Super Fun Post! Navigating Rape Culture as a Rape Survivor
It’s like rubbing your skin with a cheese grater. Fresh, raw hurt every time this bullshit bubbles up.
Ooh la la - the beginning of fall is my favorite weather - sweatshirts and flip-flops. The snap of acorns as I take meandering walks, moving to step on every crisp acorn cap. Chilly evenings on the back porch. Windows open all day. Sweater weather.
Fucking hell. Yes, it’s sweata weatha … but / and. It’s also tough-time weather.
Sorry to be a Deborah Downer, but this is where I’m at.
You can roll a turd in glitter but it’s still a turd.
Ever since 2016’s “Grab ‘Em by the Pussy” additional Trump debacle, followed by 2018’s embarrassing-to-all-entitled-mediocre-white-men shitshow that was “Coach” Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings (may the Great Cosmic Echidna bless the venerable Christine Blasey Ford with a bottomless jar of gooey chocolate cookies and stellar book sales), early fall has become, for this Unruly Quaker, not just sweater weather but also shitty post-traumatic memories weather.
To my fellow sexual-assault survivors:
This may be a difficult post, and it honestly might be more than one post.
Please feel free - nay, encouraged - to just, you know, pony up for that paid subscription you’ve been meaning to do … and then blithely ignore the next couple of Monday posts.
But if you do decide to read, let’s make plans to be kind to ourselves and each other.
FWIW, here’s my plan:
I’ll be holding ALL of you in my heart and sending love your ways.
Extra yoga, meditation, and prayer.
Extra reading of whatever books make me happy.
Extra time under the sky, just being under the sky.
Extra nourishing food.
Extra hugs from family and friends.
Extra videos of animals being cute. Here’s one now! Sweater weather for puppies!
I hope you’ll take a moment to think about how you’ll take extra good care of yourself.
You can call 800-656-HOPE to reach a national, confidential helpline 24/7.
Okay. And Away We Go.
Oct 8,2016 - Trump’s “I Just Grab Them By the Pussy” tape comes to light. No one is surprised. But I do remember folks thinking, “This must be it. This has to sink him.”
Me, I’ve always taken the man at his word: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?"
He is so full of shit he’s bursting. But never a truer word has been spoken.
Anyway.
Check the Flux Capacitor and set the Delorean for October 2016.
I write this, in response to the tape:
I was raped as a teenager. I was raped by someone I trusted, with whom I'd had consensual sex before (consensual sex that was technically statutory rape to begin with, because he was a lot older than me).
It took a lot--a lot--of tears and years and therapy and Take Back The Nights to come to terms with it. To call it what it was. To realize the devastating effects it had had on me: inability to trust men, eating disorder relapse, self-doubt, self-blame, self-loathing.
In my twenties, after a lot of work and support from wonderful friends, two amazing boyfriends, and a free-of-cost yet life-changing support group at a rape crisis center (now defunct), I joined a group of sexual assault survivors who would go talk to community groups about our experiences, to educate people face-to-face.
Because that's how change happens.
It was called SHOUT: Survivors Helping Others Understand and Talk. (This was 1998-ish. I was 25-ish.)
One time we were meeting with police officers.
I told my story.
A cop said, "I don't think that's really rape. He'd already had his hands in the cookie jar. He just wanted to get in there again."
I’ll let that sink in for a sec.
Another time I told my story on a college campus.
A male college student --who was in a men-against-rape group, nowadays we’d call him “woke”-- told me I was lucky, that at least my rape hadn’t lasted long, because I had managed to get away during the rape (i.e. before the guy ejaculated).
Sigh.
Another time, another police officer training:
On anonymized index card questions, a cop wrote, "I think the girl in the gray sweater [me] is making up her story for attention."
Making up. Her story. For attention.
Imagine you spent eight years trying to trust yourself that you were, indeed, raped. That your experience was real. That your feelings were, and are, valid.
Then have an officer of the law tell you you making it up for attention.
Ever wonder why rape victims don’t report?
I sure don’t wonder.
Quokka break
I don’t want to weirdly, abusively, gas-light-y throw in an image of cute and nice things with traumatic bad things, but I do want to take a moment to breathe.
Okay. Back to those SHOUTs.
Maybe I should call them shit-shouts.
I managed to remain calm, every time someone said something shitty. Partly because it made a certain kind of sense. These were exactly the things I’d been telling my own self, while I was still in denial of how devastating the experiences were. Before I called it rape.
The point is: rape sometimes —and often— looks like something different from others who were in the SHOUT group, women who were stranger-raped at knife-point, or who were gang-raped while passed out unconscious at a college party.
Sometimes rape comes from an ex-boyfriend. A homecoming king. Your best friend.
All of it comes from a culture where people make light of sexual assault. Where a man is elected one month after being caught on a recording bragging about sexually assaulting people (and who has been also found guilty of rape). Where another man laughs along. Ha. Ha. Haaaaa.
Back to now, to October 2023
It’s not fun. My hands are shaking. My heart is in my throat.
It's in the past, I've dealt with it, I’ve grieved, I’ve healed, but it fucking fucking never really goes away.
The memories, the feelings - it’s like this thing that won’t leave, that is superglued to my being, that I can’t shake off for the life of me.
Believe me. I’ve tried.
It’s like it’s this thing that I am required to carry around that I don’t have a pocket for.
There’s nowhere good to stash it away.
And rape culture
As a person who has spent time educating folks, or attempting to, I guess I know that a lot of people didn’t, and still don't, realize how VIOLENT Trump's “grab ‘em” words were. I guess. And Billy Bush … just laughed.
That's what rape culture is. Exactly that. To laugh, or disbelieve, or make excuses. To brush it off … to have a pocket for it, where it gets safely tucked away.
It’s part of a big ugly Patriarchal White Supremacist fishing vest — with tons of huge pockets to hide away all this violence and trauma.
And it kills me that survivors still have to write articles about it, pour our guts out, talk about how much it still hurts and why it is so unacceptable.
So. Yeah.
For now... I go be a mom, and a wife, and a friend, and a daughter, and a writer, and I try, again, to put this behind me.
To find a pocket for it.
XOXO
I thank you for enduring the pain you’re carrying in order to shine one more light on this pervasive, horribly ubiquitous social construct.
Thank you for writing this. As a rape survivor (and the grand-daughter of a rape survivor, and the daughter of a rape survivor, and the mother of a rape survivor -- four generations in one damn family), I too find Trump and Kavanaugh's elevation to positions of power in our society hard to bear, and I am grateful to all who speak out about this even when it is painful to do so. Respect.