"The R Word," Why now? and various other musings

First, another article I read and need to share. Warning that this is heavy - triggering, for some, and more graphic than most things I've ever posted. It's a discussion of the trivializing use of the word "rape," in this case specifically in video games: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/9766-The-R-Word

I think I was especially struck by this article because it articulated so many of the arguments that I tried (and sometimes failed) to make in similar discussions, most notably one evening on Facebook last year when I argued about the term "Facebook rape" with some friends of friends who I didn't even know. That night hurt and sent me into a tailspin for a little while. The author of this article describes his own experiences in pretty stark detail, which is disconcerting but probably necessary to drive home his point, especially in the gaming world which is a harsh place where I don't hang out (not just because of things like this in gaming culture - also because I'm not great at video games!).

Some key quotations, for those not keen on clicking on the potentially triggering link:

"Despite all the articles, I have yet to see one that helps people understand, in detail, why this is such a personal topic for people who have had rape in their past. Perhaps it's our fault for not taking you there, for just assuming you'd care about something that for you is an abstract idea, but for us is a painful reality." Yes. So much. And it's so hard to hammer home that point to people...but that's exactly what this brave man did. 

He voices the troubles faced by people with PTSD, rape survivors in particular, and this bit especially rings true: "My whole life I had felt worthless. I always tried harder than anyone because I was afraid of what authority figures, those who had power over me, would do if I failed. That's not uncommon for rape victims, it turns out. Trauma like that changes your brain chemistry, makes you feel helpless and inadequate even in situations you're perfectly capable of handling." My terror of authority is one of the few things that still really hinders me - at work, and in unexpected situations when I become afraid of people I merely perceive to be in positions of authority, such as more experienced drivers or better-dressed people on the street. I still cower in the face of criticism, and it wounds me in a way that is far from constructive. It is cliché to say that being a perfectionist is a weakness at work, but I do think in my case that it is. It means that when something goes wrong, and is noticed, that I dissolve entirely and have difficulty rebuilding, staying in a fearful mental space for far longer than is healthy or normal. Some of this may be due to being emotionally abused by a teacher in elementary school, compounded by years of bullying, but I do often think it was driven home by rape, which instilled in me an even deeper fear of how people in power truly could hurt me. Part of me, even years later, is still ensnared by that fear, which emerges whenever there is a situation that brings up even tangentially related emotions. It's not very productive!

Then the anonymous gamer makes a key point which I've never quite elucidated in my own arguments on this topic: the difference between hurt and offense. It seems obvious, but somehow is something I struggled to make clear to people when I objected to their words and became upset. In this case, again, his words are better than mine: "Often I won't say anything, even when I'm upset, because I don't want to be negative and ruin everyone's fun. Except "ruining fun" is exactly why I dislike it when people use that word. It ruins my fun. It sucks the fun out of a game like oxygen through a blown airlock. Being raped was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and I don't like to be reminded of it when I'm supposed to be enjoying myself. Imagine if someone captured your flag or dominated you in deathmatch, then rubbed in your face how your sister was killed by a drunk driver or your dad abandoned you when you were little. That's how close it cuts. People keep using the word "offended," in this discussion -- I'm not offended, I'm hurt. Hearing this word causes me emotional pain."

I'm hurt, not offended. This is what I wish I'd said, what I need to say, in so many similar situations. A little over a month ago, at a staff training retreat at work, several of us at lunch ended up talking about stalkers. I'm not sure how the topic came up - I certainly didn't introduce it. Someone in a more senior position to me mentioned how she'd been "stalked" by someone who gave her cookies and other baked goods, and how she'd not been fond of his behaviour but wanted to keep him around for the baking. She set up this supposed stalker with a friend of hers and they are close now.

