feminizam i priključenija

Exactly four weeks ago I sent @JeffreyGoldberg & @AdrienneLaF the email below telling them my rapist works at @TheAtlantic. Mr. Goldberg replied that the allegation was taken extremely seriously. I have not gotten a single update since.

I will not be raped with impunity. pic.twitter.com/OnfNxlBxud

— Celeste Marcus (@Celestemarcus3) February 4, 2024

plachkica wrote:verovatno nisu ažurirali biografiju

Bio je potpredsednik Demokratske stranke (2014−2016).

Bleeding Blitva wrote:Da, nedavno su ga razvalili na podcastu If books could kill. Nego može li se negdje pročitati njezin tekst After rape, uobičajeni alati ne pomažu.

After Rape: A Guide for the Tormented
CELESTE MARCUS


The worst thing that was ever done to a person I know was committed by a man who claimed he loved his victim. “That was not rape,” he told her afterwards. He was in this regard highly unoriginal. Every rape survivor who has shared her story with me was also told by her rapist that what he did to her was not rape.

The first months after my rape I would play macabre mind games with myself whenever I was left alone. I would, for example, ask myself at regular intervals: What punishment would be bad enough? Sometimes I would deliberately pose the question at a time of relative peace, to punish myself for allowing the memory of the evil to fade from the forefront of my attention. What punishment would be bad enough? What punishment would be bad enough? At two months out, I was able to make droll, dark quips about my little game with close friends. I would say that I wished I believed in hell so that I could believe he would burn forever, and I would add that faith in the possibility of eternal damnation is wasted on people who already have the comfort of a God. They would laugh and rub my back and tell me they were glad that we could make jokes. But in the skinless moments, when wit was beyond me, I would fantasize about one particular punishment. I wanted my rapist to think “That is a rapist” every time he saw his own reflection. I wanted the word to rise like bile in his throat every time he read his own byline. His condign punishment would have been the burning tang of his own evil present as a taste on his tongue.



Rape is like explosive ammunition. The bullet fragments beneath the skin, wounding all parts of the body. The initial rupture is then succeeded by a thousand subsequent tears which commit compounded, invisible violence over time. The damage spreads far from the site of the wound. The damage cannot be contained. A victim must track its effects. She must understand how she has been shredded within. She must identify and extract each shard, or else the shrapnel will continue to do damage. Feigning health is not an option.



A woman whose name I did not recognize direct-messaged me on Instagram a few months ago. I will call her Eve. Eve told me that she had reason to believe that a man who had just violently attacked her may have once done something similar to me. “Would you be willing to meet or to talk on the phone? I live in Philadelphia but can make the trip down.” We scheduled a phone call. On the phone Eve relayed that impressive social media detective work had yielded the following interesting results: her rapist and I had once been close friends, but we no longer follow one another on any platform. There was a photograph of us on a beach taken from a few years ago that he still had on his Instagram grid, though there was no trace of him in any photos on my Instagram account. Suspicious. The police, who had taken swabs of blood and photographs of the bruises which covered her chest and arms after the attack, had told her that rapes like hers are usually perpetrated by repeat offenders. Her rapist had said and done things which indicated to the cops that he had likely said and done those things before. Eve had been looking for her fellow victims, for others who had suffered as she had by the same hand. “Her rapist” might also be “my rapist.”

“My rapist”: what a heavy appellation. It binds you grotesquely. When a woman I love revealed to me that she had been raped three times by three different men, the first thought I had — viscerally, before I could catch myself from forming it — was that it was like having three ex-husbands. “My rapist” denotes a permanent relationship. This is one of the injustices for which I had been unprepared before my own experience. Another shard.

But Eve had guessed wrong. “No, he didn’t rape me.” I told her. “It’s strange you reached out. I did break off contact with him shortly after I was raped, but I wasn’t raped by him. I was raped by someone else. A few days afterward he and I were talking about date rape and he said to me, ‘That’s not real rape, though. You know usually they’re both just drunk and then she regrets it and exaggerates.’ I wonder whether I would have broken off contact with him if I hadn’t just been raped. I probably would have just yelled at him. But after that remark I wanted nothing to do with him.” But I wanted to be absolutely clear, because we were speaking in a universe of innuendo. “No, he never did anything like that to me. And my rape wasn’t like that either. I mean, it wasn’t violent like that. I didn’t bleed. I was in and out of sleep when he penetrated me and was jolted wide awake when he started moving fast inside me.”

“Oh my god.” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

Odd, I thought, that she could be moved by that detail when her story was far more gruesome than mine.

It was a swampy summer morning in Washington, DC. I had been on a run but had stopped in my office for her call. Minutes into Eve’s account I slid to the floor and pulled my knees up against my chest. It was awful to listen to her, to hear the plea in her tone while she recounted the details, and to recognize that plea. I, too, used to beg implicitly when I retold my own story. “This is bad, right? Isn’t this very, very bad?” I could feel myself imploring people to understand. I wanted them to be moved by the horror, to exclaim out loud that I was the victim of a foul crime. I could hear how pitiable I sounded. My voice disgusted me.

Eve and I spoke for a long while on that first call. She asked me the same questions that I had asked myself in the early days when getting up off the floor was the best I could manage. I looked up while she talked. In the wall-length window that spans the length of our office space I saw my reflection in the glass. The terror on my face startled me. She was at the very beginning of the trek the end of which I was only just approaching. So much pain awaited her.

Just before she hung up, she said: “This is silly but… How long, how long did it take for you to feel normal again?”

I inhaled deeply and stared at the reflection in the window. It was very important not to give her false hope. When I had been where she was now, and interlocutors were either too optimistic or too quick to affirm my feelings, I immediately discounted their support. It is difficult to say anything about trauma that isn’t trite or hyperbolic, and whenever someone whispered affirmations that smacked of insincerity it made me feel very lonely. I needed Eve to trust me. I had to be forthright and specific in order to earn her trust.

This is what I told her. “For the first two months I wanted to die. The lowest point was the morning after a mutual friend of ours — the only mutual friend we had — told me to forgive my rapist. He said that ‘he only did it because he loves you. He was fighting for your love. His heart is broken now.’ That next day I couldn’t get out of bed till the evening. At night I slammed my head against the wall over and over until I fell down. For months after that I kept arguing with that man in my head. The same argument played like a loop. ‘How can you think this evil could be forgivable?’ And to win the argument I had to make myself relive the rape precisely — every detail that I could remember from before the act, and then the exact sensations waking up, telling him to stop, waiting for him to leave and then jumping up and locking the door — over and over and over. After three months I started to see a therapist. It helped a lot — I’ll give you her name, she does remote calls. After six months the rape stopped being the only thing in my head whenever I was alone. A little shy of one year I had the first whole day when I didn’t think about it at all.”

And I continued: “I still can’t bear to see his name. I’ve blocked and muted him on every platform, but every once in a while he writes something that gets attention, and then I can’t avoid seeing his name. Right after the rape he was on a popular reading list. There was an image of the list with his name on it that kept getting re-posted. Those were a bad few days. He just published a book, so I keep seeing reviews. It feels as if there is no sanctuary anywhere. But I promise, Eve, I swear, you will feel like yourself again. You will be a full human being on the other side of this. You have already been so brave. You have done more than I did. I don’t know anyone else who went to the police after their rape.”

She thanked me. She told me that she didn’t know anyone else who had been through anything like this, so what I had to say was useful. And thus began a dark sisterhood. I took my duty to her very seriously, and when she thanked me — for checking in, for scheduling phone calls, for texting hearts at regular intervals — I explained to her that I needed this at least as much as she did. Helping her conferred a purpose upon what I had been through. It put that hell to use. The whole while I had been where she was now, I kept wishing for a guide. Now perhaps I could give her one, a guide to help her inch towards lucidity.

II

In the beginning, a victim’s desire for health exceeds her cognitive capacity. She is hemorrhaging. It is a kind of internal bleeding. With proper guidance and patience, her reason will strengthen, and she can grow secure of her own judgment. She will achieve some level of stability. But nobody is born with the resources and the mechanisms for mastering this. They must learn from the miserable experience of other people.

