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.

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.

A few more links...and corresponding ranting

I haven't written much of my own stuff lately, although I have something in the works.

In the meantime, here are a few things to read/see:

This graphic shows the magnitude of rape, and how often it is for rapists to actually be jailed...as well as showing those who are falsely accused (hint: very few!). I can't comment on the accuracy of the statistics, and indeed lots of comments on the Washington Post, where I have linked to (comments have huge potential to be triggering due to victim blaming and sheer dismissal of rape survivors), dispute the numbers. OK, so the quantitative picture may not be exact. But qualitatively speaking, it's pretty clear what the general trend is here.

Another recent must-read is Soraya Chemaly's latest post. Again, a huge potential for triggering as it talks about rape unreservedly, and with a few graphic bits. But she eloquently pulls together what's happened in India recently with rape culture as a more global issue, that recognizes India's tremendous problem with rape culture without giving an undeserved cookie to other countries that have perhaps less dramatic, but nonetheless heinous, examples of rape. The absence of justice for rape survivors is globally pervasive, and the situation is worst in countries with a more patriarchal political and judiciary system. And perhaps culture...I hesitate to talk about "culture" as I am not an anthropologist and it's hard to talk about culture without seeming racist. And India has such a diverse group of cultures. So I don't know whether the issue of "Eve-teasing" (read: everything ranging from garden-variety sexual harassment, down to fetal gang rape, smooshed together under one blanket that suffocates and minimizes the issue as something natural for men to do) is cultural, terminologically speaking. But the vary idea that there is one singular thing of "Eve-teasing" is symptomatic of something being very, very wrong.

I digress. On the flipside to Chemaly's piece, there is Doug Saunders' recent commentary, looking at the same issue. He makes a good point, but I feel like he exaggerates the extent to which Canadian and other "western" (problematic concept...) feminists dismiss the movement in India as just part of a global trend. One could read that into what Chemaly's post argues, but she has more nuance than that. India is an extreme example, yes - but it's not an exception to an otherwise feminist, well-behaved world.

A few more articles/blog posts for tonight. Kate Adach at Higher Unlearning (might be triggering for sexism and some violence, although it's not specifically about rape "jokes") blogs about sexist "humour" and why it sucks. She makes some good insights; I'll leave that for you to read. She also touches on issues of silencing, which led me to think of this piece on xoJane about everyday sexual assault/harassment in a bar setting. The author, who was groped in a bar by a drunk stranger, talks about how she wasn't sure how to interpret his actions, even to herself, so ended up mostly keeping silent and justifying it with light humour, as though it's no big deal. And perhaps for her, his touch wasn't a huge deal - but it's symptomatic of systemic issues that are a huge, huge deal. Silence is political. Humour is political. I don't mean to condemn her for keeping silent; whenever this happens to me, I don't usually bother telling people either (and, of course, she went along to blog about it; while she says she was silent and "did nothing about it," she did quasi-anonymously tell the internet. I'm sure most of us respond in ways fairly similar to hers (minus the blogging, presumably, for most folks?)...and in doing so, we perpetrate rape culture while being at the receiving end of it. It's a horrible place to be put in. If we speak out, we are "those women" who can't take a joke, who make everything in to such a big deal, who are unable to cope with the realities of our world. But if we are silent, it keeps happening. Do we let it keep happening, or are we tacitly forced to sweep it under the rug as a survival mechanism? Perhaps that's a blog post for some other night... (in the meantime, for some middle ground and a way to anonymously break the silence, there is always the Everyday Sexism Project [some posts there may trigger]).

Silence...violence...silence...violence...it's time for chocolate cake.

"Required Reading"

Sometimes this blog serves as my own set of bookmarks - a spot to save links I like and want other people to see.

Please read these two articles on the Huffington Post! Most of my handful of readers are Canadian - if that's you, and if you don't know about the issues facing our Indigenous peoples, it's time for you to learn. If you're not Canadian (I've noticed that in the past month, folks have visited this blog from all around the world! I'm excited!) then this might shatter any myths you hold about Canada. And so it should. We're not the rosy place we sometimes pretend to be on the international stage.

