Category Archives: real feminism

Justice is Love’s Surname

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Survivors get to decide what they do with their story.

My daughter reminds me of this when I complain about a particular rape narrator who seems to be exonerating people who actively refused to value her need to be heard over points in a game.

What I would tell if she answered my email is:

  • Describing your rape in sexually explicit details obscures the message that rape is always about anger and power and objectifying the victim. Do not give potential felons a script for how to commit a crime.
  • Why exonerate anyone who has now or in the past facilitated rape culture? Anyone who actively compensated for rapists needs to be called out and fired, not hugged and beatified–no matter how many teams he or she has taken on to victory.
  • What happened to you has and will happen to a lot of other people–male, female, gender non-binary, old, young, non-consenting. Don’t sell all of them out by sanitizing or excusing deeply broken human systems.
  • Don’t unwittingly hand potential perpetrators a script for rape. Whether or not you realize it, when you tell a story where no one has enforced negative criminal or civil consequences for raping you, you are not changing rape culture.
  • No victim of rape should walk down the road you have. Every person deserves incisive rules for sexual safety. We need to change those rules.
  • Most victims chose or are pressured into silence. They should not have to fear the stigma of being a crime victim who speaks out..

…but they are, and as long as they are, your message is not enough, whether it is what you say or don’t say to a group of athletes, or what you tell the mother of a rape victim

By not answering her at all.

Writing about terrible things

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I have known for some time that using the clipped, incisive, deliberate forms associated with poetry was one way to write about the devastation caused by my adopted son.

I started writing the poetry publicly when the prose seemed too difficult for people.

You could call this the “it’s too awful” syndrome, or you could call it the complicity principle. People either do not want to face the devastation and intimacy of sexual assault or they have their own story and do not really want to scrutinize how their story was handled. Notice the passive tense–change the passive tense–how they handled their story.

We have debilitating and unwarranted stigmata which we apply to the victims of sexual assault in a highly prejudicial and unscientific fashion.

All cases of sexual assault are woefully underreported, yet we claim to understand rape victims.

You cannot have a principled, scientific understanding of a condition if you force the sufferers of the condition into silence.

Nor can you ever separate the “symptoms” of victimhood out from the original crime or the subsequent, devastating consequences of enforced silence.

Every victim of a crime deserves relief, but in rape, the victim often faces subsequent harm.

They are told to be quiet or they will be marginalized.

That marginalization never stops. It can happen any time a victim shares their story.

I know because I just watched it happen again, and again, and again when my daughter wrote her college entrance essay on her rape story.

Fast

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He moves up the wall quickly, ascending over three thousand vertical feet in a little over 3 hours. We all marvel at him, as well we should, that kind of hubris and fearlessness is an altar to the human spirit

Who fails to see the God who held him there

All along

I go back to Alex’s choosing the rocks over the ladies

As I count days and hours and minutes and seconds

A slow hunger crawl

All fat girl dependence not on

Finger strength and will power but the dorsal strength of a lullaby–

Little ones to him belong, they are weak when he is strong

Shout their voicelessness

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Children are notoriously voiceless, which is why Lindy West’s crusade to “shout your abortion” is so very tone deaf.

In this country and in many countries all over the world, women of childbearing age may have the right to kill their own small daughters and sons, but once that procedure has resulted in the death of a child, it no longer belongs to the mother to shout.

Mother–see how ironic that sounds.

We have to shout for…

…the voiceless girls

Who have lost their lives, their right to shout

For daughters

For sons

Forever missing

Their voices.

But I am not a vegetarian!

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We have all been in the grips of a winter cold. This morning one of my younger kids slept-talked a single line–but I am not a vegetarian!!!

I don’t know the context, but the sentence itself was lovely in its exposition.

Often our lives are defined by others based on labels. The vegetarian label seems pretty harmless unless he was dream-offered a nut-apple-squash loaf or was inhabiting some sort of carnivore-topia.

In the world we are awake in we navigate through real perils when we reveal who we really are. Revealing we are a certain shade of skin or religion or sexual identification can cause people to see us differently–for good or ill.

Revealing our status as crime victims can do the same. I might not have thought so years ago, before I knew or started telling our family story, but now that I have, I can attest: it does.

Years ago I remember talking to my children’s counselor and she used the term “damaged good.” As in, “you wouldn’t want people to see your kids as damaged goods.”

Terrible to think she was right. We absolutely could have buried the story of what happened to us. We did not, and we are a healthy, happy, fairly isolated group of people now. Telling the story has categorized us as “high-risk” and the syndrome of isolation and silence has been almost categorical.

A small, small, lovely group of people have stuck around, bless them.

I used to believe that sexual assault victims should absolutely tell someone. I still believe that, but I would tell them not to expect much from those you tell.

I would tell them keep talking until you are safe.

I would tell them you are not alone.

The Women in the Story

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Matthew 1:3,5-6 NIV

[3] Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar, Perez the father of Hezron, Hezron the father of Ram, [5] Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse, [6] and Jesse the father of King David. David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife,

It can be tempting to ask why all their names are not there.

It can be tempting to ask why Uriah never got a son, or why Judah was such a freaking loser but still got to be on the list.

But they are there–the prostitutes, the good girls, the chronically misunderstood. Most of them anyway, because the God of Sarah, Leah, and Mary told the Israelites keep all the babies, they all matter to Me.