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Authors: Friedman,Jaclyn Friedman,Jessica Valenti
Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape (34 page)
BOOK: Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape
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For months we would meet for juice and have political discussions. Within due time, however, Alan was making advances, which I found harder and harder to resist. I missed being intellectually and politically challenged. I still felt connected to him. We expressed our love through politics, an act at the time which seemed deep. We said that we were committed to the political power of confronting and challenging personal contradictions, believing that personal transformation is a revolutionary action. I was willing to accept Alan’s contradictions, believing I could “save” him from the self-destructive man he had become. The prospect of “changing” him was challenging and exciting.
Eventually, we slept together. I remember looking at myself naked in the mirror after he had fallen asleep, feeling disgusted with myself and my body. When I bathed, I felt as if I could not clean his filth from my being. The next morning I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore, and that I would call him when I was ready to talk again, if I ever was.
I reluctantly enlisted in a womyn’s “survivors” group at my university’s mental health facility. Each week I would go to the group, feeling like I didn’t belong. I knew I had confronted difficult situations, but owning the term “violence” to describe my life felt suffocating. I didn’t want to be one of “
those”
womyn. I arrogantly made myself believe that I was smarter than the other participating womyn. They barely knew feminist theory, and seemed so entrapped in stereotypically gender-constructed lives that I told myself they were of no help to me. To me the sessions seemed like elementary self-esteem-building exercises that made me inwardly roll my eyes and reject the space and process.
those”
womyn. I arrogantly made myself believe that I was smarter than the other participating womyn. They barely knew feminist theory, and seemed so entrapped in stereotypically gender-constructed lives that I told myself they were of no help to me. To me the sessions seemed like elementary self-esteem-building exercises that made me inwardly roll my eyes and reject the space and process.
Then one day I saw Alan on campus. He followed me and declared that he was in love with me and missed me all the time. I told him I had to go, and was proud that I resisted him and went home. But my pride did not last long. I went back again, even though it brought me the greatest personal shame I had ever known. I remember my mother, who was so proud of the womon she thought I had become, saying in disbelief, “I’ve never been so disappointed in you.”
Alan proudly paraded me around in leftist circles. I was his trophy girlfriend, a radical feminist womon of color and respected community organizer. Eventually I stopped attending my womyn’s survivor group. It was now too shameful for me to share the story of my return to Alan with the other womyn I had thought too quaint and anti-feminist. We became “too busy” to deal with the issues of mistrust and abuse in our relationship. We were preoccupied with supposedly more important things.
Three years into the relationship, I was diagnosed with another STD, this time high-risk HPV. I had to go to the doctor every six months to ensure that I had not developed cervical cancer from the disease. I told Alan I was scared and he said I sounded accusatory: “Why don’t you ever think about my feelings?” I cried, and he later wrote me an apology, but we never talked about my fears or my body again.
During the last six months of our relationship, I shut off emotionally. It was the only way I knew how to survive the abuse, and make it without the love I needed to feel whole. But I wasn’t a helpless victim in the relationship. I resisted Alan’s domination in my own ways. I challenged him regularly, which very few people did. He believed that because he was well-read, I, like most people, would take his word as gospel, but I refused. I also refused to move, to leave my job, my friends, and my community, for him. Every time I imagined myself moving away and leaving the life I had worked so hard to create, just to be with him, I felt like I was drowning. For the last ten months of our time together, I would set monthly dates to end the relationship. But each time the final date of departure arrived, I found myself unable to muster the strength to leave him, so I pushed back the date repeatedly, waiting for the right time to make the break.
He asked me to seriously consider marriage and children. He said our relationship had been the most important one in his life, that it had transformed him. Less than a week later, I found myself asking his young student if she was sleeping with her professor. She nervously answered, “I’m not supposed to tell you.” I felt sick that he would abuse his power so incredibly as to sleep with his undergraduate students, much less with one who had just finished high school. He had no regard for consequences or for the girls and womyn that his actions injured physically and emotionally. Moreover, he professed to hate his white suburban students because they failed to understand their own white privilege and thus grossly abused it. But here he was, having sex with one of them. But misogyny is not about the logic of integrity or dignity; it is about domination, power, and the hatred of womyn and oneself.
