Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

I was too stunned to think rape when I pleaded with them not to have sex with me, though rape, in the traditional sense, was precisely what I meant to avoid.

I had been raised to believe that by every metric, the most serious thing a girl could do was have a penis in her vagina.

I did not understand how the boys’ violation was of me, rather than only a part of me; I did not understand that self-esteem and safety weren’t held like treasure between a girl’s legs, but could be plundered in other ways.

People know the telos of the encounter (intercourse) and the nature of the exchange (nonconsensual). Whereas I had no label. I did not think rape applied, and in any case I refused it, as my private way of caring for other girls; I considered it important to reserve the word for those who would use it to describe their own assaults.

The terms for the penetrative events of that night were felonious sexual assault (because I was under sixteen) and aggravated felonious sexual assault (because I was held down).

the legal term rape originated to describe a violation of property, not person, which is why it applied only to intercourse, and only to women.

I was looking for the word for the worst thing.

Assault conjures violence, not violation.

But sexual assault puts sex right in the front window, even though the encounter isn’t, to the victim at least, about sex at all, but about cruelty exacted in domination and shame.

And this leaves the listener to wonder: if it wasn’t rape, then what exactly went on? Which means a person, however kind and concerned for you, hears the term sexual assault and is left either guessing or trying not to guess which part of you was v...

There are also encounter, incident, event, attack, happening, situation, night in que...

Little-known fact about victims: they can tell whether you believe them by which term you use when y...

We were blessed with excellence, and excellently blessed, and our schoolwork and sports teams and choirs and clubs and shoulders thrummed with the Calvinist confidence that is actually a threat: if you do not become spectacular, it means you are not us.

vis-à-vis

Perpetrators does nothing for me. Assaulter is not a word. Attackers is useless because they were not Gauls, and so is accused, because I am not here accusing them, nor have I ever accused them.

I didn’t think of the word impostor. It would have been useful to have this word to describe the way I felt in the world every day, given how much my smallest mistakes burned me, and how I figured they marked me as not belonging, but I didn’t try to describe that feeling even to myself.

non sequitur.

For once, I wanted to be completely in the lead, as unpredictable to others as others seemed to me.

Just before I turned to head down the front walk, he patted my middle and said, “They’re still swimming in there.” It was some months before I realized what he’d meant.

The cosmetics of rape are central to proving any case.

It’s a bitter term—evidence of how the same words have different meanings to a victimized woman and a world inclined to deny trauma.

for a long time, I envied that she’d been attacked by a stranger. I thought that was lucky. And that she’d been an absolute virgin—not only a stranger to intercourse, as I was, but a stranger to any body other than her own. Unimpeachably pure. And, above all, she’d been injured. I actually envied her this. Nobody, seeing what happened to her, would say, But you wanted this.

In other words: to believe in the perfect victim is to believe in no victim at all.

Besides immorality, the salient feature of entitlement, I think, is the total failure of imagination.

jolie laide,”

I had learned the popular archetype of the well-born dolt, whose pink sweater, tied over his shoulders, is the brightest thing north of his balls.

Why don’t victims bite or kick or scream? Because we aren’t in a horror movie, we’re in our lives.

She could be anyone, but this is someone you can hurt almost effortlessly.

In bearing witness, we’re trying to correct a theft of power via a story. But power and stories, while deeply interconnected, are not the same things. One is rock, the other is water. Over time, long periods of time, water always wins. What I want to know, even now, is: how?

It’s a curious thing how children are wired to ask for help when hurt or frightened—Ouch! Help me!—but shame turns this inside out: I can survive this as long as nobody else ever knows. As though secrecy itself performed some cauterizing function, which, of course, when it comes to the matter of self-delusion, it does. I couldn’t talk about what had happened without having to let myself think about what had happened. The secret served me.

The world was made from language, Mom said, therefore the divine was immanent in language. God lived in books.

What does it mean when you feel marked? What if you think hope is self-indulgent and foolish? What if God doesn’t listen?

The text sought an ontological conception of the notion of despair,

Fear and anxiety are distinguished but not separated. The truth of the vitalistic interpretation of ethics is grace.

I scoured my brain for a clue about how to handle this, the slipping away of my confidants, but I couldn’t find any solution save saying the thing I absolutely could not say. There was nothing else that could cause them to see.

Black Ice, Lorene Cary,

I understood from this one of the rules of war: what happened to girls like me did not matter, did not even register.

I knew virginity to be the teacup construction of a world that holds female sexuality to be a possession.

I would hold on to and cherish and groom this splintered lack of experience only to hand it over to a man, who would—listen to the words—take it from me? (No man receives a woman’s virginity, no matter how freely given.) No, thanks. If it was something they wanted, then by God it was nothing to me:

It takes a surprising amount of energy to shun a person.

There is a contemporary inquiry into shame that suggests that shame is not as deeply rooted in guilt as in power.

psychologists studying the physical manifestations of shame noted that they closely resemble the behaviors of mammals trying to demonstrate subordination to a more powerful individual. Unshackling the notion of shame from ideas of right and wrong strikes me as helpful, at least where sex is involved.

In my experience, shame is not the wholehearted burn that follows a realization of guilt, which we consider to be shame’s obvious antecedent, but rather a surplus of displeasure that adheres to one party—and always the less powerful one. Shame is messy and pervasive. It does not attend to the course of misbehavior. Often enough, in...

Nothing was taken from Hobey Baker, I calculated, nothing visited upon him that he didn’t ordain. The only thing he’d ever had to give up was his own future.

T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

I didn’t tell her that if I’d known how easy it was to break a bone, how much power you could generate from sliding just a little bit fast, I might have found a way to die. Could it be done gently? Could I have it happen before I knew it was happening, just disappear without having to do the dying?

pedantic

avuncular.

eponymous

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake.