“What would happen,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser asks in her oft-quoted poem “Käthe Kollwitz,” “if one woman told the truth about / her life? / The world would split open.” Over the past few years, I’ve begun to question that quote, especially as it relates to telling the truth about sexual violence. What is the purpose and function of writing about rape? More to the point, what is the purpose and function of writing for me when writing about my rape? These questions grew more painful to consider after I published my first book examining the long-term effects of violence and survival, and more painful still when I learned this book had apparently ended up on the reading lists of various tastemakers on Twitter, one of whom informed that she was using the book as a writing prompt for her own students’ exploration of violence. Thus my private experience was to become a “jumping-off point” for others’ creativity, my descriptions of my assault apparently disseminated and refracted through the formal exercises of strangers in order to understand the effects of such violence themselves, so that my assault would become both symbol and trope, something that could be parsed and imitated until all the rage and humanness drained out of it. This was, of course, one of the possible outcomes of publishing such a book, one that ended up in the maw of social media.
Speak truth to power, writers and nonwriters alike declaim, and now this phrase has become the battle cry of Facebook and Twitter: to tell the truth of our lives as we see it, as directly and with as little remorse as possible. Such an outpouring of personal testimony has indeed cracked open the world, in part by reminding participants in social media that what most American institutions want happily to forget about our nation stubbornly persists—its violence against people of color, its killing of LGBTQ people, its seemingly implacable hatred of women and their bodies that permeates political and religious institutions alike. There is indeed a power and value to truth-telling, but most of us forget that truth-telling relies upon narrative, and that narrative telling—even supposedly artless, immediate telling—is in fact crafted for particular responses, and nothing crafts language so effectively as a Web format that requires you to express yourself in 280 characters or less, and which sells these truth-telling nuggets in a stream of visual media that makes it impossible to focus on anything but the most extreme, most compelling, and most direct language.
Social media and truth-telling both encourage the reader, primarily, to emote. And having emoted, having felt all of the things and thought all of the thoughts the writer has asked us to think and feel within such a limited format, we can thus walk away from the engagement satisfied with the blunt, brute fact of our feelings. Or perhaps, as I saw from the young woman’s response to my book, we might replicate these feelings in writing we produce ourselves in order to garner some of that same attention, that same veneer of authenticity that claims the authority of survivorship and thus makes autobiography and resilience satisfactory political goals.
A book about a sexual assault from a first-person position guarantees a certain amount of attention, because it is sensational and because writing about violence encourages a kind of voyeurism on the part of the reader, who’s implicitly being asked to imagine herself as a victim of events she may or may not ever have suffered herself. But while this may be one possible response, it is not the writer’s desire to make the reader participate in the imagined construction of violence by rewriting its events. And it is not what we teach other budding writers about the purpose of testimonies about violence, in particular the testimonies about violence that women might produce. If anything, we argue, women’s testimonies of violence should inspire not empathy (or not only empathy) but political outrage, in large part because women’s autobiographical writing has been so effectively suppressed over centuries. Women’s writing about violence serves still as a public novelty, one which, if it does not always receive the socially approved status of high literary art, at least promises its readers to be an authentic expression of rage, of grief, of endurance and survival, and—most powerfully—of hope.
But I’m not actually that interested in resilience. I want jail time for offenders. I want politicians tossed out of office, priests defrocked, federal judges fired and replaced. I want a country that doesn’t treat violence against women as sexual entertainment. I want to watch my assaulter burn.
