reminder

If you're in the Portland area and not a jerk, you should totally show up to the little dinner party some of us are throwing together tonight, Saturday the 21st, at about 5:00.
It will be, as the young people say, fun.
Be good, okay?

(this post will self-destruct, much as I never delete posts, once the event is done. It will possibly be replaced with an account of what a good time everyone who showed up had.)

on the record

This is another guest post by Pigeon, in response to the huge mess going around right now in relation to the accouncement regarding the Duke lacrosse rape case. I didn't feel qualified to offer an opinion myself, certainly not one that's not already been offered by folk who know better than I do, but this is important to read. If this doesn't bring it home for you and hurt, I'm not sure you're a person.
Anyway. I should leave it at that.
Except this, considering how many trolls are out running around right now: if you so much as consider being an asshole about this, I will moderate you so hard your ancestors will feel it, capisce?
--ll.




i tried to write about this post a few days ago, a few days after the duke verdict came out.
i tried, and erased and rewrote and erased, and gave up.
i want this to come out right. i want this to be so many things, i don’t much think it will be. but i think i need to write this anyway.

i didn’t expect the duke case to shake me so much. i feel like i hear about, talk about, read about, think about rape every day. i like to think i’ve built up some callous at this point, a tough, thick covering to take the edge off.

the whole thing caught me off guard. i didn’t follow the case very closely, mostly just reading feminist analyses on various blogs, snippets on npr. closely enough though, to know that the whole thing was deeply fucked up, that something happened to that woman that night, whether or not it fit the official charges or was perpetrated by the three accused.

and now they’ve been proclaimed not guilty, and that’s fine. i don’t know if they did it, but let’s presume innocence. glad they got their names cleared.

except now you hear the news, following “three boys innocent” with “she was never raped” and liar and whore. and no one seems to notice that the accused men’s innocence has nothing to do with whether or not she was raped, only that they didn’t do it. she called 911 for a reason, she went to the hospital afterwards, the examination supported her claims of sexual assault. we have no reason to think those results were wrong, no new information to contest it. perhaps she picked the wrong guys from the line-up, but that has little to do with what actually happened to her.
(go to feministe for more intelligent, coherent and thorough thoughts on this. read the comments at your own risk. i wish i hadn’t.)

but no one seems to remember that. instead it’s just liar, liar, liar. as if survivors aren’t called liars often enough as it is. this case just adds fuel to the fire of news media crying out, “she says she was raped, but what if she’s lying!” perpetuating the idea that women routinely lie about sexual assault to deflect attention from their own misdoings.

i don’t know a lot of statistics, and am never quite sure when to trust them, but i do know a lot of women, and i trust them a whole lot. of all the women i know, more than not have been raped, sexually assaulted or sexually abused at some point in their lives. of these women, more than not never reported. and of the few who did, more than not suffered pretty intense negative consequences because of it.

and no, this is not just the women i know, and, yes, they are representative of a much larger trend that exists in equal numbers outside of the communities that i’m a part of. it is not just a queer women thing, a once-alcoholic-drug-addicted women thing, a feminist women thing, a young collegiate women thing, a femme women thing.

and so here's yet another very public rape trial which ultimately tells survivors that it's your fault because you put yourself in a vulnerable situation or let him buy your dinner once, because you were drunk or not wearing enough clothing or made eye contact and smiled, besides, you’re probably a slut. and if you do try to press charges, no one will believe you anyway.

so, whatever, i was raped when i was sixteen. i was at your standard someone's-parents-are-out-of-town-for-the-weekend-let's-get-wasted high school party, drunk way past the point of blackout, he was the 21 year old buying us the booze. i thought i had been stupid and irresponsible getting so drunk in the first place, talked about how i needed to “take responsibility” for my behavior. rape never crossed my mind.

i was in therapy at the time, and told my therapist about what happened. she mentioned, initially, that she needed to check the mandatory reporting laws, that she might be legally bound to report it as statutory rape. i told her i didn’t want it reported. i never heard about it again, so assumed the law agreed with me. we talked about reckless sexual behavior, how that tied into my other self-destructive tendencies. the word rape never came up again.

