I know this is a bit of a controversial opinion, but I always felt that society's reaction to sexual assault give victims a reason to feel even worse about their situation.
Not to say that it isn't a severely traumatic thing to experience - it absolutely is. But, we regularly treat virginity as some sort of virtuous status - and then speak of rape victims who lost their virginity to their attacker as if they were stripped of some sort of human value in the process.
We speak of rape very matter-of-factly about how it ruins lives, ruins women for marriage, emasculates men, and follows you for life. For a victim, this almost feels like the world telling you how defeated you are supposed to feel.
I feel like way too much of society's response is about pitying the victim, and not enough of the response is about moving forward and getting past the trauma and living a normal, happy life.
I am also an American, and we tend to focus more on the negative. Many times, when I have expressed this opinion, people have been upset because my feelings don't put enough negativity on the actions of the attacker - but really, the attacker means nothing to me, only the recovery and wellbeing of the victim.
I agree with you. I have often gotten reactions of pity and the like for speaking openly of my experiences. I do my best to give polite push back against it.
I was raised with the idea that the shame is on the rapist, not the victim. I was raised with the idea that people who treat the victim in a shaming way are part of the problem.
Being open about this aspect of my life is probably the single most "political" thing I do. I strongly agree with the things I was taught on this subject.
FWIW, I likely did not lose my virginity to rape insofar as the detail of my hymen being ruptured. That probably occurred many years earlier when I fell at age 4 while trying to use a chair as a ladder.
It's cool that you can say that, as a woman. I've tried to express similar thoughts once, but I got shut down before you could say "socially constructed".
Congrats on not letting your self-worth be determined by others.
This is similar to how when men are corced into sex then it's seen as a dream come true by a lot of people, and often many such men also feel lucky themselves. But for women it become the script of what they're and everyone feels she has been wronged.
Just due to perspective in culture one see event as achievement and other as permanent assault, even though both had same circumstances
Some years ago, an internet friend of mine asked me for advice concerning an appropriate Christmas present for a woman he and his wife were helping while she left an abusive marriage. I tried to delicately hint that her husband had to also be raping her, given the description I was hearing. I failed to be subtle and he did an internet search and verified that what I was saying was true: she had all the markings of a seriously traumatized rape victim.
What I told him was that at some point she would divulge this to him and he needed to deal with his own feelings before then and not make the discussion about his feelings. He needed to respect the fact that she had already survived a lot of terrible things and yet found the strength to leave and start rebuilding her life.
It went like I predicted. He was able to be supportive and she made great strides in the following months towards putting her life back together.
It's fine to validate that a person was, in fact, victimized so long as the focus is on "That person did you wrong" and not on pitying the person who was mistreated.
The problem is that this is old news to the victim but new information for the person they are telling. And the person they are telling typically has a very big emotional reaction. After that, the conversation is about that person's feelings, identity and mental models, not about the feelings, identity and mental models of the person disclosing that they were assaulted.
The strong emotional reaction of the person receiving the information helps to keep victims silent and trapped in their silence because these reactions either burden them with dealing with this new person's feelings etc or it makes the victim feel guilty of emotionally and psychologically harming other people in their attempts to try to get help of some sort.
Having been victimized, most survivors are pretty horrified at the idea of knowingly and intentionally hurting other people. This is a huge barrier to reaching out for support.
Validation is really powerful and healing. Just don't make your feelings and your identity their problem.
By identity, I mean in part things like insisting you are a nice, good, caring, helpful, knowledgeable person while doing counterproductive things. A lot of people feel a tremendous need to have their own goodness validated in such situations and it often comes at the expense of the person who confided in them.
Don't try to fix them. Attempting to fix them just reinforces the idea that they are broken.
Listen. Validate that what was done to them was terrible and wrong. Give them breathing room to feel their feelings, whatever they are, and validate that it is okay to feel whatever they feel about that.
If it is hard for you to hear and if you have no idea what to do, say so in a way that doesn't blame them, such as "No one has ever confided something like this in me before, so I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm honored that you would entrust this information to me. I'll do my best, but I'm sure to make some mistakes."
Then, if they give you push back on something, respect that. Don't try to insist they are wrong and broken and you are right.
That's kind of rambly and I'm not at my best today. Hopefully, there are a few useful takeaways in there that will serve your needs.