Over the past year, I’ve begun to hate this book I’ve published, largely because the more I read from and about it, the more politically and aesthetically suspicious my own writing appears to me. Who had I written it for? Who did I really imagine as its audience? The book started, in part, as a reaction to the 2009 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which got me thinking about the ways in which sex discrimination has shaped my working life, which got me thinking about the sexual assault I experienced as a twenty-year-old woman at a coat factory where I worked one summer as a down stuffer along with several itinerant workers, one of whom attacked me. The book was finally published around the time our current president, then a presidential candidate, admitted to grabbing women “by the pussy,” which made the Me Too hashtag started by Tarana Burke in 2006 erupt into a firestorm promulgated primarily on social media. Into this storm my own book was tossed, and while I was happy at first to add my voice to the movement, over time I began to feel that the book sounded less like my individual voice than an automated reply. If the language the rapist and the abuser uses to describe women feels crude and rote, so too does the language the media uses to depict sexual abuse; if my attacker saw me as little more than my sexual parts, I have also been reduced to a crude sexual term by a young female writer ostensibly sympathetic to my experience, who related, in an email to me, how shocked she was to picture a man “forcing himself inside [my] pussy.” As a writer, I am more than a little dismayed to find myself—or anyone—relying upon or creatively navigating the same tropes and images and events that a thousand other women and their abusers use to construct the violence that has (if temporarily) disempowered women. To use the same language that has characterized the experience of so many other women certainly brings me into community with them, but it also makes the stories I read from other survivors feel depressingly interchangeable and flat.
Perhaps this flattening out of our individual stories is created in part by our social expectation of what comprises female psychology and women’s writing, in particular our assumption that women’s writing is primarily or only autobiographical, not imaginative, and that it stems from an institutionally disadvantaged position that we equate fundamentally with pain. This, too, enrages me. Apparently, because I am female, I was born into this language and psychology; I was prepared to tell the story of my assault since I was twelve years old and heard one of my best friends tell me about being raped by her drunk father. Since I was fourteen and followed home in a car by a man who hissed filthy racial slurs at me. Since learning from another friend in college that the best way to protect yourself from one angry man is to offer to sleep with another, possibly less angry one. These, apparently, were the stories available to me and that, like it or not, shaped me. According to all these stories, as a woman and a writer, I am a grievance waiting to be heard and endured, and at times it feels that the best I can do is pay close attention to that grievance, to give it a slightly different shape and coloration. By writing about my grief, my anger, my assault, I am now able to inhabit fully my femininity. By writing about my assault, I thus confirm what is the most inarguably authentic position of the not-male, and also the not-white: the pained, the wounded, the helpless, the small.
To speak about one’s assault in any way that feels actually authentic is to thread the needle through an incredibly slender eye made ever more narrow by the pressure of therapeutic services, which argue that such narratives are not only good but necessary for psychic healing, and by political and social institutions, which argue that truth-telling makes for good rallying cries and possible legislation, and narrowed further still by social media, which argues for ever more devastating expressions of the self to be streamed and consumed and disseminated.
Writing effectively about violence shares many of the same aesthetic traits with political language, as well as writing on social media, which is to say that its directness resists excessive or subtle interpretation. It compresses time and context in order to focus on the moment at hand. Writing about violence authenticates itself through the performance of immediacy and vivid feeling. This is what constitutes truth, and it is surprisingly, distressingly easy to duplicate.
All of which is to say that this is why the social media performances of grief, selfhood, and outrage we daily read feel like suspiciously like masquerades. In our feeds, we try to outshine and outthink the politicians and abusers inspiring our outrage, using language whose syntax and complexity rarely rise above their own, meaning we are shackled to our shadow doubles, meaning that as much as I despise the self-help books, the prayer circles, the thin whine of grief on Twitter and its overuse (and continual misuse) of the word trauma, I understand that the only identity that cannot be challenged or shamed is that of the victim, and so I see myself and others willingly write into and about how we have been diminished or shamed so as to stop ourselves from being attacked by strangers online, because apparently the only thing to keep oneself safe online is to become the witting accomplice in your own self-objectification.
Added to that is the problem that refracting and repeating narratives of violence risk also downplaying or even ignoring specifics of race and class in favor of the sensational act of the violence itself, even as race and class make some part of this violence more or less likely for certain people to experience. It is not lost on me, for example, that I came from a middle-class family but was attacked by someone skirting the poverty line, and that what brought us together was the coat factory that relied on both our labor to exist: me, the mixed-race college student earning money for her next year’s tuition; my attacker, a white man who moved from job to job, city to city, aimless and resentful, apparently, of the future and opportunities I had in a world that he imagined pandered to minorities. It is not lost on me either that the stories we repeat most often are those narrated by and about white women, and that our retweeting and sharing of these stories in some sense replicates the culture’s co-opting of Tarana Burke’s Me Too hashtag into the world of (largely) white and (largely) middle-class feminism.
