For anyone confused about the religious and social dynamic that caused me to think of killing myself in the incident recounted in this post, read John Shore’s “Pastor to Rape Victim: He should have killed you. At least you’d have died a virgin.” My upbringing was Roman Catholic, not fundamentalist Protestant, but at that time the mindsets towards women and rape victims was the same.
God help us all, but that young woman most especially.
We live in a multi-cultural household. This year Christmas falls in the middle of Hanukkah.
The Resident Shrink’s menorah sits on the entertainment center next to the decorated Christmas tree. Two nights ago, she made latkes for us, as she has for the last several years, in what has become a tradition for us on the second or third night of Hanukkah. Tomorrow, the Rocket Scientist and I will attend a church service in the morning, having muddled our timing tonight so as to miss the eleven o’clock service that we would otherwise have gone to. Christmas Eve church has been a tradition for he and I since before we were married. (It was easier back when I was a Roman Catholic, and Christmas services started at midnight.)
There will be turkey, which is traditional, because I chickened out on my intention to suggest having prime rib for once. There will be cornbread stuffing, and yam casserole, and home-made cranberry sauce. New this year will be roasted red-pepper soup and cranberry-goat cheese tarts.
Traditions change as years go by. The main change in tradition is that no one feels any need to get up before the crack of, oh, eight o’clock.* We’re all adults now, and have managed to learn to cope with delayed gratification. In fact, given that RS and I are going to church, we may not even open presents until –gasp! — close to noon.
It is odd. Something about this Christmas seems melancholy. I think it is because Christmas morning really is for small children, and we don’t have any around, and won’t, at least for (knock on wood) many years yet.
Traditions seem much more important when you are trying to pass them along.
*Except for those years in which we have really big turkeys, in which case the poor sucker on turkey duty has to get up earlier than everybody else. This year we have a much smaller turkey than usual, so nobody will need to get up at six.
Pat, dear:
It is always possible to add more ground chipotle pepper to the stuffing if you want to later. It is much harder to recover from accidentally doubling the chipotle in the first place.
The rum added to the eggnog might not have been helping, either.
And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.
Luke 2:8-14
For those of you who celebrate it, I wish you a joyous and peace-filled Christmas.
Tonight the entire household – including a friend that the Not-So-Little Drummer boy brought home from college with him — did our annual tour of Christmas lights. We were heading down streets in the Willow Glen area of San Jose, looking for the twelve-foot tall reindeer,* when a discussion arose about why almost every house had a light-bedecked tree in their front yard, even in cases where it clearly did not match the rest of the landscaping. The general consensus was that there must have been some neighborhood rule requiring Christmas decorations.
Well, what about non-Christians? We came up with some alternative suggestions for seasonal (or not) decorations:
A giant blow-up menorah.
An upside down pentacle done in dark blue lights.
“God is Dead” written in small LEDs.
A simple large question mark.
And my favorite:
Written in twinkle-lights, “The Neighborhood Association made me put this up.”
*The Willow Glen Reindeer even have their own Facebook page.
I’m tired tonight, but this is important.
If you don’t know what the Stop Online Piracy Act (in the House of Representatives) is, or the Protect ID Act (in the Senate), read this article from the Stanford Law Review. I could explain it, and why it is such a horrendous idea, but Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, and David G. Post do such a great job — so much better than I could (not surprising as they are professors of law) — that it seems silly to reinvent the wheel.
[Edited to add: You can read Cory Doctorow’s take on it here, here and here; and here is Mythbuster Adam Savage’s opinion. I think the second link — Cory Doctorow’s column on what this will do to everyday Americans — should be required reading for anyone who accesses the Internet or even owns a computer.]
After you’ve read it…
Contact your Representative and Senator. Time is short.
You need a diversion. Check out the “History of English in Ten Minutes.” It will take closer to fifteen to work your way through it, given buffering and everything, but it’s well worth the time.
And, more generally, check out openculture.com, for more free learning opportunities.
It sure beats fretting about your Chem grade, which you can’t do anything about at this point anyway.
I love your Christmas music. Your voice seems tailored to fit well with traditional religious carols. However, when you changed the words to “What Child Is This?” you not only lost the theological meaning, you lost much of the human interest, as well.
