Hate Crimes, Not Hoaxes
Via Liss, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), lied about Matthew Shepard’s death on the floor of Congress today:
Transcript from Liss:
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-North Carolina): The, uh, hate crimes bill that’s called the Matthew Shepard Bill is named after, uhn, uh, a very unfortunate incident that happened where a young man was killed, but we know, uh, that that young man was killed in the, uh, in the commitment [sic] of a robbery. It wasn’t because he was gay. This—the bill was named for him, the hate crimes bill was named for him, but it, it’s, it’s really a hoax! [emphasis mine]
Text: FALSE. Fact: “According to local police and prosecutors, the two men lured Mr. Shepard out of a bar by saying they were gay. Then, the Laramie police say, the pair kidnapped Mr. Shepard, pistol-whipped him with a .357 Magnum, and left him tied to a ranch fence for 18 hours until a passing bicyclist spotted Mr. Shepard, who was unconscious.”—The New York Times, 10/12/98
The representative’s sentence is ambiguous in that it could suggest that Matthew Shepard was killed as the victim of a robbery or that he was killed while committing a robbery. Now, his murderers robbed his body after killing him for being gay, so it’s possible that she meant the former (which would still be factually incorrect), but I’m not inclined to give Rep. Foxx the benefit of the doubt.
A hoax. In 2007, the Department of Justice found that 16.6% of bias-related incidents (i.e. hate crimes) were based on sexual orientation. The 16.6% rate was an increase from 2004’s 15.6%. There are multiple factors involved, but one is surely that people think it’s acceptable to assault people based on their sexual orientation and gender identity. Why else would they boldly admit to bias-related murder, saying, “Gay things must die”? (Allen Andrade, convicted of murdering Angie Zapata in a hate crime, quoted in CO Independent) When Rep. Foxx lied about Matthew Shepard’s death, she sent the message that targeting and killing queer people was acceptable. She sent the message that our lives and our deaths don’t count. She sent the message that even though bigots target queer individuals specifically to make us live in fear and to wipe us out of existence, politicians and people in power will whitewash our suffering as a robbery gone wrong and accuse our family and friends of perpetuating hoaxes when they seek justice. She sent the message that bigotry is acceptable, even when it takes on the form of violence and broken bodies punished for the sin of being lesbian, gay, or trans.
Fight back and reject these messages any time you hear them, starting with Rep. Foxx and the National Republican Congressional Committee. Show them that there are consequences to homophobia and transphobia and to denying the existence of hate crimes based on race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability.
Foxx’s D.C. office: 202-225-2071
North Carolina office: 1-866-677-8968
National Republican Congressional Committee: 202-479-7000
Here, have a sample message:
“Hi, this is [PD], calling about Representative Foxx’s statements in Congress today on the Matthew Shepard Bill. The representative dishonestly claimed that Matthew Shepard was killed during a robbery, when in fact his murderers have confessed to targeting Matthew Shepard specifically because he was gay. They beat him and left him to die, tied to a fence on a freezing Wyoming night. This was a hate crime, and I ask that the representative publicly retract her statement and apologize. Her statement is an insult not only to queer Americans, but to all Americans who support justice and equality.”
The bill passed in the House, 249-175 (10 no votes) and is moving onto the Senate. Please look up your legislators and let them know you support the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act.
NotAlwaysRight is Not Always Right
NotAlwaysRight.com is a site that posts “Funny & Stupid Customer Quotes.” Most of the time, the quotes are funny and show how amazingly entitled, racist, rude, and sexist, among other horrible things, customers can be. I like reading it because I did some patron-facing work at a library for a while, and got some experience in dealing with stupid, rude, and entitled patrons. I also like to read it to remind myself to not be stupid, rude, and entitled as a customer. One of today’s posts was irritating, however, because I’m certain that it was posted for “ha ha, that woman was so stupid, thinking she had a prostate!” laughs.
Sometimes Being Too Thorough Can Backfire
Military | Maryland, USA(This took place at our health clinic. The patient was an older female.)
Me: “What type of appointment do you need?”
Patient: “I need a prostate exam.”