What follows is a guide for the tormented. Its objective is to offer a taxonomy of rape’s afterlife, so that you, the victim, can make sense of your own grief. The grief will initially strike you as overwhelming, as all you will ever know. It will feel unbearable and sometimes it will be unbearable. In the early days you will worry that the grief will never end, that the inside of your mind will always be a hostile place, and that from now on you will conceive of yourself primarily as a rape victim and a rape survivor. It will take a long time until that is no longer the most salient thing about you. That crushing identity will slowly lighten and lift. Healing will take a long time, but it can be managed responsibly by anticipating the dangers and preparing for them. It cannot be sped up, though it can be slowed down.

For a start, there are two sorts of dangers: internal and external. The internal dangers are the most intractable. It is a special nightmare when the greatest threat to a person’s sanity is her own mind. The victim’s subconscious will begin to gaslight itself. You will not want to believe that what has happened has happened. The impulse to deny it or to make light of it or to interpret it as your fault will at first be greater than the need to describe the rape accurately. You will lie to yourself. You will pounce on offhand trivialities that unwitting or idiotic people say which seem to confirm the suspicion that you are being unreasonable, that your rape wasn’t really that bad, that your rapist doesn’t really deserve punishment, and other analogous idiocies. These idiocies are among the regular effects of rape. You will pick them up, put them in your pocket, and finger them absentmindedly throughout the day. You will feel like you are losing your mind.



1 — Losing My Mind

“I feel insane,” Eve texted me.

She felt insane because her rapist seemed fine. Scrolling through posts on Instagram she caught sight of him in a photograph that someone else had posted. He was sipping champagne at a party. This was shattering. If he had raped her, how could he be fine? How could he function at all? Shouldn’t the weight of his own crime be crushing him? And if it wasn’t crushing him, did that mean that he must not have done it?

Well, he certainly did do something, but what if that something wasn’t rape? After all, it wasn’t like rape on television. She thought of Dr. Melfi’s rape on The Sopranos. Isn’t that real rape? I had seen the episode and even before I was violated I could barely stomach it. Late one night in the parking lot in the building of Dr. Melfi’s office, a strange man whose face viewers can barely make out comes at her from behind and puts her in a chokehold. When she tries to escape he throws her to the ground, punches her in the face, and drags her to a stairwell, where the sexual assault takes place. Viewers are forced to watch her scream and beg until he finishes and runs away. It is candidly brutal. There is no ambiguity. No one, not even the rapist himself, would deny that what he had committed was rape.

We have all been told how common rape is. In rape’s afterlife, those statistics have human faces. You have heard that one in four women will be victims of rape by the time they reach their mid-twenties, but now the implications of “one in four” will grab you by the throat. When you walk down the street you will start counting — the women, of course, but also the men. The inverse of that statistic will dawn on you: if one in four women are victims, how many of the men you walk past are perpetrators?

And another statistic, perhaps less familiar, will have sharp teeth: of those women, over seventy-five percent will be victims of “acquaintance rape,” or rape between two people who know each other. Most rapists know their victims. Many even love their victims. According to “Acquaintance Rape: The Hidden Crime,” a report published by the Department of Justice in 1991, “acquaintance rapists are rarely convicted, and cases are generally not viewed as ‘real’ rape by the legal system” because they didn’t look like Dr. Melfi’s encounter with violence. Victims, the report found, are also inclined not to view their own rapes as “real.” This is why Eve felt insane. What if he was sipping champagne because it wasn’t real?



2 — Evil

The word “rape” is heavily freighted. It is a primary sin. One would have to be evil to feel entitled to force himself into another person. One would have to be capable of evil to have done so. I couldn’t say “rape” for the first few days after it happened. I resisted matriculation into the world of this evil. A victim of acquaintance rape must accept the fact that someone she knows, perhaps even someone she trusted and cared about, is evil, and also that he had done evil to her. A relationship with reality in which evil is something far away is no longer possible after that. The disillusionment is staggering. And reckoning with this new reality is difficult. It is enormously disruptive to have to formulate a new relationship with the world, one in which evil is not an abstraction or a historical phenomenon far away in time or place. It is tempting to deny one’s own experience when the acceptance of it is a promise of torment. And that temptation is made stronger by the fact that the only authority whom the victim can rely on to justify such a reformulation is herself. Is she sure? Does she understand the implications of what she is saying? Can it really be that this man could have done that? (See 1 above.)

