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TheModestBloggist

~ The opposite of a regret, is a story.

TheModestBloggist

Category Archives: Confessions of a Buried Survivor

New Patreon Account To Help Me Activist

20 Saturday Jan 2018

Posted by shieldingc in Confessions of a Buried Survivor, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=9380599

#ImasurvivorAnd I want representation on TV. Show me male survivors who do better things than serial-killing. Show me female survivors whose function is not martyrdom.

#ImasurvivorAnd I want to know for sure that when I try to have my adoption records unsealed the judge will consider just wanting to know who raped me is a valid health concern.

#ImasurvivorAnd I’d like to throw a party for survivors, because why shouldn’t we get to meet each other under happy circumstances?

Survivors of rape and sexual assault need and deserve our own political movement.  The only time people talk in public about sex-crime, the discussion revolves around rapists and how we ought to treat them.  But we survivors are a huge and diverse community, with needs that non-survivors have never considered. I present #ImasurvivorAnd to help us find each other, and our collective political voice.  Join me in leading the conversation around the issues that affect us.  I want to know what your political priorities are as a survivor, and how we can work in solidarity to accomplish every last one.

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=9380599

Donate $1 to my new Patreon account, and every month I’ll tweet a 280-character story about you (in the genre of you choice).  Donate $5, and I’ll sneak your name or chosen code-phrase into the first piece I publish every month.  When I have $100 of monthly donations total, I’ll throw a party for survivors to celebrate our community!

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=9380599

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Black Mirror Hates Rape Survivors

05 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by shieldingc in Confessions of a Buried Survivor, Uncategorized

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#ImasurvivorAnd, #metoo, Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker, Daily Telegraph, feminism, Help me, Intersectional feminism, Micahel Hogan, Michael Callow, movement, National Anthem, Pig, Rape, rape culture, Rory Kinnear, Sexual assault, Survivor, Survivors

That Black Mirror continues to be a popular program after the first horrendous episode is proof that survivors of sexual violence need more than the general aegis of feminism for our protection.  We need and we deserve a movement specially geared toward our interests as a community.  Non-survivors don’t know how to recognize threats against us and are not prepared in any way to address those threats.  We do, and we are, if we had a platform to preach it.

Charlie Brooker’s science fiction anthology show is supposed to examine dystopian manifestations of current trends in technology and culture.  It’s also, according to Wikipedia, “inspired by older anthology shows like The Twilight Zone, which were able to deal with controversial, contemporary topics without fear of censorship.”

So says anonymous on the internet, who, like Michael Hogan of the Daily Telegraph, comfortably hails the first episode as “a shocking but ballsy, blackly comic study of the modern media.”  But really, shut up, because I saw that first episode, too, and what I saw was a giddy self-congratulation on Brooker’s infinite power as expressed by his ability to make you watch a man’s sexual violation.

It features a fictitious British Prime Minister (Michael Callow, played by Rory Kinnear), who is tricked into believing a beloved princess will be killed by a terrorist unless he has sex with a pig live on national television.  He goes through with it, and everyone tunes in, their delirious giggles at local pubs slowly turning into mutters of “poor bastard” as he sobs his way to tortured orgasm.

It turns out the princess was never in danger of being killed.  She’d been kidnapped by an oh-so-edgy, oh-so-brilliant artist who quietly released her right before the pig-fucking, and who gracefully killed himself to avoid any discussion of just what crimes, by name, occurred.

A news analyst in the show recapped the incident one year later, tacking the following moral onto the story: the incident was definitely art.  The artist had successfully engaged a bigger audience than any artist before him.  And everyone engaged in what was clearly a public performance, whether they wanted to or not.

But did you see what Charlie Brooker did there, friends?  He got meta.  It’s not a fictitious audience fictitiously engaged in a character’s coerced sex-act.  It’s you and it’s me who were tricked into watching the full episode.  We thought there would be a point.  It’s implied when you begin a story that you’re going to get to a point eventually, and we trusted that there had to be a point, and we watched and kept watching even when we were made to feel uncomfortable, and it turns out that there was no point – just art.

Some of us, though, watched with more than vague discomfort.  Some of us, where others saw weird, bold, artistry, could see the plain old rape.  And where you were hearing white-noise, we were hearing dog-whistles.  Brooker’s boast is old as time: look what I can do.  But when you are a survivor, it doesn’t matter that Michael Callow is male and white and rich and even a world-leader; he is who you are.  The message for us was look what I can do – to YOU.

When we were sick to our stomachs and shrugged it off (because dammit what’s the point of this?  we have to figure it out), Brooker’s gloried Statement – that he did it because he could, because no one could stop him – came as a reminder, not as a revelation.  We already knew that we are powerless in the face of rape.  We already knew that you could make us watch, over and over, for no reason if you wanted to.  We might not have known (but thanks for the memo) that people like you can dream of power in terms of raping prime ministers live on TV, and all of society will say that it’s fine and good work on keeping things wonky.

We need a survivor movement: #ImasurvivorAnd I need you to see what I see.

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Hey Survivors – Let’s Form a Faction.

07 Thursday Dec 2017

Posted by shieldingc in Confessions of a Buried Survivor

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#ImasurvivorAnd, #metoo, #TrumpSexualPredator, 14, 16 women, 32, abuser, abusers, accusation, accused, accuser, ACORN, Al Franken, Alabama, allegation, allegations, alleged, allies, ally, attack, Black Lives Matter, BLM, buried, Chris Hansen, codeword, coding, community, David Hall, Democratic, dog-whistle, dogwhistle, Donald Trump, due process, evidence, fact, faction, facts, feminism, Feminist, find each other, Franken, gaslighting, Girl, harassed, harassment, help, Ijeoma Oluo, Intersectional feminism, James O'Keefe, journalism, justice, Leeann Tweeden, legal, legal departments, liberal, Los Angeles radio anchor, Mel Gibson, movement, news, NPR, O'Keefe, picture, Planned Parenthood, Political, politicizing tragedy, Politics, Privilege, programming, Project Veritas, proof, R. Kelly, Rape, rape culture, reckoning, restorative justice, Roy Moore, safety, scandal, Sexual assault, supposedly, Survivor, survivor-lead, Survivors, survivors leading, teenage, The Establishment, the reckoning, trauma, Traumatized, Trump, Tweeden, tweet, Twitter, USA Today, video, Washington Post, white supremacists

Hey survivor – pay attention.  We are under attack.

I know right now you think it’s not that big a deal.  You probably think, like I did once, that you can shrug it off forever.  But you’re wrong.  We all have our limits, and I don’t want you waiting around to find out what they are.  Believe me when I say that you could die.

It wouldn’t be an accident.  It’s what the world expects.  In movies, news, and whispering gossip, we learn that survivors don’t exist – but victims do.  Suicides, and drug addictions.  Jail, and mental wards against our will.  Death row just for men – what petition of mercy for a killer did you ever hear (designated terrorists excepted) that didn’t include every gritty detail of his molested childhood?

They are waiting for us to die, and we know it.  For as long as you’ve been a survivor, this is a weight you have carried.  Remembering, privately, words like “except,” and “anyway.”  Living for us means defying, and thriving is beating the odds.

Think about what they make us go through – the polite society of normies all around us, with their shocked panic whenever one of us announces being in the room.  Think about the weight of fitting in, pretending we aren’t who we are just to make them feel at ease.

We lack the privilege of community.  We have no automatic allies and we’re randomly distributed.  But it is hard to find each other, because we lack the privilege of even group identity.  We don’t dare throw parades to celebrate being alive; our joy can and will be used against us, even in the court of law. Can’t be that traumatized if you went to a party.

And because we’re not a group, and because we’re not in the open, we don’t get to lead on any issues that affect us.  The burden of doubt (thanks, society) keeps us so busy defending and proving and playing the part we think will be accepted that taking political command is practically taboo.  Can’t be that traumatized if you’re able to talk about politics.

And we are under attack.  We’ve always been under attack – we’re used to it.  But suddenly, right now, it feels like we’re getting somewhere.  If we don’t join together and learn how to defend ourselves, as a group, #metoo will fade into thin air, like so many other reckonings.  We all know there’s nothing this world of normies would rather see than for us to get buried again.

Think about the ways they’re trying to shut us down.  Think about Project Veritas.

This is a think-tank founded by James O’Keefe.  Donald Trump is among its many funders.  The latest project it pursued was named, “To Catch a Journalist” – as an apparent diametric to Chris Hansen’s Dateline NBC program, “To Catch a Predator.”  Hansen’s show had investigators catfishing child-molesters to help police arrest them before real children could be harmed.  O’Keefe’s project was instead supposed to catfish investigators so as to discredit molested children and help a child-molester win a Senate race.