I wanted to scream (but didn't; this is my boss we're talking about - and remember my issues with authority here! - it was also at work in a dining hall also crowded with staff whom I quasi-supervise). This isn't stalking we're talking about - this is an annoyance, petty behaviour. Stalking is a crime. Intimidation. Threats. Harassment. Not repeated purchase of cookies that stops when you ask nicely. I was stalked off and on for years by the man who raped me, and on a different occasion followed from my elementary school, threatened, and intimidated by a stranger as a child. Those are experiences I remember with terror - there is no humour in them and they are certainly not experiences I'd bring up as light lunchtime conversation with my colleagues. In my usual pattern, I retreated and proceeded to stew over it. I've been stewing since mid May, and it's now the end of June. It all brought me back to the inaccurate, trivializing, hurtful use of "rape" as a term to describe various virtual interactions that aren't very nice, but also aren't rape. Hurtful. I wasn't just offended by how this person, and other co-workers who mentioned having "stalkers" at various points, lightly told their stories as though talking about their first dates. I was profoundly hurt. She did not intend it, but something that terrified me for years became with this group of people a simple part of dating and courtship instead of the crime that it is. I felt jealous, confused, and angry - but most of all, hurt. And it's taken me a long time to put a finger on it, and to be able to explain to myself why I feel doubly wounded when somebody accuses me of simply being easily offended when I become upset about how people use these words.

I feel like I'm ranting at this point. I probably am. So I'll change gears. Another thing that's been on my mind these past few nights...why now? I've had enough of the "why me?" musings - they aren't productive and there is little I can do but accept that this happened to me. Happened. In the past. So why is it - "it" in this case being my past, issues of rape and bullying, trauma and the fear I always hid - hurting me more this spring than others?

This spring has been tumultuous for my family. My sister has been very ill, and our life has been turned upside-down. Things wrench inside of me because of the fear of losing her, almost every night. Simultaneously, a good friend is also struggling with mental illness that scares me - again, a feeling of loss with each night in the hospital, being overwhelmed and confused, terrified, and feeling helpless. All of this is a huge understatement. It will probably be a long time before I'll be able to really explain how this is all making me feel. One would think my mind would be wholly occupied with the daemons of its present, but instead in the long nights once I think things have subsided and I am finally about to sleep, the past awakens. I haven't had flashbacks again, thankfully, or hurt myself, but the anger and the fear from years ago has been flooding back. Why now? I've been puzzled by this. The best I can come up with is that there is some sort of a connection created by emotions in my brain.

I've been thinking about times and experiences as though they are islands, linked by bridges of emotion in my mind. Currently there is fear, anger, loss, hopelessness relating to my current situation and the fear of losing people whom I love. In the past, there was fear, anger, hopelessness, and so forth while being raped, and dealing with the aftermath of it, but those feelings were so intense I couldn't name them or recognize them at the time. The best I can surmise is that right now there is a bridge of sorts between those feelings, and that something inside of me is crossing over.

It's not fun. Hell no. But I am not as overpowered by my own feelings as I have been in the past. Somehow I know what they are now. Perhaps it's writing about them; perhaps it's time. In my Memories Series poem (which I posted last night while somewhat working through this post in my head), one line reads "Memories are fluid, and engulf me when it’s right \ To look at all the shattered glass that’s gathered in my knees. \ I pull out every shard of glass, and I keep up my fight: \ A fight that’s set on fire by my memories." Lately I've been wondering whether this is simply the time that my subconscious has chosen for pulling out at least some of the splinters that have been hurting me for years, which have become so engrained that I've become accustomed to them. Perhaps when I've been hurting so intensely because of other things in my life, I have the fuel to work through elements of my past that I usually keep buried so that I don't let those feelings free.

At work I jotted down today some things, just fragments, metaphorically linking this again to pulling out splinters: "healing is like pulling out deeply embedded splinters. Bleeding is inevitable even if the nerve endings have long since been severed. It's like unplugging something. It hurts unimaginably and acutely but is cleaner and less toxic than leaving a fragment to keep stabbing for eternity, fermenting, turning gangrenous inside of me."As a child I was always petrified of getting small slivers in my feet from running barefoot on the back deck, and I remember keenly the fear of my mother attempting to root out some stubborn splinters of wood, reluctantly and as gently as she could, with a sterilized needle. Now I know that slivers have to come out. Perhaps now is a time to release the splinters of wood, the slivers of the past, which have been catalyzed by my present fear. I can only hope that this won't be too dramatic or pull me down for too long.