You do not want it to be true. You are the one who has to live in the new world in which it is true. He has assured himself that what he did was not rape — after all, rape is evil — and so he sips champagne and writes his books and occasionally thinks of that cute girl he used to go out with who suddenly went crazy and sadly shakes his head. “She’s crazy,” he will say if anyone brings her up. Or, if he is sick in precisely the way my rapist is, he will tell them, “She broke my heart.” There are no shards inside his body, there is nothing he has to extract from himself. And while his life goes on, you will be staring at your own puffy face in the mirror wondering how many more hours of just this day will be spent sobbing.

It is exhausting to have been raped.



3 — How Bad is Bad Enough for Justice?

Even after accepting what you know is true — that he did do it, that the photographs of the bruises and the swabs of blood tell an unimpeachable story — there are other concerns. How bad must a crime be to render the perpetrator worthy of losing his livelihood and his reputation? What if he has a family? Is rape bad enough to warrant such an encompassing punishment? All rape? Do you want the responsibility of having destroyed his capacity to feed his children, or even to keep them?

“I keep thinking about his kids,” a friend whispered to me over drinks. She had a preliminary conversation with a lawyer about what her legal options were should she choose to bring a civil suit against her rapist. “What if I don’t know for sure that he will do it again? What if I’m only doing this for revenge?”

“You deserve justice!” I had been digging my nails into my arm trying not to cut her off, but I finally exploded. “If someone broke into your home and robbed you, would you wait to make sure that he was likely to do it again before calling the police? Rape is a crime. It is a crime. He is a criminal. We are entitled to justice. I have discovered no evidence that the man who raped me had done it before and I have no reason to be confident that he will do it again, but still I am ashamed that I did nothing — nothing — to punish him.”

At the time she found that argument convincing, but a few days after our drink she got a call from her best friend. “She told me that it was narcissistic of me to bring a case against him that could ruin his entire life. She said that I would be fine in a few months, but he will never be able to work again.”



4 – The Price of Coming Forward

Suppose a victim recognizes that she does have the right to justice. How does one go about securing justice? I am a young writer and my rapist is a better known writer than I am. If I come forward (whatever “coming forward” means) this nightmare will become the thing for which I am known. I used to say that “I will come forward when my fame exceeds his,” but even then, who can say that his name won’t come up every time someone googles mine if I make what he did known? I do not want to be renowned for my victimhood and I do not want to be tethered to his name forever. As long as I maintain this tormented silence, “my rapist” is an association kept alive mostly inside my own head. If I come forward, everyone will know about that shameful bond.

And then, of course, what will other people say?

Some will support me for the wrong reasons, which will be the least of my troubles. If I come forward, strangers on social media will debate my right to do so. People of whom I have never heard will have opinions about whether my rape was awful enough, or whether my rapist was sufficiently contrite. Some will call me a liar, and they will have just as much evidence at their disposal as those who say they believe me. “Am I insane?” “Am I sure he did it?” “Am I sure I didn’t deserve it?” “Was it just because he loved me?” “Would it hurt him more to be accused of rape than it hurts me to have been raped?” “Do I have the right to justice?” “What is justice for a rape like that?” All the questions discussed above will no longer be confined to the inside of my head.

And what will he say? Will he simply lie and say that I never said no? But I had said no to him so many times before. He knows that. I guess he has to lie about it to go on living (and succeeding). But surely it is grotesque to think that the protection of his good fortune is my responsibility.  



5 — Did You Report It?

When you share your story (if you share it with anyone) the first thing most people will ask is whether you reported it. People will never stop asking this question, as if the difference between truth and falsehood depends on your answer to it, but over time it will get easier to hear it. In the early days, it will feel like an accusation. Overwhelmingly, the answer is no. And if the answer is yes, far too often the police do nothing, in which case you have to lie, or refuse to answer, or tell your interlocutor that the police did nothing. If your interlocutor is insufficiently educated, this news may cause her to believe that your rape wasn’t “real.” And if you realize that this is her conclusion, it may strike you as confirmation that you have indeed lost your mind.