Project Veritas accordingly sent a woman to the Washington Post with a made-up story about having been raped by Roy Moore, impregnated as a teenager, and forced to have an abortion.  It didn’t work, of course; the paper followed the woman back to Project Veritas headquarters and wrote about the failed attack on journalism.  So, great.  One attack against us didn’t succeed.  But, my people, think about – just think about – the depth of the ever-present media attack against survivors.

O’Keefe was able to fool NPR.  He fooled ACORN.  He fooled Planned Parenthood.  He didn’t fail in fooling the Washington Post because they’re better detectives.  He failed because this time the story he was trying to sell was rape – and that’s a story nobody wants to buy.

Anyone who thinks doubt is a rational response to a news story relating to rape just has no idea what the world is like for survivors.  Even O’Keefe, who made a conscious decision to lead a smear campaign against us, was not able to prepare for that denial – and he controls a billionaire-funded think-tank.

Every time we get the slightest bit of traction toward a preferential option, the powers invested in rape culture pivot hard to take us down.  They’re not even subtle about it.

In a series of tweets dated November 29th, editor-at-large Ijeoma Oluo of The Establishment described an email exchange, followed by phone call, from USA Today.  They wanted her to write “the opposing view” to a piece that would argue that, though it’s good victims of sexual abuse are now coming forward, due process must still occur.

Oluo responded that, um, she also believes in due process – but she could write a response: “I’ll happily write about how their priorities are skewed and that the due process that’s missing is the due process for the women coming forward.”  She continued that, “if anything, these stories of years of abuse are testament to men getting more than due process.  And maybe instead of immediately trying to recenter the concerns of men because, like, 5 white dudes got fired, we should wonder about the countless women whose careers never even got off the ground because when they were harassed, there was NO process, let alone due process.”

After a few minutes’ conference with editors, the low-level representative from USA Today again called Oluo, explaining that they wanted her response to focus on how she just doesn’t believe in due process and is fine with a few innocent men losing their jobs to expedite the reckoning.

Oluo refused.  Her November 30th article describes the same incident, and the thoughts that ran through her mind after the call had ended.

“Did this really just happen? Was I seriously just asked by the third-largest paper in the nation to write their ‘feminazi’ narrative to counter their ‘reasoned and compassionate’ editorial? Was I just asked to be one of the excuses for why this whole ‘me too’ moment needed to be shut down?”

Oluo asks us, in the end, to consider how often we are suckered into supporting this kind of narrative.

If we count the ways that journalism works against survivors, we find ourselves in the thick of a pervasive gaslighting campaign.  No one bats an eye when we come across a sentence like, “Los Angeles radio anchor Leeann Tweeden made allegations that Al Franken groped her as she slept.”  Allegations made by Tweeden are referenced on internet, TV, and printed press as the subtitle or introduction to the picture in which we clearly see Al Franken groping her.

Similarly, one teenaged girl among several made allegations that R. Kelly raped her.  Allegations – despite there being a widely-viewed and mocked video of it happening.  Things that we see with our own eyes are generally called facts, not allegations.  As the news, you should know the difference.

And yes, I’m aware that publications have legal departments requiring the insert of such disclaimers.  That’s my exact complaint: this isn’t accidental.  How have we allowed judges who rule in favor of rapists who sue, lawyers who believe certain truths are impossible to defend, and papers that fear telling hard facts about abusers, but think nothing of telling us, impulsively, over and over, that survivors could be lying – even when we can’t be?

The word that other groups of people might use for these events is “defamation.”  We survivors are, publicly, constantly, and by conscious decision disparaged.  “Allegation,” “accusation,”
“supposedly,” “accuser” – these have become codewords.  Some are hardly used outside the context of sexual abuse, and never replaced within it. Articles don’t introduce survivors as “plaintiffs,” “indicters,” or “statement-givers.”  We don’t read about “reports,” “cases,” or “accounts” of sex abuse, nor reference to “facts in question” or “disputed testimony.”  It is important, in the news, to signify that special kind of justice that only has to do with rape.

The coding is more than just widespread – it’s active programming.  In response to Roy Moore’s abuse of a teenage girl, David Hall, chair of  the Alabama Marion County GOP, offered: “It was 40 years ago. I really don’t see the relevance of it. He was 32. She was supposedly 14. She’s not saying that anything happened other than they kissed.”

The injection of doubt here has to be kneejerk; Hall’s usage of the word “supposedly” serves no legal or rational purpose.  He literally isn’t saying that he doubts the woman’s story, and in fact by his downplaying the severity of sexual abuse in the next line we’re given to understand that he has no problem with believing she was kissed.  What the adverb tells us literally is that Hall doesn’t believe in  her – the survivor – as a living human being.

Supposedly she was fourteen when Moore was 32.  How can we really know?  What makes us so sure she moves through time at the typical rate, or that she’s existed alongside other people who counted her years as she grew?  She could be any sort of creature, who cares what Moore did.

Hall’s efforts to mythologize are unconscious, and are unconsciously accepted by a society that has forever been subject to systemic gaslighting.  We are trained, all of us, to doubt survivors claiming to be ordinary, while at the same time to believe survivors capable of impossible monstrosity.  I have seen better people than Hall reflect the training.

Immediately after 2016’s election, I took to facebook, posting furious screeds against the president-elect and the people who handed him power.  I came closer to some of my friends, who shared my anger, and blocked many others, who didn’t.  One acquaintance who became a closer friend asked permission to copy-paste some of my messages (my security settings compromised the “share” feature).  I said yes, and saw many of my messages re-posted on her wall.  But once, I noticed a very long post had been edited.  The change was subtle – just one word.  Instead of a “KKK-endorsed child-rapist,” the message now called Trump a “KKK-endorsed accused child-rapist.”

Though she’d credited me by name as the author of the message, and used quotation marks at the beginning and end to make clear that they weren’t her words, my friend included no note on the edited portion.  I did a double-take; I had to revisit my original message to check if I had actually used that word.  I hadn’t.

I don’t think the revision was a conscious enough decision on her part to consider asking my permission or explaining to her audience that there had been an edit.  But it was a change she went out of her way to make – on her own, no legal departments forcing her.  This is the self-replicating power of steady programming against us.  My sensible, smart-mouthed friend thinks the word “rapist” so dangerous that it can, if written once over the internet with no disclaimer, do more damage to the President of the United States of America than she would wish on her very worst enemy (who is, at this moment, the President of the United States of America).

It’s no wonder that we aren’t a faction.  In poisonous moments, we have been told that the most dangerous thing in the world is for us to open our mouths.  Now everywhere we go that message plays on repeat.

The irony is that, when it comes to sex-crime, survivors are the only group with a vested interest in justice.  People act like we’re out here trying to kill you.  We are the ones who can save you.

In a world where survivors’ voices lead our responses to sex abuse, I predict a great emphasis on restorative justice.  This is because, from experience, we are the only ones who seem to realize how normal is a rapist and how overlooked each survivor.  We’ll figure out quicker than the rest  that the sheer scale of rape makes any other kind of justice logistically impossible.

Justice to a survivor also has to be restorative, because the special stigma that sex crimes carry for us becomes a toxic obstacle to healing.  We need to be supported and believed.  And we’ve seen time and time again that unless our abusers stand up in public and admit what they’ve done, no amount of evidence will be enough to make most folks believe us.  We don’t have the luxury of prioritizing retribution.  Our survival requires that we center concerns on our own immediate safety and the safety of our communities.  We want to know that these crimes won’t keep happening, to us or to anyone else.

Can you, who are not survivors, decide for us under what conditions we might begin to feel safe?  If not, then I suggest you stop doing what you do in trying to defend us: stop controlling what we say.

It is notable, and not surprising, that #metoo became a big movement at the urging of non-survivors.  I mean, I don’t know what your twitter feed looked like when it first took off, but I remember so many tweets asking us to come out of the closet, now, as a demonstration of the scale of sexual abuse – written by people who identified being unable to do so themselves, due to their lack of personal victimhood.

I’m not saying allies don’t have a place in our movement.  What enabled us to come out en masse was the sudden societal permission, after all.  Guilty as survivors always are about everything, it made sense to speak out when it was for a good cause – not just us being selfish thrusting our nasty problems in other peoples’ faces.  But I couldn’t participate.  Just weeks before I’d written out a full disclosure on my blog, and I wasn’t yet in a place emotionally where I could brave another outcry.

This is not something many allies seem to understand; wanting to be believed does not mean our stories should be available on-demand, much less for the satisfaction of those who need to be showered with personal proofs of statistics we told them already.  And this is not the point of our movement – it’s not our job to save the normies from their own programming they haven’t done work to dismantle.