Me: “I’m sorry, those appointments are for men only.”
Patient: “That’s discrimination – I want to talk to your supervisor!”
Sergeant: “The specialist is correct, ma’am, these appointments are for men only. You do not have a prostate.”
Patient: “How would YOU know? I’ve never had surgery in my life!”
Me: “Have you ever had a penis and testicles at any point in your life?”
Patient: “What?! How insulting! You’re sick! I’m going to sue you!”
Me: “If you were not born with boy parts, then you were not born with a prostate. Good luck suing the Army.”
It seems clear from the dialogue (“How insulting! You’re sick!”) that the patient was a cis woman, and likely a transphobic woman, at that. However, the assumption that, because she was a woman, she didn’t need a medical exam that she specifically requested is rooted in cis privilege and in not even considering the existence of trans people. It could have been the case that the patient was a trans woman in need of a prostate exam. There have been and are trans people in the U.S. Armed Forces, after all.
Just as outright transphobia leads to death, as in the cases of Robert Eads, a trans man who was denied treatment for his ovarian cancer, and Tyra Hunter, a trans woman who was denied medical care after a car crash, so, too, can ignorance of trans peoples’ medical and health needs. S is a med student, and a while ago, she attended a panel that included a Mexican trans woman.
S: hmm this is very interesting. She related an anecdote about her trans friend who died of prostate cancer. The doctor didn’t realize that prostate exam was still necessary and didn’t detect it in time.
PD: sad and interesting
S: ignorance – the root of all evil
PD: basically
S: she’s talking about a nurse practitioner who wanted to refer her out, because he “wouldn’t even know what he was looking at” (vaginal exam), which is a ridiculously insensitive way of putting it
PD: yeah
S: but i wonder if anywhere in our education we’ll be trained how to examine transgender patients
It was casual transphobia and cis privilege on the part of the clinician and the sergeant to assume that the woman was cis. It was casual transphobia for NotAlwaysRight to post the incident as a “haha, that woman’s so stupid she didn’t realize that only men have prostates!” because that thinking erases the existence of trans people.
Zapata Family Statement
[Trigger warnings: anti-trans violence]
Allen Andrade was convicted of first-degree murder and hate crimes charges (CO Independent):
A man convicted Wednesday of using a fire extinguisher to crush the skull of a transgender Greeley woman was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole just over an hour after a jury returned guilty verdicts on all four counts charged, including first-degree murder and hate-crime charges. Weld District Judge Marcelo Kopcow imposed the mandatory life sentence on Allen Andrade, 32, for murdering Angie Zapata, 18, last summer in Greeley.
“Mr. Andrade, I hope as you’re spending the remaining part of your natural life in the Department of Corrections that everyday you think of the violence and brutality that you caused on this fellow human being and the pain you have caused, not only on your family but the family of Angie Zapata,” Kopcow told Andrade, who re-entered the courtroom an hour after the jury verdict shackled and wearing a bright orange prison jumpsuit.
Andrade faces additional sentencing next month on the bias-motivated, or hate-crime charge and on felony automobile and identity theft charges. Prosecutors plan to pursue habitual offender charges against Andrade, court officials said.
Via Sarah in Chicago, the Zapata family’s statement, as read by Angie’s brother Gonzalo:
Transcript:
[Introduction]: This is the immediate family. We have sisters Monica, Ashley, Stephanie, Natasha,niece, and mother Monica–Maria, excuse me, and Gonzalo.
[Gonzalo]: Angie was my sister.
She was a member of our family. We loved her very much, and we will miss her every day. Every day and every night my mom has to deal with the great pain that she saw one of her babies being buried, an experience no parent should have to witness. Every day our siblings and I reach for the phone and realize we’ll never hear her voice. There are times we call and try to get her advice and realize there’s no answer anymore.
A part of our family is missing, stolen from us. Angie was 18, her life was just beginning. Angie was brave, she had guts, she had courage, and was beautiful, was fun, and loving. She was our little sister.
