The more I run
the less I feel.
The less I feel
the less it's real.
It isn't fair. I care. I care.
I care.

The sign on the door will not protect you

It seems like every few months I have a discussion with friends about safety, and bathrooms. Whether we should have gender-neutral bathrooms in public places, what this should look like, and so forth. I think whenever such topics come up, others are surprised that I'm in favour of gender neutral washrooms, even if this means not having a dedicated women's washroom. Likely they assume that as a rape survivor, I'd feel safer peeing in a space where men are not allowed.

Now, on one level they are right - I don't like multi-stall washrooms in general, because I don't feel safe there. Often the stalls go only partway to the ground, leaving lots of potential for someone to spy under a door. And that's just weird. So it is uncomfortable, but I've gotten to a point where it is less uncomfortable than a day-long persisting feeling of needing to pee.

So, why don't I mind men being allowed in the washroom? First of all, I don't think it's my right to decide who is a man and who is a woman - these are mutable identity categories. While I am not in a headspace right now to find research on the matter, I do know that many people are harassed or assaulted for not conforming to binary gender norms, and are not safe in any multi-stall public washroom. Gender-policing is more dangerous than the potential of a man in a women's washroom. I would hazard a guess (and please do point me in the right direction for studies on this matter!) that there are more transphobic bigots out there than there are perverts who go into women's washroom for a thrill.

In this statement I am absolutely not denying the violence that women can and do face in public washrooms. However, the sign on the door is not some sort of force field. It cannot protect us from violence. Men can enter the women's washroom in most public buildings fairly easily, and often might not be noticed (I should also acknowledge, of course, that not all sexual predators are men!). I know this personally. I was raped, by a male student, in a women's gym changing room in my own high school. Was he allowed in? Absolutely not. But this did not stop him. The little woman/superhero-in-a-cape sign on the door is meaningless to someone who intends to rape. He cared only that I was alone in a space; a gender-neutral space might actually have been safer, as more students sharing it would minimize the likelihood of me having been alone as the after-class slow-to-dress straggler.

So, an unsolicited element of my own experience, perhaps. But I don't want to see friends boxed into washrooms where they face transphobic violence all in the name of protecting survivors such as myself. We need to crush rape culture, but gender-policing peeing people is not the way to do it.

A beautiful poem

It's been ages since I've posted, but I just have to share this beautiful piece I stumbled across tonight:

Alterations: A Monologue

The rest of her blog has some good stuff, too.

<3 br="">

Just reblogging a link

http://feministsatlarge.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/believe-me-you-are-not-inadequate/

This was lovely. Coupled with Hyperbole and a Half's recent post on depression, a good combination of things on the internet this week.

As for me, I've not been posting because I've been busy, and ok.

Meanings

I invest meaning in things that ought not be meaningful. Like in tomorrow. Abstract, socially constructed regimentation of the solar calendar. I am trying not to be scared, triggered. Trying to use my emotions as productive energy. I cannot be eaten by a date, an arbitrary thread, imaginary line linking the present to the past. I will not be smothered by an abstraction.

3652

That's how many days I've had this blog for (for the mathematically challenged, that's 10 years, less a day).

I'm doing a PhD in history. Studying change is something that I do. Studying stagnation, too. In 10 years I've seen change in the world, and I've seen it stagnate and go flat. Nothing changes, yet nothing stays the same. Same old story, what's the use of tears? What's the use of praying if there's nobody who hears? Turning, turning, turning turning turning through the years.

When I started this blog, it was all about me; my healing, my pain, my challenges. It was a private place; my mother knew where I kept my diary, but didn't know where to find me on the internet. Now, it's about bigger things, although the political is still very personal for me. Ten years ago, rape culture certainly existed, but wasn't labelled as such in popular discourse. The internet has given us a place for dialogue and social growth, but it is also a minefield, a sinkhole, a crevasse. Ten years ago, a teen was raped, but cell phones had no cameras, teens did not have Facebook, and text messaging was rare. Today, one click of a camera changes and ends lives. Perhaps it can bring justice, but not before bullying, stigma, and constant torment. The aftermath has changed immensely over the past ten years, and I cannot fathom how my horrors could have manifested themselves differently had they occurred in 2013, not 2003. Turning, turning, turning through the years; minutes into hours and the hours into years. Nothing changes, nothing ever can. Round and round the roundabout and back where you began.

Violence today has taken over the media; bombs went off in Boston at the finish line of the marathon, exploding bodies and changing and ending lives. Got me thinking about violence, and how we react to it as a society. Sudden violence brings sudden attention; everyone is asking whether the people they know in Boston are OK, clarifying the situation on the news. But not all violence is as explosive. People talk about rape how they talk about faraway violence in faraway wars - distant, abstract, a crime against bodies that are not our own. Civilian war casualties and rape survivors are unknown, anonymous, people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time; implicitly, people who did something wrong. Ten years ago, I hid my pain, my shame, my fear. I pushed it away from my mind for as long as I can. I talked about SARS, the illness that was terrifying Toronto, and not about the social ills that had hurt me. I talked about the war in Iraq, and not about the war and violence that is wrought daily on people closer to home. I had no words to talk about how I was hurting, and could only talk allegorically, abstractly.