For a non-survivor who has nothing to add to our conversation, the right thing to do is stop talking.  Those willing to do the harder job of being our allies can use their own stories instead of demanding our proof.  We’ve all seen sexual abuse, harassment and gaslighting.  Assault has occurred at awards shows, on gameshows, and improvised moments during mainstream comedies, without much or any an uproar.  Did you even see it, normies?  Did you, and did you know that it was wrong, and yet say nothing, to keep things nice and polite?

That is the proof you were asking for.  Use that in our defense.  And good, if it’s hard for you to share it.  Learn from that shame what it’s like to be in our shoes.  Learn the feeling of being powerless and out-of-place, and bring that up next time you hear someone suggest there are people crying rape for attention.  Nothing about you is so much bigger and more dignified that you would have reason to fear speaking up where we would be spared embarrassment.

It’s telling, and typical, the form of #metoo.  Across the internet, survivors were given the job of divulging raw, personal data.  And institutions were given the job of deciding what to do with it.  In the void between us – scattered, providing survivors on the one hand, and on the other hand the looming keeps of power – our allies have been stepping.  Directing political winds, proclaiming on our behalf what they want our movement saying.

It’s a problem.

I didn’t think so at first.  It excited me to read in tweets, “Let’s get #TrumpSexualPredator trending!”  “16 women accusing Trump of misconduct deserve justice!”  I thought, finally.  They’re getting it.  Days passed, and I noticed people saying, on mentions of Roy Moore and other predators, “Don’t forget, this is also true of the President!”

Yup, I thought.  Don’t forget.  Within a week, the hot take had become, “Every liberal celebrity accused has already lost his job, and Al Franken’s under investigation.  When are we going to see Trump held responsible?”

Suddenly, I could see the conversation shifting.  In the hands of well-meaning non-survivors, we’re steering away from the topics we started with.  We’re sidestepping rape culture and systemic abuse to paint our targets on the biggest bad apple.

Do the normies realize, do you think, that a rich-and-famous man without a job can still assault people?  Do they understand that we have more work to do in each of the cases they labeled “dealt with” – that the institutions allowing those with power to abuse for all these decades must not be labeled “better” because the faces of scandal are gone?  Have they wondered whether these abusers will return, quietly, gradually, after six years, in the slithering way of Mel Gibson?

Today, with eight survivors having come forward against Al Franken, and Democratic Senators suggesting Franken should resign, I am on Twitter reading: “Franken shouldn’t step down until Moore and Trump resign.”

These people are not our allies.

If I thought there was a chance in hell that non-survivors appropriating our momentum could actually bring Trump down, I’d keep my mouth shut.  But, being a survivor, I know this tactic is the very least likely to work.  It was tried and failed in advance of Trump’s election.  Exactly nothing is different.  We’re watching it fail again as we speak in Alabama.  Using survivors to shame a sex-offender out of office is just the kind of bright idea that only occurs to the normies who, due to movies, attribute to the rape-whistle mythical magical torch-wielding-mob-summoning powers that seriously don’t exist.  I’m telling you.  Sexual abuse is institutionally protected.  You can’t take down the abuser in a seat of power without challenging the institution.

Survivors need to start leading.  We can’t depend on allies to speak for us; we are a huge and diverse community.  We have more to accomplish together than non-survivors have ever considered.  To help with finding political allies in each other, I propose a new hashtag: #ImasurvivorAnd.  Because declaring our existence is only the beginning of our movement.  We are the ones who should get to decide what comes of it.

Try it out:

#ImasurvivorAnd I don’t know who raped me because I don’t have legal access to my records of time in state custody.

#ImasurvivorAnd I want to know the names of some famous male survivors who did better things than serial-killing.

#ImasurvivorAnd I want the Catholic Church to recognize marital rape.

If you can’t start a sentence that way, you need to take a backseat to those of who can.  If you can start a sentence that way but don’t want to because your circumstances keep you in the closet, we can still ensure your political inclusion with a movement designed to identify the politically active among us.  The conversations that occur in private will inform the causes we pursue as a faction.

Victimization is a spectrum.  So too, we should expect a spectrum of identity in a survivor-lead movement.  It is for each of us to decide how closely we identify as survivors and how deeply invested we are in what happens to us as a group.  The most inclusive data reports that one in three women and one in six men have at some point in their lives been assaulted sexually, and I’d bet my life real numbers are higher.  Non-physical forms of sexual abuse involve even greater numbers.

As with any invisible identity, there are no external qualifications to determine who is one of us.  A survivor movement is bound to promote consent culture over patriarchy and the rape culture that springs from it.  Structural sexism enables rape.  It doesn’t follow that an insignificant number of men and non-binaries are survivors, or that women are excluded from the pool of rapists.  Language that is inclusive of all genders is important, because all survivors are important.

For those who felt inclined to shout down men using #metoo, I recommend taking Black Lives Matter for a model.  Though white supremacists still point at white people shot by cops as evidence that there’s no such thing as racism, BLM has no problem going to bat for white victims of police brutality.  No one’s forgotten for a second that this is an anti-racism effort.  If supporting male survivors undermines some element of our movement, we need to make our movement better.  We will only work as a faction if we work as a community that supports and hears each other.

We need to stand strong against derailers and doubters who try, time and time again, to control the narrative around us.  We need to feel within our rights to tell our tone-deaf allies to back it up and stay in their own lanes.  Right now, the ball’s in our court.  Let’s never give it back.

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Allegations ARE Coming Out Now Because of Politics

13 Monday Nov 2017

Posted by shieldingc in Confessions of a Buried Survivor, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Bill Clinton, Blue, Child-Molester, consent, feminism, Hollywood, Inter-sectional Feminism, Molester, Moore, No Moore, Politics, Rape, Resist, Roy Moore, Sexual assault, Trump, Weinstein

I get pissed when I read threads on twitter patiently explaining why survivors take decades to tell our stories.  I get pissed because, as true as it is may be that fear and trauma and societal pressure can keep survivors from speaking, there is a greater pressure no one wants to mention.  It’s the pressure that keeps you from listening.

The first time a survivor’s tale goes viral is never the first time it was told.  It’s only the first time someone who couldn’t be dismissed heard the story and decided to do something with it.

It’s a one-in-a-million story that everybody cares about; a lottery of supply-and-demand.  Politics are currents, happening everywhere, always.  They are at work when a 14-year-old girl gets molested and her friends tell her she’s making a big deal out of nothing.  There are politics in the small town mothers and fathers and pastors who gaslight and downplay, and in the journalist who, in the right place at the right time, will hear that resonating rumor and decide to follow up.

If it takes tens years for a political tide to swell in the right direction and make the stories finally go somewhere, it can’t fall on survivors to explain why.  It falls on us, on all of us, to ask why, suddenly, we heard.

It is true that Roy Moore’s child-molestation only matters to most of you because of this election.  I know that for a fact because most of you aren’t calling for criminal charges.  “If Moore is guilty, Moore should step aside as Senate candidate,” is the faux-heroic stance of admired liberal after liberal politician.  Thanks so much, farmer-with-a-shotgun, for suggesting the fox kick himself out of the henhouse, but it ain’t gonna happen.  When the best you can do with your power is to suggest a child-molester remove himself from your line of vision, you’re not protecting or supporting survivors.  You’re using the waves created under them to forward your career.

Trump is a rapist and he should be in jail.  So the fuck is Bill Clinton.  And I refuse to believe that saying this will work against the movements seeking to expand healthcare or put a halt to Nazism.  The political tides that brought Hollywood-hating republicans and feminism-studying liberals together as two ears, hearing buried stories, have given me reason to hope.  That, in this perfect storm, we have made room for reckoning.

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Help Me Talk About Rape

11 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by shieldingc in Biography, Confessions of a Buried Survivor, Opinion, Stories Women Never Tell

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

advocate, Buried Survivor, culture, false accusation, false rape allegation, game, guilt, liar, opinion, Rape, rape culture, satire, Sexual assault, shame, Shielding, Shielding C, Shielding Cournoyer, Silence, stigma, Survivor, Survivors

Awhile ago, I invented a really fun game.  This is how you play: Within thirty minutes of reading these words, you have to walk up to a total stranger, and tell them, “I was raped.”

You get 50 points if you can do it, and it doesn’t count if you say afterward that you were joking or this was all a test.  25 points if you can only do it using an intermediary device like a letter or the internet.  100 points if you say it directly to a loved one.  Points accumulate every time you play.  Tell 10 loved ones, you get a thousand points.  If you can’t do it at all at all not even once and anonymously and over the internet, you get to shut the hell up forever about girls who cry rape for attention.

I’ve played every day for decades.  Most of the time, I lose.