looking back, i realize she wasn’t that great of a therapist, but i’m still shocked and retroactively appalled that she didn’t identify what happened as rape, that she apparently bought into my insistence that it was my fault for getting drunk enough to be blacked out enough to kind of say yes to a guy i was still too dizzy to even see clearly. (the left side of his face had a massive scar running from the top of his cheek bone down his jaw, the aftermath of a drunk driving accident a few years back. it is the only part of him that i can still picture in my mind, and something i did not actually see until the next morning). she knew how much i’d drunk—after smoking a few bowls, i downed ten shots of vodka in less than ten minutes, then topped off with some beer, on an empty stomach, at 100 pounds—that it was something of a miracle that i hadn’t ended up in a hospital with alcohol poisoning. we talked about why drinking that much was really not a good option for me, but not about how you are totally unable to consent while in a blackout. looking back, i can’t decide whether it was a matter of gross incompetence or internalized victim-blaming, or both.

what i didn’t know until very recently was that she actually was legally required to report what had happened. apparently the law is pretty straight forward.

261.5
(c) Any person who engages in an act of unlawful sexual
intercourse with a minor who is more than three years younger than
the perpetrator is guilty of either a misdemeanor or a felony, and
shall be punished by imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one
year, or by imprisonment in the state prison.

he was 21, i was 16.
5 year age difference.
pretty clear.

there’s more too, about what does or does not constitute consent, and there’s the broader california rape law, both of which would have something to say about my blood alcohol level, but that’s almost beside the point.

whether or not i thought it was rape, whether or not she thought it was rape, she was legally obligated to report it.

and i can’t help but wonder why she didn’t, and what would have happened if she had.

as it was, my life was a mess. he lied about what happened a week later, my friends had known him longer than they’d known me, and i was quickly and quietly ostracized. although i didn’t see a connection at the time, my already not-so-great eating diminished from little food to no food, instead swallowing caffeine pills by the handful. more than anything, i was overwhelmingly disoriented. i could never remember how many pills i’d had at any given time, so would have another just in case. i remember throwing up and nearly collapsing at the park down the street from my house, laying on the sidewalk because that was all i could do. some of the neighbor stoner boys helped walk me home, and i made it up stairs in my room just in time to start shaking and convulsing uncontrollably, then puking some more. i was mentally and emotionally completely checked out, but my body knew and my body reacted, shaking and collapsing and puking where i couldn’t scream or cry or feel anything. (of course, the combination of caffeine pills and ephedrine and no food and no sleep helped that along nicely). i have no idea how i went to school, did homework, had conversations. i was utterly and completely wrecked, and i truly had no idea why. i maintained then and for years afterwards that the event had not affected me at all.

i can only imagine how much worse it would have been if she had reported. whether or not i would have given her his name, she would have had to tell my parents and the DA or the police or whoever these things are officially reported to. my parents would have made me tell them who it was, and would almost certainly have pressed charges. the friends who had quietly ostracized me would have then been forced to pick sides—and really, we all know whose side they were going to be on—and what was an incredibly lonely and isolating time might instead of been one of public shaming and humiliation. i imagine a hospital examination would have been required, which would have been terrifying and humiliating, followed by having to recount the events over and over and over again to the litany of people who inevitably get involved in official investigations—doctors, social workers, police, lawyers, we can probably add school officials because let’s face it, gossip gets round real quick at an all-girl’s catholic school. and there are all the ways in which they could try to discredit me—i’d had previous sexual partners (read: promiscuous), i’d lied to my parents to go to an unchaperoned party (read: dishonest, rebellious, put myself in a vulnerable/dangerous situation, irresponsible), had a mix of drugs and alcohol in my system (read: blatant disregard for the law, reckless behavior, self-destructive), history of self-destructive behaviors (read: emotionally unstable, mentally ill). it wouldn’t matter that i was an honor student with good grades, that i had never been in trouble before, that i was well-rounded in my activities, and generally pretty responsible. it wouldn’t matter that was i good kid, and really, just a kid even though i would have hated you for saying so. it feels cynical of me to assume that i would have been accused of lying, of trying to get attention, of being emotionally unstable, etc, etc. but i’ve been around long enough to know that it would mostly likely have gone down that way, especially since he was lying about it to begin with.

