Iconic “romantic” image: of a WWII vet sexually assaulting a stranger by kissing them through observable physical resistance (check the hand) and atmosphere of non-consent. In 2005, during an interview at the Library of Congress Greta Friedman stated of this photo of her, “it wasn’t my choice to be kissed. The guy just came over and kissed or grabbed.”
ALL THE TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR LITERALLY EVERYTHING
Note: this piece of writing has seen many iterations and formats. If parts of this work seem vaguely familiar it could be that you read what I first wrote about coming to terms with rape culture and my complicity in it on medium in 2014 which expanded into multiple posts, now condensed again. There were a lot more swears and things like “Holy shit I’m a rapist!?! HOLY SHIT WHAT THE FUCK WE’RE ALL FUCKING RAPISTS!?” in my original piece, which was basically a self-own callout rant to the wider communities I was a part of at the time (tech, arts, entertainment).
That work over the years became a living personal document that I occasionally update as an amalgamation of honoring the original version, and adjusting bits/trimming fat as I evolve in my dismantling of rape culture in my life. I’ve revisited most recently since the Neil Gaiman allegations surfaced and kicked all this up for me again.
Looking over our emails and seeing similarities across all of our experiences has shown me I wasn’t friends with this man in spite of our first meeting including the oopsie sexual assault of someone fumbling to do better. I attached because of it and no longer believe in the mistake he’d made that interaction out to be, but rather see it now as the intentional pattern of manipulative behavior it clearly is.
Similarly, his support of this writing back then distinctly manufactured a specific kind of trust between us early in our relationship that he had not rightfully earned. That trust contributed greatly to the self gaslighting required to maintain contact with him over such a long span of time despite how frustrating it was and how shitty being connected with him often caused me to feel.
To say I am humiliated and horrified doesn’t begin to cover it. To say I’m fucking livid is an understatement. I was writing about recognizing the red alert warning in feeling butterflies and walking away from a whole entire life, while this backwards fuck disingenuously occupied space in my nervous system, grandfathered into a position in my life that was reserved for what accountable men are supposed to feel like.
I’m only just beginning to unravel how devastating the impact being connected to that guy has had on my mental health and development away from the rape culture he claimed to condemn, and I am gutted to be aware of even just a glimpse of what harm he’s done to all the people he’s deceived while masquerading as a leader in this fight.
Chapter 1: Revelations
Though I was rightfully angry, hurt, and directly confrontational, 16 year old me emphatically defended that guy who fondled me in my sleep. Insisting he was not a rapist at the time, it took me years, almost ten in fact, to finally write about the possibility that it could have been.
That person was one of those unicorn men, one of those utterly precious few, who knew what he did was rape, and named it, and regretted it, and sought help for it immediately. He was a person that wanted nothing more than to be held accountable and seek his own recovery for what he did.
The circumstances for reparation couldn’t have been much better, and yet, I argued. He parents argued. His therapist argued. We all argued. A lot.
But he was right, and even having been victimized by him, in one of the most ideal perpetrator accountability situations possible, literally in the idealized situation so many #metoo tweeters claim is is they want, as a teen I chose rape culture. Because I developed in that rape culture, it was difficult for me to transcend to hold someone accountable for habitually violating my sexual trust, and it took a long time for it to happen.
Over the course of my life as I’ve tumbled through the victim perpetrator cycle of abuse culture, even when I knew immediately that rape was what had happened to me, which again I’ll mention was rarely the case, it seemed nearly impossible to overcome my internalized misogyny to hold someone accountable for taking advantage; Because, and you may be sensing a theme here, I developed in a rape culture, and that rape culture is also misogynist as fuck.
I continually tried to negotiate and hang on to people who had raped me well into my 30’s as I slowly realized how fucked up my sex life was. They continued to choose rape culture, until, eventually, layer after excruciating layer, sleeper cell after sleeper cell, I removed them one by one from my life.
Advocating for myself and getting safer helped. But the real key for me, it turned out, was the moment on some random Tuesday that I realized; wait a second — if what I had been experiencing all this time was actually rape, then a lot of the sex I was initiating with others was likely rape, too.
Chapter 2 – Coming to Terms
“Being considered ‘crazy’ by those who are still victims of cultural conditioning is a compliment.” — Jason Hairston
Barbra Kay, a Canadian journalist, cites that “Rape culture” is overblown because it’s only a tiny percent of the population that rapes, so saying we live in a culture of rape is misleading. RAINN says “Rape Culture” is not a considerable cultural problem, but they are only focusing on violent first degree kinds of rape. And this kind of stuff is really kinda starting to piss me off.
Contrary to our enduring, vilifying approach to “rapists”, more and more people are coming to understand, at least in theory, that rape is not just an easily recognizable crime that select evil people commit.