As far as I remember, I've never been raped. Maybe as a young child, but that's just unknowable. But I have had a few sexual partners who were rape survivors. What's difficult, I gather, is how it messes with the ability to be sexually intimate. So much about enjoyable sex depends on letting go of conscious control, and that's often difficult for rape survivors.
I mean, it was just luck that kept a large dog from killing me, many years ago. And ever since, I am never comfortable around dogs.
Edit: Damn, I forgot the point. Which is that being uncomfortable with dogs is far less problematic than being uncomfortable with sex.
I have had similar responses on occasion when I bring up what happened to me in Jr. High with a sub. Eventually I decided that waiting for stigma and toxic ideologies to disappear from society wasn't the best use of my time. Instead I decided to start a charity against sexual assault and focus on healing through a positive outlet.
Moving on is crucial. However, what I find troubling about that formulation that it appears to deny the victim's experience. Can't we pause, acknowledge the negative, and then move on?
The issue is that if you get hit by a car, the entire world doesn't spend the rest of your life pitying you and hanging their car-related baggage on you and refusing to acknowledge they are doing so. If you get raped, every bit of sexual baggage of everyone you know will be dumped in your lap in the name of "sympathy" while people actively refuse to allow you to move on.
I'm a let me brag and show off by showing you my scars kind of personality (a la Lethal Weapon* ). Men can do that and impress people. I routinely get pity.
I have been on HN nearly 9 years. No one ever goes "Damn, girl, you are one helluva badass that you can discuss a topic like this calmly in such a large forum that is overwhelmingly male." No, in this very thread, more than 4 decades after the abuse ended, someone has told me they are sorry my therapy was a bad experience, though I in no way indicated it was.
How much evidence do I need to provide that I am remarkably comfortable with myself, my past and my sexuality before the world stops heaping pity upon me as an endless emotional burden I cannot escape? The answer appears to be that a rape victim is not allowed to move on. They are not allowed to stop being an object of pity.
I find that monstrous and incredibly counterproductive.
That in no way denies that I was traumatized. It merely asserts that a still ongoing issue is the negative way other people choose to view me in defiance of all evidence to the contrary.
Well it's cheap to say now, but I have thought that. :) Not necessarily about this topic though.
I have a friend, who has lived well, but who long ago was raped by her father... and then when she spoke out in her church community, was accused of lying and shunned as everyone rallied around her father, "a good man".
It seems to me there's a middle ground, which is never struck precisely but often close enough, between the extremes of gaslighting and victim-mongering. And exactly where that middle ground lies changes over time.
Stover did write the Star Wars prequels, but I don't hold it against him (too much). Abercrombie, Morgan and Scalzi all like his stuff. Caine is pretty much straight Crowley.
> I'm a let me brag and show off by showing you my scars kind of personality (a la Lethal Weapon* ). Men can do that and impress people. I routinely get pity.
No, not about being a victim of a sex crime, they can't; at least as much as women can't, maybe even moreso.
> The answer appears to be that a rape victim is not allowed to move on.
A “brag and show off by showing you my scars” person is one who has not moved on from the sources of those scars. Yeah, that kind of failure to move on may get a different typical response by both gender and source of the scar, but you can't both have a need to show the scar and complain that other people aren't letting you move on: you aren't letting yourself move on.
> Choosing to be an example of recovery is not evidence I have not recovered.
There's a huge difference, as I see it, between choosing to be an example of recovery and being,asyou previously described, a “brag and show off your scars person”, particularly in terms of the audience to which accounts of particular trauma are directed.
I like the true listening in your approach. Responding that way reinforces agency.
I think that's also compatible with having an expectation that the situation will change over time, that most often the intensity of suffering will decrease, and that the survivor will get their life back on track.
I would seriously hope that modern therapists would do their utmost to push back on any idea of virginity as an indicator of human value - an idea that comes from the idea of women as property and successor machines.
It's a value because the more people you've been with the less likely you'll stay with the one you have. However, therapists should be pushing back on the idea that we need to focus on bad things that happened to us in order to be released from them. It is simple enough to see - and one of the reasons why eastern practitioners still laugh at staunch western scientists.
> It's a value because the more people you've been with the less likely you'll stay with the one you have.
a) You are conflating rape with sex. Why would being raped be the same thing, at all?
b) Everyone I've seen talk about this has been referring to charts showing increased non-marital partners correlates to divorce, but you are talking about pre-marital partners, where divorce rates actually start going down after a few partners.