and sixteen year old me, who did not call it rape, did not even consider that it might be rape, would have been forced to choose between going along with charges that i didn’t want pressed in the first place, or saying it didn’t happen, or that i had wanted it, or something else that was not true, to try to put an end to it, which would only add to the opinion that i was some stupid, lying girl trying to get attention.

i know it might seem irrelevant to go down that road, create a reality that did not and will never now occur. it’s all guesswork, anyway, my best guesses of how it would have gone down knowing what i do about the people who were involved and the process of reporting sexual assault. but there is a point. ultimately, that therapist did me a huge favor by not reporting, however ethically questionable and illegal that decision may have been. it would have torn my life to shreds.

but here’s why this matters. i am the kind of girl who is privileged by our legal system. light-skinned, well educated, well spoken, from an upper-middle class family. my mother is even a lawyer. i was a good student & generally responsible kid on top of that. i was also pretty fucked up, but those battles were kept very private. on the outside, i had both institutional privilege and the approval of popular culture on my side. not to mention, i had a loving and supportive family, and a decent friend-base, even if most of them lived on the other side of the country at that point.

and it would still have turned out really fucking ugly. at best, i would only have had to face social consequences at school, among my peers; at worst, if it actually went to trial, if the media got involved (as cities go—if you could even call it that—the place was pretty small, so it’s entirely possible), i would have been surrounded and questioned and examined from all sides. and that would only be the outward assault—i have no idea how i would have held up emotionally under that kind of scrutiny. and who’s to say what the outcome would have been, i could very well have ended up a liar and a slut who almost ruined some poor boy’s life.

yeah, reporting sure is not looking too appealing.

and then imagine that you didn’t have a supportive family, maybe you risked physical abuse if your parents found out. imagine you’re black and the people you’re reporting to throw back racist stereotypes about how black women are promiscuous and sexually aggressive. imagine you’re a drug addict, imagine you’ve been in trouble before, maybe a lot, maybe you’ve got a record. imagine that he was actually your boyfriend, and that you’d been having sex for a few months now. imagine that your whole high school calls you a slut already. imagine that you really like to wear short skirts.

and how much worse does reporting sound now?

root cuttings

I had a profound shock tonight.

My grandmothers are troublesome figures in my life. One of them is a sociopathic ex-prostitute of aristocratic extraction who I've never met, but whose features I see echoed in my own--survivor of a brutal military occupation, bitter immigrant wife of a never-present serviceman, badly-treated as a sufferer of bipolar disorder the doctors didn't know how to properly care for. I have never met her, since my infancy, and her only contact with my immediate family is the every-few-years call when she tries to get my mother in on an insurance scam or bilk her out of money. In my difficulties with my own mother, I often hear hers speaking through her. She has become something of a legend--fascinating, terrifying, the source of a goodly amount of the beauty and madness in my own veins, a woman who took up with sea-captains and movie stars and never managed to look after her own children.

And then there's my father's mother, who I grew up knowing, and removed contact with voluntarily. She is a Democrat only by virtue of her Judaism, it always seemed to me--old-fashioned, entitled, classist, racist. She speaks to people of color like children, sends back food three times, told my father in his youth that he might be permitted to date a non-Jewish girl, but never a black one. She travels on cruises and then complains when foreign countries won't speak English and serve food bland enough for her liking. Her treatment of my mother--the brown Catholic working-class woman my father brought home after his first near-arranged marriage failed--has been, by all accounts, years upon years of nastiness, dismissiveness, and passive-aggressive cruelty. I was always surprised when reminded that she had had a career before she stopped to mother full-time--as, of all things, a doctor, which is impressive for the day and age in question. She has softened some, with the years--accepted that her grandchildren are not white, accepted that her daughter-in-law is here to stay, accepted her own frailty--but some years ago, when I was finally old enough to see her behavior as anything but normal-and-acceptable, I disengaged. I removed myself from her sphere.