All of which is exactly what this young woman, consciously or unconsciously, performed when she imitated my own writing. She understood that some part of writing about and against violence, especially the violence that women experience, is imitative and coercive. You do not have to be the victim of violence to render that violence believably or powerfully. The actual experience of an assault may be private, it may reveal the world to be artless and cruel, but the sharing of it depends entirely upon creative skills and images and ideas of identities that can be appropriated.
——
When I first thought to write my book, I assumed that writing about my assault might lead to some personal catharsis. I’d also fantasized it might do what Rukeyser suggested: split open the world. Obviously, my writing has not accomplished either of these goals. It has not made me a healthier person, it has not erased or even much eased the memory of my assault, and, while it may have helped shine a brighter light on a truth we have long known exists, it has certainly not helped change the very nature of that truth: to bring the responsible parties to justice, to hold institutions of power accountable. In that, my book’s failure is hardly unique. Month after month after month, the Me Too stories pile up. Another book or essay or blog post is published, the poem goes viral, people read and share on social media and weep and publish think pieces and gather writers on radio and talk shows, and what happens? The pussy-grabber is elected president, a man accused of trying to rape a fellow high school student gets a permanent seat on the Supreme Court. A wave of anti-choice and anti-women laws rolls across the southern states with little prospect of being stopped. Church after church admits to sex abuse scandals, and yet somehow the priests are moved to other parishes while the highest-up administrators remain in place. For months it seems the only person who appears to suffer any consequences for his behavior is a movie mogul who everyone knew was scum, and whose movies hardly anyone watches anymore.
Of course, I never really believed my writing would change the world. I know such a thing takes more concrete and practical steps: the daily, basic work of trying to keep your democracy from going up in flames. So, like millions of other women, I write the letters and go to the marches and stump for the politicians and work at the conventions and sacrifice money and time on the altar of American politics because I believe such activism is the herd immunity against fascism we are each responsible for maintaining, even if we are at times unsure of our general affiliation with the herd; even if we suspect that our current politicians would really just prefer the vast majority of us fall sick and die.
Still, I wonder what role writing, and writing about sexual violence, is meant to play in the social sphere. Added to that, what kind of language is most effective for achieving these imagined goals? Is it literary language, which as a writer I’ve been taught to revere and emulate, or is it the easily disposable and increasingly formulaic language of our feeds, which even as I personally decry it, I can’t help but recognize has forced us all to the table? If it hasn’t gotten all the offending politicians tossed out, it’s certainly ended or at least stunted certain careers. It’s altered HR policies and made us look newly askance at power dynamics in class, and it’s even got some in religious institutions arguing whether women should be able to preach. It’s reshaped the language we use around race and violence and gender in our interpersonal interactions, if not in our courts and in our administrations. In that, social media has provided us with a far more effective tool than anything my own professors and fellow activists had at hand in the 1990s, during the first wave of what critics dismissed as the “political correctness” movement. But even as I write this, I recognize that the classroom and the dinner party and the campus quad and the NPR roundtable are hardly enough. I want a different nation. In that case, what is the language that will achieve that?
Perhaps my hatred of my book is just internalized misogyny, but I prefer to see it as an ethical problem: What is the language that insists upon and reifies both our group identity and our individuation? Is there a language like that which exists for women? Do we have to be seen as people not produced first by pain in order to write effectively about it, to have that expression of pain become socially galvanizing?
And, even as I write this, it also strikes me that perhaps I’m wrong to think we’ve become numb or jaded about female narratives of pain. I think back to that look on Arizona senator Jeff Flake’s face in the elevator as he fled the Kavanaugh hearings, the moment when a protestor pried apart the elevator doors to demand he listen to the assault that she’d survived. I see again the obvious pain twist across his face. Perhaps the reason the Me Too movement hasn’t succeeded in achieving more substantial victories for women is not because its language has started to feel formulaic, but because it really is too painful for people to witness. It’s too painful because it asks those who have not suffered to imagine the limits of their own physical invulnerability—to realize, if only empathetically, that their sense of self-protection is a fantasy. We turn away from the language of violence not because it has become anodyne, but because we see how easily each of us can be made a victim.
