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.

Hey Survivors – Let’s Form a Faction.

07 Thursday Dec 2017

Posted by shieldingc in Confessions of a Buried Survivor

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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 29^th, 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.

I’m Pro-Choice and So is the Virgin Mary

15 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by shieldingc in Catholic Edition, Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

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Abortion, abstinence, angel, angels can't read minds, annulment, Annunciation, authority, Be it done unto me according to your word, Behold, bible, biological material, Birth Control, blaspheme, bodily autnomy, Bodily Autonomy, bodily integrity, body, born, Catechism, Catholic, Catholic Church, cesarean, chastity, Childbirth, Christ, compromise, conceive, conceived, Conception, consent, consent to pregnancy, corpses, crime, criminal, cycle, dead body, deadly, death, death penalty, deceased, desecration, dignity, disabling mutilation, disposable, donor body, double effect, dying, ecclesiastical, ectopic, Embryo, erroneous Catholic teaching, euthanasia, evil, exception, excommunication, experimentation, explicit consent, exploitation, exploited, fallopian tube, fallopian tubes, feminism, fertility, fetus, fifth commandment, flesh, force, Gabriel, gestation, giving birth, God saves, God's will, Gospel, health, hierarchy, Holy Spirit, hormonal, humility, I am the handmaid of the Lord, illness, impact, implantation, indulgence, infallible, intellect, intent, Jesus, John, just war, late-term, legitimate defense, lethal force, life, life begins, Life-at-conception, life-threatening, love, Luke, Luke 1:26-38, Maria Goretti, Marriage, Mary, medical, medical rights, medicine, misogyny, moderate, most high, Mother of God, natural, natural order, nine months, No word from God will ever fail, openness to life, Organ Donation, ovulation, personhood, precious, Pregnancy, Pregnant, pregnant people, Prejudice, priest, Privacy, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, Procreation, proportionate, proportionate force, Rape, rapist, Religion, reproduction, respect for the person, risk, sacred, science, scientific research, secular, self-defense, servant, sexism, Sexual assault, sexual predator, sexuality, Silence, sin, soldier, speak for God, Suicide, termination, the Church is in error, The Kingdom, theology, unborn, uterus, vestments, viability, Violent, virgin, virgin girl, Virgin Mary, virtue, warlord, woman, word made flesh, word of God, Zechariah, Zechariah's silence, Zygote, zygotes

Regarding the issue of abortion, the Catholic Church is in error.

It is no blaspheme to say so. Theological standards require that infallible doctrine apply to the entire Church, and never target an individual or a particular group of people. The Church’s pronouncements against abortion, however, remove rights deemed universal exclusively from the pregnant.

The error applies specifically to abortion conducted before the point of viability, or the point at which a fetus is developed enough to live unattached to another human being. This error, in other words, applies to the vast majority of intentional termination.

Post-viability abortion is intrinsically different, in terms of both impact and intent.

In terms of intent, the person who has voluntarily endured six months or more of pregnancy is demonstrably planning to give birth. Personally (and legally, in almost every location) it would take nothing short of a calamitous prognosis at this point to convince doctors and parents that death is the best course of action. Most commonly, it is a fetal health anomaly guaranteeing the unborn a short life of struggle and pain, or a life like perpetual coma, without hope of interaction. In these cases, the end of pregnancy is incidental to the situation, not the ultimate goal.

Late-term abortion, in other words, is not abortion. It is euthanasia.

Though comprising a very small proportion of intentional termination, post-viability abortion is predominantly singled out by pro-life literature. Images of women with pronounced pregnant bellies, terms like “fetus,” and references to dismemberment are common indicators that the protester believes all abortions occur late-term. To make the case against it, some present graphic descriptions of the removal of the deceased’s body out-of-context, as though the unborn was killed in a manner without parallel. However, the method of death is, as prescribed with every act of euthanasia, lethal injection. The remains are collected in the manner least dangerous to the pregnant person (as is also the case with late-term miscarriage).

In terms of impact, there may be few circumstances where post-viability abortion occurs in defense of life, as gestation can usually be ended by an induced, non-lethal early labor involving the same degree of risk for the pregnant person as a late-stage termination.

Abortion pre-viability, however, constitutes the lowest threshold of force for the removal of risk from one person at the expense of another. It therefore constitutes legitimate self-defense and cannot be infallibly condemned.

Contrary to what has been claimed by some who are pro-life, pregnancy and childbirth always include a very real risk of dying. This is why people tend to give birth under the direct supervision of medical professionals who keep sterilized surgical equipment at the ready, and it is why, throughout gestation, doctors carefully monitor the pregnant person’s health. Pregnancy can cause spiking and plummeting blood pressure, deadly clots, strokes, and heart-attacks. Hormone-related psychosis, depression, and other disorders which (because of pregnancy) are not treated with prescription pills have even taken their share of lives via suicide. Everyone who died giving birth or under the cesarean knife would have lived had they instead chosen a safe, legal abortion during the typical first trimester.

Nor is there any knowing in advance who will die. Every pregnant one is risking death. Hence, every pregnant person is entitled to defend her own life in this manner.

Contrary to what some may argue specifically in this context, we are not obliged to shrug off risk to our own lives as unimportant when demise is not guaranteed. Nor are we expected to defend ourselves in a haphazard fashion; a less-than-certain hazard of death does not require a defense that is less-than-certain to kill. A moderate use of force requires rather that we are to employ in our own defense nothing in excess of the force required to remove the risk of death. Up until viability, lethal force is the minimum amount necessary to ending the pregnancy; hence, abortion is the moderate use of force.