Singing “Raise, raise, the song on high, his mother sings a lull-a-bye” lacks the emotional depth of “Raise, raise the song on high, the Virgin sings a lull-a-bye.” After all, “his mother” could refer to any baby born on December 25th.
If the content of the religious carols as written bothers you enough that you change the lyrics, maybe you should not be singing them in the first place.
I got my flu shot yesterday when I went into the doctor to get the results of my foot x-ray. They gave me a paper with the list of possible side effects, but the nurse said I was unlikely to get them since I was getting the inactivated vaccine. Those side effects were:
Low-grade fever. Got that.
Muscles aches. Got that.
Sore throat. Got that.
Tenderness and swelling at the injection site. I have a hard, hot, red spot about 2.5 inches in diameter on my upper left arm; it hurts to move my arm, like it does after getting a tetanus shot. Boo.
I’m not sure if the headache is related, but it sure feels like it.
I know this is meant to keep me from getting really sick later. But did I really have to get all the minor side effects, short of a severe allergic reaction or Guillane-Barre?
Hmph. I’m in just the mood to go online Christmas shopping this evening. I am sure not going outside anywhere.
My room has been traditionally Penwiper’s stalking ground, metaphorically speaking, especially my bed. (She likes to watch television.) Either cat is allowed in here, though, and Pandora hides in my closet a lot. (It has lots of semi-open boxes for her to crawl into.) Both cats know how to open the door from the other side if it is not securely latched (headbutting and pulling with front paws in that order).
Just now, I heard the creak of my door while almost napping (Vicodin for my foot and the aftereffects of a flu shot can do that). When I got up, Pandora had come in, pushed the door shut securely behind her, presumably by headbutting it, and sat down in front of the closed door.
No. I refuse to have a turf war in my room.
Me: That’s a lovely shade of purple.
The Red-Headed Menace: Not on a human foot, Mom.*
*I broke my little toe. It swelled, and the top of my foot turned this really lovely patchwork of purple, lilac and magenta. I have at least three different shirts that would color coordinate nicely with the bruises.
I know correlation is not causation. I know that.
However , it seems clear to me that a Vermont fraternity being suspended over a survey question which asked “who would you rape?” stems from the same societal forces that result in, according to the most recent studies, nearly one in five women in America having been subject to sexual assault.
Also, of some relevance to the Plan B issue (and my post on my experiences), nearly half of rape victims reported that they had been under eighteen when they were raped.
Writing the last post was an intensely emotional experience. Although tempted to do otherwise, I wrote it stone-cold sober, more or less stream-of-consciousness, in the form you read it. I made a few changes to correct small grammatical errors, but otherwise it is as it came forth from my brain. Afterwards, I was drained, and sad.
Writing my story was necessary — it was my way of processing news I found very upsetting. The post was born of fury at the small-minded worldview of people I would have hoped knew better. And that is the charitable view: the thought that this was some sort of sop to conservatives, that the well-being of young women was sacrificed for political expediency, reduces me almost to incoherence.
Writing my story was necessary; publishing it was not. I decided to do so after posting the text to my friends’ list on Livejournal and having women thank me for writing it and encouraging me to publish. I have also had suggested to me that I should submit it to other places. I am considering that.
I am tired and sad. Yet I have not been struck by the feelings of shame and dirtiness I was afraid might result from revisiting the rape. I have been helped by the memory of a conversation I had earlier this year at a time when I was very triggered and vulnerable.
Remember H.R. 3? That was the bill that would have limited the rape exception for abortion coverage to forcible rape. I wrote a post about it. That might have been the end of it for me, except that when I was reviewing the post it struck me: my rape didn’t count. Even if I had dared to report the it, there was no way that I could show it was forcible.
I fell apart. Although I did not have visual or aural flashbacks, I was overwhelmed by feelings I thought I had left far behind. I felt broken, dirty, useless and unlovable. I took three showers a day, until my skin became cracked and infected from the frequent washing in tankfuls of hot water.
I felt I was losing my mind. I had thought I had long ago found peace around this. I had read others’ stories, and told my own (albeit in a distanced and incomplete way*: I always left out details about my father and the reason I did not report it). I had posted my story in my Livejournal as part of Rape Awareness Week. I was healed, or so I thought.
