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It's Kavanaugh's Fault (CW: sexual abuse)
Oct. 9th, 2018 08:34 amSo, I have this long, extremely funny story about losing my virginity. If you know me in person, you may have heard it. It actually is quite funny. But part of the reason it's funny is because I take all the personal trauma off the table right up front. The actual thrust of the story is how terrible my parents were. It is part of my decades-long attempt to redress the injustices of my childhood by telling family secrets. It is a pretty good story. If you haven't heard it, I might be willing to tell it again.
Or, maybe not.
I want to talk about the things I usually elide. The things that watching a probable rapist elevated to the Supreme Court has brought up. And, to be clear, I never really wanted to deal with any of this. It happened 40 years ago (come April) and is 4/5ths of my life ago. I had the whole thing carefully boxed, labeled, and put in the back of a closet. But then all those motherfuckers on the Judiciary committee kept on going on and on and on about how this wasn't really important. So, I opened the box to find out if they were right. If maybe it really hadn't mattered. If, possibly, I didn't matter.
Here are some facts that I don't elide, but I sure don't emphasize: I was sixteen, and he was 25. I was a virgin. And while I really wish that didn't matter, it actually did, for me. He knew these things. I was drunk, and he helped get me drunk. I tend to emphasize my agency in this scenario, but what I don't emphasize was that if I had been sober, I would not have said yes. I was not blacked out, or incoherent, but I don't actually remember ever saying yes. I let it happen, I didn't struggle, but I didn't really want it to happen.
What I never say: it was profoundly traumatizing. A lot of the trauma was secondary, at the hands of my parents. But that trauma would not have happened if Alan Campbell had not chosen to fuck a drunk sixteen year old virgin in the kitchenette of a Unitarian Church. (Weird side-note. Another man I was dating, also 25, was named Lawrence. My mother also socialized with him. After the event, she asked him if he had ever slept with me. [This, by the way, is even creepier than it sounds, since my mother was fucking him.] He said, in shock, "No, I would never" and said that he saw how completely destroyed I had been. So, there's an outside observer confirming the trauma. Which, oddly, I need.) For some years after the event, I believed it to be a pivotal, identity defining moment, and it was. The story I like to tell talks about all the wonderful things that happened as a result, including the divorce of my parents. And those are also true. But there's a soul-deep wound there, too. A profound belief that I was damaged. Even when I rejected the idea of sexual purity as a necessary element of being a good person, the sense of damage and inadequacy remained.
Another detail I rarely relate: My parents, when they found out, made me call Alan Campbell and tell him that I could never see or speak to him again. He said, "Ok," and hung up. It took me years to admit that what he sounded was relieved.
I had always thought that rape was a consequential act. That it mattered. Not that people necessarily paid for it, or that rapists regretted it. But I thought that it mattered to them. I do not think that I mattered as a person to Alan Campbell (who may or may not be a rapist, depending on how you measure these things) but I thought that I mattered as an object. The Kavanaugh hearings have made it clear...nope. I was just a canvas upon which he could sketch his masculinity and his dominance. I didn't even matter as a prize in the game. I was just the medium.
I am still not over how devastating this revelation has been.
The other thing I am discovering is that for forty years, I have interrogated and struggled with my choices, and never once really looked at Campbell's choices. I do not know, and will never know, why he did what he did. But the fact that he made those choices, choices which were hugely consequential to me, had actually escaped me. In my mind, he was more force of nature than a human with free will. And because I, and society, think of rapists that way, we fail to hold them accountable for their actions.
I wanna circle back to Lawrence, for a moment. He was the same age as Campbell. He was, especially by modern standards, kinda skeevy. He took me to plays, took me to dinners, we took long walks around downtown Pittsburgh admiring old buildings. He treated me like a precious person. He was funny and witty and had this gorgeous English accent. He was also fucking my mother. He was no one's hero. But he never made the choice to fuck me. He gave me the occasional glass of wine, but never, ever tried to pressure me into sex. He was a gifted kisser, and man, he had lovely hands that did marvelous things to my body. But he was gentle, kind, and did not have sex with me, even though it must have been incredibly tempting and he probably could have persuaded me, especially if there had been a little more wine.
We say that rape is about power, not sex. Which isn't exactly right. The implication there is that sex is not about power. If that were true, there wouldn't be BDSM. Sex is a complex human behavior, which serves a lot of different functions, and the exercise of power and dominance is one of them. It is also very central to the way we build our understanding of ourselves. One of the reasons the LBGTQ movement is what it is is because these things are at the center of how we understand ourselves. Our innate sense that sexual abuse is qualitatively different from other types of abuse is because of this. Rapists are affirming their central sense of self. And, honestly, that's scary.
I am not recovered from this re-visiting of trauma. It's actually kind of awful. I'm not sure what I'm learning, either about myself or my society. I really wish I could put my quasi-rape back in a box.