I know what you’re thinking, normie.  You’re thinking, “But Shielding.  You really WERE raped.  This gives you a natural advantage.”

I know that’s what you were thinking.  Don’t even try to lie.

It’s fine.  I get it.  Because you’ve never had to play this game before, you think of shame as something accidental.  You’ve heard that people who were raped feel great disgrace, and you figure it’s some glitch in our thinking – that once we’re informed that it wasn’t our fault and that there’s no reason to blame ourselves, the logical spigot from whence the shame descends will dutifully turn itself off.

You think that if you were to lie about rape, it would be just your own good conscience making you feel terrible.  You haven’t admitted to yourself that the prospect of playing my game scares you for other reasons.

Do me a solid.  Focus on what’s happening in your mind when you picture yourself saying those words to someone who really loves you.  What images make you afraid?  Are they all just you, sitting there judging yourself in private?  No, they’re not.  Don’t lie.  You’re imagining how people would stare at you.  You’re imagining seeing in their faces all their concern for you, their pain for you, their love for you.  You’re imagining feeling embarrassed at that concern, guilty for that pain, undeserving of that love.  Aren’t you?

There’s more, though.  Isn’t there.  There are the people who don’t love you, and there are people you love who you still don’t entirely trust.  Imagine telling one of them, and in their concern, you’ll see judgment – their gears shifting, reassessing before your eyes what kind of person you are.  Over their pain, you’ll see disgust.  They really didn’t want to think about that kind of thing today.  In their love, you’ll see pity.  They’ll never forget you are weaker, messier, lesser than you were.

And there’s the knowledge that you carried with you into this experiment, that it’s impossible to back your story up.  You’re stuck on the images of that one day when those loved ones are going to look at you, while you stand there stuttering and trying to explain, and their faces will lose their love and their concern.  You will be seeing shock, betrayal, outrage.  You will lose your people.

This, too, is shame.  Sit with that feeling awhile for me.  Make yourself familiar.  I want you to recognize it when it comes to you again.  I’ve seen it touch you before, when you didn’t know what it was.  When no one asked you to think about it.  I’ve seen you at the table, when I’m telling my story, clam up and look away.  You thought you were making yourself invisible.  You thought it would be bad if the eyes of anyone else in that room, full as they were of concern, and pain, and love, and judgment, and disgust, and pity, and shock, and outrage, and betrayal were to land on you by accident.  You didn’t realize that you weren’t the only one looking away.

I’ve seen you feel ashamed across the internet.  I put my story there:

https://amodestbloggist.com/2017/09/08/confessions-of-a-buried-survivor/

My blog recorded a thousand hits for that piece after it went live.  On Facebook, where I shared the link in feminist groups and on my own page, there were loves, and likes, and shares.  There were comments.  Almost all of them had one big thing in common, though: they came from other survivors.  I know this because they told me so, putting their names right there next to mine.

They are all people who already play my game.

The people like you, who never had to, clammed up and looked away.  You were afraid that a like, let alone a share or a love, would make people look at you funny.  You didn’t understand that the people like me who shared, who loved, who commented, were every bit as scared.  You didn’t see me squeezing my head with both arms on the couch the second after I published.  You can’t see me now, as I write these words, hunched over my kitchen table with my hands going up again and again to press against my mouth.

It took me thirty years to work up to my confession.

I once pitched an article on rape culture to Cracked.com.  Not a great topic match, you might think, for a site that’s known for comedy.  But neither is “5 things I learned as a sex slave in modern America” –  and here’s that article, existing:

http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-1440-5-things-i-learned-as-sex-slave-in-modern-america.html

I kept my pitch impersonal, and focused on six pieces of important, little-known information – such as the fact that pedophiles can be treated with sex-specific therapy:

https://www.childmolestationprevention.org/pages/prevention_plan.html

I edited and edited again in response to feedback I received by Cracked writers but was ultimately told that Cracked would not publish a piece about rape culture.  I pointed out that they’d recently published a piece about sex slavery.  It was then explained to me that this piece was different because it was actually written by a staff member.  That’s why it didn’t matter that the woman he interviewed remained anonymous.

Cracked knew who the source was, then.  Cracked did not know anything about me or my ability to write well about rape culture.  I wrote about me, ultimately, because I believed people would listen to my important messages if they knew who I was.  Messages like, “Pedophilia can be treated before children are molested.”

When I discovered the Institute for the Prevention of Child Molestation and its Action Plan based on a solid study of 16,000 people, you have to understand, I did what the plan prescribed.  I told people about it.  I used my social media, linking the study in my status.  I held my breath, and posted.  There was no response, so a few days later, I posted it again, and again after that.  I finally made a status yelling at the internet for ignoring me.  That time I had some bites – two or three friends reposted.

A fellow survivor messaged me privately to explain why he wasn’t able to share it.  He didn’t want people looking at him like they were starting to look at me.

It’s harder for male survivors.  I don’t deny it.  People always associate male survivors with child abusers, so they have to worry about people looking at them like that.  But the stigma is also worse, because rape is something that’s only supposed to happen to women – so coming out as a survivor means a reduction in male privilege.  I guess it’s the same for male normies.

But seriously.  Children can be saved by you swallowing your fears and reposting.

What I have witnessed again and again is that normies and closeted survivors are weighing the lives and souls of others against your fears of being weird.  You have decided reliably that having people look at you the way they look at me is way too great a sacrifice.

You don’t know that I wrote my story long before I published it yesterday.  That I pitched it first to magazines like XO Jane, where I read a piece (http://www.xojane.com/issues/why-i-talk-about-rape) by Emily entitled “Why I Talk About Rape.”  You don’t know that I wrote a dozen versions of different lengths and that I sent my pitch a few times to a several different publications when I received no response.  That I knew I could write it well, that I knew it was a story worth telling, but maybe I was crazy and after all my message wasn’t that important.

But when I went ahead and published on my blog, the comments that I did receive were not just subtle praise.

“Make this post public,” I was told.  “More people need to see it.”

I did it.  Swallowing hard, I removed the people from my restricted lists who might just judge and pity and be disgusted.  There was no disgust or pity expressed by those people, of course.  Just silence.  My article didn’t catch and spread like I and others wanted.  I couldn’t pretend it was because of bad writing this time.

I remembered, today, that Emily’s piece had been preceded by an article that was a transcript of an hour-long conversation she had with one of her rapists.  She’d taped it and everything.  That made her story different.

I thought, when Cracked writers told me they didn’t know who I was and couldn’t trust me to write an article about rape culture, they meant that they weren’t familiar with my writing style.  I know better now.

My telling the world who I am will never be  enough to make you know me.  A taped confession with my rapists might do the job, but not me, on my own, talking.  You don’t dare risk believing in me.  What if I’m lying?  What if I’m wrong?  What if it’s not just me, all alone, but you and your beautiful magazines that help other people looking crazy and stupid and weird?

Doubt is our burden, like nobody else’s.  I said this once before.  Survivors are all alone.  When you normies try to make yourselves invisible while my people look to you for help, you have to realize we’re the ones who disappear.   You have no idea at all that in my desperation to be heard I stayed up all night a couple of times in a row tweeting my story at Twitter handles devoted to survivors, and feminism, and any celebrity I could find, big or small, who speaks on social issues.  No retweets, of course. At least one person blocked me.  I don’t know if maybe I was breaking some kind of Twitter etiquette.  When you’re buried you can’t tell if anyone can hear you.  You run out of options and start shouting in peoples’ faces.  Then at least you know who’s blocking who.

I’m asking you, normie, for some help.  Nobody’s going to believe in me unless somebody people might believe is willing to put his name right there next to mine. My name is Shielding Cournoyer, and I am a survivor.  Dig me up.

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Confessions of a Buried Survivor

08 Friday Sep 2017

Posted by shieldingc in Biography, Confessions of a Buried Survivor, Stories Women Never Tell

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

childhood trauma, Confession, Full Disclosure, outcry, Personal narrative, rape culture, Secrecy, Secret, Sexual assault, Survivor

My burial began the day that I was kidnapped.

I was two then.  Blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and categorically adorable.  If my parents were the home-owning sort, maybe I’d be news.  As it was, I had a schizophrenic father in jail on a dine-and-dash turned assault-on-a-cop.  I lived in a foster home.  My drug-addicted mother took me and disappeared, along with a six-month-old baby.  There may have been money involved.  Police found her well and alone, with nothing to say about any missing children.  While I was gone I traveled hours up a highway.  Strangers waited, in a place full of trees, and then screams.

I turned up alive on a relative’s doorstep.  Doctors stitched me up and The System took me back.  I stayed in the foster home that lost me for a few more years, until I was adopted.

