Victimhood Isn’t Shameful, Permanent, or Absolute

Fuck Tony Robbins. When he literally, physically pushed a woman repeatedly to prove that she was hurting herself with her #metoo anger and “victim mentality,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmkiqfmobqI the world (or at least the world that shares my algorithms) was horrified, and he was indeed a terrible monster, but he was also pushing a belief that runs throughout all throughout pop psychology. Even though a crime happened to us, a terrible act of aggression and chaos that may have (or may not have!) jarred our lives onto a new course, we are not allowed to call ourselves victims. (Except Roxane Gay. She said at the beginning of Hunger that she doesn’t feel like she owes the world a heroic narrative, and it was SUCH a relief to read that sentiment.)

Watching Tony Robbins be a gaslighting creep onstage reminded me of the time (Waaaaaay before I’d ever thought about trauma work or survivorship or PTSD) my poor Aunt Melinda accidentally sent me to triggertown by quoting another pop psychology patriarch: Dr. Phil. “You teach people how to treat you,” she said, frustrated after listening to a relatively minor tale of roommate woe. I was speechless with anger, feeling the weight of every abuse I’d even been blamed (or blamed myself) for. I’m sure I said nothing helpful or articulate. I still feel the weight of that rage, that mute fury, but luckily there’s blogs and Twitter and being a street artist now, so I find the words. I’ll be finding the words for the rest of my life.

***PLEASE NOTE*** My beautiful anxiety brain is about to take us on a journey, in several leaps, from my personal trauma to the global trauma of history. I don’t equate my trauma to ANYONE else’s. This paragraph is to show the way my trauma helps connect me to the other much more serious pains of the world, and how gaslighting and victim-blaming helps perpetuate the smallest harms and the largest.***

I have never been able to separate “You teach people how to treat you,” from “you were asking for (rape, abuse, terror, etc.)” Did I somehow “teach” the group of teens who drugged, conspired to rape, and assaulted me that that was the kind of treatment I deserved? Did Trayvon Martin TEACH George Zimmerman that he deserved to die, or was that CENTURIES OF COLONIALISM, WHITE SUPREMACY, AND NRA INFLUENCE? For that matter, did the nations and cultures that were colonized, tortured, and sometimes even erased by Europe “teach us” that they wanted to be dominated and oppressed? No. We dominated and oppressed them because we wanted to. That’s what abusers do.

Aside from the abusive aspect of victimhood-stigmatizing, we do it to ourselves as well. God forbid I should accidentally call myself a “victim” instead of a “survivor” in a feminist thread—I’d be accused of demeaning myself and others, but why? Why should it be demeaning to admit that something bad has happened to us? (I’m worried that I’m accidentally plagiarizing Roxane Gay here. Seriously, read everything she’s ever written.)

I think it comes back to an ancient and stultifying thread of magical thinking. To calm the chaos of the world around us, humans still believe deep down that if something bad happens to you, you must be bad. On that idea is built every atrocity, every erased voice, every abuse from personal to global. Because of that magical thinking, we suffer instead of getting treated, we are pressured to perform heroic survivorship or at least general okayness, we try to empower ourselves with self-blame, we shut off every tributary of empathy. I was seriously once told by an opponent of Obamacare that I got hit by a car in the crosswalk because having insurance invited injury. That is how desperate people are to find order by placing blame, but why not place it on, I DON’T KNOW, the person who was driving?!

If we’re hurt, we must be bad, and if we care for the hurt, we just invite more badness, goes the magical thinking. Teaching the Universe how to treat us. Primal. Understandable, maybe, but the root of every violence and oppression.

Because I’ve had a bajillion years of cognitive behavioral therapy, I can occasionally question my own false absolutes, the labels we place on ourselves and others that can obscure the bigger picture. A few weeks ago, a teenage white supremacist facebook troll told me that minorities should “let go of (our/their) victimhood and be stronger.” He was wrong on every level and I told him why, but his ignorance helped make something clear for me: Victimhood can’t change anyone’s value—why would it? How could a thing that happened to us reduce our worth? A trauma or oppression may change our outlook, it may give us new insights and growth, or it may not. Victimhood may change us, but I don’t think I ever realized before, it isn’t us. The things that happened to me are not the same as what I am. (Pause for two decades of therapists to rejoice.)

The crimes and oppressions that influence us, our various forms of victimhood are not fixed or permanent. Engaging with them doesn’t make us worse or invite more misfortune. Recognizing the ways I am oppressed doesn’t take away my power, it gives me more. Understanding the obstacles that I and my fellow humans face can burnish us to alchemist’s gold, help us change the world, or just help us empathize with our own shitty/miraculous fate as we head off to conquer another day.