What did homophobia have to do with being raped?

This is more pre-work to our TEACH storytelling workshop, which I wrote 5 days prior to the workshop itself. For the record, I still haven't managed to tell aloud any reworkings of my story for the group - more about that later.

Offside - this is my 50th public post!

Bear with me here - this is personal stuff, tough stuff. I don't usually think about connections between my own experiences or try to detangle things, so I would love comments/constructive criticism if anybody does read this.

TW for non-graphic discussion of rape

What did homophobia have to do with being raped?

When it happened, I didn't see any connections. Just pain, shame, fear, and confusion. Now the links are more obvious. Homophobia was a catalyst, not a cause - in my case, rape was not a specifically homophobic crime - and it was one of the biggest hurdles that kept me silent.

In my first year of high school, fitting in was paramount. Boys were a sudden new feature of my perplexing new social landscape. I knew that admitting that I was interested in them only as friends, and that I instead harboured a crush on the girl who sat next to me in science class, would be social suicide. It would mean a return to the bullying that had followed me from school to school for five years and which I hoped desperately to escape.

So when my sister told of a guy who she and a friend had a crush on, I thought it best to play along. I flirted back, awkwardly, and kept mum through fear when he first began to touch me in the halls. Saying no would, I thought, out me right away. And telling a teacher? After years of bullying from students and teachers alike, I was reluctant to trust them. Besides, he was acting the way I believed older high school boys were meant to behave. My response was to act like a typical teen girl; that is, to giggle and play along. I hoped that would let me maintain for my classmates the illusion of being straight. To me, it was a performance. For him, it was real. I didn't know how dangerous that could be.

The situation escalated. He pursued other girls as well, but they stood up for themselves. I was too scared to, and didn't fight him off when he casually but inappropriately touched me at my locker, my heart pounding and my insides shriveling up with shame. I'd sacrifice the private parts of my body to keep my real crushes private and protect my fledgling friendships. At the same time, I felt like a traitor to myself, and to my feminist values. I started to separate my body from my mind.

In early April of that year, I made plans to come out. A good friend was scheduled to visit from out of town over the Easter long weekend, and I planned to come out to her to test the waters. The idea was that if that went well, I'd tell my whole family at our upcoming Passover Seder. None of that ever happened.

The Wednesday before that weekend, the boy I'd feared and flirted with raped me after school.

My friend never visited that weekend; fears or a flu epidemic kept her home. I couldn't come out to her as practice. Besides, I felt guilty and tainted, fearing that I'd let this happen; that I was a phoney lesbian; that other women would shun me. I came to believe that, perhaps, I had deserved it.

After that, I couldn't tell my family. Besides, my mind was reeling and my body was so detached that I would touch my own hands numbly, doubting that they were mine. As the months passed, I began to wonder if I was even real. I hurt myself, to test if I existed and to see if I could feel more pain. Mostly I felt nothing but numbness. When I did feel anything, I felt grief for what I had lost: the sanctity of my body and the queer community which, by flirting with the boy who raped me, I thought I had betrayed.

On the second anniversary of the rape, I wrote a speech about feminism which a friend of mine read for my grade eleven English class. I told of how rape had reinforced my feminist views, and outed myself as a rape survivor. Yet I emphatically denied that I was a lesbian, telling my classmates that it was something I had thought about but that it didn't really describe me. I don't know what they made of that but it was, to an extent, true. At that point, I identified as asexual, thinking any hope I had of sexuality had been destroyed by rape, and denying the attractions that I felt towards women on the grounds that I didn't deserve those feelings. Now, I feel that asexuality wasn't the word or concept that I needed, but at the time it was a way for me to acknowledge for myself that I was certainly not straight. It also justified my own decision to trample my own same-sex attractions.