My new parents were home-owners, good and normal.  They sent me to Catholic school and filled the living room with shining gifts at Christmas.  We didn’t talk about the things I’d seen.  They told me every night, voices singsong with repetition, there was nothing to be afraid of.

At six and eight and twelve years old, I learned to keep a mask on.  There were triggers in many ordinary things.  I knew a darkness lurked behind each good and normal, idle time.  It spoke with a griminess that clung to everything like gum.  And in a certainty that struck me, once in a while, like a physical blow – that there is no meaning, no escape, and no end to our existence.

I held it in, like all my obscene memories.  Nobody asked to know, so nobody learned.  I started writing before I could properly read – my poetry and homemade fairy-tales wrapping up the secrets at my core.  At the bottom of my every story, untold, there was a dollhouse in a foster home where I hid a plastic teacup.  I took it to the bathroom to gorge on toilet water when no one gave me anything to drink.

There were red nostril hairs quivering with rage overhead.  There was getting hit, just for fun – the salty, sharp smell of a crack to the nose.  Thrashing in a brimming bathtub, my breath left inches above me.  A toothbrush that scrubbed the skin off my gums before every trip to the dentist.  The closet, the car trunk, the pillow where my face pressed in, erasing my voice and my air.  I spoke of a monster that came at night, and remembered the smirk, cold and hating, on a teenaged foster brother.  There was growth-stunting hunger and lead in my blood.  There was crying, and trying to run.  There were broken-windowed warehouses that littered nasty dreams.  One day I watched the father who made me blowing on his hands in the cold – calling my name, and goodbye.  We used to have visits at Child Services.  My hand stayed on the window while the car I was in rolled away.

There was a girl, through all of this, who wasn’t like everyone else.  When they took her to the park, she ran for the road – the one that made her family disappear.  She changed the baby’s diapers but she peed her pants on purpose.  She was proud she’d found a way to make the foster mother angry.  She laughed out loud when they told her to use the word, “mama.”

Nobody loved her but me.  I smuggled her into my nice new house in pieces of memory.  I didn’t mind that she was messy.  I wouldn’t let her die.  She peeked through every mask I wore, pissing people off.  Coming on to everything too strong.  She did not need your help and she didn’t want to play.  She’d rather pick trash off the playground than waste any time with no cause.  She would smile every time she found out she was hated.  Being liked tells you nothing.  People being mean don’t hide who they are.

I had no word like survivor growing up.  It’s hard medicine, kept out of children’s hands.  It’s regulated, moderated, carefully consumed.  It took me years to track that label down.  In the meantime, I was crazy.  I was stupid.  I was weird.

The land called normal shimmered around me, bordered by the flowers in my garden, the architecture of my clean white house, the laundered clothes I wore.  Privileges like cloying honeypots tried to make me ignore the feelings of weakness creeping in.  I told myself not to be fooled.

At night I kept vigil, tearful and sweaty, inside a blanket cocoon.  There were things with no names and no witnesses more real to me than anything seen in the day.  I had nightmares of apocalypse and took it for a prophesy.  It made sense that one day food would shrivel up, the sky would burn, we’d all stomp off to war.  Nothing made sense about the years passing.

But there’s nothing to be afraid of.

Empty words can take up so much space.  I mulled over library shelves and shelves devoted to Sigmund Freud.  Psychology’s founder announced that child-molestation is the root cause of hysteria.  He took it back when people got mad.  Now his books claim that those kids weren’t lying about the rape, but they did kind of make it all up.  Venerated doctors ever after have preached that some kids who weren’t molested wish that they were, and daydream about it so hard they want to kill themselves.

In story after airbrushed story, we tell each other monsters live in only other worlds.  Hollywood villains launch their subtle rape-threats at leading ladies; I notice every time, and wait, with baited breath, to see if they’ll follow through.  They don’t.  In movie universes, heroism and sexual violence cannot co-exist.  The perfect girl, be she heroine or hero’s prize, mustn’t be sullied that way.

There are rare exceptions.  Red Eye and American History X feature survivors – real, and weak, and striving.  Drops in an ocean of damsels kept pure, and forcefully-courted dames who are stupidly never traumatized.  Men don’t get raped, unless it’s for a joke.  Survivors on screen turn out to be liars so often it’s not even good for a plot twist.  Lying she’s are the kind of monsters good folk have no trouble believing in.

When there is a rape on screen – official, exposed, and true-beyond doubt – the victim usually dies.  Otherwise it’s like in Gran Torino, where a badass Sue will stumble home with bloody thighs, and you can’t hear her voice for the rest of the film, and she doesn’t get a medal or a car, and they say no one’s going to jail since there was no witness to what she suffered through.

It’s all adding up to the message: Survivors Don’t Exist.

In the news, we hear of ‘alleged attacks,’ and ‘claims’ of assault.  Examinations will be made and any muddled details trumpeted as proof that we’re not real.  In private messages with friends, and flaming-angry public tweets, you’ll see the likes of Trump and Cosby called out as ‘accused’ and ‘probable’ brutalizers.  Disclaimers bracket every voice of protest.  Knee-jerk, and self-imposed.  Google a rape conviction: dollars to donuts you won’t find a rapist, but someone or other ‘found guilty of rape.’

Doubt is our burden, like nobody else’s.  Believe in one of us with no reservation, and it’s only a matter of time before they start calling you stupid and crazy and weird.

This can’t all be concern for the apocryphal Wrongly Accused.  Six attacks in a thousand are remembered by a day in jail.  Popular legend lies when it tells us that rape is never forgiven.  Senators are bluffing when they say sexual assault admitted on tape is a Very Big Deal.  People vote for who they want.  People hire who they require.  People love who they spend every day with.  No one’s coming to lock up all the rapists and throw away the keys; there are too fucking many.  They are normal, they are human.  We need them in our lives.

But I am a mythical creature.  My story is legend.  I don’t exist.  The rule for good and normal people seems to be: Bury the Survivors.  Before you start to believe in them.  Before you have to know the world of good and normal things can break.

I swallowed all my memories politely growing up, until they became an invisible background.  Never recognized, yet intimately part of me.  Then in high school, I had an epiphany of a suspicion, and started making lists.  I tallied up the nightmares, the feelings, the faces people made when they looked at me.  The deep dark, pressing sense of secret at my core.  The lack of virgin pain or blood, the broken memories.  Willing myself to breach some indestructible conclusion.  I never felt more crazy than the days when I was almost, almost sure.  I wanted to speak about my troubles, but dared not risk that kind of lie.

I was more alone than I knew how to explain.  Looking for my people, without being consciously aware of it, I developed a pretty reliable rapedar.  I recognize triggers in other people, and how they try to hide.  There might be a torrent of words too loud and too reckless around a brutal subject – assault, or puberty, or things that bodies do in secret.  A wide-eyed, looking-down moment at the mention of Boys Don’t Cry.  A fury or a fear around some ordinary thing, or a chronic inability to be like other people.  Social dynamics being what they are, the people who have suffered most will usually suffer more.  Bullying can be kneejerk, or it can be wickedly shrewd.  I’m not the only one who knows what triggers look like.

Once, to commemorate a fallen officer, a delegation of police families from my city traveled to Washington.   My family was one of them.  We paid a visit to the Smithsonian while we were there.  At twelve years old, I was terrified of the two little buds of breasts poking through my tank-top.  I slid my tray along the counter in the museum cafeteria, right beside my looming cop of a Dad.  Beside me on the other side was a stranger, who introduced himself by pulling down my shirt.

If my father had seen, I’d have to die of humiliation.  But his head was turned the other way.  I stared at him a few slow seconds, reassuring myself that he didn’t know, before turning back to the stranger.  I still remember his smile, and the way he watched my face.  He knew.

I didn’t know it about myself, yet, but he did.  He knew what I was afraid of.  He knew what made me tick.  He’d seen how deep my shame was, and that I’d never tell.

“I was going to get the pizza, but you moved,” he said loudly and comfortably.  “This was your fault.”

There was a lady standing on the other side of the food-counter.  She said something that made him walk away.  I felt her eyes on me as I staggered down the line, blindly piling chip bags on my tray.  My mom noticed and told me not to eat so much.  My dad told her it was fine.

One day when I was all grown up, and had learned the stark facts of my past from a former foster sister I found again through Facebook, my mother let it slip that my parents knew about the worst of my pre-adoption abuse.  They had always known, in fact.  The baby who was with me had required surgery.  It was a fleeting comment, and no conversation followed.  The parameters of our relationship had long been cast in stone.  I kept my feelings to myself, lest she call me crazy and stupid and weird.

My parents, good and normal, were the first to bury me.

When we’re buried – disbelieved, hushed, ignored – it means we have no allies.  Not our Dad standing next to us in line or a cafeteria full of cops all prejudiced in our favor.  Maybe a lady on the other side of a counter.  No one who can stop us from getting picked out in a crowd and brutalized under their noses.