If I could take away one idea from the world’s consciousness, it would be the idea that if something bad happens to you, you must deserve it. It’s a toxic, rotten, compelling idea, a holdover from the time when we believed that illness came from demons, that misfortune must reveal some secret sin. It would be especially be good to get rid of this idea because THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO DO THE BAD THINGS! WHERE IS THE COMFORT IN BLAMING THE VICTIMS INSTEAD?

While we work on eradicating victim-blaming, I’m happy to be a little more free of victim-shaming, to see trauma as a shifting influence, survivorship as multifarious and not something at which I have to be amazing. It reminds me of when my BFF/ex-wife were watching Kesha’s Grammy Performance  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buM8OErfvu0 and Amy, eyes full of tears at Kesha’s monumental, beautiful, grumpy transcendence said “She’s too nice!”

“It’s only one song on the album,” I said, and that’s how I feel about all of this. Kesha’s survivorship is a diamond-brilliant facet of her artistic identity, but so is her goofiness, her feverish dance beats, her sly romance. For anyone to reduce her or the #metoo movement to stigmatized victimhood is only to see a very, very narrow part of the picture. Everything I make will be an attempt to break that narrow lens.

What the G.O.P. Gains from Campus Rape

Every once in a while, I look at the Trump administration’s policies and ask the somewhat futile question of “Why?” Mostly the only answer I can come up with is “pure contempt for life itself,” but a trip down the Betsy DeVos rabbit hole gave me a little more specific (though no less alarming) answer.

DeVos has decided to frame campus rape as a crime that victimizes both the survivor and the rapist. Her stated goal is to minimize the damage to “the accused,” apparently having missed the movie with that title.

I feel like for the most part society at least has acknowledged that rape cases generally put the victim on trial, asking her to demonstrate enough “innocence” in herself to prove that she is somehow virtuous enough for rape to be possible, rather than her very female existence being, in itself, a kind of consent.

But to DeVos and the Men’s Rights Advocates, rapists are the real victims when it comes to campus rape. (It hurts to even type that sentence.) Along with the rest of our rape culture-steeped society, Trump’s deplorables set out not to preserve women’s right to learn safely, but to preserve the “bright futures” of campus predators. It would seem like the only possible aim here is to shore up the structures of rape culture itself—but why? Why advocate for members of society who feel entitled to the bodies of others without consent? What possible function could that serve?

My assertion is that the aim of making campus rape easier is to drain resources from women and make it harder for us to live independently and advocate for ourselves politically. Though my rape stories didn’t happen on a college campus, I can offer some insight as to what being a rape survivor costs. Like many women, I decided to get my PTSD treated after Trump was elected. I go to exposure therapy every Monday afternoon, drawing out and reliving rape and abuse stories in order to help my brain heal. It takes a long time to bounce back from the sessions, so time off work costs me about $100 per week. I am generally too exhausted to participate in political or artistic activities on Mondays or Tuesdays. A little less than 2/7 of each week is given over to treatment for rape and abuse. That adds up to about $5200 per year, and would be much more if I weren’t lucky enough to be treated at a free clinic. (Women Organized Against Rape! Call them!)

With all that said, I am probably among the luckiest rape survivors in human history. I have the money, time, and support necessary to devote myself to healing, and I have the spiteful and sassy temperament that it takes to stay positive and productive for the other five days of the week, to stay self-actualized and part of the Resistance.

But it’s still time theft. Because of my status as a survivor, I have less time and money to devote both to my own freedom and to the causes that I care about. Multiply that by every well-cared-for survivor, and it’s a lot of days, a lot of money, a lot of women’s physical, emotional, and political resources being siphoned off to recover from rape, and that’s just those of us who are lucky enough to be treated.

The damage done by rape can’t be quantified, and women emerging from college should have the right to devote their full selves to the life they want to lead. My littlest cousin just entered college this week, and my nieces aren’t far behind. I want them to have sovereignty over their own bodies so that they can build whatever life they choose.

So back to my original question of “Why?” Though I fully believe that the Rapist-in-Chief would love nothing more than to create an apocalyptic Handmaiden-scape, I think that everyday Republicans are after something that to them, seems more benign. I think that they want to save us by keeping us in what they think should be our place, and that means protecting male dominance no matter what the cost. I think the landscape the average Republican is trying to create is a whites-only 1950s suburb, where women are happily enslaved in the home and ever more willing to produce white, conformist children, all the while feeding the economy by purchasing ever more expensive kitchen supplies.