One request: please don't admire my bravery. I am not at risk. Nothing bad is going to happen to me for telling this story in public. No one powerful or dangerous will see this, or care if they do. Christine Blassey Ford -- that was bravery.
Or, maybe not.
I want to talk about the things I usually elide. The things that watching a probable rapist elevated to the Supreme Court has brought up. And, to be clear, I never really wanted to deal with any of this. It happened 40 years ago (come April) and is 4/5ths of my life ago. I had the whole thing carefully boxed, labeled, and put in the back of a closet. But then all those motherfuckers on the Judiciary committee kept on going on and on and on about how this wasn't really important. So, I opened the box to find out if they were right. If maybe it really hadn't mattered. If, possibly, I didn't matter.
Here are some facts that I don't elide, but I sure don't emphasize: I was sixteen, and he was 25. I was a virgin. And while I really wish that didn't matter, it actually did, for me. He knew these things. I was drunk, and he helped get me drunk. I tend to emphasize my agency in this scenario, but what I don't emphasize was that if I had been sober, I would not have said yes. I was not blacked out, or incoherent, but I don't actually remember ever saying yes. I let it happen, I didn't struggle, but I didn't really want it to happen.
What I never say: it was profoundly traumatizing. A lot of the trauma was secondary, at the hands of my parents. But that trauma would not have happened if Alan Campbell had not chosen to fuck a drunk sixteen year old virgin in the kitchenette of a Unitarian Church. (Weird side-note. Another man I was dating, also 25, was named Lawrence. My mother also socialized with him. After the event, she asked him if he had ever slept with me. [This, by the way, is even creepier than it sounds, since my mother was fucking him.] He said, in shock, "No, I would never" and said that he saw how completely destroyed I had been. So, there's an outside observer confirming the trauma. Which, oddly, I need.) For some years after the event, I believed it to be a pivotal, identity defining moment, and it was. The story I like to tell talks about all the wonderful things that happened as a result, including the divorce of my parents. And those are also true. But there's a soul-deep wound there, too. A profound belief that I was damaged. Even when I rejected the idea of sexual purity as a necessary element of being a good person, the sense of damage and inadequacy remained.
Another detail I rarely relate: My parents, when they found out, made me call Alan Campbell and tell him that I could never see or speak to him again. He said, "Ok," and hung up. It took me years to admit that what he sounded was relieved.
I had always thought that rape was a consequential act. That it mattered. Not that people necessarily paid for it, or that rapists regretted it. But I thought that it mattered to them. I do not think that I mattered as a person to Alan Campbell (who may or may not be a rapist, depending on how you measure these things) but I thought that I mattered as an object. The Kavanaugh hearings have made it clear...nope. I was just a canvas upon which he could sketch his masculinity and his dominance. I didn't even matter as a prize in the game. I was just the medium.
I am still not over how devastating this revelation has been.
The other thing I am discovering is that for forty years, I have interrogated and struggled with my choices, and never once really looked at Campbell's choices. I do not know, and will never know, why he did what he did. But the fact that he made those choices, choices which were hugely consequential to me, had actually escaped me. In my mind, he was more force of nature than a human with free will. And because I, and society, think of rapists that way, we fail to hold them accountable for their actions.
I wanna circle back to Lawrence, for a moment. He was the same age as Campbell. He was, especially by modern standards, kinda skeevy. He took me to plays, took me to dinners, we took long walks around downtown Pittsburgh admiring old buildings. He treated me like a precious person. He was funny and witty and had this gorgeous English accent. He was also fucking my mother. He was no one's hero. But he never made the choice to fuck me. He gave me the occasional glass of wine, but never, ever tried to pressure me into sex. He was a gifted kisser, and man, he had lovely hands that did marvelous things to my body. But he was gentle, kind, and did not have sex with me, even though it must have been incredibly tempting and he probably could have persuaded me, especially if there had been a little more wine.
We say that rape is about power, not sex. Which isn't exactly right. The implication there is that sex is not about power. If that were true, there wouldn't be BDSM. Sex is a complex human behavior, which serves a lot of different functions, and the exercise of power and dominance is one of them. It is also very central to the way we build our understanding of ourselves. One of the reasons the LBGTQ movement is what it is is because these things are at the center of how we understand ourselves. Our innate sense that sexual abuse is qualitatively different from other types of abuse is because of this. Rapists are affirming their central sense of self. And, honestly, that's scary.
I am not recovered from this re-visiting of trauma. It's actually kind of awful. I'm not sure what I'm learning, either about myself or my society. I really wish I could put my quasi-rape back in a box.
One request: please don't admire my bravery. I am not at risk. Nothing bad is going to happen to me for telling this story in public. No one powerful or dangerous will see this, or care if they do. Christine Blassey Ford -- that was bravery.
