling if we wait for the ‘perfect survivor’.

The Johnny Depp-Amber Heard story is all about male entitlement, the bedrock of misogyny. 

(Photo: Chetan Bhakuni/The Quint)

The Johnny Depp-Amber Heard story is all about male entitlement, which is the bedrock of misogyny – a system that fights everyone who tries to stray from sexist beliefs that are hostile to women and girls. Abusive men of privilege feel entitled to everything, from perpetrating violence on their partners to never being named as perpetrators. They feel entitled to a good reputation and to refusing accountability. They feel entitled to dragging their exes into courts to re-traumatise them.

When men face resistance from their victims and are deprived of their ‘right to abuse’, they find it shockingly unbearable and unfair. When their victims try to escape from them, they see it as an affront. They want to drag them back to themselves in legal battles – it’s their entitlement to continue exerting control.

'We're Married Now. I Can Punch Her in the Face'

Researchers have found that entitled behaviours are linked to sexism even among women. In heterosexual relationships, this entitlement grants men privileges that come at a high cost for women. When made to confront concrete evidence of their abuse, they feel entitled to everyone believing their lies. And the job of their misogynist enablers is to provide them with the social and institutional “support” that reinforces this sense of entitlement.

Like spoilt brats, abusive men feel entitled to everything from sex, consent, and orgasm to labour, pleasure, and success. When denied these privileges, they feel real pain. They feel wounded and victimised. Kate Manne does a great job of explaining this with real-life stories in her 2020 book ‘Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women’.

Everything in the Depp-Heard story fits together neatly when seen through the lens of male entitlement. If you start with their wedding day, Depp told iO Tillett Wright (as per Wright’s recent testimony), “We're married now. I can punch her in the face and nobody can do anything about it.” That’s Depp’s entitlement to assault her physically.

Depp also felt entitled to slip in and out of “monster” mode in their relationship (which meant physical, verbal or sexual abuse) and expected Heard not to retaliate.

Heard filed for divorce and left. Depp still felt he was entitled to control her. He filed and lost a libel case against the 2016 article that called him a ‘wife-beater’ and listed the 12 times he hit her. Then he slapped the defamation trial on her for the op-ed she wrote two years later in The Washington Post.

The Verdict Was an Endorsement of Depp's Entitlement

Judge Penney Azcarate’s decision to allow cameras in the courtroom allowed the world to watch court proceedings humiliate and re-traumatise Heard. This move helped Depp’s entitlement to inflict “global humiliation” on Heard.

The vicious victim-blaming strategy deployed by Depp’s lawyers wasn’t as unique or brilliant as their incel fans on the internet made it out to be. It was the typical misogynist (and rather nonsensical) trap for survivors of male violence in courts – the entitlement to impose the ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ approach.

In the closing arguments, Heard’s lawyer, Ben Rottenborn, described the senselessness of the arguments of Depp’s lawyers perfectly: “If you didn’t take pictures, it didn’t happen, and if you did take pictures, they’re fake … If you don’t seek medical attention, you’re lying. If you do seek medical attention, you’re crazy.”

The spewing of misogynist hate on the internet is the enablers’ sense of entitlement to defend the abuser’s own sense of entitlement.

Depp, his lawyers in court, and his supporters on the internet have behaved like a bunch of entitled bullies – jeering, laughing, gleefully pounding fists, doing high-fives, and generally looking very relaxed.

That is not how victims behave. That is how abusers act, with a sense of entitlement to dominate with aggression. As for the verdict, it was the ultimate endorsement of Depp’s entitlement to win and celebrate.

Feminism Is About 'Real' People, Not Empty Solidarity

Women speaking publicly about male violence is a recent and rare phenomenon that the world still doesn’t know how to respond to as a society. It is punished unapologetically by overtly misogynist people and institutions. The question is, have feminists really found ways to respond in ways that support survivors? Heard is a celebrity. Many dismiss her for being too privileged. But we aren’t doing much for less privileged survivors either.

Sometimes, we see distressed survivors asking on social media why men who raped or abused them are being invited to public events as “respectable members of society”. But onlookers tend to empathise with the men and the opportunities they might lose. They wonder how far vengeful survivors will go and why they cannot move on.

What survivors really want is that people should pay attention to how their trauma is trivialised, how justice still hasn’t been delivered to them whilst they are already participating in their rapist or abusers’ entitlement to be admired.

Many feminists still speak in generic terms about solidarity with imaginary survivors but aren’t able to centre real people around them who have experienced abuse or assault. Speaking with indignation about sexual violence is not enough if you remain distant from real survivors.

We Can't Wait for the 'Perfect' Survivor

Supporting survivors is about overcoming our internalised victim-blaming and speaking up in the victim’s support clearly and loudly. It’s about sticking with them through their trauma triggers and mood swings. I don’t know many feminists who know how to do that. Some even diminish survivors’ trauma by saying, “we are all survivors in some sense”. We are survivors and will be as long as patriarchy thrives, but not all of us struggle with post-traumatic stress; not all were raped, beaten, or denied justice in courts.

The realisation that we are left alone to fight for ourselves hurts survivors almost as much as the abuse or assault itself. It usually starts with awkward silences from common friends, many of whom choose to side with the perpetrator. Then the realisation dawns that courts or lawyers cannot bring you justice. And then all hope crashes when feminists respond in a lukewarm way. Other vectors of oppression, such as casteism, racism, transphobia, or ableism, are often intertwined with this violence, making it worse for some among us.

Feminists shouldn’t use survivors as mere mascots of the movement against gender violence, but centre them.

Placing survivors at the heart of feminism also means not believing in the myth of a perfect survivor. We will keep enabling male entitlement if we wait for the perfect survivor to arrive.

(Noopur Tiwari is an independent journalist and the founder of the feminist platform “Smashboard”. She tweets @NoopurTiwari. This is an opinion article and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)