I realized I could not go on like this, and started calling people. After two unsuccessful calls (“revisiting my rape, call me” was not a message I wanted to leave on voicemail), I reached my friend the PLD. He was busy, but arranged for me to call him back in forty-five minutes. When I did so, he listened to me talk about my brokenness, my shame, my feeling that I was worth less than the dirt under my feet.
He started, “I can imagine…” and then he caught himself. “No, I can’t imagine. I’ve never been through anything like this, so although I can understand how horrible you must be feeling, I can’t know what it’s like, and don’t want to belittle it by pretending I can.”
His comment was unexpected, and exactly right. It not only expressed sympathy, it recognized and honored the enormity of my experience and the feelings associated with it. He went on to reassure me that I was, in fact, a wonderful person who had a great deal to offer the world. Although I was still shaking when we hung up, I had started to feel better. It took a couple of days, but I was able to move on.
That conversation has stayed with me. It reminds me of my strength. It reminds me that what happened to me was significant, that my feelings around it are not craziness but a natural reaction to a horrible event. The comments I’ve received in my LiveJournal and elsewhere from other women who have read my story remind me that I am not alone: telling our stories is the first step towards creating change, so that hopefully one day far in the future incidents like this will be extremely rare. Both of those together have meant that I could write about what happened and not feel worthless or ashamed. I’m not only going to be all right, I’m okay as things stand. I did not even come close to having the feelings I had last winter.
I don’t think I ever told him the effect his words had on me. And I need to thank those who have responded to what I wrote. So here goes:
To the women who have responded to my story: thank you for your encouragement. It has made me feel that what I say matters. It reminds me once again that “the personal is the political,” and that all policies affect real human beings, and that the first step to change is knowledge.
And to my friend: I don’t know what to say, except… I hope you understand how important that conversation was to me. Thank you.
*Edited to add: so incomplete, in fact, that the Rocket Scientist told me that he learned things from my post that I had never told him, and we’ve known each other for over three decades.
[Warning: rape/suicide triggers.]
There was this girl. She was young and naive. Because of other family dysfunction, she spent a lot of her teenage years raising herself. There was a lot she didn’t know about the world, even more so than other teenagers.
She had a friend. This friend had a car and a boyfriend who lived out by the beach. The girl had had no chance to learn to drive, but didn’t think about the possible consequences of being in a location miles from home with no way out.
It was a warm evening in late July. The friend, her boyfriend and his friend who lived next door began drinking. Although she actually had never drunk much (just a glass of wine when she turned eighteen, three months before), the girl joined in.
It is at this point that I have to stop. The third person, which I had thought to use for this story until the end, will not do. I use it sometimes to protect myself when telling this story to people I don’t know, as a way to distance myself from what happened.
This time, I have to tell it as myself, as my own story. Making it about some theoretical girl protects me, but it also minimizes what I went through.
I and my friend Lorrie went out to the beach to visit her boyfriend, Doug, and his friend who lived next door, named Gary. All of us were drinking: the booze started with beer, and moved on to rum and tequila. Heady stuff for a young woman who had had no exposure to any alcohol but a glass of red wine on her previous birthday.
Lorrie and Doug moved from kissing to necking to the inevitable decision to have sex. They kicked me out of Doug’s half of the duplex he shared with Gary, leaving me alone with no place to go. Had I been more street-smart, I would have stayed in the car until morning. Instead, I accepted Gary’s suggestion that I come into his place.
I was drunk. Very, very drunk. I had never been drunk before in my life, and was having trouble coping with the room swimming around my head, let alone walking much. I sat on the bed, while Gary bolted the door.
I am not going into all the details. There are details I don’t remember because I passed out. There are other details that I could remember if I tried very hard, but the memory of them would break me. Although every once in a while something happens to leave me feeling shaken and broken, I have not had actual waking flashbacks in a very, very long time and am not going to risk triggering one now.
There are details that I remember that I can relate. Unless I try very hard, I cannot remember what my rapist’s face looked like, because my mind protects itself. I do remember the house, though, and the pink stucco walls. I remember begging “please no, please no, God please don’t do this I’ll do anything you want just please….” and I remember having my arms pinned down. To this day I am likely to react badly if my arms are immobilized. Once, in the middle of a mutually consensual tickle fight, I kneed a man in the groin — hard — because he pinned my arms down.
