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Buying into the notion of not that bad made me incredibly hard on myself for not “getting over it” fast enough as the years passed and I was still carrying so much hurt, so many memories.
What is it like to live in a culture where it often seems like it is a question of when, not if, a woman will encounter some kind of sexual violence?
It’s true that your kids, by virtue of both being boys, will be in a privileged position, but the idea that they “won’t have to deal” with rape culture makes you shudder. You very much want them to “deal with” rape culture the way one “deals with” a cockroach problem.
Don’t ever use an insult for a woman that you wouldn’t use for a man. Say “jerk” or “shithead” or “asshole.” Don’t say “bitch” or “whore” or “slut.” If you say “asshole,” you’re criticizing her parking skills. If you say “bitch,” you’re criticizing her gender.
THIS IS YOUR NEW THING: WHEN A MAN YELLS AT YOU ON THE street, you yell back. You are tired of pretending you can’t hear these men. You are tired of gluing your eyes to the sidewalk in shame. You are tired of taking it, of treating it like a tax you must pay for the privilege of being a woman in public spaces.
Sometimes it seemed to me that the girls just didn’t want to hear that rape is never the victim’s fault. They wanted to have something to believe in, rules to follow, a formula, reasons other girls got raped and they didn’t:
It’s not like he touched you. It’s not like he hurt you. It’s not like he raped you. I’m supposed to be grateful because I wasn’t raped.
Rape was and is a cultural and political act: it attempts to remove a person with agency, autonomy, and belonging from their community, to secrete them and separate them, to depoliticize their body by rendering it detachable, violable, nothing.
RAPE AND COLONIALISM ARE NOT COMMENSURATE, BUT they are kin. When we talk about sexual violence as feminists, we are—we have to be—talking about its use to subjugate entire peoples and cultures, the annihilation that is its empty heart. Rape is that bad because it is an ideological weapon. Rape is that bad because it is a structure: not an excess, not monstrous, but the logical conclusion of heteropatriarchal capitalism. It is what that ugly polysyllabic euphemism for state power does.
The faith I grew up with demands forgiveness for abusers, but angry women? They must be silent.
Anger is the privilege of the truly broken, and yet, I’ve never met a woman who was broken enough that she allowed herself to be angry.
An angry woman must answer for herself. The reasons for her anger must be picked over, examined, and debated.
a girl, even a good one, was at best an unreliable source, and, at worst, a liar.
“How did you know you were gay?” is another version of “Can I believe you?”
People you tell will make comparisons. They will compare you to everyone else they have heard of who has experienced something similar, and they will rate how you are doing according to that metric. Are you more or less functional than their college roommate? Are you more or less sexual than that one woman at the office? Are you thinner or fatter than the other survivors they know, does it sound like something they heard about on TV, did they read a book about it, can they tell their partner about it over dinner that night as a sad story and shake their head? They will want details, as many
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You can keep it to yourself today and tell tomorrow, and you can tell everyone you know and then never talk about it again. You don’t owe anything to anyone. Your story is not the currency you exchange for love, for understanding, for getting what you need. You are allowed to get what you need without justifying why you need it, regardless of what you choose to reveal and what you keep private. No one is entitled to that part of you and you have no responsibility—none—to make your experience easier or more palatable by constructing a narrative other people find acceptable.
It’s not that I don’t want to love unharmed people; I just don’t understand them. The scales are all off, the proportions are wrong for when we talk about how something hurts.
as if saying no sixteen times is so many more than one that it makes my claim of violation more valid. I said no more than a dozen times. Does that sound better than saying it once? Exactly how many times did I need to say no to make what happened to me wrong and worthy of care?
THERE IS THIS IMPOSSIBLE PARADOX WHEN YOU ARE VICTIMized by sexual assault. You want to—you have to—convince yourself that it wasn’t “that bad” in order to have any hope of healing.
On the other hand, you need to convince others it was “bad enough” to get the help and support you need to do that healing.
“The survivor who was raped at knifepoint feels guilty she has taken up the space of a survivor who was raped at gunpoint. Everyone believes there is suffering worse than her own, that they should be strong enough to cope without me.”
SEXUAL ASSAULT MUST SIMULTANEOUSLY BE TERRIBLE AND BE something you’re able to accept—which is an impossibly hard thing to negotiate. Inevitability must also be a key factor, because God forbid if there was something you could have done to stop it.
That was “real” rape; anything less than that seemed like it was supposed to be tolerable. Anything “less” than that, well, at least you could say it wasn’t as bad as what happened to Sylvia. Date rape was a risk you took because you were a girl and you’d agreed to go on a date.
as women we are told to view and value ourselves in terms of how men view and value us, which is to say, for our sexuality and agreeability.
stifling trauma is just good manners.