My father outed me to the extended family the other day, starting with her. By all accounts, she wasn't even surprised. She was kind, compassionate even--and then the shock.
My grandmother, in all of her socially-conservative, old-fashioned everything, was not just any doctor--she was a doctor in women's health and, moreover, the doctor the queers went to.
She had a lesbian patient who she treated--and this was rare in that place and time--with understanding and without laying judgment, and word got out. By the time she retired, her clientele was half lesbian women.

My grandmother.

I was going to write about my connections to the women in my family; I was going to write, in grand cliched fashion, about my mother. I need to let this settle, though. I need to shift the lenses and rearrange my conception of the people my blood comes from.

I think maybe this is the point--not just in our relationships to women, or to family members, but in all of our interactions--not just to avoid forgetting, but to assume there are layers we don't know about. We don't know--especially when it comes to our elders--everywhere someone has been, everything someone has been. Sometimes they surprise us with their venom and cruelty; sometimes they shock us further with the currents of decency, or courage, or sure-sightedness, that we never thought them capable of. When we are situating ourselves--finding context, taking root, a vital project for those of us attempting to move the world--we cannot let this just sit.

We cannot ignore where we come from, and a large part of that is the people around us. And we cannot--cannot--forget where they come from.
Feminism is, as a project, about building connections and communities if it is about anything. When healthy as a movement, one of the most momentous things it does is remind us to listen to each other, to connect us in common struggles and common experiences. It connects women especially to each other by emphasizing that those connections between us matter, and that they are avenues by which we can strengthen each other and, by the slow and steady work of building communities of mutual support, change the way all of humanity moves and breathes and lives. Part of my context has been, until now, a disconnect from the women two generations back of me, because they're hard. They're problematic, they're embarrassing, they hurt. But while self-preservation matters--especially when you're talking about a con woman and a lifelong manipulator--the most problematic thing is my disconnect.

If we can learn from anyone, it's the ones that are hard. It's the ones we'd never go near if we didn't have to--like the woman who looks at my brown skin and cringes, but who I have to know because she is my father's mother--like the woman who would rob me blind and then hex me for good measure, but who I still hope to someday meet, because she is my mother's mother--who present the most opportunity to challenge that reflex to judge, to sneer, to say no, not for me. If they weren't my grandmothers, it would be too easy to cross the street when I see them coming, to duck away and surround myself only with the people who treat me well and make sense to me. It would be too easy to let them be caricatures who never put themselves on the line to care for people they didn't have to, who never made great sacrifices in an unknown land to give opportunities to the same children they heaped abuse on.

We have to look after ourselves, of course. But we have to look after each other, too. If that woman can look at me and still see granddaughter, how can I look at her and see nothing but bigot? In examining these connections, it becomes clear that it's too easy an impulse to deny these people their complicatedness. And isn't that what we're supposed to be working against, in the fight for social justice and equality? The impulse to make simple cardboard cutouts of people and not engage with their wholeness, their difficulty, their own voices, no matter how hard those voices are to hear? It is imperative that we try to forgive the fact that not only does the world put us in places that hurt, but that sometimes those doing the hurting are the ones who are supposed to love us. To remember that even those who stand in our way have stories, and those stories come back around and become part of our history, too.

It's hard to keep in mind that we're all family here. It's hard to look out at the seething mass of humanity and see them all as unavoidable, as hitched and bound to us, as people who, in the end, we cannot just cross the street to avoid. We can turn around and around and around, but the fact of the matter is, people are complicated, and their histories tie to ours, the good parts and the awful, and they aren't just going away. I can hardly think of a better reminder than the ones we're supposed to call family by default, even the ones who don't treat us like family ought to. We don't have to welcome them in just yet, but we have to engage. We have to let them be messy and real. This is radical love. This is the love that acknowledges that we are connected whether we like it or not. It's not about redemption, or deserving, or who's good and bad; it's not about good deeds, or courage in adversity, excusing cruelty and bigotry. It's just about letting it be more complicated than that, and insisting on caring.

Let people surprise you. Take another look.