Afterwards, while Gary sprawled on his bed, having fallen asleep, I went and took a shower. I ran the shower until all the hot water was gone, got dressed, unbolted the door, and went to the car. When Lorrie stumbled out early in the morning, I said nothing of what had happened. We drove home, with her chatting away about Doug, oblivious to my silence.
I said nothing to anyone. I had to say nothing to anyone.
My father was an ex-Marine who took a very dim view of people hurting himself or his family. He was never abusive towards his wife or any of his kids, but when he felt his safety or ours was threatened he could become violent. I knew that he had once hooked a man in the neck with a fishhook who was trying to run him off his fishing hole with a motor boat. When the man approached him at the dock, Dad pulled out a filleting knife. I knew that many years before, when my eldest sister was run over in our driveway by a delivery truck completely by accident, Dad had gone out with a shotgun looking for the driver. Fortunately, his hunt was unsuccessful.
I knew where he kept the revolver, and the ammunition. I knew as well what would have happened had I told my dad what had happened — or if he had heard it from anyone else. Dad would have blown Gary’s brains out. (I would have been lucky: there are families where the first fatality would not have been the rapist but the girl.) While I would have had no problem with Gary’s death, I could never have lived with my dad spending the rest of his life in prison because of me, because of what I thought I had done.
Because in my own mind, it was my fault. I had grown up a Roman Catholic, and like far too many of us had internalized the vile idea (not from my parents but from the priests) that sexual violence was the fault of evil women tempting men into lust. Gary was simply acting on his natural instincts. Although I was never sure of what exactly I had done to tempt him, other than being drunk and female, I was sure it was something. I was a sinful woman who had essentially only gotten what she deserved.
I was terrified that I might be pregnant. I spent three weeks praying to the God I was sure hated me that if nothing else I not be pregnant. Being pregnant would mean that my horrible secret would be exposed. I was prepared for pregnancy, though: as I said, I knew where my dad kept his gun.
When I hear someone — in this case, the President — say that Plan B or other emergency contraception should be kept behind pharmacy windows, available only to those over seventeen, I shudder. I think about my rapist, and my dad, and the gun that would have ended my life had I been pregnant. Yes, I would have been old enough to purchase Plan B had it been available, but what of sixteen-year olds? Sixteen is old enough to be a junior in high school. Old enough for a girl to drive, but according to the administration (in complete disregard of the FDA’s position on this), not old enough to take steps to protect her health.
No one should have to go through what I went through. Rape is horrific enough, but to disallow medicines to young girls that would lessen the damage is almost unthinkable to me. Not every rape is reported — sometimes for very good reasons. And in those cases, withholding drugs that help to ensure that a young woman will not have to carry the additional burden of a pregnancy by her rapist is obscene.
People think about what parents want. Sometimes even the victims think primarily about the good of their families rather than their own well-being.
Someone needs to think about the girls.
I am pretty sure that I am preaching to the choir. At least, I hope that I am.
Another teenager, this time in Tennessee, killed himself in response to being bullied. It sounds terrible, but I am not particularly surprised.
This Daily Kos post contains two powerful videos. The first, by a boy named Jonah Mowry, talks about the terrible pain of being bullied. The second, equally moving, is from a bully who harassed Jonah, apologizing and explaining the origins of his bullying.
I know grown adults who as children literally lived in fear of their lives from bullies. I know people whose lives were destroyed, who were forced to reconstruct their sense of self slowly, bit by bit, and who bear scars — physical and psychological — that will never go away. People who were driven to the brink of suicide. People who today as grown adults struggle to cope with PTSD as a result of this trauma.
There is another, larger price to bullying. Schoolyard bullies can turn into adults who commit violence. Gay-bashers do not spring full-fledged into adulthood: they are nurtured from a young age to hate and to use that hate to justify hurting others. Every man holding a “God Hates Fags” sign, who thinks that some African countries have the right idea when they jail or execute homosexuals, was once a boy who might have felt justified in torment he heaped upon others.
Violence begets violence. Exclusion and hatred beget more exclusion and hatred.
As the Red-Headed Menace observed, sometimes the whole world is too much like middle-school.
The Wild Winds of Fortune 