Some do not like the categorization of abortion as self-defense for the reason that they would rather not place the unborn in the same category as any violent criminal. This, however, is bias – and it undermines one of the Catholic Church’s foundational teachings. That is, all people are equally, incalculably, precious. When removed from battle, a child-soldier, blameless and vulnerable, is to be shown the same mercy as the commanding warlord. The rights of others dictate, however, that while posing an active threat, either might be killed in self-protection.

Legitimate defense is not a proclamation of guilt, nor a dismissal of human value. No crime makes a person unworthy of living. It is simply the Church’s position that when two lives are in conflict, neither is obligated to forfeit for the good of the other. As the Catechism states, “one is bound to take more care of one’s own life than of another’s.”

The fact that the Church classifies abortion as a special kind of sin, resulting in instant excommunication for the pregnant person and doctors involved, emphasizes the targeted and discriminatory nature of this teaching. Unlike the soldier joining, in good faith, what seems to be a Just War, or the sovereign who orders the death of a citizen in pursuit of societal safety, the woman who is pregnant and chooses abortion (along with those who serve her) are presumed to be acting with mal intent and operating without the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. The demonstrable good of her continued existence on this planet is not considered, or else is worth nothing, such that abortion is purported evil by nature.

In cases where the error of this assumption are glaring, Catholic thinkers have exercised mental acrobatics to deny it the medical context proclaimed by secular feminism.

In an ectopic pregnancy, where the embryo is found developing without a uterus, it is clear that termination will save the life of the pregnant person, and that the unborn will otherwise not have long to live. Still, the preservation of one of those lives can only be accomplished by such pretended accident as might require, for instance, the removal of a woman’s fallopian tube.

In impact and action, this is abortion. A willing deed ends one life early and saves another. But, by a discriminating twist of logic, it is reasoned that intending the action that will certainly cause death is not the exact same thing as intending the death itself. So this is not abortion.

But it would be, if the embryo were removed through a tubal incision small enough to heal.

We see by this example that a condemnation of abortion requires that sanctity of heart and mind not meant to be trespassed, even by angels, to be plastered over with assigned purpose. Neither the woman seeking an abortion nor the doctors helping her are granted the privacy of their own intentions. For them, and only for them, benign intent must be externally demonstrated in order to exist. What satisfies the Church that they mean well, furthermore, is singularly the removal of a piece of her body. This is nothing but abortion pre-absolved – by the sacrifice of one’s fertility and the physical assurance of her lifelong suffering. It is an ordered corruption of indulgence.

Denying pregnant people their medical rights in order to maintain that abortion is wrong does nothing to disprove the medical nature of abortion. If sin cannot be justified by the avoidance of harm, then sin cannot be required as a condition for the avoidance of sin. Non-therapeutic amputations, mutilations, and sterilizations are explicitly-listed sins against bodily integrity. In this context, the removal of an entire fallopian tube is all of the above.

Consideration for respect of the person and scientific research led the Church to rule concretely that it is “not morally admissible to bring about the disabling mutilation or death of a human being, even in order to delay the death of other persons.” As the best possible outcome of tubal removal for an ectopic embryo is the delay of death, such mutilation serves no ethical purpose. In removing a pregnant person’s risk of death entirely, however, direct abortion is an application of legitimate defense – in keeping with the fifth commandment and the spirit of defending life.

Nor is respect for the person to be undermined in the interests of saving life. The donation of one’s bodily organs is hailed by the Church as an act of love and compassion, but is “not morally acceptable” if the donor has not issued explicit consent.

Even when the donor body is no longer alive, and sharing of its parts endangers no one, it must be unambiguously established that the deceased had intended donation. In condemning abortion, the Church has established that the dead possess more rights than the living pregnant person. For, as has been pointed out, every act of pregnancy requires the donation of one’s organs and the accompanying compromise of one’s health.

Symptoms of a typical pregnancy would certainly be termed illness – and often severe illness – if experienced by any category other than the pregnant. Nine months is a long time to be so incapacitated, but many of these symptoms, such as tooth decay, have permanent effects. Childbirth and the major abdominal surgery known as cesarean sections are, of course, objectively damaging in the best of circumstances and require many weeks and months of medical recovery. Very often the person bringing life into the world sustains serious injuries rarely acknowledged. Tissue damage may result in enduring painful intercourse, lost libido, or incontinence. Irreparable pelvic fractures are also very common.

Explicitly, the Church holds as the organizing principle for the regulation of human bodies, the fifth commandment. The value of life. But where it is not argued that the individual is the appointed guardian of her own life, and it has not been established that the insides of our bodies are as private or as sacred as the insides of our minds, it is taken for granted that violations of body are wrong for the reason that they go against a certain order established by the Church.

Consent does not justify medical experimentation enacted voyeuristically. Consent is not the baseline for determining what constitutes a desecration of the dead. The Church establishes the order, and in so doing, places the human body firmly under its own jurisdiction. Ecclesiastical authority can say that pregnancy does not violate its integrity – even when bones break, muscles tear, and hearts stop. Even when the person who is pregnant does not will it, and is screaming for it to end. There can be no violation because, as regards the pregnant, it has established that this is what their bodies are for and this is what their lives are for.

The fact that sexual assault appears in the section of the Catechism listing sins against chastity, rather than those entailing sins against health, freedom, bodily integrity, or respect for the person, speaks further to this troubling assumption: it is the business of the Church to regulate, not the pure morality of how people treat one another, but the material usage of bodies. With relation to all things sexual, it is human reproduction the establishment seeks to command.