Rather, rape is a culturally lauded system of behavior that is connected to toxic patriarchal masculinity (kiss the unconscious princess), entitlement (“no” means keep pestering), heteronormative sexism (“there are only two genders and only one of them gets raped”), misogyny (hysterical and/or underhanded women “cry” rape), the prevailing misuse of substances and alcohol, as well as racism (“white women get protections women of color do not”), and virtually any societal oppression you can fucking think of, if you do think about it, which I have. A lot.
As a ‘woman’ I’d been groomed by this society my entire existence to be beguiling, and found my worth unconsciously linked to my desirability since before adolescence. The resulting behavioral patterns were stark and damning.
I’ve melted down and cried and caused a scene when I’ve been rejected sexually, feeling desperate and victimized at the time and realized in hindsight I’d coerced them. I’ve pressured men who clearly didn’t want to sleep with me into sex and thought it was funny. I was the first naked one at parties usually, had little concept of boundaries, and spent nearly 12 years in a significant relationship with a person I eventually came to understand I had raped.
He was visiting my city, as a friend, when I jumped him from out of nowhere while we were both shitfaced drunk in my house. While there was tension and attraction, we’d discussed nothing of embarking on a sexual relationship in our multi-year platonic friendship. I had given him no time to respond or consider what was happening, let alone consent; which he wasn’t capable of doing anyway, a circumstance of which at the time I had not thought about and did not particularly care.
Turned out, I found the next morning, I was his first – the concept of which at that point in my life meant to me that I had a life-partner level of responsibility toward him now. I embraced this, calling myself a ‘virgin eater’ for years afterward. Also; Oops!
Do you, dear reader, have any fucking idea how many times I told that story to our gigantic group of friends, or to people we’d just met, or to strangers on the internet? Told that story to people who applauded as they watched him get on his knee on New Years Eve five years later (circumventing my established boundaries, what a theme!) to propose to me?
It was one of my favorite stories for a long time. That story always got laughs. I like getting laughs. Know how many times anyone pointed out that what I was describing was rape?
Zero.
That marriage, by the way, didn’t work out.
In each of our own ways we were all participants. The victim perpetrator cycle is not always as clear-cut as agreeing to something together and being overwhelmed or taken advantage of anyway, and it’s not always easy to see the forest for the trees straight up. Even such basic “quirky” things as having bad boundaries (swigging from peoples drinks, dragging from others cigarettes) I ultimately found is part of this matrix. I learned as a child that someone reneging their personal boundaries was how people proved to me they really “loved” me. How do you think that showed up in my sex life later?
We often straight up mimic, romanticize, and identify with the rapey shit we’ve learned and experienced, finding ways to feel powerful and make what happened to us enjoyable. I did that for much too long myself, particularly as a young rageful 90’s/00’s girl steeped in misogyny who had elected to fight the fire of patriarchy with more “one of the guys” patriarchal fire.
Like many my past is checkered and scarred, especially the years I was in active substance abuse, which is an element of this cycle that deserves more attention that it receives if anything due to how much rape often happens when you hang around people motivated to supply you with them. Most of my sex life was fueled by inebriation, and I shudder to consider what previous partners of mine may have eventually come to think of situations I thought at the time were us mutually agreeing to get stoned and fuck.
One of the most harmful misconceptions about rape culture in my view is that it doesn’t make any “sense” and for me, substances helped me ignore how much sense it actually does make. It’s my responsibility to understand how to honor a complicated and imperfect sexuality that formed through a culture of rape in ways that encourage my development and limit harm to anyone else. Addressing the origins of addiction was a crucial step in recognizing that.
Even when being textbook raped by former lovers despite my clear, directly stated boundaries (If you’ve been violated by Clayton Hibbert, David Cohen, Eric Rachner; it’s a pattern, and you’re not alone.) confiding in others about it was ineffectual. Very few even tried standing on business, and ultimately I saw no authentic justice including from our shared (formerly- fuck you guys) “sex positive” community. Despite telling my friends, their friends, coworkers, collaborators, literal fucking bosses, despite sometimes staging entire interventions for the people in my life who were serially raping me, holding this abuse accountable in “community” has been an absolute fucking nightmare as both a victim and a perpetrator seeking support, and that is a core reason why I limit participation in them at this point in my life.
None of these things are ok, the spectrum of damage and shame the cycle of rape culture perpetuates is immense, and the only person who truly owes you the grace and efforts to forgive you for enacting that harm is yourself.
In my opinion, no matter your level of conceptual awareness or how openly you might bark about everyone else, if YOU are not pushing against the wave by actively, somatically, intentionally illuminating and transmuting the darkness that is rape within your own life, you are wallowing in rape culture and continuing to pile it onto others.