Validation, acceptance, endorsement, and promotion have murky boundaries. Validation and acceptance are key components to a healthy outcome after a painful experience. It can go too far, and endorsement and promotion can mutate a viewpoint until it culminates as an obsession.
Recovery, however, is hardly ever a straight path. Sometimes people get stuck. Sometimes, people shift their viewpoint to something else that's extreme and unhealthy. In the grand scheme of things, this journey lasts our entire lifetime.
There’s a line that gets crossed between “oh well that sucks but that’s life” and legitimate traumatic experiences. When that line is crossed your suffering goes from whining to legitimate in the eyes of society, so a lot of people realize this and maximize their victimhood in order to gain any sympathy.
Yes, there's a weird way that when we label people, it changes the legitimacy of their condition. It's broader than just how acceptable it is to complain. Other examples are depression and autism. If you're diagnosed with one of those, it transforms you from an unpleasant person that nobody wants to be friends with to someone deserving pity, support and/or respect.
I think there's some kind of value in this. Everyone's got a bit of psychological disorder and for normal people, they can use willpower to bring themselves into a good state. We ridicule those who fail to do that as a kind of motivation to sort themselves out. But with an actual disease that has a name or a distinct experience like rape, we think they're beyond being able to help themselves and no amount of insults is going to be any use in making them feel better.
This attitude also seems to be behind the competing ideas of alcoholism being either a disease or a behavior. If it's a behavior, you can blame the alcoholic for failing to sort themselves out, but if it's a disease, maybe they're truly helpless.
>This attitude also seems to be behind the competing ideas of alcoholism being either a disease or a behavior. If it's a behavior, you can blame the alcoholic for failing to sort themselves out, but if it's a disease, maybe they're truly helpless.
Implicit in this is the idea that behavior originates from an identity, from some independent center.
You have to believe in the notion of free will to assign blame.
Kindly do yourself a favor and re-read Zeller's last words in its entirety. While yes, his attacker's actions are utterly despicable, and the experience in no doubt has been more traumatizing to him than we could imagine. At the same time, Zeller also goes into great details about how nobody has really been able to support and help him recover from that trauma.
On his relationships, he discusses how he was never really able to open up to his significant others about what he was going through: "So I watched as things fell apart between us. I had put an explicit time limit on our relationship, since I knew it couldn't last because of the darkness and didn't want to hold her back, and this caused a variety of problems. She was put in an unnatural situation that she never should have been a part of. It must have been very hard for her, not knowing what was actually going on with me, but this is not something I've ever been able to talk about with anyone."
On the doctors he has seen: "I've seen a number of doctors since I was a teenager to talk about other issues and I'm positive that another doctor would not have helped. I was never given one piece of actionable advice, ever. More than a few spent a large part of the session reading their notes to remember who I was."
On his family: "I'd also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise everything they stand for and I truly hate them, in a non-emotional, dispassionate and what I believe is a healthy way. The world will be a better place when they're dead—one with less hatred and intolerance.
If you're unfamiliar with the situation, my parents are fundamentalist Christians who kicked me out of their house and cut me off financially when I was 19 because I refused to attend seven hours of church a week."
"I grew up in a house where love was proxied through a God I could never believe in. A house where the love of music with any sort of a beat was literally beaten out of me."
And there's plenty more. The vast struggles that Zeller faced and described are not inconsistent with the points that @DoreenMichele is discussing.
Not to say that it isn't a severely traumatic thing to experience - it absolutely is. But, we regularly treat virginity as some sort of virtuous status - and then speak of rape victims who lost their virginity to their attacker as if they were stripped of some sort of human value in the process.
We speak of rape very matter-of-factly about how it ruins lives, ruins women for marriage, emasculates men, and follows you for life. For a victim, this almost feels like the world telling you how defeated you are supposed to feel.
I feel like way too much of society's response is about pitying the victim, and not enough of the response is about moving forward and getting past the trauma and living a normal, happy life.
I am also an American, and we tend to focus more on the negative. Many times, when I have expressed this opinion, people have been upset because my feelings don't put enough negativity on the actions of the attacker - but really, the attacker means nothing to me, only the recovery and wellbeing of the victim.