—–
Here’s something from my life, and about my understanding about my assault, that I did not include in my book.
Many years ago, I lived with a man who’d been raped as a child. This man wasn’t a writer, never wanted to construct a narrative about his experience, never even wanted to speak to me about it. It was only the slow, painful death of our relationship that compelled him, finally, to admit what he’d suffered. Even then, my boyfriend didn’t tell me much about what happened, but he told me enough. My boyfriend, like many children, knew his rapist. This rapist was a mentally disturbed cousin who lived with my boyfriend’s grandparents in a run-down cabin my boyfriend and his brother visited each summer. The cabin had only an outhouse for a bathroom, my boyfriend told me, so the cousin would watch and wait for my boyfriend—then twelve years old—to go to the outhouse, at which point he’d follow him in.
You might think that a man who’d been raped would make a perfect romantic partner for a woman who’d also been sexually assaulted, but it turns out to be the exact opposite. While he was kind to me, tender, would never have dreamed of hurting me, my boyfriend was also skittish and paranoid. While I only learned of his rape a month or two before we broke up, in retrospect I see that his assault affected every aspect of our two-year relationship. My boyfriend was highly suspicious of women, particularly of women who he said “claimed” to be raped. He saw them as manipulative, he said, victims who lacked the mental fortitude to protect themselves. For this reason, we often argued about feminism and politics, about women’s sexual agency, about what it meant when a woman said “no.” For this reason, I never told him I’d been attacked. I knew it would only confirm his worst suspicions, that it would inspire disgust and fear in him, not sympathy.
Of course, when my boyfriend finally admitted his own rape to me, some part of his paranoia and misogyny made sense. It wasn’t mistrust of women but envy I think that motivated my boyfriend’s anger, the sense that he’d been abandoned by family and society, left to his own devices to deal with the aftermath. My boyfriend refused to see a therapist. At the time he was coming to terms with his childhood abuse, he knew (or suspected) that there were no support groups, no therapeutic movements around male rape survivors. Even the word rape itself conjured (and perhaps still conjures) solely male perpetrators and solely female victims. My boyfriend was also a large man, six foot five and 250 pounds. No one would have imagined, or believed, he could be a victim of assault. Added to all of this was the newly in-vogue ’90s term sexual harassment, which for my twenty-three-year-old boyfriend—himself still trying to discern the rules for appropriate and inappropriate male desire—meant that women could, at any time, accuse a man of unwanted attention and be believed. Believed in ways my boyfriend felt that he, as a child and as a man, would never have been.
My boyfriend was trying to survive in a society that had made him the victim of sexual abuse but refused to imagine he could also be one, that offered him no therapeutic language or spaces, that offered him no communal identity that didn’t also suggest he must reframe his sexual orientation from straight to gay. In other words, there was no culturally understood identity for my boyfriend to perform and be healed by.
When I bemoan the ways in which female identity gets elided with victimhood, and the way social media has only made this imagined relationship more performative, let me also say that I see some benefit to that in a culture where women are statistically highly likely to be attacked, molested, and raped. Having no language, I believe, is worse than having too much of it, and if I fear at times that I’ve disappeared into the dark narrative of female life shadowing me since birth, I can also appreciate the terror of stepping blind into the glare of a spotlight that shines on you alone. Even at age twenty-three, I understood there was no language around rape that wouldn’t have rendered my boyfriend more vulnerable, more terribly seen. Then, and possibly now, my boyfriend’s confession would be socially galvanizing, far more so than my own, but it also might be personally ruinous.
At the same time, my boyfriend’s automatic rejection of the term victim, his knee-jerk misogyny also told me just how much women’s testimony and female identity remain social anathema. My boyfriend didn’t just hate being seen as a rape victim, he hated what being a rape victim implied, which was that he was now just like a woman.
Again, it’s probably not just likely but inevitable that I’ve internalized this same misogyny. Perhaps my struggle to find a language adequate to express my own assault is less about my frustrated political desires and my dislike of social media and far more about my fear that I write like a woman; that so long as I am compelled to write about what happens to me and those like me, the tastemakers and critics and “high art” consumers and prize committees won’t take me seriously; I’ll never be judged as having produced a book that gives me the same credibility and authority as a man.