This is why, though it was never acceptable to kill an attempting rapist, it was once taught as valiant to kill yourself in the event that you were a virgin girl who otherwise would be raped. Saint Maria Goretti, who died fighting off a sexual predator, is still commemorated at the pulpit for “defending her virtue unto death.”

What sole, unspoken virtue could there be in a young woman’s death – except the prevention of a baby, whose very existence outside the bounds of sacrament would sully institution?

It is not by reasoning, but by the default prejudice known to feminists as “sexism” that we have always determined something in a woman more precious than her life. And by that same determination, we have reduced what life may be within her to exploited, “disposable biological material,” however hard we preach to the contrary.

When we include those zygotes who fail to implant, three-quarters of all persons conceived are never born. That the Church nevertheless will demand unprotected sex between married persons is a valuation unexamined. It states that an infant is worth the sacrifice of every life lost in utero. In the Church’s eyes, the born child is worth more – by far – than the zygote or the embryo.

The Church’s teachings against birth control further are a statement that allegiance to natural order as defined by institution are of greater import than human life or dignity. Science informs us, in fact, there are many more zygotes lost in the course of natural ovulation cycles than could be in the storied event of breakthrough ovulation, as it may occur within wombs too thinned by hormonal birth control to sustain life. Assuming hormonal birth control even does thin the uterine lining and hinder implantation. The jury is still out.

So, too, the teachings on marriage requiring openness to life, while maintaining that perpetual abstinence is sin. A discovery that one partner entered the union with no willingness to have children qualifies a union for annulment – a disavowal that true love ever existed. In pursuit of procreation, the Church makes the statement – never mind the fact that Jesus’ parents followed quite a different model – that this is what your marriage is for. This is what your love is for.

This is the context by which abortion is without conceivable merit. The great evil is not death – for all lives are equal and every child born requires the risk of another. What rankles so is the insubordination; the fact – the known fact – that a pregnant person made a choice about it.

Let it rankle and be known, however – the Virgin Mary is pro-choice.

It says so in the bible.

In Luke’s gospel, the angel Gabriel does not frame it as question, but fact – that Mary the virgin will be overshadowed by the power of the Most High, will become pregnant and will give birth to a baby, whose job it will be to save all the people of God. (Luke 1:26-38). The Annunciation ends with Gabriel’s insistence that no word from God will ever fail.

Mary tells him, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done unto me according to your word.”

This is not a yielding, simple, sweet agreement. Mary’s first word is the literal demand – look at me. And, contrary to what most think, that line about being the handmaid of the Lord is anything but self-dismissal. For context, we need to look at the story immediately before the Annunciation – the one where Gabriel appears to Mary’s cousin, Zechariah.

Line by line, this conversation (Luke 1:5-20) reads as a foil for the second. Both visits begin with Gabriel suddenly appearing, telling the human not to be afraid, and proclaiming a boy will be born to change the fate of the world. In both cases, the human wants to know how it is even possible to expect a baby, given how old he is on the one hand and how unmarried she is on the other.

It is in answer to Zechariah’s skepticism that the angel self-identifies as a servant of God, whose words reflect God’s will. Then Gabriel tells the old man that, because he failed to believe the angel’s words, he will be silent until the prophecy comes true. (Accordingly, Zechariah can not speak again until he supports his wife in naming their baby John.)

When they come from an angel or a man in gleaming vestments, claims of serving God are hailed as proof of a special proximity to heaven. He uses this claim to imply that he, better than others, is able to decipher the Lord’s will. And if no word from God will fail, speaking for God makes one infallible.

But enter the maiden – poor and young. Never having commanded angelic legions in heaven’s defense, and making no claims to any standing in divine presence. She is bold for no reason – except faith. Where Zechariah was shut up by Gabriel’s humble-brags of higher service, Mary makes the angel look her in the eyes. Mary speaks of her own service to God. And Mary tells the angel famously, “Be it done unto me according to your word.”

So active and forceful is her consent – practically a command – the annunciation is painted as a sort of proposal in most biblical interpretations. But she answered a question that was never asked. By her yes, Mary asserts, against the angel’s presumption, that she has the right to say no.

This is a stand that flies in the face of erroneous Catholic teaching. The girl is not consenting to sexual activity that may or may not lead to pregnancy. She is consenting to her pregnancy in the moment after learning there is a person – with a name, a gender, and a destiny – whose life depends on her.

Mary’s faith in God was not the type of faith that could be blinded. She could not be silenced, like Zechariah, because she believed no word from God would ever fail – and if the word of God was in the angel who served her , she knew the word of God was in her own voice, too.

Mary’s love for God was not the type of love that would let her forget the dignity of her own person. So she told the angel yes, even though she wasn’t asked.

It was in that very act of choosing that Christ was made, before the angel’s eyes, from a perfect foretold prophecy to a person of flesh, who might be denied. Without that yes in honor of his mother’s personhood, there could be no honor given to the personhood of Christ.

Let Mary teach us, in a spirit of humility, to halt our quest for The Kingdom where it causes us to tramp beyond the veil of a breathing human’s flesh. We do not honor children by removing from their parents such rights as we still give to corpses.

Allegations ARE Coming Out Now Because of Politics

13 Monday Nov 2017

Posted by shieldingc in Confessions of a Buried Survivor, Uncategorized

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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.

The Virgin Mary is Pro-Choice

18 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by shieldingc in Uncategorized

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Abortion, angel, Birth Control, Catholic, chimera, Christ, Conception, Elizabeth, Embryo, Feminist, fertility, Gender, God, Grabriel, heresy, inter-sectional feminist, Jesus, Jesus Christ, John the Baptist, Life-at-conception, misogyny, Privacy, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, Rape, rape culture, Religion, sexism, Twins, Virgin Mary, Women, Zechariah, Zygote

The gospel of Luke begins with two announcements. First in a conversation with an old priest named Zechariah, and then in a meeting with Zechariah’s cousin, Mary, the angel Gabriel declares that there will be another baby born, to change the fate of the world.

The first annunciation (Luke 1:5-20) is set up as a foil for the second (1:26-38). Zechariah and Mary each ask the angel how could they, given their strange circumstances, parent a child? But whereas Zechariah is struck voiceless because of his doubts, Mary’s voice only grows stronger.

“Behold,” she tells the angel, when it has been explained to her that no word from God will ever fail. “Behold,” meaning, look at me. Then she says: “I am the handmaid of the Lord.”

Taken out of context, this might be read as a declaration of passivity. However, just a few verses before, Gabriel responds to Zechariah’s skepticism with a similar introduction: “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you.”

Serving God was given, not as reason for dismissal, but as the source of the angel’s authority. Anyone who disbelieved God’s servant was kindly invited to shut his mouth for the next nine months or so.

After Mary speaks, it is the angel, and not the woman, who has no more to say. He stays just long enough to hear her final answer: “Be it done unto me according to your word.”

So active and forceful is her consent – practically a command – the annunciation is painted as a sort of proposal in most biblical interpretations. But Mary assumes a question that was never asked. By her yes, she still asserts that she has the right to say no.

Most traditions on the matter hold that without her permission, God would never have made her pregnant. The narrative has been used in theological circles as a parallel for sexual consent. However, Mary wasn’t consenting to sex. She was consenting to pregnancy. And Jesus, though not incarnate, was fully-formed. Gabriel knew his name and gender and what his destiny would be. Mary accepted, regardless, in a way that made it clear – she didn’t have to do this.

Jesus was a choice that she was making.

Though no story was recorded, it is evident that Zechariah’s wife, Elizabeth, experienced some form of annunciation as well. She knew her son’s name was John, though her husband couldn’t tell her so, and shouted as soon as she saw her cousin again that Mary was the mother of her Lord. We aren’t privy to the way that Elizabeth spoke with God. Elizabeth ensconced herself in solitude for the first five months of her pregnancy, so perhaps this missing story speaks to how highly she valued her privacy. But she issued a statement during this time that rings loud and strong across the ages: the Lord had done as she requested. John was a choice made, too.

Neither lady seems to have been particularly phased by the knowledge that whole nations and peoples would be shaped by their decisions. Of course, as they were women, this knowledge was nothing new.

Women are socially prepared, in great and subtle ways, to foster the life of the species. Identified females at every age are discouraged from partaking in activities, diets, and habits considered unhealthy in any given culture. Women must be clean and cautious, discriminating in our mating and producing the right number of offspring.

Conversations concerning family planning invariably fall under the umbrella of women’s issues – from secular spheres where chemical birth control has never been developed with men in mind, to the natural family planning promoted by most Christian groups, wherein the prescribed ingredient is a wife’s unerring knowledge of her own menstrual cycle.

Worldwide, fertility rates have always been determined according to the number of children per woman born. We are reminded again and again that our bodies represent the greater public good. Those like Elizabeth, who can’t or won’t have children, have long borne the shame of society’s disappointment. So, too, the teenaged mothers, poor and unmarried, like Mary.

Popes and presidents, scientists and prophets all have voiced their strong, conflicting opinions on the way that female bodies should further human aims. The fate of the world’s population is given as ours to decide. John Paul II preached that, as the family goes, so goes the nation, and so goes the whole world in which we live. This follows his appeal for married couples to see children as “God’s special gift to them and to society.” He suggests, but doesn’t say it: As goes a woman, so goes her family.

It adds up to a political reality wherein no choice regarding pregnancy is ever isolated from societal concern. This has always been the reality. Those who become pregnant are required, rather than called, to serve the highest good – independent of which choice is made – by the very act of choosing.

Mary certainly knew her pregnancy had a political context. The Jewish people were an oppressed minority within the Roman Empire, and the long-discussed Messiah was expected to flip that paradigm. On her visit to Elizabeth after speaking with the angel, Mary sings that the Lord has “brought down rulers from their thrones but lifted up the humble.” God was doing a great thing for her in making her a part of his revolution. Her choice is a power that she is proud to wield – not in a general pro-life way, but specifically for the advancement of Israel’s people. Mary demanded, before Gabriel knew her answer, that the angel recognize her as someone God trusted to make such great decisions.

To call abortion selfish is to ignore the sociological landscape that demands women choose, in every moment of living, the highest manifest good of our communities. Fleeing abusers, hunger, political unrest, unemployment, or the violence of neighborhoods guarded with suspicion by established authorities – the choice of abortion has very often been a choice in pursuit of conditions that are safer and more conducive to life. We have it on biblical authority that pregnancy is not always a blessing. Cursed be the breasts that suck and the wombs that bear in days of tribulation. Luke said so a few times, and Matthew said so once.

Those who have small children, and who plan to have children in future, acutely know that a risk to their own lives is a risk to others’, too. You may argue that there are very few circumstances where abortion can be seen as a defense of a pregnant person’s life. You would be wrong. Pregnancy and childbirth always include the risk of death. Hence people hurry to hospitals at the first signs of labor, preferring that medical professionals with surgical equipment actively supervise delivery. Throughout a pregnancy, medical check-ins are normal and encouraged. Rising and falling blood pressure throughout gestation can cause deadly clots, strokes, and heart-attacks. Hormone-related psychosis and depression, and other conditions which during pregnancy could not be treated with prescription pills, have even taken their share of lives via suicide. Everyone who ever died giving birth or under the cesarean knife would have lived had they instead chosen a safe, legal abortion during the typical first trimester. There is no knowing in advance who will die; the risk is there for every pregnant person.

