5:14am December 23, 2011

so [TW: rape, rape culture]

this is the start of something bigger, but:

I am reading a lot lately, probably prompted by the recent revelation that Male Feminist Hugo Schwyzer is a sexual predator and would-be murderer, on accountability and the possibility for personal change and growth for people who are/have been abusers.

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OMFG perpetuator? PERPETUATOR?!?!!?!! Holy fucking shit fuck damned fucking-ass SHIT. SHIT SHIT SHIT. FUCK. FUCK FUCK. FUCKING FUCK. FUCK. WHAT THE FUCKING FUCKETY FUCK. FUCK.

With that out of the way.

I think my brother would have the same reaction to that neologism-vomit that I just did. This being the same brother that used to rub himself on me, and threaten to rape or kill me, while teaching me an extremely misogynistic worldview and a bunch of other fucked up things (huge age difference – started when he was 25 and I was 11).

Unlike a lot of people (including, apparently, lots of “progressive” people who aren’t incestuous child molesters) he’s got an actual sense of accountability. I began to realize that when, after he’d spent years in therapy, our therapists started to reunite us again. He talked about the first time he threatened to rape me, and the first time he touched me inappropriately. About the touching, I said something like “Oh I never even noticed that’s what you were doing. So that’s okay.” His response – “No. No, that’s not okay. That’s worse, much worse.”

That’s one of many “little” things that taught me that he actually gave a fuck that his actions were outrageously bad. He never expected forgiveness or anything else out of me. And I don’t mean in a showy way, but in a firm, taking hold and shaking himself, “With what I did I don’t deserve ANYTHING” sort of way. And he told me and others a lot more about what happened and why he did it than he had to, given that large parts of what happened were stuff I hadn’t understood or stuff I was trying hard to forget. He could have gotten away with a lot but he confessed every last action.

Not that I’m trying to paint him as a wonderful guy. Just saying it sounds like he has a better handle on the enormous wrongness of his actions than a lot of non-child-molesters who act as if they care. And that… that’s really fucking disturbing given that I, to put it mildly, don’t see him as the most ethical person in the world. Just surprisingly ethical for a guy who molested his kid sister.

And… no. Just no. He is a perpetrator, a child molester, a sexual abuser, anything but some kind of wimpy-ass “perpetuator” shit. And he’d be the first to say he deserves shame. There are ways I don’t like how our society handles child molesters but I don’t think anything you touched on is one of them. They do something truly heinous and they deserve the overwhelming majority of what they get for that. They sure as hell don’t need to be verbally coddled. It’s an ugly crime and it deserves ugly words.

I once went to an LGBT community center. And there was a guy there who kept saying that maybe just as LGBT people were misunderstood and oppressed, child molesters were misunderstood and oppressed too. And that maybe we as LGBT people ought to be more tolerant of them. (Way to convince any straight people in the room that the stereotypes about us are true, asshole.)

I believe that is when I screamed at the top of my lungs, lunged towards him for a second, yelled again, ran behind a wall, and cowered on the floor, shaking and crying.(*)

He said “See? That’s a good example of what I mean. People can’t even stand to hear the idea without becoming hysterical. Her reaction proves society just isn’t ready for ideas this radical.”

My friend (thank god she was there) told him that I was molested as a kid by several different men, two of them family.

He said, “That means she’s too close to the issue to see it objectively.”

I have blocked out the rest of that night.

But what child molesters deal with is not oppression. And my rage and horror at the very thought of that idea is not closed-minded, intolerant, oppressive, or whatever else the guy called it. It’s called actually giving a shit about the consequences of people’s actions. As for my reaction showing society isn’t ready? Damn straight society isn’t ready. Society should never be ready for people to prey on children sexually. (And yes, prey. Predator. Not fucking perpetuator.)

My experience as an incest survivor makes me understand how fucked up it is on a visceral bodily level, it doesn’t mean I’ve got too little objectivity. That asshole could have used a little subjective feeling to understand that this isn’t some kind of parlor game or dispassionate thought experiment. It’s real people’s lives. Real people die or kill ourselves, real people end up in mental institutions, pregnant, get STDs, deal with the fallout in future relationships, slam our heads into walls trying to stop feeling the pain or start feeling something, anything. Some people are affected more than others, and the stereotype of a life ruined forever doesn’t always come to pass – but nobody is wholly unchanged by these experiences. I’ve spent the rest of my life unlearning the bullshit my brother taught me about myself and about women, and undoing the rest of the emotional damage he and others caused. I just can’t get into the pain of the poor, oppressed child molesters.

As for the self-congratulatory left, life experience as a disabled person has taught me to fear people who consider themselves above all that, or make a huge effort to make others see them as compassionate.

(*) I am so very much one of those "lesbians who don’t need to announce that they are angry, because it is clear, from their every word and gesture.“ To quote an article by Caryatid Cardea that I read long ago about therapy culture undermining political work and driving a power-wedge between the usually middle class or higher people who can sit around primly saying shit like "I feel some anger around this”, and the rest of us who just plain get angry. Or sad. Or afraid. And show it all over our bodies.

Notes: