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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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Until we demand this education for ourselves and for girls, we’re all still floating in the same boats together, up the same creeks, generation after generation. Our minds are not free and our bodies are not safe. I, for one, don’t look forward to having my granddaughter come over and break down about a friend who got really drunk at a party and forced his hand down her pants, all the way down, but it was sort of a joke, so she laughed, until she realized it was really happening, and then she was, like, frozen, and by the time she removed his hand, he’d already gotten away with it and now she feels slimed and disgusting and has to see him every day at school, where he acts like it never happened, and she’s worried about what will happen at the next party.
Oh, honey,
I might say to her,
did I ever tell you about the time my boyfriend tied me to the bed while I was crying and saying I didn’t want him to? Yes, we women are built of some strong stuff. Think of all we have endured!
Oh, honey,
I might say to her,
did I ever tell you about the time my boyfriend tied me to the bed while I was crying and saying I didn’t want him to? Yes, we women are built of some strong stuff. Think of all we have endured!
To hell with that. A drunk friend at a party looking to get away with something crude? A boyfriend with a jumprope and a bad idea? That shit can be stopped. But only by us and only if we’re ready for a fight.
Yes, fighting is dangerous, and getting into one is risky. But we’re already getting hurt, and even the United States Department of Justice has reported that a woman is not more likely to be injured if she resists an attempted assault. This makes sense when you also consider that more than two-thirds of sexual assaults are being committed by men we know. These are not the rapists of our nightmares; they are the poorly behaved men of our lives, workplaces, and neighborhoods who
always
gave us a bad feeling. A stranger with a knife jumping out of the bushes to rape and possibly kill us does happen, though less frequently than movie posters and the nightly news suggest. But it doesn’t take a rape at knifepoint to ruin a woman’s life and deny her her right to be a sexual being. Though that may surely do it, we all know there are easier ways to murder a woman’s experience of sex, love, and pleasure, and it’s happening all the time.
always
gave us a bad feeling. A stranger with a knife jumping out of the bushes to rape and possibly kill us does happen, though less frequently than movie posters and the nightly news suggest. But it doesn’t take a rape at knifepoint to ruin a woman’s life and deny her her right to be a sexual being. Though that may surely do it, we all know there are easier ways to murder a woman’s experience of sex, love, and pleasure, and it’s happening all the time.
We can learn to fight for sex on our terms. Literally. With strong words, conviction, and certainty, with hands, elbows, knees, feet, and a “NO” so mean it chills the blood. I’m talking about a self-defense strategy that is imprinted on our cells and that affects every seemingly insignificant aspect of how we live, whom we love, and what we cherish. I’m talking about tucking our studied knowledge of the violence we are capable of into our muscle memory and being ready to unleash it if the situation demands it. I’m talking about each of us refusing on the most basic level to be especially vulnerable to the one violation that has so far defined being female.
When I was fourteen years old, I took a hammer from my mom and dad’s toolbox and put it under my pillow. I also swiped a screwdriver, which I hid in my underwear drawer. Until recently, I had always looked back on that choice and thought,
Geez, that’s fucked up.
But I’ve changed my mind. That’s a girl who doesn’t want to be harmed in her bed, a girl who wants to sleep soundly but knows she needs more than a cheery outlook on life in order to do it. That’s a girl who not only will fight for her right to be sexual without being forced into sex, but may kill for it. At the time, I lacked the skills to support such an intention, and a good night’s rest was still a long way off for me.
Geez, that’s fucked up.
But I’ve changed my mind. That’s a girl who doesn’t want to be harmed in her bed, a girl who wants to sleep soundly but knows she needs more than a cheery outlook on life in order to do it. That’s a girl who not only will fight for her right to be sexual without being forced into sex, but may kill for it. At the time, I lacked the skills to support such an intention, and a good night’s rest was still a long way off for me.
That’s no longer the case. And though there’s no such thing as safety from an attempted rape in this world, I’m all the weapon I need, and I sleep well.