Life is not a miracle, in the word’s most common sense. It’s not something that just happens, as though by magic – nor is it, as children may be told, born by stork through open windows. The creation of a human being requires the physical suffering of another person. Symptoms of a typical pregnancy would certainly be termed illness – and often severe illness – if experienced by any category other than the pregnant. Nine months is a long time to be so incapacitated, but many of these symptoms, such as tooth decay, have permanent effects. Childbirth and the major abdominal surgery known as cesarean sections are, of course, objectively damaging in the best of circumstances and require many weeks and months of medical recovery. Very often the person bringing life into the world sustains serious injuries rarely acknowledged, affecting areas of the body considered unfit for public discussion. Tissue damage may result in enduring painful intercourse, or incontinence. Permanent pelvic fractures are all too common.

It is sensible to presume that, even if no laws enforced it, the vast majority of abortions would continue to occur within the first trimester. A person who endures five or six months of pregnancy clearly intends to have a baby. Late-term abortions are overwhelmingly the result of dire health concerns, and not what any compassionate person would call “elective.”

The Catholic Church, easily the most prolific and influential pro-life organization globally, enshrines a much more stringent definition of non-elective abortion. Even when the termination of pregnancy will most certainly save the life of the person who is pregnant, and when the life of the unborn otherwise will certainly not be long, no abortion is moral that intends the death it causes. For example, in the case of ectopic pregnancies, an embryo found developing in a place other than a uterus may only be terminated indirectly, by, say, the removal of a lady’s fallopian tube.

Following what is characteristically Catholic logic, it can be argued that the intent of an action is as important as the impact of the action. But following what is characteristically Catholic prejudice, intent is treated as more important than impact when the subject is abortion. Further, and uniquely here, intent is treated as external, rather than private – visible to the Church and open to public evaluation.

As a Catholic, you are taught in other contexts that a person’s heart and mind are private spheres, and that this privacy is sacred. Not even angels can read minds. It can’t be assumed that the intention of abortion is to kill a zygote or embryo anymore than it can be assumed that the intention of a fallopian tube’s removal is not to kill a zygote or an embryo. Excepting such specific, individual cases where, say, a pregnant woman appeals for advice to her parish priest, then – the logic that is being used to tell us that it’s wrong to have an abortion, can’t be used to tell us that it’s wrong to have an abortion.

By a similar prejudice, the Church’s reasoning regarding self-defense is never applied to pregnancy. However, abortion removes the risk of death from one person at the expense of another. Because pregnancy cannot be ended with less than lethal force, lethal force is proportionate to threat. On these grounds, abortion should be considered valid self-defense.

You may balk at categorizing a helpless embryo the same as a willful assailant. This, too, is bias. According to the Church, we have no right to distinguish the value of lives based on guilt or innocence. Regardless of what crimes a person has committed, Catholic teaching holds that human being as incalculably precious and worthy of life. A child-soldier, blameless and vulnerable, is to be shown the same mercy as the commanding warlord when either are removed from battle and posing no active threat.

While in battle, the Church’s longstanding support for the concept of Just War argues that (arbitrarily contrary to what we’d argue with abortion) it is permissible to organize and intend the use of lethal force. A pregnant woman is different from a soldier only in that she is neither following orders, nor recognized, by the Church, as an authority over the territory of her body.

Interestingly, though the Church does specifically proclaim bodily integrity to be a value worth the outlaw of slavery, torture, and medical experimentation enacted voyeuristically, we have never been clear that a violation of bodily autonomy, even including rape, justifies defensive homicide. It was, however, once considered acceptable to kill yourself in the event that you were a virgin girl on the verge of being raped. And if you died while “defending your virtue”, you might just earn your sainthood.

There is something to the Church more precious than a life.

Abortion is a special crime not because of death – for all life is to be equally valued, and every child born requires the risk of another. What rankles so throughout the Church is the fact, the known fact, that a pregnant person made a choice about it.

If it were known to all that the Virgin Mary was pro-choice, would we take her experience into consideration? Or would we dismiss her? Would we hate her? Would we call her an enemy of life? Would we, solemn and troubled, ponder the idea, that mother though she was, and Mother though we call her, she was able to hold her head high and consider, just a minute, a world where we didn’t belong?

Does that thought bring us too near for comfort to the brink of non-existence? Can we feel the power slipping from us if we place it in her hands? Does it make us feel better to imagine that she had no choice, that she was God’s servant in the sense that she couldn’t say no?

Or maybe we’ll just compartmentalize, again, to save ourselves from considering abortion in one vein with the rest of our theology. The Annunciation will have nothing to do with questions of life or death. The main difference, we’ll conclude, is that – regardless of whether God was obliged to respect her wishes – a hypothetical no from Mary wouldn’t have physically killed Jesus.

According to the Vatican, life begins, case-closed, at the exact point where a sperm and egg cell meet. The angel says, you will conceive – Jesus wasn’t there, yet. Of course, conception as the starting point makes it theologically difficult to determine when Christ’s life did begin. There was no sperm involved. Unless it was God-sperm spontaneously generated. Maybe zygote-Jesus was entirely concocted from divine genesis, or one of Mary’s egg-cells divinely mutated. The point is, we have no canon idea when or of what Christ was made.