Rape is one of the most under-reported crimes in the United States. Shortly after I shared my story with him, a friend of mine said about my rape: “My wife says that if it was really rape you would have gone to the police.” His wife is not alone. Despite the fact that sixty-three percent of sexual assault victims do not go to the police, “Why didn’t you go to the police?” is often the first question people ask when told that you were raped. Initially, in the early days, the answer was that I did not report it because I was broken and could barely function at the time. Since that was the true answer, I never bothered to figure out what would actually happen if I had reported it. In all likelihood it would have yielded only more pain, and only for me.  I had no physical evidence. I did not bleed. He did not leave behind a soiled condom. I’m pretty sure that he did not even ejaculate, since I woke up when he started moving quickly as if about to climax, and that was when I said “no, no, no” for the final time. For the first three months after the rape, probably due to stress, I did not get my period. I wondered through a thick fog if that meant that I was pregnant. The humiliating prospect of contacting him to ask if he had ejaculated, or if he had worn a condom, was so unbearable to me that I resolved, dimly, that I would rather just be pregnant.

What actually happens after a victim goes to the police? It is bizarre and frustrating how difficult it is to figure out. The urban legend is that involving the police is a bad idea, that little is likely to come of it, but why exactly it is a bad idea and what exactly “little” means is difficult to ascertain.

On its website, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, in whose jurisdiction my rape occurred, offers its own account of what victims will experience if they report a rape:

What to expect:

When a dispatcher receives a call, a police officer is sent to the location of the reported incident.
The police officer will ask the victim some questions about what happened.
The police officer who responds to the scene will contact the Sex Assault Unit once an incident involving sexual assault has been reported.
The investigation is transferred to the detective when the detective arrives at the scene.
The detective will conduct a more detailed interview.
The detective will also contact the Forensic Science Division to respond to the scene to collect evidence at the location of the crime.
If necessary, the detective will arrange for the victim to be taken to the hospital for a forensic exam.
A specially trained nurse will conduct the forensic exam.
It is important that you do not:

Disturb the crime scene.
Shower, bathe or wash.
Change your clothes (if you have already changed clothes, place them in a paper bag for the detective).
Eat, drink or smoke.
Brush your teeth.
Use the bathroom.
Remember

Sexual assault is never the victim’s fault. It is always the fault of the assailant no matter what your relationship is to the assailant, what you were wearing or doing, or what drugs or alcohol you ingested prior to or at the time of the assault.

Members of the MPD’s Sex Assault Unit take every report of sexual assault very seriously and investigate each case as fully as possible.

The tone of the text is thoughtful, but it belies the experience of many victims. There are myriad steps between reporting a rape and getting to criminal trial, and at each one the victim faces often insurmountable obstacles. According to a report conducted by the journalist Barbara Bradley Haggerty, police are often unsympathetic to victims of reported rape, which is consistent with the fact that police officers themselves are accused of rape at a rate of one per week in the United States. Of the five hundred officers who have been accused of sexual assault in the last five years, three-hundred and fifty of them are still serving as policemen. This fact, and the aura in which it shrouds police generally, is among the many reasons that women are hesitant to report.

And if she does choose to report it? There is an epidemic of rape-undercounting in police departments around the country. In 2013, Human Rights Watch published an investigation which revealed that the DC police were systematically mishandling and downgrading reported sexual assault cases. Cases which are counted are often mishandled. For example, there are currently four hundred thousand untested rape kits in America. Some have been on the shelves for decades. Victims who do go to the police and who then give DNA often wait in vain as kits with evidence taken from the most private parts of their bodies are sealed, stored, and forgotten about.

And for those whose cases are investigated and the evidence is processed and a trial can begin, the best-case scenario also involves significant pain.



6 — Why Didn’t You Scream?

There are certain questions that the police will ask a victim in the United States. “Why didn’t you scream?” is apparently a common question. Also, “Why didn’t you push him off you?” The answers are not hard to find or to understand. There are studies which show that victims often go into shock and so are unable to scream. Why anyone needs a report to tell them that boggles the mind.