The good news, I think, is that that landscape never existed, and that the young women of today don’t want it. No matter what happens to Title IX, the young women of today will not support the G.O.P’s white supremacist misogynist heteronormative ideal. They deserve to own their bodies and their futures, and I hope they won’t have to fight as hard as I did to heal.

Against White Fragility and Entitlement (Especially My Own)

I’m ashamed to admit that it took me more than four decades to learn the above sentiment, and probably I’m still in the long hard process of learning it. In my twenties, I remember refusing to join the Gay Straight Alliance at Syracuse because I thought they were too hard on straight people. When my feed erupted with grief about Ferguson and Charleston and all the other white atrocities of the past few years and my friends all called out for white people to wake up, I’m ashamed to admit that it hurt my feelings. I’d been doing my best to fight racism and I wanted credit for that, like some kind of get-out-of-racism-free card.

That’s white fragility—we’re so used to not having to think about our racial identity that it feels upsetting when someone asks us to examine our role in things. My entitlement was in thinking that for acknowledging the existence of racism, I should somehow get a pass, should get some kind of gratitude. The poets asking white people to wake up weren’t necessarily even talking about me, but I felt indignant anyway, entitled to credit and rewards for caring about justice, which is really the bare minimum of what every human being should do.

Those at the top of the privilege pile (Here I’m talking about white people, but this also applies to male, straight, cis, Christian, and all of the other American entitlements) we feel hurt when we’re questioned because we (unconsciously, I hope) think that our status entitles us to be the ones doing the questioning, the shaping, the defining of even the most deeply personal parts of other people’s lives.

The thing that makes me the angriest about entitlement is the way that we colonize other people’s identities. We superimpose our idea of what people should be and refuse to let them define themselves. That is an evil coercion that threatens and warps the basic, unique, loving perfection that each individual is born with. I would love to see what we’d all be like without the personal colonizations of the power structure.

One of the most sickening examples of white entitlement is the idea I keep hearing from white people that if people of color “showed more respect” to the police, they would not be hurt. This is an abuser’s mindset, and there is absolutely no way for abused people to win it. As someone who grew up with abusive parents, I can understand a tiny fragment of what this might feel like. You bend and twist and hide and equivocate to try and please your oppressor and create some kind of safety for yourself. You learn the moods and whims and warning signs and you shrink yourself down as far as you can go, but you always, always still get hit, hurt, punished. Or in the case of so many people of color, murdered by police.

            The insidious idea beneath all of this is the same one that fuels rape culture: the assumption that if something bad happens to you, you must deserve it. My mother        broke my heart when she suggested that Trayvon Martin must’ve done something we didn’t know about.

            People embrace this false reasoning to protect themselves from the sadness all around them, and I can feel compassionate about that, but it isn’t okay the way it allows us to turn a blind, callous eye toward the people who need us most. Blaming the victim is what allows all cycles of abuse to continue, what makes the fight for fairness feel so impossible.

            But I’m mostly writing this to expose my own very regrettable blind spots. Last spring, in a fight about something only vaguely related, a former friend said that I’d failed as a teacher because of my entitlement and cowardice. Mean, but not entirely wrong. There were a million things that made me a bad fit for the classroom, but there was also this:

            In retrospect, I think I felt entitled to a level of respect from the children that was not directly proportional to my basic person-ness. As a white person with primarily black students, I think that on some level I expected the kids to treat me better because some creepy, awful part of me thought I was better. In times of stress, ugly things came out of my mouth that I will never forgive myself for. At my last school, I got livid when parents would rather talk to my African American grade partner, despite the fact that she had four decades of experience on me, vastly more insight into the children’s lives, and was generally all-around awesome. (She tried so hard to convince me that I was a good teacher, to prop me up as I collapsed under anxiety, and I should probably write her a letter of thanks.) I went into education to fight the achievement gap and be a resource for African American children, and I am deeply ashamed of how much gratitude I thought I deserved for that.

            White entitlement is only a tiny piece of the sociopolitical tangle of life in those classrooms, but it was a thread. I’m not telling you all this to ask for absolution, but to share some important missteps on my road to imperfect but steadfast allyship. I’m so ashamed, I’m so sorry, and thank you for sticking with me in spite of my failures.

            To change things, we all have to be able to check our assumptions and examine our underlying motivations, our ugly inherited selfishness about our place in the world. Today, I try to be always ready to say I’m sorry, always ready to listen. I feel so grateful to everyone who has been a bridge for me, who has let me cross over into other circles and cultures and make stupid mistakes so I can get better. It’s a very lucky life, and I’m going to keep trying hard to honor it.