The absolute basic foundation of authentically addressing rape culture is to stop the fucking rape that you perpetuate in your own back yard, in your own bed, in your own family, in your own mind, toward others, and toward yourself. Not passing the buck to Russell Brand or whatever Predator of The Month happens to be in the news cycles some week. Not hiding behind the John Drapers in your circle everyone keeps around in part to point at and say “at least I’m not that fuckin’ guy”.
I suggest: It’s not complicated. It’s just fucking uncomfortable.
It’s slamming on the breaks of the runaway train and straining for your fucking life while being burned by the sparks and suffering the consequences, it’s standing up and accepting what a fucking hypocrite you’ve been and doing something tangible about it, and it’s scraping your knees up scrambling to lean back into that lever when you’ve been thrown off by this rape-addicted mob of a society that just wants you to stop yucking their yum.
The process is messy, fraught, and nonlinear. Yet, there is also no acceptable settling into the in-between. It’s in the supposed “grey” areas where the coals feeding the beast are loaded. “It’s complicated” is where abuse continues to thrive.
Chapter 3: Origins
People who have developed with a clear and complete, respectful value of consent are the rarity of my experience, not the norm, and those people have usually had to work very, very hard at unlearning what is considered normal. Rape is all over Hollywood, all over our media and cultural representations, most of us not even registering what it is when we see it. Rape is represented in our success stories, religion, in our business practices, in how our ancestors founded this country (I’m a settler of occupied Turtle Island), in how our economy functions.
We think rape is sexy and fun, we think rape is a mating dance, we think rape is courtship and romance. We think the rush we get is passion, we think it’s the fire burning, the indication of a mutual spark, while so often not even having the awareness or connective skills to perceive mutuality, or what our own signals might actually be saying to us.
And all of us, regardless of gender, internalize and mimic these lessons to one degree or another, even if it’s simply turning a blind eye to the fucked up shit the people around us have normalized. Or in my case, actively encouraged and perpetuated.
That rush whisking me into bed with someone was my red alert alarm. When I’ve dismissed this or rationalized it and continued toward someone who ignited me in this way, I was proven right again evnetually. It’s the same rush I would see my parents having drunken, mortifying sex. It was the same rush I got as a child while I was violated while I pretended to sleep. The same rush I got playing doctor with my peers. The same rush I got when my unicorn friend re-enacted that abuse in my teens and many, many other times in my life..
That rush is not my ‘holy shit I am turned on and want this!’ response. It is the recognition and reanimation of intense and devastating trauma. “Knowing” this has helped me tremendously, but it is a trap of which I am still vulnerable, both in romanticizing the ways I’ve been victimized and recognizing that I have to be careful not to take advantage of anyone who gets swept up. Which is much easier without power, clout, a following, or a performance career, turns out.
And, again in my experience, not only do recovering white feminist people like me, who adopted toxic models of masculinity in their rejection of oppressive feminine roles (I was the worst of the worst of the ‘one of the guys’ kind of girls) also fall into the traps of a toxic and dominating rape culture, many so-called progressive men seem to think of gracefully and passively tolerating being raped and “letting others lead” is what puts them in touch with their so-called feminine side.
Fuuuuck this, y’all.
Chapter 4: What’s in a Word
Rape culture is a “phrase used to describe a culture in which rape is pervasive and normalized due to societal attitudes about gender, sex, and sexuality.”, but the common use of “Rape Culture” and its overtly intentional and violent examples are only just barely beginning to speak to how much of a rape culture we truly fucking live in.
How fucking weird it is, right now, to be coming to terms with the reality of how one of my allies whom I saw as someone slashing a path from ahead of me through this shit actually understood this when he said “My hesitation in re-posting it is mostly that I don’t want to be yelled at by people saying ‘but this definition of rape minimises my own rape which was horrible’.”
When I first published this piece, it was mainly to share my anecdotal and observational evidence for why I was deciding to use the term “rape”, even for what most considered to be the subtle shit. We live in a “Rape Culture” and I think it’s about time we woke the fuck up about the cultural roots of the role that rape quietly plays in our everyday lives, contributes to our misery and substance abuse, the indirect ways in which we request affection, the liberties we feel entitled to once sex enters a relationship, and so on.
The solidification of this long coming epiphany occurred in direct correlation to having been raped in early 2014 by a casual dating partner, and feeling subsequently emotionally abandoned in favor of rape apology by my primary partner at the time. Really silly to think that I would have gone from being a person who casually raped people and had tolerated rape and rape apology for most of my life to directly being attracted to people who were truly safe and removed from all that shit just by becoming aware of it.
The warning signs from them both of those relationships kept flooding back as I wrote over that long, insomniatic weekend.
Remembering how I bullied my felt senses with my brain.
Remembering the boundary pushing.
Remembering my primaries favored catch phrase: “Can’t rape the willing!”.
Remembering my sense of not actually being safe.
Remembering my sense of not actually being supported and respected despite the cloak of ‘niceness’ they both had.