The victim who will be asked “Why didn’t you scream?” by police may also be asked to scroll through her text conversations with anyone she spoke to in the days after the rape, and read through those conversations, and screenshot any details that may be relevant to the case. In some cases, they will simply take her phone and search it themselves. (There are cases of victims being arrested for evidence that police discovered on their phones after the victims turned to police to report their own rape.) If, shortly after her rape, anyone saw her looking particularly out of sorts, if anyone caught her crying, or noticed that her make-up was smudged by tears, then the police may ask to speak to them to corroborate evidence. If she bled during the rape, police may demand to speak to prior sexual partners to prove that she was not a virgin. If she has any recorded interactions with her rapist after he has raped, she will be made to review and then share that information with the police as well. Officers will ask her more questions: “Why didn’t you call it rape that night?” “If you were so upset, why did you go to the bar the next day?” “Why would you speak to him again if he’d raped you?” Even if these questions are posed in a gentle, understanding tone, as if they are nothing more than due diligence, they will sting like shrapnel.



7 — It Wasn’t So Bad

People will tell you that what happened to you wasn’t so bad. Not everyone of course; but each time someone makes that merciless observation another shard sinks deeper. It’s worse when women do it. One afternoon about two weeks after my rape, a woman with whom I was friendly mentioned my rapist by name. I couldn’t bear to hear it, so I told her what he had done to me.

“Why didn’t you go to the police?” she asked briskly.  I hadn’t learned yet to expect that question, and so each time it was posed I was thrown back into a wrestling match with myself, while my interlocutor politely and uncomprehendingly waited for a response. “I… I don’t want to be responsible for ruining his life.” I muttered, repeating something that I had once heard someone else say. She smiled. “That makes sense,” she replied. “Where I come from, men do stuff like that all the time anyway.” I gasped. “Men rape women all the time?” I asked. She waved her hand: “No, no, but you know they can be very aggressive when they hit on us.”

How is such a dearth of understanding possible? I think about that conversation now more often than I think about the rape itself.



8 – You Will Make Your Loved Ones Miserable

Everyone who is closest to you will be in visible pain. At first it will be because you are in raw pain and your raw pain is difficult for them to witness. They will feel helpless because they will know that there is absolutely nothing they can do to help you heal. Love hates to be useless. But all they can do is hinder the healing process. If they are hurtful — and they will be, even inadvertently, simply by waking up every morning and being manifestly capable of basic executive functioning while you can hardly stand — they will throw you off course. If they are kind and understanding and generous, you will still be alone with the shrieking inside your own head.

When the shrieking stops, when you transition out of the shrieking phase, you will reach the phase at which all you can think and talk about is the rape. You will talk incessantly about your rapist, what he is doing, where he is living, whether or not you should call the magazine where he works and inform them that they are employing a rapist. You will hear yourself returning again and again to the same subject and you will see your friends’ eyes widen or their lips tighten. Sometimes they will say, “For your own sake, you need to try not to think about it.” And if this doesn’t make you burst into tears, it will at the very least make you angry, and angry with them as much as with yourself because you are trapped inside your mind with these thoughts which they cannot handle even in limited dosages.

You will feel pathetic, and you will also feel boring, and isolated. Communication will seem impossible. And these feelings will chew away at your already depleted self-respect.



9 — Medicinal Self-Respect

The only authority who can bear witness to what happened to you, to its subsequent effects, to the wreckage wrought by one man’s hideous sense of entitlement, is you. You must bear witness for yourself. This time you must take innocence and justice and humanity seriously enough not to take care of others but to take care of yourself. There will be no one else you can say you are doing this for, no one else to save. “Self-care,” that phrase which until now has always reminded you of posters on the walls at Barnes and Noble, will suddenly be immensely important. You will discover that clenching your teeth and bearing this pain is a childish and irresponsible thing to attempt. It will not work. You cannot push the pain away: it is stronger than you are. Grow up, rise to it, meet it, and take care of yourself.

