Don’t forget about the mental illness we’ve induced in our people to ensure cheap oil prices 🙂
Never forget about PTSD. Never forget that as bad as it is we’ve willfully inflicted this upon our brave soldiers and sailors and pilots and the like, we’ve inflicted the illness at a much higher rate on those who’ve survived sexual assault.
You see, it’s been years. But I still can’t tell this story without my stomach roiling up to my mouth. I still can’t think about anything that happened that day without seeing a penis in my face again. I flinch to the left, to run from the phantom penis pressing itself towards the right side of my face.
They were gross and disgusting before. They induce flashbacks now.
I tried to you know. After it happened. I was in a beach town at the time, so once my numb body and lifeless mind were released onto the streets again, I started walking toward the sea. I wasn’t calling it rape yet, but I was calling it the end.
I didn’t make it to the sea.
And guess what? You would be too.
But not one that has ever benefited me. Anger is like the gun my family would have told me to pull on my attacker: sounds helpful, but is only ever turned against you.
I’m not a girl. But what do you see when you look at me? A girl.
I am not constrained by your narrative, have never been. I tried to fit it though. Tried hard and long and drove myself into the ground over it. I am not a good girl, but I tried to be. I am not a girl, but I’ve let you assume that in the hopes you’d simply let me be.
Gets good grades, is respectful, is quiet, reads her bible and goes to church on Sundays. She wears dresses and bows in her hair, and she’s pretty, but never slutty. She tries, but not too hard. She gives the boys no reason to harass her (but someone always finds a way anyway).
Is the one the boys harass of course. Because her skirt is too short and her makeup too thick. She’s tried too hard, or not enough. She’s loud and draws attention to herself. She enjoys the attention of course, and even worse, she enjoys the sex. She must be punished because otherwise she might topple the systems we’ve built to maintain our dominant narratives.
I’m not a good girl. I’m not a bad girl. I’m not a girl. I’m not a woman, and I’m sure as hell not a man. I am Gracetopher.
They’re used to being the center of their own narrative. They’re used to being given what they want. They’re used to being allowed to bully and harass the little girls all they want without consequences. It’s the little girls who are told not to react because the little boy is just looking for a reaction, it’s the little girls who are told to manage the way they respond to abuse. We don’t tell the boys to stop harassing. We never tell the men that what they’re doing is harassment. How could we? The narrative is stacked against us.
Well, then I’d be fighting everyone. Fighting the narrative that says this doesn’t happen to good girls. Fighting the women who have only found their own safety in shadows. Fighting the men who’s reputation is at stake. Fighting the organization who’s reputation is at stake. Fighting my own trauma and fear and boiling rage and urge to vomit.
To let the fight die. To simply die.
Rarely does a man make the conscious choice to sexually assault a woman. He simply doesn’t realize what the effect of his actions really is.
(Friendly Reminder: I’m telling this so that I don’t explode, NOT for anybody else)
I said no. Multiple times. I pulled my shorts back up and tried to leave. But I didn’t fight and scratch and kick though like I’d always imagined I would in such a situation, so was it really rape? I hadn’t tried hard enough to get away, and hey, I’m human, I enjoy sex. I even enjoyed a minute or two of the physical sensations that day, so obviously it couldn’t have been rape right?
It took me three months to tell anybody anything about that day. It took six months before I used the word rape.
I was supposed to wait until marriage you see. The only times it was semi-half-ok to have sex before marriage was this narrative of “we just got carried away.” Sometimes you do get a bit carried away when you’re a teenage kid with your first significant other, and if my first girlfriend had been my first girlfriend in fact and not just a girl I went on a few dates with and experimented with just enough to realize I was definitely super into girls (hello boobs wow amazing), then it would have only taken a week or two more before we’d gotten carried away.
The thing about “getting carried away,” is that it doesn’t allow for affirmative consent. I was raised to view all sex as evil unless holy matrimony had yoked me to some equal oxen or whatever biblical bullshit words you want to pull out of your ass about all this. I’d had sex with one person possessing a penis and one person possessing a set of tits, and in both cases I wanted it, but couldn’t allow myself to consciously decide because then I would be consciously sinning.
Then when Mr. Boogeyman shows up, when I say no and try to get away, I can’t help but compare it to those other times. Maybe I did want it, I just couldn’t say it because I didn’t want to be a bad girl. Maybe I was a bad girl, after all, would a good girl have enjoyed it?
Wrong question. Try again. The real question here is, why didn’t we believe the women who came forward. The follow-up question is, how could we expect more women to come forward after they saw what happened to their fellow survivors?
I’ve acted all my life as if I do, but I don’t. So don’t read this and think that it is your right to know any of this. Read this and know that these are the stories that I tell so that I don’t explode. Read this and know that there is a good goddamn reason why I have kept my mouth shut for so long, just as there is a good goddamn reason why the women who have been coming forward in recent months were not believed before now.
Read this and know that this is my story, not his. Read this and know that it is my story, not yours.
Yes, I’m aware that it’s not July 4. August 15, 2017 happens to be the 70th anniversary of the day a different country broke away as politically independent of England: India.
Few things inspire more passion, more violence, than the struggle for freedom. Political independence always requires a fight of some kind, but on August 14th and 15th, 1947 the world learned that the fight doesn’t require violence. While the independence movement in India and Pakistan was not entirely bloodless, ultimately England agreed to let them go peacefully. This peaceful independence was unique and influential, and owes much to Gandhi and his philosophy of Satyagraha.
People often use words like “civil disobedience” or “nonviolence” to describe Gandhi’s approach, but Gandhi himself preferred the term satyagraha. This term was coined specifically for India’s independence movement, and as Gandhi explained, “truth (satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha, that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence.” In crafting as well as interpreting the word, Gandhi took care to keep force central to satyagraha and his nonviolent approach.
Many interpreted nonviolence as weakness, but the satyagraha Gandhi practiced and preached not only requires but also grants great force. After all, the practitioners of satyagraha (called satyagrahi) were faced with misunderstandings, anger, and hatred from within and without, which are circumstances that make holding firmly to truth and love very difficult. Ultimately however the force each individual put into the movement created a collective force that proved strong enough to overthrow imperialism.
Using satyagraha to overthrow a government drastically changes the word overthrow because it usually implies violence. With satyagraha however, the aim is not to defeat through physical force, but rather through voluntary conversion; as the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, “in the end, there is neither defeat nor victory but rather a new harmony.” The harmony that Gandhi sought for his country is made obvious by the fact that he didn’t focus simply on the single issue of political independence from Britain but also worked for equal rights for all within Indian society.
Even as we celebrate India and Pakistan’s independence and the crumbling of imperialism, we still deal with the reverberations of our ancestors’ actions.
Bigotry and hatred are all around us. A simple call to nonviolence is inadequate, but I for one am going to study further Gandhi’s concept of Satyagraha. A simplified version of Gandhi’s nonviolent approach can and has been used to silence marginalized people, but anybody who espouses Satyagraha needs to know that this kind of nonviolence comes from an honest examination of what the truth truly is.
One of the more common Gandhi quotes is a call to “be the change you wish to see in the world,” and so I am starting with myself. Just like every one of you reading this, I have unconscious biases to unlearn, and I have listening to do. Because I want to hold firmly to the truth; I want to help create that new harmony where a greater truth and justice is understood by society at large.
Gracetopher Kirk 