Remembering the reactionary abuses I rendered to both of those ex’s, while I avoided and downplayed my instincts that I needed to get away from them.
Remembering how I would lash out to try to protect myself and make sense of what was happening.
Remembering holding on and on and on to that false intimacy, while I stuck around those relationships for years, begging them with bricks to face themselves.
Note: My concept of ‘goodness’ has transformed immensely and reading this now makes me cringe (as do other parts, honestly is it even growth if that doesn’t happen?). But I’m leaving the following quote for posterity, and because at one time, it made a big impact on my community, which was thriving and expansive in part because the shit I said and how I said it mattered to people. -nov 2019
True goodness is its own kind of heroic. It takes attentive, solemn, unending work to be a good person. It requires skilled humility and having learned a firm, yet supportive self accountability. It requires self love and the honoring of ebb and flow; to be a good person is to recognize when oneself is not doing so and have the wherewithal to return to balance. True goodness can not survive unexamined shame, or the avoidance of facing growth of ones own ethic. True goodness is action, not of simply performing external deeds and favors, but of profound personal integrity, and quality apology when having drifted astray of it. True goodness requires giving up, over and over again, the compulsive circular chase for superficial proof of ones goodness. To be a good person means to be under your own constant examination, to be willfully accountable to others, and to have the willingness and ability to question your ideals, entitlements, and beliefs. True goodness is pure courage. – My Facebook, 2013
Chapter 5: The Road Ahead
At this point in my personal evolution, I believe that sexual consent is only ambiguous when it is held up against the persisting ideals of a culture of rape.
I pledge to myself that I will not again make it my responsibility to educate the intimates in my personal life about rape culture, much less ever again doing so while I struggle to heal from being raped by them.
I pledge to myself to hold my own safety and growth as more important than anyone’s fledgling concept of sexual boundaries, no matter who they are or what I may feel for them (or, more accurately, for their potential).
I have resigned my guilt and shame-marinated position as The Rapist/Rape Apologist Whisperer.
I pledge to myself to re-evaluate this written work whenever I’ve discovered that I’ve relapsed into those old habits, to find my way back to myself through this writing and its wisdom.
I have wanted for my entire sexual existence to own the above values for myself, while being relentlessly steeped in the deep end of a culture which has done virtually everything it could to deny me of the empowerment of even considering it a viable option.
A culture that lied to me about what rape is, what consent is, and told me since I was a child that I was supposed to be a sleeping beauty waiting for a stranger to come turn me on by taking advantage of me in my fucking sleep.
A culture that supported and encouraged me in my dangerous sexual aggression and coercion.
A culture that taught me to reward abuse, and rewarded me for mimicking my abusers.
A culture of which I wholly, and to the absolute best of my waxing and waning abilities, reject in every form it takes.
A culture that taught us all that being raped brings us in alignment with our womanhood, and raping brings us in alignment with our power.
A culture that presented us with the ridiculous notion that anyone could evolve a fish, in a sea, and somehow avoid ever getting wet.
From physical violence to gaslighting to emotional blackmail to being sexualized by grown men since I was less than ten fucking years old, I have undulated in time with a culture that wants me to rape and be raped.
Fuck that.
Fuck “Rape Culture”.
It’s not for me. It never really was for me. I know what I will tolerate in my own life, and which sorts of civil atmospheres I wish to endorse and participate. And that is no longer up for debate.
Chapter 6 – Consent Model
Here’s my living framework for consent, updated and improved upon by Dr. Odd. ALL parameters must be met/negotiated for ALL PARTIES in order to have consent to engage sexually, and frankly, for me, in a lot of other nonsexual scenarios, too.
IDEAL Consent is:
INFORMED
I am fully aware that I am being propositioned, and what it is I am actually being propositioned for. I am aware of any surrounding circumstances that pose a risk to me, and am definitively NOT being presented with a request or offer that is a means to an unspoken end. I am free to ask questions, to say no, and am given clear and honest answers to what I ask.
DIRECT
I have communicated explicitly and emphatically through my words and/or actions that “I want this.”
ENGAGED
I am interested in what we’re planning and I’m enrolled in that process, as well as in the results. I am decisive; even if that means I have decided that I want you to decide what it is we do.
ALIGNED
My words and actions match up, there is no contradictions between what I say I want vs. how I am behaving. Furthermore, this activity is aligned with my values as I understand them; my overall feelings about participating in this activity are positive, even if I’m trying something I may be nervous about.
LUCID
Lucid means I am awake, I am conscious, and I have control of myself.
Over the years since I co-created and adopted these stances, agonizingly unaware of the vast legacy of consent culture advocates who paved the way before me, this sort of approach to social interaction has become a bit more common and accepted.
But progress not only has to be fought for, it is also decisively non-linear.
