No pity. No shame. No silence.

[vvvexation]

No, I haven't experienced sexual violence myself.  Emotional abuse, yes, but that's an entirely different story and best discussed some other time.  But do you know what really gets me about all this discussion of sexual assault?  It's the fact that every single time I've seen someone I know make their own "I'm a survivor" post, it has not surprised me in the slightest.  Not because I always suspected it of those specific people, or anything like that, but for deeper reasons that, when I think about them, scare me.

Let me attempt to explain.  Some people, evidently, are afraid their friends will look at them differently if they find out they've been victims of rape or sexual assault; I've never understood, not on a gut level, why anyone would change their opinion of a person based on something that happened to them that they had no control over, but now I'm beginning to see that there's something else I've been missing in this particular case.  I'm realizing something I don't think I'd been fully aware of before, namely that even some of those who don't blame rape victims still feel that they are marked in some way, that the experience makes them somehow different.  Finding out a friend of theirs has been sexually assaulted is akin, perhaps, to finding out a friend of theirs is gay--it requires a change in their worldview, a readjustment in how they see things.

Or at least, I guess that's how they feel.  I have a hard time postulating outlooks different from mine--but I'm starting to vaguely recollect a time when I might in fact have reacted that way myself.  There was a time when I thought rape was something that didn't happen to people like myself and my friends, who after all had fairly comfortable and "normal" lives...but somewhere along the way, as I met more and more people who had had it happen to them, I came to accept it as a commonplace thing.  Now, it seems, I've swung so far in that direction that I just assume it's happened to half the women I know and probably a number of the men, even if they haven't told me about it.

Let me repeat that, in a nutshell:  I am damn near incapable of being surprised to hear any acquaintance's history of sexual assault, because I already figured, unconsciously, from the moment I first met them, that there was a very good chance something like that lurked in their past.  I'm still capable of a little surprise if it comes from a male acquaintance, or at least from some male acquaintances, but I probably won't be surprised once I've heard the details.  And as for women, I suspect you could point to almost any woman I've ever met and tell me she'd been sexually assaulted, and I would simply nod and sigh.

Now, what the hell does that say about the world I live in?

That's what freaks me out.

Comments

[vito-excalibur.livejournal.com]

It says you're in danger and people are not to be trusted. Really, it doesn't bear too much thinking about. Though, of course, it's true.

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

Ordinarily I don't think much about it, is the thing. I get nervous when I'm alone in downtown Oakland after dark, but other than that I don't go around thinking I'm in danger--perhaps because I've been lucky in that respect. It's not so much that I fear for myself as that I despair at the state of the world, if that makes any sense.

[ocicat.livejournal.com]

It's a sad state of afairs. Probably half the women I've been intimate with have confided in me (at some point) that they have been sexually asssulted. Usually as children.

I too now consider it likely to have occured to any woman I know. Which is just horrific.

[lintqueen.livejournal.com]

Well, FWIW, you're not the only one. Once upon a time people were surprised that I'd been a victim of sexual assault...it seems these days we all know so many people who have been, the surprise factor is much reduced.

[shipofools999.livejournal.com]

This feels like the switch that happened about divorce when I was a kid. It use to be that you were the oddball if your parents were divorced. Then it became that you were the oddball if your parents weren't divorced. With so many people standing up to say they have been abused, it feels rather odd to not have been abused. Welcome to social engineering.

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that's an angle I hadn't thought about. It's true, though, that it seems odd not to have been sexually assaulted myself. I sometimes wonder if I'm just really lucky or what.

got me thinking, and philosophizing...

[(Anonymous)]

The world we live in...now that's a fucked up place. I actually have a theory of why sexual violence is so frequent, it involves the movies (and you're talking to someone who is normally vehemently against the idea that movies are responsible for social problems). I read a book recently, called "Against Our Will," published by an ardent feminist in the 1970s. It's somewhat dated, but it nevertheless demonstrates to a fairly convincing degree how rape and responses to it permeates any given society. Further, the stigmatization of sexual violence can express itself in, what you say, the idea that a survivor of sexual assault is somehow different. It's not the same as blaming the victim, certainly, but a person who has experienced sexual violence is somehow marked.
I have not experienced sexual assault, yet my reaction to news of it is as if someone had given me a swift kick in the gut. That and rage, anger that someone is capable of such an unspeakable and repugnant act. What does that say about the world? I don't know, but I don't like the answer. The way I see it, the prevalence of sexual violence either suggests that at least most people are inherently cruel and sadistic, or, at least most people are so immune to the general shittiness of the world that their only response is one of shock and regret.