Shootings, bombings, even natural disasters bring dialogue. It strikes at people that it could have been them, somebody they knew. And people talk about that. Rape is different. We hear about teens who have had their lives torn apart, but if people are thinking, "that could have been me," we don't say so. People talk about an abstract girl, usually one who did something wrong, a girl who should have, could have, done something differently. That girl is also me, could also be you. We are surrounded every day by people who have experienced horrible violence, and we are silent. Around the world, people die in wars with nary a mention in the media. But there is a war on our own soil, in every country in the world, and it's not the "war on terror." We are at war, in terror, changing our lives to avoid rape, averting our gaze while talking about rape in the assumption that it always happens to someone else, never to me, never to you. Invisible, silent, anonymous, insidious violence. It is probably eating somebody near you, consuming from within.

We see the blood, the physical manifestations of violence in Boston. But the explosions in the heart of a survivor, the daily amputations of parts of the soul - those are invisible. The marathon runners who witnessed and experienced trauma in Boston today will have a venue to talk about their fears, their pain. All violence is horrible, yet some violence is privileged in its social reception.

I do not mean here to silence the violence experienced by civilians targeted in war or terrorism, but there are parallels. We are abstract and silent on the massacres of people of colour in places far away. We are abstract and silent on the sexual violence faced primarily by women in places close to home. The emotional rawness that we see in discourses of non-sexual violence affecting people of privilege is absent when violence affects us at our most marginalized. Rape culture is silencing survivors, enabling and perpetuating violence. I have not lived in a war-torn nation. I fear that it may be appropriative to suggest that rape culture is a war, so this parallel is certainly problematic. Yet, with the barrage of abuses it entails, rape culture situates women's bodies, and other bodies that don't conform to hegemonic masculinity, in an abstract nation, far away. Like war, rape culture normalizes violence that happens in a far-away, abstract place. Like war, rape culture gives a louder voice to the perpetrators of violence than to its victims.

I've survived the past ten years. Personally, I've moved a long ways. I've won a battle. I am, and we are, still at war.

Must we always be at war?

Round and round and back where you began.

Adventures in mindfulness, part 4, or so.

The mindfulness group I've been attending all term ended tonight. I'll miss it. It was the hardest thing I've done in a long time, but really rewarding.

Dissociating has been my go-to coping strategy when things are really bad, for a good 10 years now. A few years ago, I learned to at least control it, and use it as an intentional coping strategy rather than a cop-out from my subconscious. I could get away from pain by taking a brief vacation from my mind and body, somehow. It's hard to explain if you've never dissociated. Five years ago, I managed to control flashbacks, so that I would dissociated into nothingness, rather than terror. This term, I've been working on being present, and riding with things that are painful. There were nights when that was crazily hard, but I got through. 

This term has been a bit like trying to fix a hole in a knitting pattern. In order to go back, you have to rip some stitches, and that can be tricky, as there is a risk that everything might unravel. Even once you do succeed, sometimes there is still a kink in the thread where the problem was. It takes surrounding the messy part with clean parts to make the messy part blend in and not look so significant. I unravelled some of my emotions a bit this term, and have been re-knitting them. It still looks bumpy, but I'm hoping to have a well-formed sock in the end.

This morning, this appeared on my Facebook:

"The Day I Taught How Not to Rape"

I had several amazing teachers in high school. But this was not a conversation that we had. Ever. It was something that didn't happen to "people like us."

I can't help but wonder if this sort of discussion could have saved me from so many years of struggle.

Latest Case in the News...

I've been meaning for a few days now to post about the Steubenville case. I have, however, been too overwhelmed by other things to put my thoughts together coherently.

Other bloggers have done it, and quite well. See, for instance, this powerful post: http://rantagainsttherandom.wordpress.com/2013/03/19/so-youre-tired-of-hearing-about-rape-culture/

Of course she doesn't touch on everything - rape culture is far more exhaustive than any one post can portray it as. It is so insidious it is hard to sum up in writing.

I think the thing that hits me, when I read about Steubenville in the media, is that it's so much more than this case. This is the case that went public. These dramas are playing out around the world in courtrooms...and those are the minority that ever make it to court. Rape culture surrounds us. This is just its latest public manifestation, and we can watch people be outraged for a couple of weeks before it is slipped back under the rug, invisible, insidious, omnipresent, and hurtful.

I am so triggered tonight. I can feel everything happening to my body. I haven't felt that way in a long time.

I am a survivor and I have healed a good deal. But some nights are still hard, hard, hard.

It's been almost 10 years. One of my students is harassing me, following me, and it brings me back to 10 years ago, when things were starting to escalate...the media today, portraying Steubenville (more coherent post about that some other point!), saying all the horrible things I said to myself in the days, weeks, months, years I did not report or talk about it.

It gets easier but dammit, it just doesn't go away.

I am safe and taking care of myself, but feeling too many things to process them.

[Edited to add: it's morning now, and with the help of a few good friends and one squishy orange cat, I stayed grounded all night. It was surprising and scary for me to feel so bad, after so long - but I am OK and going to distract myself today with work, as a form of self care]