It’s certainly not as if I wrote this, and suddenly, I was anywhere near perfect at getting and giving explicit consent every time, or even half the time. I still struggle with it, and being enticed by people with bad boundaries who are looking to be seduced and taken for a dangerous ride.
And on the other end of things, I must accept over and over again that as someone who developed in and spent years actively contributing to rape culture I will always to some degree be struggling with these concepts and misinterpreting my bodily signals, wanting to move toward my senses of unease out of curiosity and self gaslighting.
I’m here to remind you after deceiving myself again and again, dear reader, that knowledge is only the first part of where toxic behavior actually stops. The work itself is lifelong. Anyone who says they are healed from and/or above generational social conditioning of this scale whether it be misogyny or white supremacy or rape culture is lying to themselves.
But there are alternatives, it gets better, you can learn to catch yourself, practice better habits, shift to healthier proclivities. And much like religions, there are many formulas out there that are teaching basically the same thing, many people offering consent workshops, writing books, and providing other resources to help soothe those thousand tiny cuts, and continue moving the Overton Window along.
It will take generations, but the first step is to stop the behavior where you can – with you, and with the influence you have on the people around you The baseline to heal this over time exists.
Chapter 7: The Boiler Room
Originally, this work was posted to medium.com, and received many comments challenging what I was saying. I responded with a separate post, now included here. -nov 2019
Ping: “Your definition of consent and of rape is not leaving room for developmental exploration, and for people who are just finding their way about sex.”
Pong: I am speaking to awakening from a lifetime cultural influence which tainted my sexual development and caused a lot of hurt and confusion for both myself and my partners. My point includes the nuance that the ways in which we encourage our selves and one another to explore and find our way about sex needs an overhaul — because a lot of it revolves around unconscious rape and being unconsciously raped. IDEAL consent and a much less stringent definition of rape are two powerful tools to combat this which I expand upon even further in my followup to this piece below.
Ping: “You’re being prejudice against people (like me) who like being woken up with sex/being unconscious during sex, by calling that rape.”
Pong: These behaviors are not in and of themselves corrosive when at some point a consensual agreement was made surrounding them and one lucks out by those agreements still being viable when the act is later carried out. But I also want you to consider, dear commentator, that what is consented to by saying “wake me up from unconsciousness with sex some time” or “I want you to fuck me after I’ve passed out” is not only rape play, it also puts one at great risk of actually raping their partner, as they will be unable to consent in the moment.
Perhaps all sexual developments are not as graphic and colorful as mine, but lord knows we have all been encouraged to canonize, pursue, and glorify rape, violence, and power struggle in sex, in pop culture, in relationship pursuits, in the everpressing rush to act like an “adult”.
Rape not being seen as an actual violation due to the presence of a rape culture that normalized rape is the actual issue, and it’s a subterranean problem that is effecting our society in both subtle and tremendously dramatic ways that once you allow yourself to see, you can never, ever fucking unsee.
Consider that by asking for this kind of sex you are asking to be raped by your partner. You don’t have to agree or anything; Just think about it. Over time, preferably. Lots of time. For my part, I’m gonna walk down the path of our tendency of accepting rape in even its most subtle-seeming forms as being something worth taking grave fucking issue with and calling what it is.
But most pointedly, and to bring my own focus back to the personal nature of this essay; rape not being seen as rape was devastating to my life, my psyche, and my development as a person. As part of my reform from that, I am drawing a very, very clear line in the sand. Sex that is not IDEAL is rape.
Ping: “The behavior you’re talking about is bad, but it’s not rape”
Pong: Arguing over the current largely accepted definition of rape is basically my anti-point — I’m saying it’s woefully lacking.
The real point of sharing my story in this public manner is to shake up some apathy, and stimulate not only this existing conversation, but to provoke those delayed reactions after being initially dismissed.
Is it rape?
If not stated in my state legislature, creatived in vast part by powerful men, should I consider it rape in my own personal intimate life?
Has anyone ever raped me?
When I dig down into my guts and listen to myself about this, do I know for sure if I have ever raped anyone?
If so, do I want to continue to rape? To risk raping?
If not, do I want to continue behaviors that cause me to question whether I’m raping?
Was that time in the back of that guy’s car after he fed me shots for three hours rape?
Was that time I manipulated those two people by lying to them both about one another and withholding my STD status to ensure they would have sex with me.. was that rape?
How do my actions and beliefs contribute to rape culture?
How has rape culture contributed to me?
When it comes to combating this cult of personality on both an individual as well as broader level, I think it’s really important to take a look at how we are defining rape and what that’s been meaning for us, not just say “pfft. That’s not how rape is defined.”. Especially when it.. erhm.. actually is, in a lot of places.
At the very least, even if this level of self exploration isn’t your cup of tea, we should be asking how we are unconsciously encouraging rape that IS collectively defined. 11th principal, an organization dedicated to consent, created this handy rape pyramid to help with that.