Throughout the past week and a half, we have watched as our sister Angie was lied about in this court. We watched angrily as defense presented an image of my sister that wasn’t true. Their strategy, and make no mistake about it, it was bullying, tearing down my sister to make a monster look a bit better, it will not work.
We want to make things clear: Angie was our sister, an aunt, and a daughter. Life was sometimes difficult for her, we learned along with her to understand that she was born a girl with a body that was wrong for her.
We know Angie was one thing above all else, she was honest. It took such courage to be who she was. Life wasn’t always easy, but she was so strong, and there was no reason to believe my sister was anything but strong and honest with everyone.
This week, we are deeply saddened and angry as we witnessed graphic details about the last few minutes of my sister’s life. A big brother is supposed to protect his–[sobs]–I got it. A big brother’s supposed to protect his little sister. It breaks my heart to think there was nothing I could do. [sobs] To protect my little sister.
My sisters, Monica and Ashley, when they saw what this monster had done, they wanted to hold her, to comfort her and to make her feel better. It was hard to realize that there was nothing they could have done.
He stole something so precious from us. Only a monster can look at a beautiful 18-year-old and beat her to death. This monster not only hit my sister, but continued to beat her head in over and over and over, and over again, until her head was crushed in. Then, he left her there to die.
He’ll never understand how angry we are at him and how much he has hurt us. This past week and a half, we’ve seen attorneys working their hardest to seek justice for my sister. Our family wants to thank Robb Miller, Brandi Nieto, Detective Thorpe, Kelly Winters, Kelly Costello, Crystal Middlestadt of CAVP, Mindy Barton, and the GLBT Community Center of Colorado, Fred Sainz of the Gill Foundation, and Adam Bass of GLAAD, along with the entire Weld County District Attorney’s Office, Ken Buck, for their support of our family and standing with us, and standing with Angie.
We are grateful Colorado has tough laws that make it clear that attacking people because of anti-gender bias will be taken seriously. Targeting someone because she is transgender will be prosecuted aggressively in Weld County. This means a lot to our family. We are grateful that the laws are in place that make hate crimes wrong.
In memory of Angie, we call on Colorado’s leaders to pass a federal hate crime law to protect everyone.
Justice was achieved for my sister today. A message was sent loud and clear that crimes targeting LGBT people will not be tolerated in Colorado, and specifically, Weld County.
We would ask everyone to remember my sister. Remember her like we do, as a beautiful, wonderful, precious teenager. She would want us to remember the happy times in her life. And together, and in Angie’s memory, make the world a better place.
We will always love you, Angie, and we will always miss you, mija.
Thank you.
Dating As A Feminist: Consent & Sex
Warning: brief mention of sexual assault and lots of mention of my sex life. If the latter is TMI, please stop reading here.
I recently had the pleasure of hooking up with a person that I met at a party. As usual, I didn’t see it coming*: we were chatting, wandered apart, wound up chatting some more, he suggested that we go for coffee sometime and asked for my number, we danced a bit, and then he leaned in slowly, clearly telegraphing his intentions–asking, not demanding–and we kissed. There was some PG-13 necking in the kitchen, which was sweet and nice, and then, since I figured that even I knew where this was going, I felt that I should do a couple things:
1. Establish consent rather than taking it for granted.
2. Inform him that I have an STD.
I didn’t want to fumble our way through assuming consent and him finding out later that I was drunk out of my mind or me finding out later that he was drunk out of his mind and that one of us wasn’t really into the other or didn’t really want to have sex. On a more personal level, I hate taking things for granted and relying on assumptions in these kinds of interpersonal situations, so I’d rather be the person who pulls back, looks the other person in the eye, and bluntly says, “Okay, question – are you drunk?”
In retrospect, there were much better ways to phrase that, such as, “Just to be clear, do you want to have sex?” Now that I’m looking at the words, although what I meant was, “Are you drunk? Because I want to establish that you’re capable of giving meaningful consent,” it could also have come off like a creepy, “Are you drunk? Because I like to rape people too drunk to give consent.” *wince* I think he got the drift, though, and I’ll get better at articulating myself with practice. Open mouth, insert foot–that’s me.