If you want to read more about MUCH TABOO ABOUT NOTHING, try:
• A Love Letter from an Anti-Rape Activist to Her Feminist Sex-Toy Store BY LEE JACOBS RIGGS
• The Process-Oriented Virgin BY HANNE BLANK
If you want to read more about SEXUAL HEALING, try:
• Reclaiming Touch: Rape Culture, Explicit Verbal Consent, and Body Sovereignty BY HAZEL
/
CEDAR TROOST
• In Defense of Going Wild or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Pleasure (and How You Can, Too) BY JACLYN FRIEDMAN
If you want to read more about SURVIVING TO YES, try:
• What It Feels Like When It Finally Comes: Surviving Incest in Real Life BY LEAH LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA
• The Not-Rape Epidemic BY LATOYA PETERSON
21
Killing Misogyny: A Personal Story of Love, Violence, and Strategies for Survival
BY CRISTINA MEZTLI TZINTZÚN
I WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE HERE. I was supposed to be smarter than my mother. But a culture of rape, misogyny, racism, and violence had become a tragic generational cycle for the womyn in my life. I can trace the birth of my radical feminist thought to age eight, when I vowed never to let a man devalue me. I made this promise to myself after crying with my Mexican mother, watching her suffer through another bout of daily verbal and physical abuse by my white father, which was intertwined with his constant cheating with sex workers and mistresses. As I cried with my mother, feeling helpless to change her reality, I felt the intensity of her emptiness, her lack of self-worth, and her inability to leave my father, which showed me she had quietly accepted that she deserved only self-sacrifice and suffering. In that moment I vowed never to become her. Yet, eighteen years later, at age twenty-six, I was reliving my mother’s same mistakes. I was involved in a long-term abusive relationship that, in every sick pattern, mirrored my parents’ relationship.
I stood in a parking lot, tears streaming down my face. I had just learned that my partner of the last four years, the supposedly ever-radical feminist man of color, was cheating on me—again. This time, though, it was more sickening. He, thirty-five, was sleeping with his nineteen-year-old white student. In that moment I cried not for him or “us,” but for myself, for my soul, and for the strong womon I wanted to be, but so obviously was not. Though I left him for an extended period, I returned to him despite the fact that he cheated on me, lied about it, gave me two STDs, and continued to see the womon he cheated on me with for nearly a year—a womon he claimed to despise. And somehow I still took him back, even though I wrote in my journal, “For you to ask me to love you is to ask me to hate myself.” I stayed in this destructive and unhealthy relationship, even though we never bonded emotionally. Instead, we constructed our shallow relationship around a supposedly deep political analysis of a white racist power structure that perpetuated institutionalized racism and inequality. Yet we rarely (if ever) applied this radical analysis to gender inequality and patterns of misogyny in our relationship.
From an early age, I had pushed myself to understand my own social reality and myself as a womon of color through radical feminist works. I had used feminist writings to create a path for my own liberation as a womon of color. I had been raised in a space where the norm was daily degradation of womyn of color, and where sex and love were equated with the violence of sexual assault, domination and subjugation, and physical and verbal abuse.
1
I had worked diligently to understand how patriarchal, racist, heteronormative, and classist roles had created the existence of my family, which manifested itself in a modern colonial relationship: my white, middle-class, misogynist, and racist father dominating and abusing my poor, brown Mexican mother. I was a known radical feminist womon of color. I had even published my first feminist article in the anthology
Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism
when I was nineteen years old, and was read in women’s and gender studies classes throughout the country. I had named the contradictions of my parents’ relationship and proudly proclaimed my fierce resistance to reliving those patterns. Both womyn and men had congratulated me for my bravery in exposing the pain and contradictions of my life. Yet here I was, living the life I had promised myself never to experience.
1
I had worked diligently to understand how patriarchal, racist, heteronormative, and classist roles had created the existence of my family, which manifested itself in a modern colonial relationship: my white, middle-class, misogynist, and racist father dominating and abusing my poor, brown Mexican mother. I was a known radical feminist womon of color. I had even published my first feminist article in the anthology
Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism
when I was nineteen years old, and was read in women’s and gender studies classes throughout the country. I had named the contradictions of my parents’ relationship and proudly proclaimed my fierce resistance to reliving those patterns. Both womyn and men had congratulated me for my bravery in exposing the pain and contradictions of my life. Yet here I was, living the life I had promised myself never to experience.
Feminist literature has been an important tool for me to analyze my own social position as a womon of color. It has given me tools for intellectually understanding love and sexual relationships; it has empowered me to believe in a different vision of what love and sex should be. Yet it has not given me the ability to truly uproot the lessons in patriarchy and abuse that I learned as a child, which still govern my heterosexual relationships.
My father taught me one of my most important lessons when I was twelve. We were arguing about his infidelity. When I challenged him to remain faithful to my mother, he grew indignant and looked me sternly in the eye. “You know what, Cristina,” he told me, “all men cheat on their wives. And any man that will ever be with you will cheat on you, too. So get used to it!” In that moment, I resisted my father’s statement. I told him it was not true, that not all men are like him. Yet I feared he was right, that all men would treat me as less than human, that they would see me only as a body to fuck, and that my relationships would always give true meaning to the word “misogyny.” I wanted to believe my father was wrong, but in my childhood the only adult men in my life fit his characterization, and all the adult womyn in my life had lived through rape and verbal and physical abuse. Throughout my life I would carry my father’s declaration with me, and to this day I ache with deep resentment that he would wish for such suffering for me.