Ping: You’re lessening the impact of the word “Rape”/I don’t like the word “Rape” therefore I will not listen to you.
Pong: Ok first of all? Fuck you.
Secondly: I’ve seen this notion in both question form and as outrage. Ava has encapsulated this well, and touches on why I tend to simply say ‘rape’ rather than using ‘casual rape’ or ‘common rape’ or ‘second degree rape’ or some other verbal dilution:
“Well, there’s rape. And then there’s rape coupled with assault. Which, interestingly, is what most people think of as rape. But an absence of assault is not an absence of rape, or even a lesser degree of rape. It simply leaves less physical evidence, which also makes it more difficult to identify and prosecute.”
Here’s another way to think around the language of it: When someone punches me in the shoulder to greet me at a party, I don’t generally sneer at them in an accusatory tone out the gate “That’s assault!!”, even though that’s exactly what it is. If we have that consensual arrangement, I take the punch good naturedly (or maybe I punch them right back).
Further, in a perfect situation where power dynamics are neutral, society knows that assault is inappropriate, and we’re not all running round clocking one another in the throat and pretending that isn’t assaulting a person, if I’m vexed about how I’m being treated I’ll only use the stronger language of more extreme versions of that same violence if they don’t respond to softer language.
But we live in a fucking rape culture friends, and part of how we remain in that state is by refusing to acknowledge that rape is rape even when it’s not combined with other obviously terrible and violent things.
So I ask you then: Has defining assault in the way that we have watered down more severe versions of assault?
No.
Has it stopped buddies from punching each other in the shoulder or rat-toweling each other in the ass as acts of consensual endearment?
No.
Does escalating to calling it ‘assault’ tend to apply a sense of urgency associated with behavior in need of correction?
Hmm.
Would someone who gets whipped with a towel via bullying rather than camaraderie be capable of enrolling their community in ending the harm caused by leveraging use of accepted language around the continuum that is assault?
Yes.
Would we ever have gotten here if we insisted that only being bludgeoned to near death by a particular brand of sledgehammer by a man you don’t know jumping out from behind a dumpster counted as being assaulted?
Perhaps I’ve made my point. And if not, again: Fuck you.
“When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.” — Carl Jung
Calling rape rape does not take away from the severity of other rape. It’s a ridiculous notion that plays into many of the themes I’ve already discussed in this lumbering demon of an essay; a false equivalence.
The premeditated assault type of rape being held to such an extreme degree, and overwhelmingly being the type that’s generally referred to when rape is decried, has had the unproductive side effect of stigmatizing all rape and rapists into that ‘they’re gonners, kill them with fire’ category.
All rape, or people who have raped, which is fucking A LOT OF US, are not in that category.
*I* am not in that category.
Rather than lessening the impact of the word rape, I am using the truth about the existence of rape to increase the impact of the concept of consent in my life, and I’m writing about that where others can see and glean insight from my process.
Ping: “What about intent? If someone isn’t intending to rape, then how can it be rape?”
Pong: Search for ‘accidental rape’ and ‘unintentional rape’ — it’s actually a thing — and/or, watch this video of a stirring rape prevention advert which speaks to the subject of this thing that does in fact exist.
I know from my own relational experiences as well as from being certified in grief recovery that our systemic misunderstanding of grief and misinformation regarding how to address that complex emotional process leads the way to unidentified feelings like betrayal, shame, and mistrust being stifled — only to pop up later looking like they’re directed at something else.
Our current stigma makes it really damn hard for a person to admit to themselves that they were raped, even when it’s confessed upon and literally named, as in my situation I talked about a million and a half years ago at the beginning of this essay.
It is my opinion that the intent of the rapist, as well as their response to being called out about the impact of their behavior, has more to do with how one might handle their future participation in the situation/relationship and less about whether or not having had non-consensual sex with someone is technically “raping” them. Because clearly, it is.
Did I overtly intend to rape people in *my* life? No.
Did I rape people? While no one from my past has ever confirmed with me that they agree I raped them (probably because they’d then be forced to examine their own behaviors..), I find it impossible to believe I haven’t done so. And it is possible, nae, probable even, that any time I engage in sex outside of my outline of IDEAL consent, that I could rape someone again.
Pussyfooting around referring to rape as rape was not working to address the cultural grooming, the rape-encouraging behaviors, and the cycle of perpetual triggering of my own rape-related traumas that I needed to be looking at. I need to name rape and rape culture for what it is in order to transform how I’ve internalized it and continued to allow it to rule my relationships, my self esteem, and my life.
In a larger sociopolitical sense, the normalization of mealmouthed language also adds to the stigma of people who do have the courage to face those rapes and to speak them clearly for what they are.