I learned in time about myself, that this deep secret of mine was like an uncovered manhole.  It was a trap that would suck me in if I ever forgot it was there.  Anyone who spoke of it could own me, like by true name magic.  Several fraught relationships began exactly in this way.

A young man I met in college learned of my secret after asking me the meaning of a poem I’d written.  He seemed to enjoy discussing my past.  He used the word rape with languid relish, brazenly retelling me my guesses.  I listened without breathing to my heart’s slow explosions, and followed him like a puppy up and down a starlit road.  A year after we’d stopped speaking, he sent me a poem on Facebook, the last line of which referenced “semen stains and stab wounds on a twelve-year-old-girl’s breasts.”

“I’m flattered that she takes my poetry so seriously,” he told a friend to tell me, after I’d blocked him.

I wasn’t crushed by what he said.  I was crushed by knowing that, for the first time in a year, I did not feel more alone than I could explain.  It was a bad, abnormal guy who wanted to destroy me sending that kind of poem.  But he would never make me disappear.  I was buried every day by other kinds of people.

I was used to subjects changing, rolling eyes.  Silence.  Doubt, denial.  The mountains of euphemism forbidding full disclosure – dampening human interest stories on the news, and making me wonder, and wonder again, if I really knew what happened.  The common courtesy assuring everyone you won’t be exposed to that kind of story unless you’re in the right place at the right time and fully prepared to hear it.  Trigger warnings I get.  The societal requirement that I ask permission before I talk about myself puts me in the debt of whoever would call me a friend.

I’m tired of asking permission.  I’m tired of the pressure to look like anyone else.

I’m even fed-up with survivors, in-the-closet, who retract their late-night confessions in the morning, who brush off references to specific childhood nightmares as having no meaning at all.  Come out in your own good time and all, but I need you.  And the more you reject my category, the stronger the story that tells us that our kind of person is less.

Survivors need allies.  I don’t think you know it.  Survivors are all alone.

Here’s something else, if you’re normal, that I don’t think you know: The world needs its survivors.

We are the people who can, if we fight to, shine light in dim corners, and heal you.  We are the people who won’t get destroyed by your crazy and stupid and weird.  We know in our hearts what others won’t admit: that you are never safe now.

All worlds crumble one day.  Yours will, too.  When your back is to the wall, and you’re going down hard, you need to know that you’re going to stay alive.  It can’t be helped.  You’ll want to be strong and cute, but you’ll just be this squirmy little worm who doesn’t know how to die.

I was broken many times.  It’s fine; I find many ways to rise.  Believe in me.  One day maybe you’ll need to believe in you.

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I Want to Laugh at Traumatized People

28 Friday Jul 2017

Posted by shieldingc in Biography, Confessions of a Buried Survivor, Stories Women Never Tell

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Catalina, Catalina Aruca, Child Abuse, Comedy, Comic Trauma, Comically Traumatized Hero, Comically Traumatized Person, Ellie Kemper, Erin, feminism, Foster Home, Friends, funny, Gabe, Gabe Lewis, Homelessness, Humor, Hunger, Intersectional feminism, Jared Dunn, Kidnapping, Kimmy Schmidt, Lisa Kudrow;, My Name is Earl, Nadine Valezques, Phoebe, Phoebe Buffay, Rape, rape culture, Refugee, Sexual assault, Silicon Valley, Survivor, Taboo, The Office, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Traumatized, TV trope, Undocumented, Zach Woods

“They alive, dammit!”  Cheers The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s opening chorus.  “Females are strong as hell!”  Such is our introduction to Kimmy – a childhood kidnapping victim who spent 15 years buried in a bunker in Indiana.  She emerges, clueless, but smiling and apparently unscathed.

Schmidt is a pioneer beyond her fictional universe.  She represents the pinnacle of a TV trope that is recent, infrequent, and classically overlooked: the Comically Traumatized Person.

It started with Friends’ Phoebe Buffay.

“I remember when I first came to this city,” Phoebe tells Rachel comfortingly in episode one.  “I was fourteen.  My mom had just killed herself and my step-dad was back in prison.  …And I ended up living with this albino guy who was like, cleaning windshields outside port authority – and then he killed himself –  and then I found aromatherapy.  So believe me, I know exactly how you feel.”

Shocked glances suggest no one is comforted. But this is the recurring source of Phoebe’s humor – disturbed expressions following offhandedly tragic disclosure.  Her sunny disposition is the only thing that makes it work.  For a horror-tale survivor, she seems utterly, unreasonably, fine.

Catalina Aruca, My Name is Earl’s undocumented Bolivian refugee, carries on the trope with gusto.   “This is the sweetest, most justified kidnapping I’ve ever seen!”  She once praises our show’s namesake, calculating after that she’s seen five or so.  She likes the pop-pop-pop of bubble-wrap, because it reminds her of her childhood in bullet-riddled La Paz.  And she never has plans for Mother’s Day, because her mother is dead.  When offered condolences, she shrugs and explains, “It was either her or me.”

In every genesis of the Comically Traumatized Person, but most of all in Nadine Velazquez’s Catalina, we hear a voice of quiet social conscience.  She reminds other characters of the vastness between their privilege and the world of strife she remembers; they can respond to her revelations uncomfortably, or not at all.  She will disturb, annoy, offend, and be ignored – but she stays within the bounds of comedy.  Because around her, no one knows what to say.

The archetype emerges next with Erin, from The Office – an apparent pre-incarnation to Kimmy Schmidt, also played by actress Ellie Kemper.  Erin unleashes the trope’s positivity to an on-it’s-own comical degree.  “I like every person that I have ever met,” she says, smiling blissfully, as though she hadn’t just been told by her co-workers that they’ll never really like her.

It’s no secret that she’s an orphan – her frequent references to The System include practical know-how in ridding the office of lice and statements like, “In the foster home, my hair was my room.”  Everyone she meets is a likely substitute for the family she never had.  She is worshipfully gratefully to colleagues like Michael Scott and Kelly who offer her lukewarm attention in return.

“Thank God he’s my boss, because I would not have said yes to a first date if I didn’t have to,” she tells us about Gabe Lewis – one of two low-key predatory supervisors she ends up dating.  The very first time we’re introduced, she’s being encouraged to change her name by her regional manager’s interim replacement.  He sets a precedent when he breaks decorum to tell her that she’s pretty.  And co-worker Clark convinces her to wear skimpy clothes solo to a non-existent audition at his apartment.  (The date-rape of a scenario is avoided only by the intervention of her future love-interest, Pete.)

Erin’s vulnerability is an overstatement, more so than a departure, from her Comically Traumatized kin.  They are all blatantly exploited by other characters; they value relationships with a heedless valor rarely or never mentioned.  Phoebe takes on the surrogate pregnancy of her brother’s triplets.  Catalina returns to stripping against clearly-stated inclination, to free chief-rival Joy from prison after Earl collapses in a big heap of fragility.

Though each CTP recounts a wide variety of traumatic life experiences, the element of sexual violence is a connective fiber, implied by every one with ever so cautious a subtlety.

“This reminds me,” says a pregnant-and-grumpy Phoebe to a Rachel who can’t stop agonizing over Ross, “Of the time when I was living on the street and this guy offered to buy me food if I slept with him.”

After a confused pause, Rachel asks, “How is this like that?”

“Well, let’s see, it’s not really like that.”  Says Phoebe.  “Because that was an actual problem and yours is just like, y’know, a bunch of high school crap that nobody really gives, y’know…”

We later learn that she contracted hepatitis when a pimp spit in her mouth.  Neither her fiancé nor the fiancé’s rich parents, to whom she has thusly introduced herself, ever ask for specifics.

When Catalina learns that Randy is afraid of chickens, she soothingly offers, “We all have fears.  I fear snakes and rape.”  She had no male friends before fleeing Bolivia, due to her belief that they would rape her mother.  And we watch her good friend Earl slap her butt, to express his disillusionment, and earn a reprimand because she “expects better” of him than she does of other men.

Then we have Silicon Valley’s Jared Dunn, who springs from The Office’s ashes as a Comically Traumatized, nicely non-predatory version of Gabe (both characters played by Zach Woods).  Staring wide-eyed at the giant portrait of Gavin Belson they’ve agreed to hang in his garage bedroom, Jared muses: “I was scared of intruders ‘til I had one of those in my room, and then I realized, you know, if they’re gonna kill me, they’re gonna kill me.  ‘Cause he kept whispering that.”