He called her a “little fucking liar,” but I had heard enough. I told him I didn’t want him to contact me for the rest of my life. I could only hear him screaming, “I love you! Don’t do this! We’re going to get married and have children.” That evening I changed my number, blocked him from all my emails, and called my old therapist. By the end of the week, I rejoined a womyn’s support group. I meant it for life this time. I wasn’t going back, not to him, not to anyone who would treat me that way. I was not going back to that life.
Even though I knew Alan would rape me continuously of my love, my sanity, and my health, I had stayed and continued to sacrifice my own emotional and physical health for him. I wanted to be with Alan because I wanted to prove my father wrong, to prove that someone as sick as he was was capable of transformation. I felt that if Alan could love me above all the other womyn he had abused, that would prove how unique and loved I truly was. I wanted my love for Alan to be my most sacrificial gift; I wanted it to be strong enough to heal us both. As a womon having lived through generational abuse, I instinctively equated sacrifice with being a
good
person, and thus, in my mind, this made me a more desirable human being to him and myself. It was only after I left Alan that I heard myself, sitting in therapy, speak these masochistic thoughts out loud. These were my mother’s words. The ones I used to mock. The ones I hated to hear. I thought they were weak, anti-womon, and plain stupid. Yet I thought them, too. I felt them. I believed them.
good
person, and thus, in my mind, this made me a more desirable human being to him and myself. It was only after I left Alan that I heard myself, sitting in therapy, speak these masochistic thoughts out loud. These were my mother’s words. The ones I used to mock. The ones I hated to hear. I thought they were weak, anti-womon, and plain stupid. Yet I thought them, too. I felt them. I believed them.
Few people understand, but I feel I needed the relationship to end the way it did. I needed him to do that to me so I could leave and never go back. I had to move beyond intellectually engaging with my history of abuse and violence to emotionally and physically confronting it, and allow myself not only to imagine a different possibility of love and sex, but to practice it by first loving myself. I would like to pretend that reading feminist books and learning the rhetoric of womyn’s liberation and racial justice was enough to free myself from re-creating systems of abuse and male domination in my life, but it wasn’t. I had to walk down a path of self-destruction to be able to see how little it mattered how far, intellectually and politically, I had developed myself. My analysis was still so emotionally empty that it had allowed me to become a womon I despised.
I needed it to end without any way for me to deny the similarities between my father and Alan, and fully accept the implications. This forced me to come to terms with the fact that uprooting and confronting my history of abuse is a lifelong process. Up until recently, I did not want to accept that I would be dealing with the shit of my childhood for my entire life. I wanted to believe that I could simply put my past behind me, and that I would never have to feel what I did in those moments and memories of violence in my life.
This is not an easy journey I have chosen to embark upon. I know it will be filled with the immense pain that true self-reflection requires. I will have to forgive myself for my mistakes and overcome the shame and embarrassment that come with knowing that the men who have most influenced me and whom I have let “love” me have been the most abusive, violent, sick, and selfish men I have ever known. I will also have to heal the emotional scars and the physical consequences that the STDs I carry in my body have brought me. I want to learn not only to accept my body, but also to rejoice in myself again as completely sexually viable. I want to love my body and see myself as being as beautiful as I felt before Alan. I want to challenge the shame and guilt our society creates out of myths about sexually transmitted diseases, sex, beauty, and love. I do this by creating my own uncharted path, educating myself about my STDs and learning to practice sex safely, and learning how to have sex in new ways that help overcome the frustration that comes from the avenues of sexual pleasure that have been cut off to me.