I’m open to the possibility of the people I’ve sneak-attacked not agreeing I raped them. That doesn’t make it any less rape to me. Seduction is wonderful, but it ceases to be seduction if the beneficiary of that seduction does not genuinely want to be seduced. I didn’t have consent, I didn’t ask for consent, and ultimately I didn’t care to make sure I had consent. Whether they want to hold me accountable for that doesn’t effect whether or not I should.
Ping: “This [piece] is fucking deranged. You need help.”
Pong: This troll actually brought some thoughtful response to me, because he is right. I needed help, as do all the people who have developed like I did, to overcome this mass delusion.
Fuck Highlander Me was welcomed with open arms until I chose to stop her. I had pathetically little outside incentive to change, as do most perpetrators of abuse, particularly sexual. No one wanted to get involved, if they recognized it at all. No one was willing to confront me. I had to confront myself.
After doing that, I have needed every ally, therapy session, healing circle, recovery method, self help book, and care regimen I’ve ever fucking done to own and address the harm I caused; both what I’ve inflicted, as well as breaking free of the self loathing cycle which kept me enmeshed in a pattern of being re-traumatized over and over by more rape under the dominance of others.
It’s a tremendous undertaking to own and recondition something like this. To give up stealing sex as power, to learn means to sooth and validate oneself, to untangle the automatic habits developed in all the time of having done elsewise; It takes years. It takes your whole life. It takes support. It takes loneliness. It takes discomfort. And it requires the totality of an authentic person constantly scanning, seeking, and challenging, to succeed.
A lot of people need the same help I need. Maybe even you. So thanks for mentioning it, troll. And Good luck.
Ping: “I recognize rape happening in my life. But now what am I going to do about it?”
Pong:
Chapter 8 – Moving on.
“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” — Frederick Douglass
The sociocultural-evolutionary arc in how we ultimately resolve rape culture in its various forms and incantations all over the world, is a long and expansive process that requires many drops and ripples in the collective. We want this to go away now, to make a law and poof, a year from now, 5 years from now, it’s resolved — but it will not happen that way.
Change of this nature and complexity happens slowly, even on an individual level. As a society, it takes generations to unlearn and repair the conditioning we’ve re-enforced. Contributing to that future takes intense healing and radical honestly regarding the trauma perpetuated and maintained by that conditioning. It takes restorative, transformative, authentic means of justice that do not exist in our mainstream zeitgeist.
We have a long road ahead of us, individually and collectively, before the reality of rape culture can truly be amended from our normalized interpersonal lexicon. My place in this larger movement, other than continuing to heal myself, is to share what I’ve learned in doing so far.
It took, essentially, three things to get me started on this path:
Step 1: I recognized that I was a problem.
Emotional armor is not easy to shed, and we have it for valid reason. That armor is protecting us from feeling things that our unconscious worries we are not able to feel without dying. It is a non-trivial task to even be looking at the catalyst for putting that armor on, let alone our part of a problem which has managed to cause us, and those around us, so much torment.
Even more so when it is such a loaded, triggering issue as rape, an issue in which vital aspects of so many of our identities have been defined.
This was, by far, the hardest step for me. It happened under the surface long before I’d even considered what was happening in my life was rape. Knowing something was wrong was the wind at my back, before I had found the language to write any of this.
“How we call down judgment upon ourselves is simultaneously the most horrific and the most beautiful thing about us.” —Zadie Smith
Sometimes what it is we honestly need, is a swift kick in the ass. Those profound lessons hurt, and they are called fucking BREAKthoughs for a reason. Because OUCH!
Our breakthroughs have a violence to them that is important to recognize and have compassion for, particularly when we’re presented with ingrained pattern-oriented epiphanies which are contributed to by our upbringing as part of a fundamentally oppressive society.
But a kick in the ass, when present, is a kickstart in the process of healing, not a constant element of that process, and this is an integral part of addressing the underlying cracks in ones integrity.
Just as we’ve figured out that we don’t heal up from a bone break by resetting our broken arm over and over until the end of fucking time, our emotional bodies can’t heal that way, either. It took me a while to understand I was just another fish in the sea who got wet, when most of the others just haven’t come around to accepting that yet.
We also can’t heal effectively, if we keep using our just-set arm to the degree that we’d like it to be functioning again already; When we do that, we end up with a painful mangled half-healed mess, and the same too goes for our psychic healing too. When I find myself deep in struggle and feeling uncharacteristically set back, any number of these three factors is usually part of the reason why:
- Hanging on to beating myself to shit over my habitual behaviors
- Engaging in/making excuses for engaging in said behaviors
- Compulsively indulging in distracting myself with judging the unconscious patterns of others.
