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Authors: Friedman,Jaclyn Friedman,Jessica Valenti
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BOOK: Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape
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When I start wanting again, it’s no surprise—I’ve always wanted sex, always been a huge slut and a huge bottom. I was jerking off at six, always thought of myself as sexual. Sex was in my body like the incest was in my body, two tracks, just like Survivor World and Regular World floating side by side. I don’t know if being a survivor made me extra sexual or if I would’ve been anyway, and I don’t think there’s a way to know, just a choice about what story to believe. I start jerking off every day again. I save up for my vibrator. I check
Best Lesbian Erotica
s out of the library. I start flirting. As my health and money come back, I can afford to buy lipstick again. I flirt awkward, I go out on awkward dates, I finally fuck the cute QPOC boy I’ve had a crush on since 1997, since before the avalanche happened. The one who has slept with so many queer girls and so many survivor girls and he knows; it’s hot fucking him and it’s like fucking on training wheels—I can’t fall over. I fuck my girlfriend on the railroad tracks, in the bathroom at Vazaleen, the giant queer club where she won the Bobbing for Buttplugs contest two years in a row, where there are hundreds of perverted queers making out.
Best Lesbian Erotica
s out of the library. I start flirting. As my health and money come back, I can afford to buy lipstick again. I flirt awkward, I go out on awkward dates, I finally fuck the cute QPOC boy I’ve had a crush on since 1997, since before the avalanche happened. The one who has slept with so many queer girls and so many survivor girls and he knows; it’s hot fucking him and it’s like fucking on training wheels—I can’t fall over. I fuck my girlfriend on the railroad tracks, in the bathroom at Vazaleen, the giant queer club where she won the Bobbing for Buttplugs contest two years in a row, where there are hundreds of perverted queers making out.
I’m poly and slutty and kinky, and I’m also hesitant. Sometimes, just like how reaching my hips one inch farther to the left so they turn into the right spot in yoga is horribly hard, so is asking for my girlfriend to call me the right name or telling her where to put her fingers in my cunt or admitting that I’m not going to get off. I make myself come to ecstasy on my own, but am totally quiet about feeling broken, not working, when I’m fucking someone else in my bed. It’s much easier to say that it’s all better now. Much easier to make the girls and bois I fuck come than to wind my way to what will get me off.
But I keep stepping. The years pile up, and each time I return to child’s pose in yoga, my legs spread out in a triangle and my head pillowed on my knuckles, I inhale safety into all the cells of me. Every time I go into the trigger and see what it has to say, it’s less scary. Every time I’m naked with my lover and my pussy is no longer clenched shut with vaginismus, no longer a scarred, numb place but the place where she knows how to make me come over and over, easy; the place where my doctor found a very old scar during a pelvic exam melts under his fingers. Every time I have just the kind of sex I always wanted, every time I grow more into the fierce, fearless femme I have always wanted to be, I heal not like a cliché but like I can see new cells being made, the purple and magenta color of the outside of the skin cells, the bone being reknit.
I read and reread
The Survivor’s Guide to Sex,
and it feels like everything left out of that tiny little “Moving On” section of
The Courage to Heal
—like this is what resolution and moving on mean. Not just the ability to fuck exactly how you want and to take pleasure in it, but all the things author Staci Haines writes about the intelligence and memory of the body. That you have choices in walking back into your body, and that that is the final goal: to be able to live in your body, all the way.
The Survivor’s Guide to Sex,
and it feels like everything left out of that tiny little “Moving On” section of
The Courage to Heal
—like this is what resolution and moving on mean. Not just the ability to fuck exactly how you want and to take pleasure in it, but all the things author Staci Haines writes about the intelligence and memory of the body. That you have choices in walking back into your body, and that that is the final goal: to be able to live in your body, all the way.
Just like
The Courage to Heal
had said, the years came where everything did quiet down. Slight economic stability, 9/11, my career taking off, and my first steady girlfriend all happened at the same time, and the combination made me want to stay in bed with her as much as possible and go buy sheets, towels, and furniture at IKEA when we got out of bed. She got a job at the youth shelter where she used to be a client. I worked at the feminist crisis line, and it was my first good job. We had breakfasts and parties with friends and slept in late, and not everything was the Crisis Pregnancy Center of Incest all the time. We had vacations, and I spent Christmas with her cool anarchist mom and her boyfriend, not my crazy parents. Sheets, towels, and cable felt like enough for a while.