Reminiscent of Phoebe, Jared often mentions hunger and homelessness, including sleeping in a box on the street.   Like Erin, he frequently refers to foster care; the closest he had to a stuffed animal was a Ziploc bag stuffed with old newspaper and a smile drawn on the outside.  Also like Erin, everyone calls him by a name that a supervisor stuck to him.  He’s seen dead people, like Catalina, some of them naked, and, like Kimmy, he used to be a prisoner. “When I was little,” he tells us, “I used to pretend that I shared a room with Harriet Tubman and we were always planning our big escape.”

True to his trope, Jared’s enormous devotion and self-sacrifice on behalf of those he has chosen as his family are persistently taken for granted and overlooked.  Still, he is ultimately valued more in his universe than Phoebe, Erin, or Catalina are in theirs.  The founder of his tiny company, Richard, arguably abandons his evil plans to “force-adopt code through aggressive guerilla marketing” due to Jared’s vocal withdrawal of support.

But never until Kimmy was a Comically Traumatized Person at the center of the storyline.

The series is appropriately bizarre.

In episode one, Ms. Schmidt’s roommate Titus Andromedon begins a question about money with the sentence, “I’m very scared to ask you this – ”

“Yes!” Kimmy cuts him off, rolling her eyes.  “There was weird sex-stuff in the bunker.”

The actually-frank disclosure of sexual assault is reiterated in Season Three.  “It’s kind of sophisticated if you think about it,” says a lady named Wendy, speaking of her attempts to get Kimmy to sign divorce papers so she can marry the same reverend who held her prisoner.  “An evening in Manhattan with my lover’s wife.  It sounds like a Noel Coward play!”

Kimmy shoots back under her breath, “If Noel Coward really was a coward who rapes everybody.”

Her admissions are swallowed in swift-flowing narrative, but beginning in the second season with a soldier who calls her out on her PTSD, her life involves more and more recognition of how her past affects her present.

“If you think you don’t have triggers, then you’re in denial,” The soldier tells her, after she reacts to his sudden movement at a party by wrestling him on the floor.  She also reflexively hits old-flame Dong with a telephone each time they kiss, until he’s in handcuffs – at which point she says her brain feels calm enough to attempt coition.

None of this happens with any sobering hint of drama.  Kimmy, and all of our Comically Traumatized characters, stay funny.  And that is a narrative revolution.

“I couldn’t stay,” says Kimmy’s hot-mess of a mom, referring to life in their small town after her child was abducted.  “Everywhere I went people were looking at me like I was a bummer, you know, with their eyes all watery, ‘I’m so sorry for your tragedy’, when I just was trying to get one minute of peace on a mechanical bull.”

“Ugh,” says Kimmy, “I hate that look!  I don’t want pity.  It’s like, I’m more than this one terrible thing that happened to me!”

“Exactly!” Says Kimmy’s mom – who, in possible homage to Phoebe, is also played by actress Lisa Kudrow.  “I’m all the terrible things that have happened to me.  And I’m not a bummer!  I’m fun.”

Drama, the near-exclusive purveyor of traumatic representation in the arts, prescribes a gingerliness in dealing with sexual violence – a thorough separation of survivor from what she has survived.  Here is the thing that shouldn’t have happened, and there are the things you fear and think and unhealthily love in result.  Somewhere under all that trauma is the real you, the person you were meant to be before these bad things happened.  A Comically Traumatized Person does what may never have been done before on screen; she claims every fear, and think, and unhealthy love as her own.  She is not fun sometimes and traumatized some other times.  She is always both.  And proud.

“Don’t worry about me,” Kimmy says to Dong, grinning after insisting she’ll help him marry someone else.  “I’m like a biscotti.  People act like I’m this sweet cookie, but I’m really this super hard thing, that nobody knows what I am, or why I am.”

The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt gives us a Comically Traumatized Hero who can tell her own story.  In the words of her unlicensed psychiatrist: “Kimmy Schmidt is free, okay?  She can just assume that everybody already knows [about her trauma] and stop worrying about it.”

This isn’t Rachael’s or Monica’s or Ross’s New York.  We see the world through Kimmy’s eyes – which are like Phoebe’s eyes, and Catalina’s, and Erin’s, and Jared’s.  In their freak vision, ‘normal’ is a boring unicorn.  The world doesn’t make a ton of sense; but it’s bright, and resilient, and loudly being lived-in.  You are invited not to pity, ignore, or revere – but fully, and finally, relate.

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Sexism Kept me out of STEM

17 Tuesday Feb 2015

Posted by shieldingc in Confessions of a Buried Survivor, Stories Women Never Tell

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Ambition, Bad Teachers, Classism, Domestic Abuse, Failing Schools, Female Nerd, Gender, Male Privilege, Math, Racism, sexism, Silicon Valley, STEM, Underperforming schools

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Sixth grade was the first time I was sorted.

They were two groups we were sorted into – Groups “A” and “S”. The rating decided your class for both Math and English; you couldn’t be “S” for one and “A” for the other.  They didn’t tell us what those letters meant.  We just knew “A” was better.

I, having a B- in Math and a solid A in English from last year, was sorted “S”.

This was horrifying.  Forget Math – English was my turf.  Kids would call me Jane Eyrehead for reading Bronte during recess.  I entered and won writing competitions every chance I had – school-wide, state-wide, one even regional.  I bested higher-graders as a matter of course.  No one tried to tell me before that English wasn’t mine.

In a class of 27, there were ten of us.  Three were boys, and seven girls. “S” doesn’t seem to mean “standard” in a room that small.  Still, I wasn’t hopeless.  There were two boys in “S” group who were only there (we were told) on account of being transfers.  Our little Catholic school regarded the A’s and B’s of other institutions as suspect, so the two new guys would have to prove their salt if they wanted to advance.  I saw no reason I couldn’t work, like them, to prove myself.  I’d make them move me up.

Our first class began with a question.

“What’s the biggest number you can imagine?”

My hand shot up.  “A googol!”

This was the highest number I knew with a name attached – a one followed by one hundred zeroes.

“Really?”  Mr. Math asked me.  “You can actually imagine, say, a googol of apples?”

I thought again. No, I couldn’t visualize that many of anything. I could picture, maybe, five apples at a time. I could push the apples in my head into rows of three or four, and see more of them that way.  But not as many as a googol.

“Think in terms of decimals,” Mr. Math continued. “Hundreds, thousands – what do you think is the easiest type of number for people to manage?”

There was no way I could picture more than 15 apples.  But I knew my mind would be judged by my answer, so I kept it safely vague and offered, “Tens.”

“Tens!”  Mr. Math gave a little laugh.

“I meant high tens!” I protested quickly. “Like, 99 apples!”

“Hmm, ok,” he said, leaving the issue be.

One of the new kids raised his hand. “Billions,” he said, without a sliver of doubt – and I knew right away that he had it.  Our teacher toyed around for more answers before conceding that New Kid was right.  Billions were, in fact, the highest sort of number that people could imagine.

“Because there’s something we do visualize in the billions – money. Beyond billions, we all lose count.”

The rest of the class passed uneventfully.  Conversation turned to sports, and I waited.  Mr. Math was laid back, cracking easy jokes.  No assignments were issued, no other questions asked.  We went to lunch, and when we returned to our homeroom we were informed that New Kid had been promoted.  He acted all surprised.

“Whatever you said in class today, New Kid, you must have really impressed!”  Our everything-but-math-and-science teacher cooed.  New Kid was her favorite already.  (I was not.  Prior to a church assembly where a handful of students were chosen to represent virtues, she once informed the class that I had been selected to represent Humility because to be humble meant considering the possibility that you could be wrong, and that was something I should work on. She then explained that New Kid was assigned Valiance because it meant being able to stand up for what you believe in, regardless of what other people think, and that was something he represented well.)

For years, I’ve thought on Mr. Math’s first question, and wondered.  Was that just so much bull?

Was he asking about some secret mathematical concept I still don’t get, or did New Kid just guess right what he was thinking?  Was is it even about math, or had he ripped the query from some Economist-type article illuminating the changing relationship of people to decimal places?  It didn’t seem fair, even at the time.

But I wasn’t frail.  I didn’t give up.  I approached His Mathiness a few weeks later and asked how I could earn a promotion.  The work in his class wasn’t hard, and the year was young.  What would it take to get me into “A”?

He said the division was mainly due to English.

“That’s not what Mrs. English said.”  She’d told us it was due to Math, and that there’d be no difference in what “S” and “A” studied in her room (a lie – by year’s end we’d have read three fewer books, and she’d tell us it was because “A” kids settled down more quickly when they came in from lunch).

He repeated, “It’s mainly due to English.”

I stood a second more at Mr. Math’s desk, trying to read his face.  Behind his mustache and his glasses he seemed securely unperturbed.  His eyes fixed on thin air beside me.  Mr. Math would not be moved.  I went back to my seat, aware of the other kids staring, and got to work looking for a bright side.