So life-at-conception isn’t inclusive of Jesus.

Nor is he the only one left out. Identical twins, springing from a single zygote, would have to be considered half-people if personhood could not begin after conception. Chimeras, splicing from multiple zygotes into one, contain multiple living strands of DNA. Such people can sometimes be identified by two differently-colored eyes. If both zygotes are people, and neither one dies, a chimera is a couple.

Great though it would be to watch the Vatican back-dooring acceptance of “them/they’re” pronouns and polygamia, the prospect of forcing a several-soul identity onto a child born chimera should remove from us such arrogance as would assert we know no mystery regarding life’s beginning.

What we have learned through science is that, including those zygotes who fail to implant, three-quarters of all conceived are lost naturally before they are ever born. That the Church does not condemn unprotected sex as reckless endangerment, but rather endorses it between married persons, is a valuation unexamined. It states that an infant is worth the sacrifice of every life lost in utero. In the Church’s eyes, the born child is worth more – by far – than any developing embryo.

Humility could spare us heresy and bless us with compassion, when, without it, our quest for righteousness entitles us to tramp beyond the veil of a breathing human’s flesh. Is there no reason, after all, that God saw fit to bury the sphere of life within us? Are the insides of our bodies not private, and sacred, just like the insides of our minds?

Mystery has its job to do. It stands as shield between us and a knowledge too profound. Protecting us from heartbreak in the wake of zygotes gone. Blowing away our labels before we stick them to each other, and lifting from our backs the weight of explanation. Some things don’t fit neatly into boxes. The straightest path has always been to accept that we’ve been confounded.

Help Me Talk About Rape

11 Monday Sep 2017

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

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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.

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.

Who Needs You

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by shieldingc in Pro-Choice Shorts

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Abortion, abstinence, abusive partner, Analogy, Domestic Abuse, Parody, Pregnancy, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, Rape, satire, sex, unwanted pregnancy

Nicole’s new relationship has her sister concerned, but no one else seems to want to get involved.

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To read this story and 20 more, look for Consider An Abortion by Shielding C – on sale now for $2.99 on Amazon!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0189C4S7Q?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

When There Ain’t No Holla Back

16 Monday Mar 2015

Posted by shieldingc in General, My Incessant Bitching, Stories Women Never Tell

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Are you in love Mr. Petrov, Are you in love Mr. President?, Claire Underwood, First Lady, Frank Underwood, He’s pimping you out, House of Cards, little pickle, Netflix, Petrov, President, Rape, rapist, Season Three: Episode Three, seduction, Sexual assault, Street Assault, Street Harassment, Viral Video, whore, You’re a whore Mrs. Underwood

Spoiler Alert – I’m talking about House of Cards, Season Three.

The dinner was a history-in-the-making. The first lady sat beside Russian president Petrov and asked him sweetly, as though oblivious of the whole rest of the crowded table,

“Are you in love, Mr. President?”

P-dawg let some time and banter pass before he answered her, in lines that make him one of the best bad buys I’ve ever seen on T.V. He’d heard this line before, he said – ‘are you in love’ – because Claire had said the same thing to one of his ambassadors. Was this the role of the First Lady, then? Her husband could speak of power, and leave the seduction to her? “There is a word for that – what is it? Oh – pimping. He’s pimping you out.”

At the center of the laughing, wine-clinking table, where the business of the world’s richest and most powerful has come to rest, Petrov’s first act of aggression is directed in no uncertain terms against America’s First Lady. You’re a whore, Mrs. Underwood. Your husband brought you to get fucked.

Claire is flustered – you see it – yet still manages to return volley with her own ladylike toast to Petrov’s “little pickle.” We laugh and cheer and might expect for that to be the end of the evening’s personal battles – round one, point Claire. After all, Petrov already dropped the biggest psych bomb in his arsenal, didn’t he, in pointing right out the power imbalance between Claire and her husband? There’s no way Petrov can get back at Claire after that public jab at his cock size.

Except for – oh yeahh – actual sexual assault.

Claire is caught off-guard when Petrov asks her to dance. If there’s a diplomatic way of saying, “No,” she doesn’t think it up in time. So they clasp hands and twine and untwine bodies out in front of everyone. And when the song’s almost over, Petrov grabs the First Lady and forces her against him, his jeering kiss both a personal and a broadcast humiliation.

Petrov was telling the truth about the Underwoods’ one-sided relationship. The American President brought his wife to dance the dance of seduction in the interests of others, and Petrov has every political latitude to claim that forfeit. No one will avenge her, or even speak of it in public. America’s First Lady – hey. It came with the territory.

* * *

It wasn’t until I was talking to a friend about Season Three of House of Cards (a male friend) that I realized how subtle or submerged was the narrative of this particular power-play.

“Didn’t the “little pickle” line come after the kiss, though?”

“No,” I said, surprised. “The kiss was retaliation for the line about the little pickle. It happened after.”

My friend – we’ll call him Shebecca, because. – shrugged, taking my word for it, and moved on. Days later, we’d gotten into a heated discussion about a viral video that features a lovely actress walking alone through NYC. She recorded over 100 catcalls in ten hours on her jaunt.

“Some of them were definitely creepy,” Shebecca argued. “Like, a few of them who followed her. But some of them were just guys saying, ‘Hi, you’re beautiful.’ The thing she never acknowledges in the video is the fact that, well, she’s hot. I mean, some of those guys might have wanted to get to know her. If they don’t say anything, they don’t give themselves that chance.”

