THE PRICE OF MATERNALIZING SEXUAL VIOLENCE

THE PRICE OF

MATERNALIZING SEXUAL VIOLENCE

by Kathleen Hoy Foley

 

Rape, we're mostly led to believe, is a one time misfortune that befalls nameless, faceless, and let's admit it, sluts, when they cross paths with the wrong strangers.  Which, damn it, they could prevent if they'd just stop making poor choices.  Poor choices you imagine to be something like stumbling down a dark alleyway in a string bikini, drunk.  That's why you know it won't happen to you or your daughter, or your granddaughter, your niece, given that none of you are sluts.  Besides, since rape happens at the hands of strangers anyway, all a girl has to do is stay away from them and the seedy venues they inhabit.  That and keep all the windows and doors locked, along with, don't answer when a creepy man is leaning on your doorbell.  Most rapes could be prevented, you insist.  And since every girl, every woman you know follows these basic instructions, every female in your life is safe from rape.  See how easy it is?  Whew...

Not so fast, tootsie...not so fast.

Rape is happening right now to a girl or a woman you know.  If there are six adolescent girls gathered for a birthday party, at least one of them is enduring or has endured sexual assault.  Most likely the predator is someone she knows.  That's where most predators reside, inside the confines of our personal lives.  And they're hardly ever outed, handsome devils that they are. 

And the elder women in your circle of loved ones?  At least one of those six old ladies enjoying pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving dinner was sexually violated in her youth.  You'll never know who.  Your mother?  Your grandmother?  Your favorite aunt who always remembers your birthday?  Or the one of the gaggle of "greats" who reside now in care facilities, shuffling about on walkers? 

A girl then, odds are the old woman was assaulted not by a stranger, but by someone she knew, a slick, cocky fellow adept at selecting his victims.  And ever since she's hidden it in the shadows of her own shame.

And I'm wondering if something didn't happen to you too.  Something lurking way back there in the gutter where you do not dare look; where you can't look.  Maybe you've concealed the trauma for your entire life.  Maybe its been so long ago that your hair's turned gray and you refuse to think about it, telling yourself it never mattered.  You blame your addictions, your depression, your piss poor bad behavior on anything but what happened back there on that mattress; in that car.  You think it's safely buried.  But there's little hiding from another victim.  Victims know the secret language, the codes, the telltale signs.  And I think something happened to you.    

Let me guess.  No one ever told you that it was rape.  They called it your own stupidity; your own failure.  Your mistake.  What you deserved for your wanton, teenaged lust.  Your bad choices.  You believed in them, believed they were privileged with all truth and so you abandoned the sweetness of who you were, the promise of who you could become and aligned your tarnished star with their cruelty and joined the chorus of condemnation against you.  From then on you lived crippled by blame and its favored associate, shame. 

You did not know then that they were cowards.  That they used you to ease their own burdens, to avoid their responsibilities, to cling to their twisted beliefs.  You thought they were heroes, even as they destroyed the most tender parts of you; the parts needing nurture and tending to blossom. 

And still today, you cannot point the finger of liability at those who were assigned to protect you all those years ago.  I know this.  You protect them.  You defend them.  Because they did not know, you insist.  Or they didn't mean to.  You continue to punish yourself because to do otherwise is to look in the familiar eyes of those you love and know the truth: that they looked the other way when you bore unexplained bruises.  That they mocked the tears you cried over spilled milk and punished you for your explosive anger, when really you were crumbling under the weight of an unfathomable hurt. 

After all these years to realize that the family and friends surrounding you did not want to know that you were being harmed, that they deliberately closed their eyes to your suffering, choosing instead to blame you, creates such exquisite pain, it's easier to pretend and proclaim their innocence.  I know that to face the repugnant truth of such casual betrayal would force you to reorder the perception of your life and the people in it.  It's easier to believe it was your fault.  That's the lie they handed you, the one you believe.

I know that what you endured, what no one called rape, was rape.  I also understand that the reality of rape inconveniences many, many people.  People who want to see themselves as moral and just.  People who want to uphold illusions and images, both personal and public.  Cowards won't pay the price of truth, not when blame is free.  And cowards always need someone to blame.  It is why lynchings took place; why one child in a family is selected for beatings above the others.  Simply, it was just a whole lot easier for everyone around you to pervert your anguish, to label it teenage romance gone awry, lust, whoring around.  There is not much people, including your family, won't do to avoid the truth.  You saved them the aggravation of having to admit it.     

But rape is what you silently endured.  Quietly, in the shadows so close to the people you loved, the rapist dehumanized you again and again.  And the rapist knew well, as he degraded you in secret, that his ultimate power over you was your terror of exposure: the sins he would accuse you of; the sins all others would accuse you of.  I know this is true.

Back then, maybe you envied the other high school girls, the regular ones, the good ones.  You wondered how they came to strive for such unattainable goals: good marks, college; a car.  Marveled at their achievements as they leapt across the stepping stones laid at their feet that sparkled like precious jewels guiding them into their futures. 

But it was different for you, wasn't it?  Rape, that misfortune that befell faceless girls at the hands of an insane strangers, what no one ever called rape, had strolled right in your front door, grabbed you by the waist and thereafter, defined your life.  Twisted your days and linked them into endless months.  Stretched them out into a year, longer.  Shaped your eternity.  Until dragging you along that dirty trail, rape broke you.

That rapist hacked your life in two.  Life before rape.  Life after rape.  Secretly you know that.  A thick black line separates the you of before and the you of after.  That vast swath, that ghostly black gloom, is where your youth and the finest parts of you were discarded.    

I know about your stepping stones and they did not fan out into a rosy path of acing final exams and winning the softball playoffs and applying for college, hesitating just long enough to dazzle your friends with the cutest sweater ever and its matching headband.  Your treacherous stones circled, leading always back to where you started, beneath the rapist.  You're goals were simple: breathing; keeping up appearances.