I have become open about my STDs. Sharing my experience in public readings has broken much of the shame. Womyn, men, and trans folks have stepped forward to express their own similar experiences with STDs. I now see that maintaining silence about my herpes and HPV only assisted in perpetuating my hatred of my body. I allowed the diseases to embarrass and control me, to the point that I stayed in an unhealthy and self-destructive relationship because of them. Practicing honesty with my new partners and owning these diseases as part of me has been a slowly liberating process.
The first time Alan gave me an STD and cheated on me, I remained silent. I believed that my suffering was personal and should remain as such, and that because I had left Alan (for a time), that should have been consequence enough for him to change. But he still maneuvered in the spaces where we talked about womyn’s rights and radical social change. I had thought that Alan’s friends, as radicals, would challenge him and see his behavior as unacceptable, but no one did. Our silence was complicity, for it allowed Alan to continue to violate womyn without repercussions. Most important, it violated the “safe” spaces we were supposed to be creating for womyn, people of color, queers, undocumented immigrants, and other oppressed and marginalized people. Womon after womon stepped out of circles where Alan was, internalizing their own pain and struggle as an individual experience. As a strategy, this failed time and again. Our community failed to create collective accountability and make our spaces safe for womyn like me and for so many womyn in history who faced similar circumstances. We also failed to challenge men like Alan to change their own self-destructive behavior.
I am now committed to living my life more boldly, by pushing for collective accountability, not based on the principles of “justice” embodied by our current penal system, which stress punishment, human disposability, vengeance, and the breaking of the spirit, but collective accountability based on love, support, forgiveness, transformation, and
consequence.
consequence.
We’ve learned too well to become good theoreticians, but have not learned to be good practitioners of what we preach. When ideas from books become only that and don’t translate themselves into our lived realities, at best we’ve become disingenuous, and at worst we’ve become dangerous and destructive to the ideals of the movements to which we adhere. Too many times in radical left circles, we uphold the image of the man who transforms himself from being hypermasculine and self-destructive to being hypermasculine and revolutionary, but fail to extend this same image to the scores of heroic, deserving womyn who have transformed themselves from victims of a life of subjugation and violence into radical, self-loving feminists who use these personal struggles as a catalyst to create radical social change. And I do believe in the radical possibility to convert ourselves into true revolutionaries, to rise further than our own imaginations were able to foresee, and to rise above a life of violence and rape. I believe we can tear down the walls of silence that maintain structures of misogyny and create safe spaces that are maintained through deliberate action, praxis, and love.
I am working to create this space in my community in Austin by articulating my personal needs to friends, family, and organizations that Alan and I worked with—letting them know that his behavior as a radical and supposed feminist is unacceptable, and that I need them to recognize this to be supportive of me in my healing process. I have asked the leftist community here to practice our politics when the answers aren’t as obvious as slogans like “fuck patriarchy,” but rather require real engagement and self-reflection.
I have reached out to other womyn whom I learned Alan violated, in addition to other individuals who have lived through similar experiences. Through study groups and workshops, we are collectively articulating our vision of how to create “safe” spaces. Through public readings of this piece, I have torn down my own image as strong and perfect to help in redefining strength as vulnerability and honesty. I have broken my silence and forced accountability. I want my conscience clean as a feminist, by demanding consequences for Alan, not as punishment, but with the hope that Alan will use this as a starting point to initiate a process of self-transformation and to make our spaces safe for other womyn. I have tried to create this by sending anonymous letters to the university where he teaches informing them of his behavior, and asking them to ensure a safe learning environment for their young female students. It is imperative that young people be supported as they come into their own and discover politics, and not have their innocence or lack of experience be seen as motivation for violation and exploitation.
I never wanted to just be a “survivor” of violence, because that sounded like I was just getting by. I wanted and want to triumph and grow and revolutionize my soul, my spirit. To challenge myself and my community to re-create our shared space as one that is safe for me, and for all womyn who have experienced violence.
BOOK: Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape
6.84Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
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