Here are the two aforementioned articles:

Wab Kinew: Idle No More Is Not Just an "Indian Thing"

Obert Madondo: What Chief Spence's Hunger Strike Says About Canada

Little children

 Same old story; what's the use of tears?

What's the use of praying when there's nobody who hears?

Turning, turning, turning turning turning through the years...

Watching the news this evening about the shootings in Connecticut and the stabbings in China, all I could do was think back to similar shootings and all the senseless rhyming in the recent history of school shootings and violence. I wrote a poem about this for Virginia Tech, years ago, and it sadly still rings true.

Sometimes the World Ends

Sexism/The Internet

I've been thinking about this post from Hook and Eye - it rings for me. But I feel like it's not the whole picture - if there is a photograph of sexism, the picture frame is the internet. Or perhaps the camera is the internet. I'm not entirely sure where this metaphor is going, but there's something insidious about how the internet perpetuates sexism that makes all of this more problematic. Sexism, catalyzed by the internet? The internet is still a problem here.

Anyhow, here's the link:

http://www.hookandeye.ca/2012/10/amanda-todd-problem-is-sexism-not.html

Thoughts? (if I get my first comment - ever - on this blog post, I'll find some way to make you a cookie!)

With the media abuzz about Amanda Todd's recent suicide after years of bullying, in person and online, I've been reflecting a fair bit about how things have changed since I was her age - and how the changes have made bullying that much more insidious.

I was bullied persistently through grades 4 through 8, at two different schools and overnight camp. But unlike what today's youth deal with, the bullying could never follow me home.

The worst bullying I experienced happened from 1997 to 2002 - the internet was in its beginnings, and cellphones were an oddity rather than a social expectation. My peers were reluctant to bully me in our regular evening MSN conversations, because they knew that I'd then have a written record of what they said - and besides, many of us at the time shared computers with our parents, and bullying online would be more likely to be caught. In one case, when I told a school guidance counsellor about how the other girls were teasing me, one of the bullies printed off our MSN chat from the evening before in which she'd been perfectly decent to me while talking about a school project, and used it as supposed proof that she and her friends accepted me into their in-crowd.

There was no Facebook, or equivalent social networking site. When I finished middle school, I deleted the girls who tormented me from my MSN contacts list, and had no reason to ever communicate with them again. These days, a teen in the same situation would have these peers on Facebook, and often keeps peers who bully her, as having a large list of "friends" is a marker of social status. I could sever contact, and more or less create a new life for myself. That's not an option anymore.

Of course, that's not to say that bullying never extended to the internet - but for the most part, kids were more civil online than they would ever be in person. There was one situation that stands out to me. When I was in grade 9, and was having a rough time, a former friend whom I'd fallen out with suggested - perhaps jokingly, but I'll never know - that I just go ahead and kill myself. That was the closest I'd ever come to suicide, and if other friends hadn't been there (also online) to support me, I can't say with confidence that I'd be alive today.

If the internet back then had been what it is today, I don't know if I'd have survived those years. When I left school, I was free. I could go home and read, and be in my own world where nobody could hurt me. Now, that world would be interrupted by a mean text message or inappropriate photo posting. It surprises me not that Amanda Todd ended her life, but that so many youth are so alone, a sea of bullies surrounding them even in their own homes, and have somehow managed to cling on to hope and survive.

If anybody who is reading this is in a rough situation with bullies - it can get better, with time. It's hard to keep hoping when you hurt so much, but one day, you'll realize that your perseverance is worth it.

Kensington Market assaults

I've been on my guard a bit lately because of several sexual assaults in Kensington Market, an area which I enjoy spending time in. Here's an article by a freelance writer which so well summed up my thoughts about having to stay alert, and how unfair it all seems. (link is not especially likely to be triggering)

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1229896--women-always-have-to-be-alert-to-the-threat-of-sexual-assault

In short: I shouldn't have to watch my back when I walk alone at night. He should have to watch his penis.

The world disgusts me.

A group of men in Cambodia wanted money. They stormed an international pre-school and held a group of kids hostage. A two-year-old boy from Victoria was shot in the head because he wouldn't stop crying.

A two-year-old child is dead because of some idiots who wanted money. Money is material, and useless in the long run. A child is priceless.

I can't imagine what those parents are going through now.