The Courage to Heal
had said, the years came where everything did quiet down. Slight economic stability, 9/11, my career taking off, and my first steady girlfriend all happened at the same time, and the combination made me want to stay in bed with her as much as possible and go buy sheets, towels, and furniture at IKEA when we got out of bed. She got a job at the youth shelter where she used to be a client. I worked at the feminist crisis line, and it was my first good job. We had breakfasts and parties with friends and slept in late, and not everything was the Crisis Pregnancy Center of Incest all the time. We had vacations, and I spent Christmas with her cool anarchist mom and her boyfriend, not my crazy parents. Sheets, towels, and cable felt like enough for a while.
A big part of that life was working at that first good job, doing crisis counseling at a holdout feminist therapy-referral center/crisis counseling line. On paper, our job was supposed to be hooking up women, men, and transpeople with therapists from our screened pool of sliding-scale anti-oppression feminist counselors. But a lot of folks who called us were going through every name in the pamphlet they’d picked up, trying to find something that wasn’t a voicemail. So I also spent a lot of time talking to ritual abuse survivors living on government disability who had no extra income for therapy, who needed to talk to someone anyway; or women who needed help getting themselves and their kids out of the apartment they lived in with a scary lover; or the trans kid who washed dishes at the vegan café who needed to find somebody to talk about the stuff that happened with hir mom.
I was good at my job because I’m slightly psychic and I had survivor knowledge. Survivor knowledge includes knowing things like never approaching someone from behind, and never asking, “What happened?” but waiting for them to tell you. Just like when I was thirteen, I could read between a client’s “Uh, I want to talk about some, uh, family stuff” and know how to say, with just the right degree of normalcy, “So, was there ever any kind of abuse that happened as a kid that you’d like to talk about? It’s fine if you don’t want to say, but we ask because it’s very common and a lot of people have a hard time saying if it’s an issue for them.” A lot of people are waiting to be asked, silently screaming in their heads,
Ask me, go on ask me, can’t you fucking see what’s going on
?
Ask me, go on ask me, can’t you fucking see what’s going on
?
I referred folks to the same five free time-limited counseling programs, asked if they could try to afford $25, our bare minimum for private therapy, tried to get them in to see someone they would like and trust who was still taking the cheap clients. I told clients about the same three group-counseling programs that had existed when I started looking. And even though the system was totally inadequate—three programs for a city of three million people?—it was much, much better in commie Canada, in downtown Toronto, then it was ten hours north or twenty hours south.
I got people therapists and counseling and books, and those are all great and wonderful things. But there were so many times when I felt like even here, at the grooviest, most feminist, most critical-of-psychiatry counseling spot in town, wasn’t there something missing? Beyond six-week support groups and once-a-week therapy, how badly did I want to be able to offer herbs, scream therapy, justice, music, a certain zine, a million rage-filled folks running down the street, the juiciness of feminist rape crisislandia twenty years ago, but updated and now? I remember Chrystos writing in “Truth Is,” an essay she wrote for the last issue of
Sojourner,
a Boston feminist newspaper that died in 2002, “I want a circle of women who will rage and cry and scream for days. . . . Then maybe I’ll ‘heal.’ But incest is not a cut that can be stitched up.”
Sojourner,
a Boston feminist newspaper that died in 2002, “I want a circle of women who will rage and cry and scream for days. . . . Then maybe I’ll ‘heal.’ But incest is not a cut that can be stitched up.”
Much has been written, by INCITE and other brilliant feminists of color, about how the nonprofit industrial complex turned the rape crisis centers and incest resources that were once run out of somebody’s basement—not with a client/worker perspective but with the perspective that we
are
battered women, survivors are us, there’s not an us or a them but a we—into increasingly depoliticized centers focused on a sanitized version of recovery, with no politics allowed if you want to keep your funding. Riot Grrl, as faulted as it was (it didn’t implode just because of the Spice Girls—we had wars over racism and classism as far back as 1993), didn’t cost anything to join. For stamps and ink, you could trade zines, write letters, write your story. We shared what we knew about healing, and it wasn’t bland. Often I feel like programs, though often lifesaving, are just one more form of social control to keep the lid on survivor rage. Every time I’d give someone her referrals and she’d thank me, I’d feel good but think:
What if instead of individual women depressed in individual houses just getting support groups, we could shake the system that made us to its foundations
?
are
battered women, survivors are us, there’s not an us or a them but a we—into increasingly depoliticized centers focused on a sanitized version of recovery, with no politics allowed if you want to keep your funding. Riot Grrl, as faulted as it was (it didn’t implode just because of the Spice Girls—we had wars over racism and classism as far back as 1993), didn’t cost anything to join. For stamps and ink, you could trade zines, write letters, write your story. We shared what we knew about healing, and it wasn’t bland. Often I feel like programs, though often lifesaving, are just one more form of social control to keep the lid on survivor rage. Every time I’d give someone her referrals and she’d thank me, I’d feel good but think:
What if instead of individual women depressed in individual houses just getting support groups, we could shake the system that made us to its foundations
?