As a child, Sex 101 for me was a series of stories that equated sex with violence, disempowerment, and rape. Stories like the ones of my mother being raped throughout her childhood, then three times as an adult, including the time my father raped her on their first date. At age fourteen, my Aunt Victoria came home with her yellow dress covered in blood from the waist down. Upon seeing her, my alcoholic grandfather beat her for being a “whore.” Shortly thereafter, Victoria was forced to marry her rapist because she was culturally seen as spent. My mother, the eldest, recounted the story to me with heavy guilt, noting how she’d stood there and watched the horrific scene unfold, feeling herself drown in her own silence.
Very early on I was taught by my surroundings that as a womon my body was my only real asset, and that in turn my body was what made me most vulnerable to acts of sexual assault, beating, and unfaithful heterosexual partners. In theory, I refused to accept these gender roles.. But what my most recent relationship taught me is that though I understood the fallacy of accepting as fact that all men are misogynists, I did not understand it emotionally or physically. I hadn’t learned any other way to have sex or be loved, beyond abuse.
The first time Alan asked me out, I told him I didn’t date older men. I believed that a man his age who wanted to be with someone as young as I was had to have serious emotional problems. He convinced me otherwise, through persistence and patience. I remember the first night we spent together. After giving me oral sex, he respectfully asked me if I was ready for him to put a condom on. I laughed and told him that I wasn’t going to have sex with him. I informed him that first he would need to get an STD test and bring me the results. He stopped and looked at me, taken aback. He told me that if he had anything he would let me know, that he would never disrespect me or my body. We agreed to wait.
Ten days later I was at the health department, being diagnosed with genital herpes. The doctor told me with pity that it was rare and unlucky to get genital herpes from oral sex, particularly from someone showing no symptoms. I left the health department crying and rode my bike to work, where I felt my discomfort grow as my sores began to open, my body ravaged by the disease. By day two my vagina was unrecognizable. I was afraid to bathe, to go to the bathroom. Every time I saw my body distorted, damaged, and destroyed, all I could do was weep heavily with uncontrollable grief and fear. I knew that my body was damaged permanently, and that this would change how I made love for the rest of my life.
Alan claimed ignorance. I screamed at him and told him I wanted nothing to do with him, but I felt so desperately alone in my physical and emotional state that I yearned for someone to take care of me. I wrongly accepted that because I was now infected with herpes, no one would want me, and my only choice for love and sex lay with Alan. In my heart I knew he had always known, that he was too selfish to practice the bravery of honesty. Yet I pushed these instincts aside and continued with the relationship.
We spent the next four months together almost daily, riding bikes, reading, discussing politics, making dinner together, and making “love,” slowly making our lives become one. As our bond and “love” grew, Alan began to push for a more deeply committed relationship. He said he was falling in love with me, but was concerned that I wasn’t as committed to the relationship. He wanted me to make the same effort and investment he was making.
One week later I stood in his apartment, demanding that he tell me whether he had cheated on me. He claimed I was the only one he loved, and that Sonia was a sellout Latina who had no “analysis.” The closest thing to an apology that he could muster was, “I’m sorry for what
you
think I did.” Months passed before we would speak again. I used that time to heal. I pretended to be self-reflective, but in reality I was concentrating all of my energy on analyzing Alan, his own sickness and self-hate. Motivated by the belief that true justice derives from forgiveness, and from the humility, strength, and love that such a process requires, I wrote Alan and told him I was ready to forgive him. I told him I felt I had to, because of my belief in the society we were both fighting for, because we were building something deeper than ourselves. I believed, and do believe, no one is disposable or unforgivable, not him, not I, or anyone else.
you
think I did.” Months passed before we would speak again. I used that time to heal. I pretended to be self-reflective, but in reality I was concentrating all of my energy on analyzing Alan, his own sickness and self-hate. Motivated by the belief that true justice derives from forgiveness, and from the humility, strength, and love that such a process requires, I wrote Alan and told him I was ready to forgive him. I told him I felt I had to, because of my belief in the society we were both fighting for, because we were building something deeper than ourselves. I believed, and do believe, no one is disposable or unforgivable, not him, not I, or anyone else.
BOOK: Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape
10.7Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
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