I don’t care what your politics are, and I don’t care how you feel about Hillary Clinton. You need to know what you did to me personally.

From the Horse’s Mouth

He admitted to assaulting women. We have it on tape. Simply hearing the news talk about all of that aroused this same feeling I have right now – the desire to vomit, the shaking, the sweating, the sense that a strong enough wind might knock me right out of my own goddamn body and into the ether.

We have his ex-wife’s account, we have the legal wording that removes blame from him. Because when a man is powerful enough, he can get away with anything. When a man is powerful enough, his story is the one that carries.

Tangerine in a toupee, Wine Stains

I wish I had the fearlessness to use their names. As Dumbledore said, “fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.” But then again, neither of these men are the thing itself. It is not their stories I am concerned with, but the larger cultural narrative.

Symptoms

In our larger cultural narrative, we teach women not to walk alone at night rather than teach men not to prey on women. We talk about what a woman was wearing or what she was drinking. We teach women to be careful of how much they drink and to obsessively keep their alcohol within arms reach at all times. Who ever thinks to teach men not to drop poison in other peoples’ drinks? Who ever thinks to tell men that they don’t have a right to my body?

The wine stain tells the tangerine’s stories. The wine stain and those like him have shaped our collective unconscious by feeding the ever-ravenous appetite we have for content. The wine stain might pretend to support me and mine, might pretend to be telling stories about us. But his story lies with the tangerine’s. Bedrock of a cultural narrative where the wine stain and the tangerine and those like them are the subject, and the object is and has been me and my allies.

Flipping the Narrative

Like I might flip a table in anger, I deny what has been said about me. True or false, the story cannot be told by you. This is my story to tell. This is a story where I am the narrator and the subject.

Wine Stains and Tangerines are Objects

They are objects of fear, of terror, and of illness. But they are goddamnn objects. In my story, I vomit because of them, and if they showed up here in my pigstye of a room I would literally vomit on them.

If the mainstream culture finds my story, they’ll quickly turn it against me. If I vomited on the wine stain a year ago, I would be tried and found guilty in the court of public opinion regardless of why it had happened.

Even now, just try vomiting on the president of the United States. It’s not like this is a bodily function I have much control over, but can you imagine the headlines? I’d be a hero to some, a disgrace to others. Some would champion my cause, as if I’d had one aside from discharging bile that arises when I think about the more difficult parts of my story, the bile that arises when I think about the Honorable Tangerine, Rapist in Chief. Some would revile me because they are triggered when they see one of their own become an object in any way for any reason.

Illness

We all suffer, even if some of us don’t notice. The illness is revealed in the symptoms: those objects of tangerine and wine stain and so many other nameless unimportant people.

The wine stain is finally revealed, and we see how far and wide the damage has spread. You all know at least one person who said #metoo.

The sickness goes deep into the bones of our society, and I’ve long despaired of living to see it’s cure. It’s only in my most foolishly optimistic moments that I even kid myself that there is such a thing as a cure.

Impeach the Rapist in Chief

But it would solve nothing about our cultural problems. The second in command is the kind of man I was raised to admire, and therefore he would be harder to fire. He is a “godly man,” or so I’ve been told, but if I might be so bold, the godly man is the kind that I fear most of all. Godly men think they own me more than most. Think my purity is their goddamn business.

Godly men might be marginally less likely to rape me, but they are absolutely more likely to slut-shame me for any and all sexual experiences, consensual or otherwise.