The class was easy; I could do all the homework in school during a five-minute snack break.  I had more free time to think, and to write.  I didn’t need “A” English, either.  I’d started composing a novel on my Dad’s computer.  I typed away my weekends.  I asked for books at every holiday – anything Shakespeare, Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment (whatever I heard an adult mention as important) – and would cry and huff if anybody tried to buy me a crap abridged-specifically-for-kids version.  So the year went on.  I maintained A’s and B’s.

At the start of 7th grade, I learned that the other two boys had been advanced. “S” was now composed of girls.  I didn’t believe in sexism back then, but I was aware of stereotypes.  You hear tell in the land of anything Shakespeare, Moby Dick, or Crime and Punishment that women have the lesser minds, for doing lesser things.  Looking around the all-girl S class, I knew I’d done nothing to contradict the notion and was filled with shame.  How embarrassed the A-group girls must be at our existing.

Good old Mr. Math addressed our group’s changed composition right away.  “It can be a positive thing,” he said. “To have a small class. As I learned last year with the 4 boys in my algebra group. You can literally go through an entire textbook.”

My opportunist ears were ringing.  Yes!  Take us through a textbook, Mr. Math.  Let us start here, small in number and swaddled with shame.  Let the A-groupers snicker while walking past our room.  We could hit that book so hard, just the few of us, we’ll be even with those jerks in no time.  By year’s end, we’ll overtake them.  It’ll be too late to stop us when they realize we’re the underdogs.  Soon we’ll be A, and they’ll be S.

 

I was not humble; I wouldn’t give up.

Of course, it wasn’t up to me to set our pace.  Classes went the same as always – lecture, worksheets, tests every once in awhile.  Mr. Math cracking jokes and reminiscing about old Catholic school.  The A-groupers didn’t even use the same textbook. When they took back assignments with scores of 30%, they’d laugh.  Their work was so advanced, they were getting used to it.  I did homework on the bus and used the extra time to write.

It was somewhere in the middle of the year that one of our group – a nice, polite girl, who unlike me did not try to bond with our teacher by making fun of his bald spot – finished a test ten minutes early.

“Obviously someone’s not being challenged, here,” Mr. Math told us quietly. He left the room and came back minutes later, instructing our sister-S to join the A-kids in English.

I didn’t know before that you could advance in the middle of the year.  Now I did.  I pulled out all the stops; every worksheet was an Olympic-tier race.  When I succeeded days later in completing an assignment far ahead of the rest of the class, and had sat looking at our teacher significantly for awhile, and not being acknowledged, I began loudly explaining the shortcut I’d discovered to the girls around me. “See, you don’t need to write out all this crap. You can do the whole thing in two steps.”

“Yes,” said our teacher when everyone was finished and were asking whether I was right. “I’m actually surprised more people didn’t figure out that shortcut.”

I may have glared.  It didn’t matter; Mr. Math never looked straight at me.

But I still saw chances; I couldn’t give up.  Mrs. 7th-grade English adored my writing and didn’t understand why I wasn’t in A-group.  I told her that I didn’t know, either.  She vowed to speak to Mr. Math on my behalf.  During a break that day, a sister “S” passed the room where Mrs. English was making her appeal.  She told me she saw English speaking, and Mr. Math sitting in his chair, saying nothing back.  The only thing I learned, when I asked about that conversation, was that Mr. Math said no.

 

Lady English promised me that, in her class, anyway, I would do the work they did in “A”.  My turf.  Subjective, fickle Math wouldn’t let you make a case for your own advance.  In English – only in English – I could create what matched my ambition.

Mr. Math retired and was replaced in eighth grade by a Mrs. Math.

Mrs. Math was bad at teaching.  By which I mean, two weeks into the academic year she’d stopped lecturing, issuing assignments, or conducting tests.  Not in both groups.  Just in ours.  Instead of math, she discussed such issues with us as the physical, sexual and emotional abuse she’d suffered at the hands of her first boyfriend.  And the pain of losing one’s virginity.  And the saving hope of true love.  She also talked about her baby.

She once remarked that after looking at the grade-logs she’d inherited, it astounded her there weren’t more kids in “S”.  She didn’t, as far as I know, petition to restructure the division.

I liked her class, in a guilty pleasure way.  When there was no dire conversation, I sat there writing poetry.  I’d let her read it after.  She always called it beautiful.  During the times when she talked about life with her voice tender and confessional, I would listen with my chin in my hands.  So did the other girls.  We understood these stories were for us; she never would have shared them if boys were in the room.

But I knew, at the same time, that there were whole horizons kept outside my reach.  A-group did real math.  I would hear their casual talk of homework and tests and take it in my gut, tenuous and lurching.  The feeling of falling behind.

During a break one day, I shouldered my way into a group of “A” kids comparing answers.  They laughed together when I asked them to give me a problem.  One girl obliged, copying a question from her text book onto a piece of lined paper, and handing it to me.  She warned the other A-kids with her eyes not to share the joke they had going.  This wasn’t part of their homework.  It was algebra.

I knew from the giggles it was a problem none of them could solve.  It took it anyway.  Looked at it hard, and folded it away, like I was stealing.  I studied it all morning behind my other books – simple, gripping thing, with its two x’s and a y to solve.  I knew that I could figure it out, if only I had time.  But when Math class rolled around, I couldn’t contain my secret.  I showed Mrs. Math what I’d been working on.  She wrote the question out on the blackboard, and answered it, muttering the hows to herself.  She shrugged at me, as though asking if I were humored, then turned her attention away.

I didn’t expect it.  But that was the day that I quit.

I had exposed hopes that were, after all, frail and humble and without a chance.  I was embarrassed and I couldn’t fight it anymore.  Math was not my turf.

I felt relief, not fear, when at Freshman Orientation the next year my vice-principal explained that, given this and that about our credit-system, “You only have enough to fail one class.”  I was bad at math.  So math would be my freebie.  I failed accordingly.  And I nearly failed a few other subjects that year.  I was rude, and not in the good, imma-take-this-education-and-mess-you-up-with-it kind of way.  Rude in a buck-the-system, look-at-me, I-can-make-everybody-laugh kind of way.  I’d learned from prior years that I didn’t need and wouldn’t find a mentor.  When I craved stimulation, I made it myself – in the middle of class if I had to, behind a notebook or out in the hallway, spinning around, then dashing back to capture that spirit in fleeter words.  There was nothing for me in those classrooms, and there’d be nothing for me in the real world.  Somewhere buried in the woods there was a cottage I could scribble in unheard of until the day I died, leaving castles as my legacy and torture as my glory.

Bowing to what was expected of me, I went to college anyway.  I straightened out my grades enough by senior year to gain admittance to a four-year liberal arts school.  It helped that I’d dominated the literary portions of the SAT’s.  I came out exactly average on the math.  (Massachusetts standards are apparently high enough that even a failing student at a failing school can cram her way to an eleventh-hour national average.)  Not that it mattered; I knew the feeling of failure as an untold constant.  Careers in all fields STEM were out of the question.

If you’re a woman, you can read a story like this and think sexism has nothing to do with it.  I won’t blame you.  I don’t blame you for saying that a girl who wants to get math done doesn’t give up just because no one believes in her.  I get it.  I write.  I told never-ending stories just as soon as I could speak and asked my mother everyday when I would learn how to read.  I kept a notebook by my bed and wrote by nightlight’s glow, using the letter “c” in place of “k” and “s” because I was in kindergarten and hadn’t learned all of the alphabet.  If you told me that sexism took your writing away, I surely wouldn’t listen.

When you are ambitious and a female there are things you can’t afford to hear.  They might sort you, and tell you no.  Laugh at you, while you take on that problem no one else knows how to solve.  You won’t hear it.  You won’t listen when they tell you that failing is allowed.  Or when they remind you to work on humility while praising the valiance of that New Guy in the room.  They’ll snort when they ask you, oh really, you sure now, you can imagine a googol?  You won’t listen then, and you won’t when they tell you – over and over – that it’s dangerous to be a woman, you’ll cry and bleed the first time you have sex, you wont sleep a wink after you have a baby, and all of that is more important today than your stupid little problem-with-two-Xs-and-a-Y.

 

When you’re the underdog, sometimes you don’t want to know.  And if that’s where you’re at, sister – go ahead.  Tell everyone I’m wrong and sexism’s a ghost.  Don’t listen to my story.  One too many warnings that you move against the grain, and anyone with sense would quit.  Maybe that’s what I lack, and why I write.  Maybe I can just afford, today, to name the force you’re up against.

It’s a funny kind of privilege that we get by giving up.

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