You thought the rapist, whose alias was boyfriend (cousin, uncle, father, brother, friendly neighbor, parish priest) would keep your dark secrets.  But he didn't.  He fed off your terror and became more powerful, nonchalantly exposing you more and more.  Then finally the rapist crawled up inside you and began growing.    

I know what it is like to have a rapist feasting on your blood.  How it is to have him swaggering inside your body, seizing tissue and fiber, guzzling your oxygen, invading every cell; exploding underneath your dress, growing larger and larger until you are disfigured and grotesque.  And desperate.  Embedded within you, the rapist raged like a gluttonous, insatiable god, leaving you no place to hide, not even within the smooth, interior corners of the bones that barely held you upright.  The rapist inhabited your body; he was your body.  He breathed your breath.  You could not escape him. 

The rapist--he is what lived inside you.  You know this.  This is the truth you are not permitted to whisper; the truth you are denied.  This is the truth that is deemed so offensive, women are condemned just for its utterance and, therefore, forever deprived of any possibility of mending, of recovering and rebuilding what was stolen.  You can deny the truth, you can hide it, but nothing can change it. 

Pregnancy, the disgraced spectacle of it, the lie of it as a love story, the lie of you as a slut--that was the catastrophic injury, the permanent damage.  It is the moment in time when who you were to become ceased to exist.  It is what lurks now inside the destruction you visit upon yourself, upon others.  The shame, the horror of it is what ambushes you so easily, so silently; it is the secret you cannot bear to reveal.  It's a useless cry. 

A lifetime has passed.  Rape victims have Roe v Wade.  They are not forced to bear an unwanted pregnancy.  Today girls are starting to speak.  They are challenging shame and the burden of guilt and blame that girls and women have traditionally endured for being sexual assaulted.  Girls are beginning, with support, to understand and lay claim to their innocence and express their outrage, instead of being shamed into hiding.   

But perhaps because choice is so available today, it's easily forgotten what it was like for the girls when abortions were illegal; when the only options available to a girl in need were a back alley butcher, suicide or adoption.  The catastrophic pregnancy you endured as a youth, the concealed adoption, are all relics from another time.  The trail left by your legal, medical and personal documents promised to be permanently court sealed, are easily breached and intentionally disclosed by proponents operating under ethics that sacrifice the rights of one to appease the desire of another.  The guarantee of anonymity that you built your life upon is gone.      

Those we believed were our heroes, the adoption agency that rescued us, the government that promised us safety, now violate our right to privacy and make public our confidential medical and personal records.  And adding insult to injury, they pimp us out as mothers to service their social and religious demands.

Defining us as mothers (or using any familial terms) with its connotations of love, warmth and nurture, instantly prejudices society against any girl or woman who gave birth against her will and was aided by the adoption process.  Society, despite legal abortions and available information on sexual assault, continues to force acquiescence and maternal responsibility on aging and elder women for catastrophic, unwanted births that occurred in their youths. 

Society pressures girls and women to submit to the belief that conception and birth somehow negate rape, judging that eventually the ordeal will magically develop into a welcomed event.  Insisting that if it does not happen immediately, in time women ordered to be mothers will come around.  In the midst of this stampede are the women I call Mary Queen of Rapes with their tales of obedience and joy.  Women, impregnated by rape, who champion such conceptions as blessings and work to force their opinions on all rape victims, repudiating and minimizing any conflicting experiences.   

By maternalizing sexual violence, our culture imposes upon victims responsibility for the physical crimes perpetuated against us and continues the violence with demands for rape victims to trivialize and alter the trauma of our ordeals because a conception occurred.  Who but people of honor and intellect capable of grasping the repercussions of such social and religious propaganda will even attempt to understand this? 

I am outraged at the breach of faith and promise and the public disclosure of my confidential records.  Beyond the official documents disclosed though, were private communications and personal information that were skewed to support the mother fantasy encouraged by our culture.  That deliberate lie invited a stalker to torment me for a nearly a decade because I refused to submit to her illusions and demands. 

But the outrage of one woman will not change the prejudice against girls and women who were forced to breed, or how we are stigmatized with terminology and social and religious fantasies. 

Without a political or even a social voice, each woman in hiding must arrive at her own solution.  That leaves you dangling like prey, doesn't it?  Your secret in the hands of ones who will exploit it, threaten you to gain your cooperation.  Give them all the personal information they want, and they will go away, protect your privacy.  That's what the New Jersey legislature says.  Do you believe them?     

You think you are powerless; I did too.  I crouched below the radar of society hiding my secret, terrified of exposure, crippled with shame.  My shame and silence cost me an entire lifetime of personal freedom.

You are not powerless.  What has power over you is your secret.  Reveal your secret and you destroy its power.  Tell your truth, define your boundaries and set limits on those around you.  You have much more courage than you ever imagined.

Our culture will never stop branding me a b.m.  It is not going to stop blaming victims or maternalizing sexual violence.  Through their beliefs, courts and laws it will continue to insist that I am responsible for the catastrophic pregnancy all those years ago.  Society will continue to condemn me for being rescued by the adoption process.  They are going to continue to attack me for speaking out.  Where there is rape, where there is a catastrophic pregnancy, there are visceral convictions verging on hysteria.  There will always be those who impose their will and ideology on victims.  That is never going to change.

But I have changed.  I now see them for what they are; their judgments no longer immobilize me.  I have lost things in this fire--people I held dear, people I thought loved me.  But in facing my truth in all its ugliness, I gained a freedom I never thought possible.  And from there I began rebuilding and reclaiming what was stolen from me all those years ago.

If you're breathing, you still have time to do the same.