Overcome by pangs of jealousy when a friend came out as a lesbian, I called a queer youth helpline. They listened to me. They assured me that my past could not dictate my identity. The young woman at the end of the line never doubted me or denied my pain. She just said, "that's rough" and let me talk all I wanted. The guilt and uncertainty that had paralyzed me for two years began to melt away. I could almost feel my body thaw. It was not easy. Over the past few years I have felt and lived through the pain that I had denied by living separately from my own body. Dissociation, I have since learned, compounds physical pain and saves it for later, like a systemic burning regurgitation of an unwanted meal. That's not to say that I don't still sometimes dissociate - but it's a coping strategy I use when it's the safest thing to do at the time, rather than by default. I no longer hurt myself.

Days after calling the helpline, I came out to my immediate family, and in the weeks that followed, to some close friends. I was lucky to be surrounded by accepting and loving people. My fears of rejection and further abuse were unfounded. I only wish that I'd squarely faced homophobia and my fears of its potential impact before it blinded me to the positive forces that were with me, and within me, all along.

Some timetravelling tonight...

I haven't updated here in over three years.Welcome back.

I wrote this essay/speech seven years ago. Seventeen-year-old me is in a sense worlds different from how I am today, but simultaneously exactly the same. Then, I wrote it as a response to a class debate on feminism, not realizing the reaction it would cause from my classmates, teacher, principal, and even the school superintendent. Now, I am less concerned about a reaction than about having a place, years on, to share once again. Several years later, I might phrase things somewhat differently, and it would likely be more academic in tone. The sentiment, however, is exactly the same.

To share with whom? I frankly have no idea. Perhaps the blogosphere, but likely not. If anybody is out there, reading, then say hello.

Here goes...

**trigger warning for discussion of sexual assault**

Let Each Girl Grow To Become a Phenomenal Woman: Why I Am A Feminist

April 16^th, 2005

“I should never be able…to hand you after an hour’s discours a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantle-piece forever” ~ Virginia Woolf.

I will, however, try very hard to convince you of my plight as a feminist, as Virginia Woolf did for me in A Room of One’s Own.

***

I am a feminist. I was raised and educated as a feminist, but that is certainly not the sole basis for my feminism. I consider becoming a feminist to be a personal decision; it can be influenced by outside factors, but the final piece of the puzzle rests in a person’s heart. I know what I want, and I am working toward it. My feminism is not based on my feminist education, my female role models, or even my realization that I am not entirely safe in the world. It is the convergence of all of my social values, my present reality, the story of my past, and my views of the world that make me a feminist. I am proud to be a feminist.

Some people like to point out that I was raised without a male role model, but that is neither true, nor would it mean that I hate men. I absolutely do not hate men. I did grow up without a father, but there were still enough men in my life for me not to develop the idea that men were violent. I was never suspicious of men; on the contrary, I frequently wondered what would happen if a man I met was my father, and I usually decided that while it would be quite agreeable, I liked my life enough as it was. My male role models were gentle and kind to me and to other girls and women. Men can be feminists too. A feminist can be any person of any race, sex, or sexual orientation.

I have often heard remarks that I do not “dress like a feminist”. What, might I ask, does a feminist dress like? Is a feminist supposed to fade into the woodwork and hide her whole body under clothing so that men cannot mistake her as a sex object? Or is she supposed to dress in clothes that are as revealing as possible to prove that she is proud of her sexuality? Or should she dress as eclectically as possible, so she can let the world know that she is not afraid of being different? I think a feminist can fit any combination of these descriptions; she should dress however she likes, and not try to live up to standards that she does not support. My clothes match if I can be bothered to match them, and are as modest or immodest as I wish, depending on how self-conscious I feel on a particular day. I disagree with any idea that only women who wear certain types of clothing are “real” feminists.