“They don’t really have a chance when they holler at her on the street, either. I mean, if you expect me to talk to you, at least have something interesting to say. Otherwise you’re basically expecting me to start the conversation. If it was in a store we might be going for the same cereal or something and a conversation starts that way.”

“You’re talking about effectiveness now. The video is about ethics. They act like its wrong for a guy just to say ‘hi.’”

“I wouldn’t hold it against a guy I didn’t know if he said ‘hi’ to me on the street. But I can see why it’s on the video. Cause when you look at it from her perspective, it’s stressful. She doesn’t know which of those guys is going to follow her and which isn’t. If it wasn’t out on the street, there might be a different story.”

“Saying ‘hi’ doesn’t make you more likely to follow someone than not saying ‘hi’. It’s not like you go from saying ‘hi’ to raping someone. And it’s not like you have to respond – you can just keep walking like she did with no negative repercussions.”

“There are repercussions, though. Cause I have to worry about, if a guy says ‘hi’ and I keep walking, maybe he’ll get offended. It’s rejection. Like the guys who told her, ‘You should say thank-you when someone gives you a compliment’ – obviously they expected her to respond, and were offended that she didn’t.”

“It’s not about what guys expect. You can just keep walking – you don’t owe it to the guy to be polite. Saying ‘hi’ to someone you don’t know is like buying a lottery ticket. You know she probably won’t respond, but it’s a chance you have to give yourself.”

“But it’s a lottery ticket that causes other people stress. If you know that it’s hurting someone, then it is wrong. They say ‘hi’, you keep walking. Then they call you a bitch, and things start to escalate. Maybe it leads to me getting followed.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“You don’t believe there’s actually a reason to get stressed out?”

“I don’t believe it’s stressful.”

“What?” That’s the part he doesn’t believe? …The part where I say what my feelings are? “How do you not believe that?”

I never quite realized before that moment the great gulf that exists between women’s and men’s understanding of the hows and whys of sexual assault. Because men and women are both raped, by men and by women, and for all we know, in equal numbers. Rape doesn’t happen on the streets most of the time – it happens in bedrooms, between people who know each other, and often without the kicking-screaming-fight-to-the-death-obvious violence that is the most famous hallmark of that crime. It happens because one person says ‘no’, and another person pretends not to hear, or decides not to believe in the invisible feelings inside of other people. No gender has the monopoly on listening.

It’s an equal-opportunity horror behind closed doors. Out on the street, though, things aren’t equal. Famously underreported though rape is in general, street assaults involving strangers and potentially witnesses are the most likely to be recorded by law enforcement or medical professionals. When it comes to street assault, statistics depicting a rate of victimization among females many times higher than that of males are probably accurate.

Out in public, there’s a hierarchy. There are issues of status and socialization to account for when calculating our relative risk-levels. At the back of my mind when I turn a corner, there are studies, and stories, and interviews. Dr. Barbaree taps me on the shoulder and reports, “Very often the rapists say that the trigger for the rape was when a woman made them angry, usually by rebuffing a sexual overture.” Dr. Ahuja agrees, “For the power-assertive rapist or the anger-retaliation rapist, being angry at a woman or being insulted (or perceiving an insult) by a woman would be a significant trigger.”

I thought that narrative was something we all understood. But my good friend Shebecca, despite being one of the most intelligent, caring and empathetic people I’ve ever met, does not know how to see it. And this, to me, is evidence that most men don’t know how to see it, even though it may be playing out in front of them, on the street or on Netflix, or anywhere that men and women gather.

Like at the party I went to, not too long ago, where someone I knew turned out to be a rapist.

He wore a suit. He was the only one there who did, and he walked through the door with a group of guys who must have been his friends. I didn’t know him all that well – we’d worked together once, and gotten along. He called my name grandly across the floor, and I gave him a hug, asked him how he’d been. He asked me if I’d like to dance, and I said sure. But before we’d gotten to the dance floor, he changed the subject, asking me if I’d like, instead of dancing, to give him head in another room.

I said no, and no again because he kept on asking until I regained enough of my composure to walk away. I don’t know what a guy might have made of that situation, but to me the danger was absolutely, crystal-clear. Mr. Head did not want head because of horniness. Mr. Head had gone to the trouble of collecting a group of friends, and wearing the only suit, and loudly greeting a young lady in a dress across the room, because he was feeling bad about himself, and wanted to feel better than somebody else. He wanted me to suck his dick, so he could show his friends how much better than everyone else he was.

I hit the dance-floor without saying anything about this to anyone. Hours later, I was heading up for a drink when I passed by Mr. Head again. He was standing in front of the group he’d brought with him, and he asked me the same question, loudly, in front of them. I laughed, patted him on the head like a dog while calling him an idiot, and walked away. Embarrassment was evident in the sudden quiet behind me.

It was twenty minutes later, as me and some friends sat chatting, that we heard a woman scream. The loser with the suit had gone with a young lady into a separate room, and tried to rape her. Several people heard the scream and rushed to intervene; Mr. Head wound up getting knocked out and crapping his pants (so much for feeling better than anyone).

To some, the attack was random. From my perspective, it had a story – one that follows a familiar and established pattern. Little pickle. Dance and kiss.

We’re Not Talking About Privilege Enough

15 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by shieldingc in General, My Incessant Bitching

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Arthur Chu, conversation, District 9, Laurie Penny, Nerd, Privilege, Rape, Scott Aaronson, STEM fields

Look – privilege!

Now that everybody’s good and riled up, let’s take a moment, by ourselves, to breathe and think.

Privilege!

Time out! – breathe, think, breathe.

PRIVILEGE!!!!!