Overall, however, I think my anger is due to the fact that, whether the language renders us invisible or hypervisible, “female” or “male,” believable or not believable, however we express the violence we’ve experienced, that language is not finally controlled, owned, or authored only by us. Our language is taken from us by the audience that consumes it, by the media that reports on it, by the technology that perpetuates and capitalizes upon it. As much as our writing about sexual violence purports to slip outside the systems of institutional control we want to critique, it can’t. The language becomes owned or policed by sites like Facebook, co-opted by politicians and social movements that have little real investment in our own psychic rehabilitation. It is repeated and consumed, shared, spread, and rendered unremarkable. In a corporate culture in which anything can be purchased, social media has taken away the real power of personal testimony and replaced it with the image of power, the suggestion that immediate self-expression is tantamount to individuation, even as the algorithms suppress actual individuation in favor of interchangeable mob approval. If the last election proved that outside forces can use social media to disrupt elections, it also proved that Twitter and Facebook and Instagram work as perfect social controls for those eager to work inside a capitalist system that purports to reward the active self-promoter: we can sell more of ourselves to ourselves. In that, our attempts to change via these systems negate any actual change.
Some part of my boyfriend understood that, I think: not about the role social media plays in testimony, as social media hadn’t yet been invented, but about the nature of privacy, the limits of confession in a culture hungry to absorb people’s personal information. He understood those limits for exactly the wrong, and terrible, reasons, but his reluctance to confess what had happened to him was, I think, also based on the knowledge that he could not forever control or return to that language once he said it aloud. Once he spoke about what had happened to him, it would become a story—one he was no longer the sole author of, as I’m proving to you now.
My ex died recently, and I don’t know if he told other people what happened to him. I assume he told his wife, perhaps having seen how his silence negatively affected our relationship, which was as loving and supportive as it could have been at a time when both of us believed—but never admitted to each other—that we thought our lives were ruined. I hope he told her. And I hope that telling her gave him some moment of peace, and some sense of community with her, even if speaking about his assault also meant some crucial loss of control. I know that for me, as much as I regret publishing my book, I do not regret telling my mother, who never knew about my assault until my book’s publication forced me, finally, to tell her. “I need to prepare you for what’s coming,” I said one night over dinner with her in a restaurant. My mother is a very tough person; she doesn’t compliment, and she never cries. I remember she sat and listened to me, balling up her napkin as I told her, and then she cried.
And I remember the look on my ex’s face when he told me what had been done to him. We were sitting outdoors in the grass at a concert, and he wouldn’t look at me as he said it. The music thumped over and through his words. And yet I heard every syllable clearly, and with each word, some new detail about his face emerged for me. The exact outline of his ear, the fox-red hue of one corner of his beard. Minute by minute, my boyfriend became intensely real to me.
Perhaps that is the true value in giving our testimony: making us real to each other, not another figure in the grand political theater, not another sound bite on social media. And perhaps this, in the end, is why I am so angry about the book that I published: I never told my ex what had happened to me, not even after he told me about his rape. I told a thousand strangers for whom I have no actual meaning, who have no true meaning to me. I made myself a talking statistic for them, and refused to become truly real to a man who needed me.
My ex died two years ago without ever knowing my story. Had I told him when we were dating, perhaps I could have changed our relationship, changed his own relationship to himself, to his future wife, to his own body. But I was afraid then, and fear made me selfish. It was out of this sense of diminishment that I said nothing.
“Perhaps writers like us really can change the world,” one young woman wrote me recently in a private Twitter message. “Your book inspired me to tell my own story. You can check out my feed.” I sat and thumbed down the screen to read it, the image of this stranger, like me, humiliated and hurt, raw and furious, her own terrible story wedged now between video grabs from a Trump rally and a trailer for John Wick 3. I stopped reading and her story flickered past. I sent a message thanking her, adding a few glib notes of praise. I told her I hoped she’d continue writing. And then I deleted her message.
An excerpt from “Notes on Sexual Violence” was previously published in AGNI Journal.