I also do not fit the stereotype of the butch woman who plays hockey. I have never, ever, simultaneously worn skates and held a hockey stick, and I have no intention to. I do not see any reason to play traditionally male sports just to prove that I am as tough as a man. I also do not see any reason to fight, to push people around, or to attempt to claw my way to the top of any sort of a chain. I can be a successful woman and be good at what I do without living on the top of the world and hurting other people to get there. A strong woman should not need to hurt other people to get where she needs; she can get there without sacrificing the dignity of other people. A feminist does not necessarily have to be richer or louder than a man; she just needs to know what she wants and know how to get there, wherever it may be.

I have read the newspaper ever since I could read. Every so often, I would see an article that talked about how a woman was raped or injured by a man. It upset me. I did not want to be a part of the so-called weaker sex, but I wanted to be a woman. At school I learned about the media, and how much it degraded society. I hated the stereotypes presented in the magazines that my classmates read. I hated hearing about women in the sex trade who had to sell their bodies to survive, and were killed because there was no safe place for them. I hated the music that talked about sex, because it was usually shallow and it all sounded the same. I was sick of hearing stories about a beautiful woman lured into bed, told through toneless music designed to appeal to a man’s sexual desires rather than his musical ear. That is not what music is supposed to be about. Most of all, I hated the music, movies, and magazines that glorified violence, especially sexual violence. I did not think it was fair that the music and pop culture industry supported the hell that some people had to live through, every day of their lives.

One story in particular bothered me. A girl who was introduced to my grade seven class as Sally was assaulted because she had supposedly “implied consent” by wearing a low-cut top to a job interview. The court ruled against her, saying that it was her own fault, and that she had chosen for the assault to happen by dressing the way she had. As far as I had learned, assault is an involuntary action, and a survivor could not have simply “implied consent” with her choice of dress. It disgusted me that a woman could be hurt in the way that Sally had, and that the law would not even support her by punishing her assaulter. I have since learned that it is nearly impossible to convict a rapist; the survivor’s “character” is shredded by the defense, the people she is allowed to use as witnesses are screened, and the case is usually dropped due to lack of evidence. Ninety percent of rape trials end without a guilty verdict for the rapist. This does not mean that ninety percent of alleged rapes did not really occur; instead, it shows the gross faults in the justice system’s ability to deal with sex crimes.

My campaign to crush violence against women began two years before this violence became a suffocating part of my own life. I started writing articles for a school zine, On Target. I wrote empowering poetry and drew cartoons. I doubt that my work ever had any impact on my community, but it felt fulfilling and gave me a sense of the reality I would experience when sexual violence shattered my life on April 16^th, 2003. I do not like to delve into details, but I will admit that I no longer feel safe at school, where the attack occurred. I think that is where my feminist ideas took hold of my life more and more. I deserve to feel safe at school. As I slowly recovered and accepted that the memories I have from that terrible afternoon will always be a part of my life, I realized more and more how little my peers realized that events like this actually happen. Many people think that rape is something that happens in the movies, to people who they do not know. That is undeniably false. It had never occurred to me that these things could happen to me until I experienced them first-hand.

One person who I commend for her courage in bringing the issue of sexual violence to light is a young woman named Hanne, who posted the following empowering story on her online journal, provoking a large group of women in an online community to acknowledge that they deserve better, and creating a huge response:

After a dear friend of mine was raped a few weeks ago, I've been thinking a lot about sexual violence and how you're not supposed to talk about it.

This friend of mine who was raped recently isn't the only person I know who has endured being raped and lived through the aftermath, just the most recent. She isn't the only person I know who has had to try to figure out how to glue the broken bowl of her life back together after having it shattered by sexual violence, praying that it'll still hold water when she's done.

As I have altogether too many times in the past when other friends have become victims of rape or other sex crimes, I have wondered what I can possibly do to make it better. But I also know I can't take it back or prevent it or even really make it easier. The best thing I can do is come out and let her know that she's not alone, that there are others of us out here, that she can make it through, because I'm a rape survivor, and we do make it through.

I was thinking in the shower this morning about how many people I know -- women, men, transfolks, others -- have some sort of sexual violence somewhere in their pasts, wondering how many more people I know have some sort of sexual violence lurking in their future.