He said that no, he wasn’t drunk, and I said, “Okay, second thing–I have HPV.”
He said, “That’s okay, I wasn’t planning on having sex,” and asked, “are you drunk?”
I said, “No,” then thought about it for a second and said, “Well, yes, a little, but not much–I like this,” and wound my arms around his neck and kissed him.**
Cue slow, comfortable making out.
Until someone wandered into the kitchen looking for a drink, and flipped the lights on.
Oops.
We adjourned to his bedroom, had a good time, and went to sleep. I should note that although I badly wanted to have sex, I didn’t pressure him for it. I didn’t whine, I didn’t plead, I didn’t beg, I didn’t “forget” and grab his penis and sit on it (also known as rape, CA Penal Code 261 (a) (2), 263). He’d expressed his desire in that regard and I respected it. Doing anything other than respecting his wishes didn’t even occur to me until now, weeks later.
Not. That. Hard.
Fast forward to this week, when we met up, hung out, and he came over to my place. In the middle of rolling around in bed, while I was trying to figure out a smooth way to ask him to please fuck me now, he paused and asked, “Is it ok if we just go to sleep?”
I said, “Yes,” got out the extra pillow for him, and we fell asleep curled around each other. Again, not. That. Hard.
I keep thinking about these hook ups over and over again, and for a while I thought it was just that I was starved for sex and floating along in a delirious “I hooked up with someone! Who is smart and makes me smile and is cute! And we’re seeing each other again! Yay!” haze. After thinking about it some more, though, I’ve realized that it’s not just the physical acts that are wonderful and surprising to me, it’s their mutuality and our consent to them. They weren’t just about his pleasure or just about my pleasure, but about enjoying ourselves together and respecting each other’s desires and boundaries. It’s been a long time since I had a hook up like that, so long that these recent encounters stand out to me.
The last time I had penetrative sex with a man, I made it clear that I would not have sex without a condom. The first round, he wore a condom. The second round, when he was penetrating me from behind and I couldn’t see, he “forgot” and put his penis in me without a condom. I kicked him out of my apartment for that. The last time I let Reis try anal sex, it hurt badly and I told him, “No, stop, it hurts.” He insisted that it would feel better and kept going until I crawled away. They weren’t concerned with my desires or my pleasure, only their own, and they felt entitled to use my body to achieve it, regardless of what I said or wanted.
Now that I’ve been on the opposite side of the situation, namely, being the person that wants to do more and finding that my partner isn’t ready, is tired, doesn’t want to, etc., I would like to reiterate my disgust with the “common knowledge,” patriarchal, and rape-enabling assumption that it’s completely unreasonable to expect straight and bi men to listen to their female partners when they say, “No.” I’ve heard it said so many times that it’s impossible for men to control themselves, that it’s unrealistic and borderline inhuman to expect them to stop in the middle of a hook up or, god forbid, stop and pull out during penetrative sex when their partner asks them to.
It’s not.
Being a decent human being that believes that I have the right to do as I like with my own body but not anyone else’s, I already thought that it was a crock of shit to say that once a man’s stuck his penis into an orifice, he’s helpless to pull it out until he’s had an orgasm. He just can’t help himself. Blue balls. It’s unreasonable to ask him to stop. If she’s already said yes at any point to anything else, she can’t expect him to stop just because it hurts or she changes her mind.
Bullshit. The experience of respecting my partner’s desires when he said, “No, not now,” just reinforces my previously held belief, because, guess what! I really, really, really wanted to have sex. And yet, lust didn’t turn me into a mindless rapist. My clitoris didn’t shrivel up and expire. My night was not ruined. I didn’t think that just because he’d worn a shirt that set off his fabulously blue eyes (she was asking for it, wearing a skirt that short), had a drink with me (what’d she expect, drinking at a bar with a stranger?), kissed me (she danced with him, she led him on and that’s like consenting to anything and everything), and come home with me (she went somewhere with a stranger, what did she think would happen?), I had the right to rape him and ignore his request to stop fooling around. Fascinating.