You see? Nothing terrible can happen to you if you read the word. All the feels will wait patiently if you give yourself a second to collect them – no reason to go rushing into diatribes defining your place in the world here, no sir.

The reason I bring it up is because I think we’re not talking enough about it. No, seriously. This used to be a striking and powerful word. There used to be depth, and pain, and learning to it. Now, it’s bandied about as effortlessly as though it referred to staying up past one’s bedtime or getting extra time at recess – something nice and kind of paternal, accessible in the abstract.

It’s not surprising, I guess, when what we’re trying to discuss are institutionalized forces like racism, sexism, homophobia and the like. How do you talk about a system in a way that relates to the lived experience of actual people? This word, privilege, came about as an answer to that. The conversations that can happen because of this word are fundamentally personal, as they illustrate society-wide problems.

Are those the conversations you see happening around the word ‘privilege’? If not, my guess is that the word is being used too easily. It’s easy to talk about ‘your privilege’. It’s hard to talk about mine, about the ways that I benefit from systems that hurt others, and the ways that I am automatically part of the system, sometimes even while I struggle not to be. It’s hard to admit that, while I’m all totally for gay rights, my remarks about a bi-sexual pastor marrying a woman being like a hero (because he openly acknowledges gay fantasies as normal) reflect the privilege that I have in not having to take seriously the anti-gay voices that will point to him and say, ‘You see! Even if you’re gay, you don’t have to be!”

It hurts to talk about the ways we have benefited from and been useless in the face of and actively contributed to the systemic oppression of other people. It also hurts to talk about the ways the system works against us – the ways that we personally are vulnerable. None of it feels particularly heroic or brave – that useless, gross feeling is just about the hallmark of a genuine change for the better, as Arthur Chu eloquently points out. “As reviewers at the time pointed out, the important thing District 9 focused on is that being a human in a world where aliens are oppressed is actually pretty awesome. Giving that up wouldn’t be an act of liberation, it would be painful and terrifying and humiliating.” http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/24/who-died-and-made-you-khaleesi-privilege-white-saviors-and-the-elusive-male-feminist-who-doesn-t-suck.html

Chu stresses the importance of being willing to let others take the spotlight from us – having the capacity to fully listen when others open up to us, to acknowledge what they’ve experienced and sit with that knowledge as long as necessary for it to fully sink in, how different and alike this person may be from you.

The conversation in recent weeks between MIT professor Scott Aaronson and Laurie Penny as regards male nerds and privilege is a really good illustration for just how difficult these kinds of conversations are to pull off. There were some astoundingly courageous people involved, allowing themselves breathtaking levels of vulnerability and earnestness, and I believe the public conversation moved as a result. Still, there were snags that definitely show a wooden use of the word, a newness and tendency to fumble with it.

Initially what sparked it all was a comment on a blog post by a self-identified female nerd, who describes the awful reality of having been raped by a similarly-bookish and awkward male nerd. She spoke of the frustration of implications that male nerds lack male privilege. Ideally, this would be a good place for anyone reading the word ‘privilege’ to breathe, and think, and breathe again. Aaronson apparently did not, and his response was lacking an acknowledgement or direct empathy with the commenter’s experiences. What he wrote instead was a long refutation of male privilege, also in a very personal and vulnerable vein. He spoke of having grown up with a fear of being seen as a rapist or potential rapist for having a sex-drive directed at women, great enough that he contemplated suicide and asked a doctor to provide him with medicinal castration.

Writer Laurie Penny picks up the conversation from here in an article with the promising title, “Male Nerds Think They’re Victims Because They Have No Clue What Female Nerds Go Through.” http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120653/nerd-entitlement-lets-men-ignore-racism-and-sexism

Penny is more considerate of Aaronson’s feelings; she actively acknowledges his suffering, and describes her own feelings of awkwardness and inadequacy in kind. What is lacking from her article is what the title promises – an explanation of what it’s like to be a nerd with the added dimension of sexism thrown in. This is not something Penny describes on a personal level, and because of that, the conversation pretty much ends here – on a tit-for-tat expose of general adolescent angst suffering filled out with more general implications of a looming sexism machine. We don’t get a clear picture of what any individual female experiences differently from a male with similar attributes, and my sense is rather that Penny’s goal in speaking of her personal insecurities was not to illustrate anything systemic, but to return the conversation to the impersonal and academic. It’s as though Aaronson’s vulnerability were written off as a drunken TMI, and Penny responds, nicely, by admitting to her own awkwardness to even the emotional playing field.

Aaronson’s post could have been seen as dauntlessly progressive, were it not in response to an even-more-vulnerable comment that he actively avoids addressing. His TMI then can be seen in turn as attempting to level the playing field out of niceness and bring the crazy-personal back to the realm of the safely academic. It’s not by accident that he refers to the academically feminist articles he’d read in his youth. In a number of stable, gentle, graduated steps, the most sharply painful and courageous of the musings on privilege are sidestepped and in the end only faintly remembered.

I’m sure that privilege has more potential than that.

It’s going to take some practice. The word isn’t all that new, but we’ve been fumbling with it for a little while. Key to our success has to be what’s key to the success of our entire brilliant down-with-tyranny experiment in human history – the ability to speak honestly (and for ourselves), and to listen as deeply as human minds allow.

For my own personal take on male privilege in STEM fields, stay tuned for the next installment under Biography this week, where I will be outing myself as a victim of the patriarchy in another brazenly personal TMI ❤

TheModestBloggist

~ The opposite of a regret, is a story.

Tag Archives: Rape

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We’re Not Talking About Privilege Enough

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