A few months after I was raped and a few months after he blithely told me to forgive my rapist, that mutual friend of ours contacted me and asked if we could get coffee. My reply to him reads in part:

I’m not going to try to describe to you the hell the past several months have been because it would feel too much like I was trying to convince you of the gravity of what was done to me. That is the argument I have been having in my head with you since our initial phone call. It resumes every time there is a lull, every pause in the general commotion, an incessant inner monologue. But the rape, like all rape, was very bad, and one of the indications that it was is how horrific processing it has been. The psychological burden is immense, at times far too heavy for me, and it has forced me to make miserable the people who love me most. Watching them suffer through my pain has been the most tormenting experience of all.

I have learned since July that the only way for me to get through this ordeal is to be assiduous about preserving my own self-respect. I say all this by way of explanation, because I need you to know that I cannot have coffee with you, or with anyone else who I know is friends with the man who raped me, who knows he did that, and continues to be friends with him. I’m not going to ask you to break off your friendship — if you were going to do that you already would have. (I assume that you must not conceive of what he did to me as a rape, because I can’t imagine that you could call it that in your mind and continue to be friends with him. If my intuition about this is correct, I ask that you never tell me so. I have relived the incident far too many times to be told that it did not happen, or that I misinterpreted something so disgusting and egregious, a primary transgression, a grotesque violation).

I don’t say this to be childish, I just have studied the precarious condition of my own well-being closely enough to know that if I sit down at a table with you knowing that you have done so with him just a day or an hour or two before I will not be able to get up off the floor the next day (just as I was not able to get up off the floor the morning after our last call). I wish that I was not so vulnerable, I wish that I was strong enough to withstand that sort of interaction. I wish that he had not raped me.

It had taken me several months to gather the clarity and the strength necessary to tell a person that their dismissal of my desecration was unacceptable. In far less febrile circumstances, demanding respect is a difficult thing to do. But dignity is a precious resource and in extremis it must be preserved. It is undignified to beg someone to recognize your humanity. It is not possible to maintain cordial relations with a person who has so blatantly disrespected you and lazily preferred not to listen to you closely in your hour of crisis. You, the victim, must disentangle yourself from such a person and, if you can, tell them why. Force them to recognize how their behavior has damaged you. Give them the opportunity to consider what you have to say. If they respond vilely, gird yourself against that ugliness and consider it an affirmation of your choice to extricate yourself from them. If it is possible for them to recognize their transgression and repent for it, their apology will be a precious balm. It will be an explicit recognition of the rape by a party who had been predisposed to discount it. A shard removed.



10 – Forgiveness

Treat the wound until it has scabbed and then scarred. When the scar has faded to a shadow, you will have the capacity to consider the questions of charity, repentance, and forgiveness. There will be a long list of people who have done you serious damage in the wake of your rape. The time will come when you will ask yourself who among them can be forgiven. And the time will come when you, or others, will ask whether your rapist himself can be forgiven. “Move on,” some people will say.

You must not forgive him. You must respect yourself enough to know that this you cannot do. Anyone who would ask you to forgive him is not worthy of your association. And yet you must not calcify into an uncharitable, withdrawn, fearful, and unforgiving person. Do not allow that to be another thing he has done to you, another one of the rape’s effects. Protect yourself from swimming in your own bitterness.

There will be friends who tell you it is your duty to forgive that man. They are wrong. There will also be friends who tell you that his conduct impugns all men, that every man must be guilty because he is. They, too, are wrong. Both of these protestations are absurd. Heeding either one would cripple you. This isn’t easy.

There will be days when every man on the street looks to you like a rapist. Do not belittle what your rapist did by implying that all men could have done it. They could not: he is freakishly cruel, freakishly entitled. Withholding forgiveness in this case makes it more meaningful when forgiveness is given in other cases, in the rest of life. Trust and forgive others as a testament to the fact that his evil is unusual, that he is a monster, that most people — most men — could not do what he did.

You are safer now than you were before: you understand the threat accurately.

Bleeding Blitva wrote:Da, nedavno su ga razvalili na podcastu If books could kill. Nego može li se negdje pročitati njezin tekst After rape, uobičajeni alati ne pomažu.

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