Respecting your sex partner is not difficult. Checking for and obtaining enthusiastic consent, rather than operating on an assumption of consent-until-proven-otherwise is not difficult. All that’s necessary is thinking of your partner as a human being with the right to decide what to do with their body, not a life-size, breathing, living blow up doll for your pleasure.
Asking for consent was not awkward (aside from my terrible phrasing) and didn’t ruin the moment. It didn’t break the mood. What it did was establish that we were both interested in each other and also establish that there was a limit, i.e. he didn’t want to have sex right then. That was actually helpful for me, because it let me know that I shouldn’t expect it. In short, asking for consent was not the terrible experience that some people make it out to be (ZOMG! We’ll have to carry around contracts! It’ll kill the romance!). It was positive, helpful, and made me feel more comfortable and helped me figure out what my partner did and did not want to do. It clarified the situation and let me focus on having a mutually good time rather than worrying about whether or not I was reading him correctly about his boundaries. Amazing.
Just to reiterate: asking for consent is easy. And it’s good and necessary.
[Disclaimer: I'm sure some people will think that I just don't understand, because I'm a woman and women don't have sexual urges and so they can't understand that sometimes, men just have to rape because they can't control themselves when they're aroused, they desperately need sex . To them, I say, wrong and wrong. I quite demonstrably have sexual desires and men are capable of controlling theirs, despite a patriarchal, rape-enabling culture that insists that men lose their self-control and turn into ravening rapists when a woman walks by. "I couldn't help it!" is actually, "I felt entitled to raping my partner!" or "I didn't want to help it!"]
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* Seriously, I am the master of not seeing it coming: I fall for straight women and gay men and think that people are making casual conversation when they are actually saying, “Shall we go back to the hotel and screw like bunnies?” My attractiondar, it is broken.
** My response makes me a little uncomfortable, because it’s my general rule to not sleep with anyone who’s drunk. On the other hand, I think it’s very obvious and easy to tell if the person you’re with is willing, interested, and capable of making decisions, and I was all three of those. I might write on this more later.
Allen Andrade Trial
Autumn at Pam’s House Blend has a post on the trial of Allen Andrade, who is accused of murdering Angie Zapata in an anti-trans hate crime (note: Andrade has admitted to killing Angie; the defense are trying to get him out with a trans panic defense, i.e. claiming that it’s perfectly acceptable to beat someone’s head in with a fire extinguisher and kill them if that person is trans.)
Crystal Ann Gray has updates on the trial at TransGriot.
I remember discussing the murder with some colleagues last summer, particularly “legal analyst” Scott Robinson’s assertion that the murder was “not a classic hate crime.” The colleagues, both former lawyers, laughed at the idea of trans panic defense; they thought it was beyond belief that any lawyer would try to get an admitted murderer off on the claim that the murder was justified because the victim was trans. Cis privilege.
My roommates were talking about prostitutes the other day and as soon as the word “transgendered” came up, began cracking up. Why? No reason other than that they thought the very concept of being trans was laughable and funny, a freak show to point at and giggle over.
These attitudes allow transphobia to flourish: seeing people as ridiculous solely for their gender identity. Not understanding how much hatred there is and dismissing it. The first contributes to the marginalization of transpeople as being worth less than cispeople, and therefore acceptable targets for violence. The second denies that the marginalization happens and denies the reality of constant discrimination.
Andrade should rot in hell, and I hope that the jury convicts him of murder and a hate crime. But these explosions of violence are not isolated outbursts, they are facilitated by the casually transphobic remarks and cis privilege.
A Thousand Words
*sigh* The same place where I saw this poster now has this poster up.
It’s a poster of an East Asian-looking person wearing what looks like a surgical mask and sterile gloves (an allusion to SARS? I don’t know.). Someone defaced the poster by writing “ChinK” and “Fag” and drawing an arrow between the word “Fag” and the person’s head. There are two Chinese characters on the poster and it’s unclear as to whether they were part of the original piece or added in response to the graffiti. If anyone knows what the characters mean, please let me know and I’ll edit this post.