I wondered for a moment what it would look like if just for one day, everyone who had survived sexual violence were visible as a survivor, if we could actually see the extent of it, if we could all know just how very not-alone we are. I wondered how angry and sad it would make me to know. I wondered how much power there might be in the truth.

I'm not sure what to do with this, yet. But I do feel like outing myself, and encouraging other people to out themselves if they feel okay about doing so. This isn't about telling the story of what happened -- just for the record, I don't generally like to talk about it much and I get uncomfortable with other people's voyeuristic curiosity about what happened to me, although other people feel differently about telling their stories or being asked questions, and I think people should be free to place their own limits on how and with whom they want to talk about details.

This is about being public in regard to something that is normally kept a very big, very dark secret, thus ensuring that we can [not] all pretend that This Sort Of Thing Doesn't Happen To People Like You And Me.

It does happen to people like you and me. Trust me, I know.

I'm Hanne. I'm a survivor of sexual violence.

No Pity. No Shame. No Silence.

Like Hanne, I want to raise awareness and bring the issue to light without highlighting my own story, which I still find very painful to tell. However, I am stepping up and giving my point of view after realizing how many of my female classmates think that women have had equal rights to men since the 1970s. These girls are far too wrong; women still pay more money for the same services, such as the identical dry-cleaning job or haircut, than a man would pay. At last, some government officials want to fix this problem, but they are scorned by other officials who feel that the government has better things to do than protect women’s rights.

Women living in Toronto are very fortunate; we get much easier access to abortion, health care, and other social services than women in rural areas, let alone those in less progressive parts of the world. It scares me. I do not feel safe at my own high school, and yet I am considered fortunate compared to many of the world’s women. I am appalled by the political situation in the United States. I dread the day when abortions are again made illegal. Many countries are embarking on a path that will eventually take away the rights that feminists have strived for over many generations. I fear that one day, women will have no rights at all. Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale presents a terrifying depiction of a woman’s life in a future republic in what is now the United States of America. This woman’s life as a handmaid, having no rights, sexually degraded, and forbidden from anything that gives her real pleasure, is eerily close to the future that I fear the world may be approaching.

To me, a feminist has many essential roles. She must protect women’s rights from descending into a dark hole, until they are eventually forgotten and women are dismissed as no longer legally being “persons”. She must advocate for women’s rights in countries where women are still not legally recognized as citizens, and where they do not have the freedom to choose their own path in life. She must demand justice for women who are hurt in sex crimes, and have no fair justice system to turn to. Being a feminist is not about standing up and saying “I am woman, hear me roar!” It is about proving to the world through actions that women can do more than roar. We can also make change.

I am a feminist because I believe that I deserve more rights and freedoms than I currently have. One in four women experience sexual violence that is inflicted by men in their lifetimes, but hardly any men experience the same violence from women. I am one of those one in four women, and I want to change this statistic, as well as many others. I will not stop fighting for my cause until that statistic is evened out, or until violence is removed from our society altogether. I will not stop until women feel safe, and do not have to endure degrading whistles as they walk down the street. I will not stop until women and men are financially equal. I have no wish for women to be better than men, only equal. I am a feminist not to fulfill somebody else’s dream for me, not to get revenge for my past, or to make men feel as degraded and unvalued as many women have felt. I am a feminist to build a better future myself and for the girls and women who I care about.

Resources

Print Sources:

Angelou, Maya. Phenomenal Woman.

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: McClelland and Steward-Bantam Limited, 1985.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Frogmore: Triad/Panther Books, 1977.

Canadian Women Studies Journal/ The Linden School. On Target: Taking Aim At Violence.

Online Sources:

Australian Women’s Intra Network. International Women’s Day: A World to Win. 16 Apr. 2005.

B, Hanne. No Pity. No Shame. No Silence. 8 Mar. 2004. 16 Apr. 2005.

Tiana. Rape: It’s not your fault. 11 Oct. 2001. 16 Apr. 2005.