Step 2: I got back in touch with my body…
I started small accepting myself in whole without needing to be validated sexually. Gradually, I became more comfortable with myself, less judgmental of my body, and less afraid of the warning signs it gives me. I began experimenting with my diet, my sleep cycles, tracking my menstrual cycles, and after a few years, what was once foreign and horrifying is now a form of intense wisdom.
As most of us who have engaged in any form of ‘alternative’ community probably know, these communities are not without their faults and failures. Often Sex Positivity is confused with Enthusiasm For Sex, and there was a tremendous amount of emotional abuse and manipulation disguised as polyamory and sex positivity in my experiences with the BDSM community of which I have long departed.
In this fight, it is vital for us to acknowledge that even the people we hold in our highest regards are a often a product of rape culture, and are inherently protected from the impacts of their abuse. None of us are immune to it and none of us are above it; if there must be an us vs. them, then let it be the us’s that have cultivated the courage and resources to challenge this about ourselves, and the us’s that have yet.
But we certainly won’t get anywhere good any time soon by allowing known unapologetic predators who outright refuse to address their harms to stay in the lead, as happened so many times in my community experiences.
My early life experiences as a sex worker, and later a giver and taker in the Sex Positive scene, has ultimately positively shaped me overall. Yet the single most profound, life altering lesson I learned in my many years experiencing those things was the utter importance of having touch in my life…
…In a way that was not sexual
and would never become sexual.
Hooo shit! You can’t heal your relationship with rape culture by having more/slightly different sex?
From where I’m sitting: No. You can’t. I am here to tell you: No. You can’t. Working to stop using other people’s sex to define our Selves is one of the absolute core elements of healing from rape culture. And you’ve simply gotta stop fucking people to do that.
Since trauma recovery from prolonged exposure is approached differently than trauma recovery from one quick, unexpected incident, and includes removal from the traumatic environment so you can actually heal, simply continuing with what you’re already doing with whoever you’re already having established rapey questionable sex with is NOT, I repeat, NOT going to work.
Step 3: I addressed my unresolved grief.
At one time, this section focused mainly on the grief recovery method I experienced and then got certified to teach, but I realized it was unethical to focus on any aspect of my business in the context of this triggering writing. I’ve long since left the healing arts and no longer teach or blog personal development for many reasons, including addressing any future misuse of the power dynamics involved in teaching/coaching others.
“Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is half a sorrow” — Swedish Proverb
Like many/most of us, I sought human witness of my grief first through intellect. I started in 1995 by writing publicly online about my deep dark flaws, which helped me clarify and berate myself for my problems, and undoubtedly perpetuated a lot of secondary trauma in my readers at the time, but did not serve to go any farther than that. A dumping ground of sorts.
Psychiatry, Grief recovery, healing circles, and processing sessions with other people whose special interest was personal development was great, but I eventually found I had to take steps in my life to get to where I could participate in healing with my whole person, not just my thoughts and ability to examine them.
In finding a massage practitioner I meshed with, my world, and eventually my lifes purpose for a while too, shifted forever. It shifted again when I discovered circus aerial and began taking classes, a physical challenge which engaged me both motivationally and creatively, the love for which forced me to re-prioritize my escapism through drugs and alcohol abuse (and the rape that came along with that).
Eventually, that confidence grew into human witness as a performance career, which for me was instrumental to my healing work, as well as other forms of art I’ve practiced.
Conclusion:
What I have learned is that growth takes time, that it takes the bravery of being willing to fess up to the shit I pulled before I knew better, and sometimes even after, and that I must be willing to be very lonely for a while. Possibly a really long while.
Part of enabling ourselves to do our work is having an extreme reverence for the power of influence in our lives, developing our sense of what is safe for us, and what simply is not. Before I could truly begin to heal, I had to understand that I couldn’t do it by staying engaged with the people around me who were still where I knew I didn’t want to be.
More painfully, I had to accept that most of those people would not have an interest in coming “with” me, and as I continue along this trajectory I find more often than I’d like that those who have successfully appeared to be “with” me in this are not. I’ve had to, and will likely continue to have to, turn my back again and again on a twisted flavor of enabling that we are commonly taught is love, but which directly encourages habitual inhumane behaviors.
I also had to accept that some people would not be able to take ME along with THEM if they were to have any hope of healing themselves because of the ways I’ve behaved toward them. The reality of the victim perpetrator cycle is that while I am unable to heal alongside my own personal villains, I also am that villain to some. That took a lot longer to come to terms with..
These steps, and this document, have been immeasurably helpful in my deconstruction. Despite the ebb and flow of other support systems and resources through the years, through this work I have a repeatable formula for this particular spiral of my life. Doing this has enabled me to immensely reduce the harm I perpetuate and subject myself to with every consecutive pass, and serves as a reminder of how far I’ve come since I related to a lot of what’s written here.
“For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.” – Cynthia Occelli
PDF – A TRANSFORMATIVE JUSTICE HANDBOOK – GENERATION 5