[ETA] Thanks to OD in the comments and SYW, the characters mean “Air” and are probably a reference to air pollution and Yellow Sand. That would also explain the face mask. [/ETA]
It just makes me sad and angry, y’know? I love street art. I love how creative it can be, how it interacts with landscapes and whimsy to raise questions about public vs. private property, transience, and anonymity. And where someone put up this poster, someone else saw it as a canvas for expressing hatred.
Someone is so full of racism and homophobia, is so steeped in it as part of the garden variety background noise in their head, that when they saw a poster of someone who looked East Asian, they thought, “Chink.” It wasn’t enough to merely think it, though, they had to express their hatred by scrawling it out for everyone to see, a reminder to me and to every other stereotypically chinky-looking person that we are not welcome, that we will be judged by our presumed ethnicity, by the color of our hair and the shape of our eyes, and found wanting.
The graffiti reminds me of every time people have yelled at me, “Go back where you came from!” or played the “Where are you really from?” guessing game or opened a conversation with, “Are you Chinese?” or run around pulling slanty eyes while yelling, “Ching chong ching chong!” *
Racism isn’t just a joke. The questions, the insults, the taunts add up over a lifetime and the sum is a great big get back on the boat and go home, Chink, because you’re not welcome here.
Now for the “fag.” The poster looks androgynous to me, neither particularly feminine nor particularly masculine–it doesn’t have markers that meet stereotypical depictions of masculine or feminine presentation. Yet, it’s still got “fag” scrawled across it. So either “fag” is just a generic insult, because being gay means that you’re worth less than a straight person (or just worthless, full stop), or the vandalizer read the poster’s subject as male and the use of “fag” to deface the poster is tied to the racist, misogynistic, and homophobic stereotype of East Asian men being effeminate and therefore gay, because gay men are practically like women and that makes them worthless.
As a queer, chinky-looking woman, I say, “Fuck off.” I’m not leaving and I’ll never sit down and shut up.
*“Go back where you came from!” You mean California, you idiot
“Where are you really from?” I’m from America. Yeah, America. California. San Francisco. THE UNITED FUCKING STATES. No, really, I was born and raised in the U.S., and if I had to call any place else home, it would be Italy, so if you want to ask what ethnicity I am, that’s not the same question. Don’t assume that I’m “really” from somewhere else.
“Are you Chinese?” No, I’m not, and that’s not the way to start the conversation if you want to hit on me, jerk.
Sexual Assault
SEXUAL ASSAULT TRIGGER WARNING FOR THIS POST AND FOR THE SHAKESVILLE POST AND ITS COMMENT THREAD.
Liss has a post up today, The Survivor Thread:
As I’ve said before, this points to an interesting, ahem, blindspot in the oft-cited statistic about 1 in 6 women being victims of sexual assault or attempted sexual assault sometime in their lives: Many of those women will have been victimized multiple times.
And many of us who are survivors of repeat assaults will not speak of it; many of us will pick the “worst” one and talk about that in threads on assault, as if it’s the only one. We do this for many reasons: We might feel embarrassed by being repeatedly victimized, as if it’s indicative of a character flaw within ourselves; we might have trouble discussing multiple assaults without undermining what tenuous feeling of safety we have; we might have faced reactions of incredulity from people with whom we shared this information and thought we could trust; we might have been called liars or hysterics—accusations born of the silence about sexual assault.
Disbelief is the inevitable result of swimming in a culture which renders invisible the reality that enormous numbers of women—and men—have been sexually assaulted, many of them more than once.
And so, this will be a thread of clattering teaspoons breaking that silence. Share your stories here.
This is a safe space and this is the survivor thread.
As I type these words, the comment thread is at 181 comments and counting. The thread will be longer by the time this post goes live, and I have no doubt that tomorrow morning, after people have gotten off work, come home from school, found a free moment to relax after taking care of their families, and woken up in other time zones, the thread will be much longer.
Coincidentally, April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. It’s almost a year to the day that I wrote about being a sexual assault survivor for last year’s Blog Against Sexual Violence Day.
There are 181 comments, almost all of which are personal stories of sexual assault. Supporting Liss’ point that the one out of six statistic says nothing about how that one will likely be raped multiple times, almost all of the comments have multiple stories. Mine does.