The story doesn’t end, but in the most recent chapter of it, I finally move back to the States last year after a decade of living in and loving Toronto. I move to a pretty little apartment in North Oakland for MFA grad school, teaching, freelance writing, and finishing my second book.
Oakland charms me like it charms so many. It’s the luckiest I’ve ever felt, the most grown. When I climb up the hill in my neighborhood to the post office that’s fringed with blooming wild sage, giant agave cactus, and scraggly palm trees, rocking a miniskirt and giant platforms in February, I can’t believe that I’m grown, adult, and living here. It’s not like incest stops living or speaking in my body, it’s just that shit really did change. I learned how to talk and calm myself down, how to fuck and love the way I always wanted to. Not everything’s a disaster, and when it is I know what to do with it. I could almost blend, almost blink, almost forget the whole underbelly world I knew.
But if I forget thee, oh Survivor World, I am as complicit as all the everyday pod people walking around sipping their Starbucks, eating, sleeping, working, and consuming. For survivors who get to this place, happiness is such a novelty, of course you want to just stay in it for a while. And of course movements built only on rage risk burnout. But there’s got to be something else we make together—a movement of radical survivors of sexual violence that is all of the above: us loving, fucking, healing, praying, listening to one another. Not too much. Not either permanently damaged or fixed and never wanting to talk about it again. Not just workers in programs, people trying to do self-care and forget it, but people remembering and knowing Survivor World but also fully alive and healing and able to use our new energy for the fight.
I get excited about the work of UBUNTU, the Durham, North Carolina, organization founded in the wake of the March 13, 2006, rape of a black woman by members of the Duke University lacrosse team. UBUNTU is led by women of color and survivors. They’ve done much work, including organizing a community-wide “Day of Truth-Telling,” which included a march survivors led through Durham to raise the issue of sexual violence and abuse.
In their points of unity, they say,
We envision a world without sexual violence, and we work persistently to bring that vision into being. We recognize the roots of sexual violence to be pervasive and deep, and therefore recognize our work to be a steady, long-term effort to remove these roots from our societies, and from within our own hearts. . . . Survivors will create the path forward. In resisting violence, homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, and capitalism, survivors of oppression have the power to generate the vision for all of us to follow. Survivors have a right to decide how their safety will be protected; within this group that includes an agreement that disclosures of responsibility for acts of sexual violence will not occur within general meetings. We work to keep the voices of survivors of sexual violence, women of color, young people, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and transgender people central. We are not waiting for leaders—we are each of us leaders and we are stepping up to the charge of building a world without sexual violence.
This is the movement I can’t wait to be a part of. No prefab six-week-session road to healing, but a movement as real as us, filled with sex, yoga, bike rides, fabulous adventures. Surviving as a crazy road-trip adventure. Survivor knowledge as juicy and individual and full of rage and wisdom and sluttiness as we are.
As feminists and queers we made up butch-femme, Kitchen Table Press, black queer clubs, underground trans highways. We can make up just the movements we need that defy all expectations to give radical survivors exactly what we need to live through this. And we can make it as easy to access as MySpace, a book from the library, or a letter in the mail. Saying, this is what it looked like, that healing, when it finally showed up for me. This is how I got there, and this is how we will remake the world.
If you want to read more about HERE AND QUEER, try:
• Shame Is the First Betrayer BY TONI AMATO
• Why Nice Guys Finish Last BY JULIA SERANO
If you want to read more about RACE RELATING, try:
• Trial by Media: Black Female Lasciviousness and the Question of Consent
BY SAMHITA MUKHOPADHYAY
• Killing Misogyny: A Personal Story of Love, Violence, and Strategies for Survival
BY
CRISTINA
MEZTLI TZINTZÚN
If you want to read more about SURVIVING TO YES, try:
• A Love Letter from an Anti-Rape Activist to Her Feminist Sex-Toy Store BY LEE JACOBS RIGGS
• Who’re You Calling a Whore?: A Conversation with Three Sex Workers on Sexuality, Empowerment, and the Industry BY SUSAN LOPEZ, MARIKO PASSION, SAUNDRA
8
BOOK: Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape
6.23Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
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