They wanted it to be our quiet shame

This essay is part of End Collective Punishment, a project documenting how discipline, silence, and bureaucratic credibility operate inside British Columbia’s public-school system. I write as a parent and advocate, connecting the politics of education with broader feminist questions of truth and power.

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Lily Allen says, “No one fucks with me and gets away with it.” The line lands like a gavel. Twenty years ago, that kind of declaration would have drawn eye-rolling about bitterness or oversharing. Now it reads as equilibrium, a woman reclaiming authorship after a decade of being translated by everyone but herself.

@lilyallen

hehe whats your fav song? #newmusic

♬ I got a plan – ASMR icons

On Allen’s new album Westend Girls the songs are orderly, brutal, sometimes funny. She isn’t begging to be believed. She’s telling us what happened and assuming comprehension. I recognise that posture as it is the same one I adopt when I write about collective punishment and exclusion in BC public schools.

When she drops the line about being “the mother of two teenagers” on a dating app, she rewires the hierarchy that still governs visibility. The phrase isn’t self-deprecation; it’s jurisdiction. It says: I contain multiple roles, and none of them cancel the others.

Revenge as coherence

I think about revenge as coherence rather than destruction. Men’s revenge stories are framed as philosophy; women’s as pathology. Allen’s version feels administrative—tidy, lucid, resolved. She’s balancing a ledger. That’s what I do when I file complaints or write essays: I make a record because the record itself is the act. Truth becomes revenge when silence is policy.

From Alanis to Allen

I grew up watching the culture dismiss Alanis Morissette. Her pain was marketable but rarely deemed credible. Decades later, Allen releases an album about betrayal, and the mainstream treats it as craft. That shift feels like progress. Each generation of women artists moves the scandal threshold a little farther. The more they narrate directly, the less shocking the next confession becomes. Every mother who publishes testimony about school harm participates in the same recalibration.

The moral architecture of “telling tea”

I like the phrase telling tea because it exposes how justice work and gossip overlap. Both are systems for information flow when official channels fail. When I write about a principal or district, I’m telling tea with footnotes. The tone may differ from Allen’s melodic one, but the function is identical: to translate experience into record. Masculine revenge often seeks closure through dominance or doubt; feminine revenge often seeks justice through exposure.

The redistribution of scandal

We’re living through a reallocation of scandal. Once, a woman’s anger was the scandal. Now the scandal is the institution that provoked it. Reviewers tread carefully. Outrage looks provincial when the art is this controlled. That’s why Allen’s bluntness matters: “No one fucks with me and gets away with it.”

The politics of middle age

Allen’s visibility at forty unsettles a culture addicted to the ingénue. Pop once treated midlife women as expired. She makes adulthood sound strategic. I feel kinship with that posture. The older I get, the less patience I have for politeness that protects violence. Survival, when done publicly, becomes its own aesthetic: clean lines, no apology, full documentation.

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The latency of backlash

What’s striking about this album cycle is the absence of public sneering. The usual moralising hasn’t arrived, yet, mostly. That silence doesn’t mean acceptance; it means assessment. Critics are watching to see whether admiration becomes consensus before they risk contempt. They don’t want to draw the eye of 1 million women celebrating this album online. They see the streams increase everyday, like an atom splitting.

When a woman delivers pain and humour with precision, the backlash hesitates now. There’s no obvious weak spot to attack. “Sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside / Hundreds of Trojans, you’re so fucking broken / How’d I get caught up in your double life?” Everything is vulnerable, so there’s no secret to exploit.

Backlash rarely disappears; it waits for cover. Yet Allen’s listeners seem ready to defend her, shifting the risk calculus. Any delayed dismissal will sound like resentment. The tables have slightly turned.

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The grammar of revenge

Her lyric—me rather than us—has been rattling around in my head. She could have said “No one fucks with us.” She’s a mother; she could speak as a unit. But she doesn’t.

I notice how often I do. I write our family, we, our children. I speak collectively because the harm was collective, but also because we feels safer. I don’t want to be accused of being selfish for wanting something for myself. The singular woman defending herself is still coded as selfish; the mother defending a group reads as moral. Pronouns become armour.

Allen’s me claims autonomy; my we claims legitimacy. Both are strategies inside the same grammar of survival. Her lyric restores the self; my essays rebuild solidarity. Together they outline the continuum of female authority—personal, familial, civic.

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Boredom as control

There’s another reason the backlash has been muted: many men find women’s grief uninteresting. They tolerate it when it’s stylised but tune out when it’s procedural—when it sounds like paperwork, repetition, testimony. Boredom functions as a kind of censorship. If they can’t discredit the emotion, they can declare it dull.

A man’s grief is treated as plot; a woman’s grief is treated as aesthetic, as ambience. Allen’s record refuses that division. She makes grief methodical, rhythmic, reportable. It’s the same alchemy I attempt when I turn years of correspondence into public evidence. Grief, organised, becomes revenge.

Boredom has always been a way to keep women’s narratives peripheral. Declaring something “uninteresting” is cheaper than disproving it. The feminist response is persistence: saying it again, with more clarity, until repetition itself becomes style.

Allen’s ex is quiet

Allen’s ex, an actor, has not publicly responded to the album. However, in April, GQ wrote that he preferred not to engage because it would only encourage “a salacious shitshow of humiliation.” The line is almost comic in its self‑protection. It sounds like someone trying to look credible instead of acting accountable. GQ Magazine UK

That instinct—to preserve image rather than integrity—exists everywhere. It’s the reflex of institutions when they issue statements of regret without change, or suggest that critics are unstable rather than admit systemic failure causes instability. The question that lingers for me is how history will interpret these gestures. When credibility itself has been the currency of power for so long, what happens when that currency devalues? When the voices once dismissed as emotional, difficult, or unserious become the primary sources?

Maybe that’s the quiet cultural departure we’re witnessing: a world where record‑keeping replaces reputation as the measure of truth. When virality happens, when the misogynists decide it’s safe to enter the room again, the archive will already exist—and so will the women who built it.

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End Collective Punishment documents how institutions protect their credibility instead of acting accountable.