In my post last year, I wrote,
I can’t talk about the assault yet. I’ve thought over the words, strung them together inside my head, and I still can’t do it. One day, I hope I’ll be able to. But for now, I will own these words. I have a face, I have a name, I am a person you know, online or in real life, and I am a sexual assault victim. I am a sexual assault survivor.
One year later, here is my story:
The 8th grade science teacher who looked down girls’ shirts. His students were 13-14 years old.
A man fondled my butt on the bus.
Going clubbing and random men grinding and kissing me without so much as a “May I?” I realize that’s accepted clubbing behavior, because they didn’t pursue it when I pulled back, but this is why I won’t go clubbing alone. It shouldn’t be acceptable.
Going clubbing with a friend. A man tried to dance with her and she pushed him away, saying, “It’s a girl thing.” He said, “Prove it, I want to see you kiss,” and knocked our heads together.
Walking back to my hostel late at night and being followed by a man who grabbed my hand, dragged me into a dark and isolated area, and kissed me, despite the fact that I was yanking to get my hand back. He stopped and ran away when I shouted at the top of my lungs, and I consider myself lucky for that. What was he thinking? That I wanted to be assaulted? The yanking should have been a clue even before the screaming.
I was hooking up with a man who wanted to have anal sex. I’d tried it once and it hurt, so I said no. He kept insisting and so I said ok, thinking that maybe it would be better this time. He shoved his dick in without any preparation–I was crying at how much it hurt and blood dripped out every time I went to the bathroom for the next few days. I told him to stop, it hurt, and he said to relax and it would feel better, and kept thrusting until I crawled away. We were having sex without a condom (I know, it was stupid) and later on, he came inside me although we’d agreed that that was off limits. I think it was his revenge for not letting him fuck my ass.
Last year, I wrote
I believe that the mainstream silence around sexual violence is part of what allows it to flourish, because most people are good, and I think that if they had any idea how rampant sexual violence is, they would be up in arms. Not only feminists, not only victims, not only allies, but everyone. We would recognize all forms of sexual assault as such and not dismiss “lovers’ quarrels,” slaps, bruises, intimidation, gropes, “unwilling” or “nonconsensual” sex, or anything else. We wouldn’t make excuses for them. We wouldn’t contest the idea that individuals should never have their boundaries violated or their bodies touched against their will, and that putting up with some groping, some shouting, some hitting, some raping is not simply the price of living.
I’m not sure that I believe any longer that most people are good. I do believe that the silence around assault and the silencing of victims allows and perpetuates sexual assault and further harms sexual assault victims. I read the entire thread and I am sick with rage for all of us, victims and survivors that we are.
Go read the thread. The entire thread. Don’t feel sorry for me, don’t try to shield yourself from the horror of those stories and distance yourself by offering pity. You want to do something? Support sexual assault prevention and take a stand, even when it’s unpopular and even when it rocks the boat. Read the stories and allow them to rip you to the bone as you think about them. Ask yourself if any of those stories sound familiar–if they sound like things you’ve done to someone and justified to yourself as consensual or deserved or okay. Ask yourself what you would do if someone told you their story, and be honest: it’s easy to say that you’d be sympathetic and believe them, but as so many of the comments prove, most people try to rationalize the assault, blame the victim, silence the victim, save the assailant (“Do you really want to destroy his future over something like this?”), and pretend that it never happened. Acknowledging assault breaks apart the status quo, where we can pretend that everything is okay. It’s a fragile, thin silence we skate around that lets rapists and assailants and non-victims off scot free and forces victims to pretend that everything is okay, so long as we don’t think about it too much and ignore the pain behind the empty, forced smiles.
I want to shatter the silence one word at a time and burn down the world until that facade of complacency, and the social equilibrium that prioritizes social relationships and the delicate sensibilities of everyone but the victim, are utterly destroyed. I’ve accepted that those men assaulted and raped me and I will work to keep it from happening to anyone else–and to provide a safe space when that fails, as it already has and inevitably will.
Oh, god. It was rape.
