let's face it

I recently turned 24. When I was 16 I wasn't sure I'd make it this far! Hell, when I was 23 I wasn't sure I'd make it this far.

Shit's still happening in my life that makes me feel helpless and unstable, but instead of turning my anger inward I'm turning it outward, exploring curses and shit. In a book that has sections titled "The Homewrecker: [for when] you want to destroy a marriage." The first sentence below that is, "Do you really?"

Do I really. Is it a marriage or just marriage that I want to end? To be sure it's one in particular, because the people involved in this particular marriage really fucked me over and I am angry. It's hard to know what to do with that kind of energy. A friend recommended that I make pretty things while thinking about the friend who got married and then moved away and then fucked me over, so that I would be able to move on. But I'm less convinced that I can make pretty things at all, and I'm not convinced at all that I was ever able to sublimate my anger into anything productive.

This girl, my friend, she got married to this creep. I will tell you what kind of a creep he is. He's one of those dominant dudes, like BDSM dominant. Did I ever tell you I give those kind of dudes a wide berth? They're fucking creepy. Something about dudes, especially white dudes, wanting to own women, control them. Explicitly, like it's part of their sexual identities that they've put a lot of thought and consideration into. (And BDSM isn't something that freaks me out or that I think is necessarily antifeminist or whatever. By the way.) How do these dudes not understand what the fuck it is they're saying and what kind of ideas they're promulgating?

I thought about all of this and I lost hope. I lost hope in women, I lost hope in men. I lost hope in friendship. I lost hope in love. I lost hope in kink. I lost hope in feminism. I lost hope in philosophy. None of these things will work because they don't make women stick together. As long as a woman is content to remain, psychologically, twelve years old, to abandon friends who care fiercely for her for a man who cares for her as long as she remains his property, it's all for nothing.

She told me before she left. She was afraid that she was going to lose something. She liked the person she'd become over the summer while she was hanging out with me. Something clicked for her, I guess, because I had never heard her say anything that even remotely suggested she liked herself. So I didn't want to let go of her and I tried to keep in touch with her. I didn't care if I was the one trying to call her and the one trying to hang out with her when she was in town. I made her promise to stay in touch with me before she left. A couple facebook messages, a couple posts on twitter and that was that. I started demanding she pay me the money she owed me and then nothing at all anymore.

What makes women do this?

I'm not a feminist anymore. I can't claim a label like that. Gender parity? I don't believe in it, because it doesn't exist, because we'll never get there. Not as long as women keep themselves under these structures. Not as long as they're willing to let dudes separate them from everything just for a little taste of approbation.

I don't want to change anything in this society. I just want to take a few women and get the fuck out because I am tired. There is nothing here for us anymore. There is no progress. We're just regressing, and not just along gendered lines, either. It's all lines. Somehow the powerful are just gaining more power. We got a black president here in the U.S. I think we've peaked. Somehow in a strongly Democratic, supposedly liberal executive and legislative branch we got campaign finance reform which basically said the pantomime is over. The rich have won. Arizona isn't the end of the immigration reforms that say let me see your papers. So the whites have won too.

And let's face it. The men have always been winning.

Pessimistic? Sure. But what exactly do I have to be optimistic about? The HRC has bought Harvey Milk's camera shop and now they're planning on selling mouse pads with his face on them, with the proceeds going to HRC, of course. Never mind the fact that when he was still alive they didn't exactly get along. Slow change and all that. Never mind that there could be a crisis center for gay kids there. It's much more important that the HRC inflate its wallet so they can more effectively fight for white, wealthy gay folks.

See? The same shit keeps getting kicked around. The same people keep getting kicked around. Back in October all we could think about was young white gay men killing themselves. But this months it's back to basics. DADT and marriage.

It's sure good to be back where we were.

I had briefly entertained the notion of becoming president when I grew up. This was in sixth grade. I wanted to change the world. I was disgusted by what I saw on the news, but not defeated by it. I believed in myself.

It's weird what happens to girls at a certain point in their lives. One moment they're these tough little things, racing around, jabbering, excited about just waking up to see what else is new in the world. Everything just opening for them, it seems like. That was how I felt. And then suddenly I was Vile. I hated everyone. I never spoke in class. I gave up wanting to be president.

(from Violet & Claire by Francesca Lia Block)

All throughout high school I read the same few books by Francesca Lia Block. I often tell people that this woman's books got me through high school, which they did. She writes about girls and friendship between girls. She writes about daughters and mothers and fathers. She writes about being straight and being gay and being somewhere in between and being somewhere outside straight or gay and being fat and being anorexic and being young and being old (I notice a lot of it is about being these things and being white, though). Her books are so heartwrenchingly beautiful, and even when I'm rereading them for the second or third or tenth time I cry. I say her books got me through high school because high school was such a hard time for me like it is for everybody (everybody I know, anyway: my best friend got arrested twice when he was in high school for something he hadn't done, my guy friends had controlling girlfriends and it made them kind of misogynistic, a couple of friends had fathers who generally made their lives a living hell, one friend I don't talk to anymore was struggling with issues that her stepfather had given her, one friend had a mother who was emotionally abusive. The list goes on) and we all find something to cling to, something to get us through it. I didn't believe in the magic that Block always writes about, and I never thought that I would find it, but it was nice to think about. Nicer to think about than anything else in my life.

I read Dangerous Angels when I was in ninth grade. It took me years to really get it, because even though I got it, and I identified with it, this fucking culture still made me feel like I wasn't important, that girls aren't important, so although the books were about girls and how amazing and powerful they are, I still didn't absorb that message. And that - girls being important and valid and complex and real - is what she writes about. In high school I always said I never needed anyone else to know who I was and feel valuable, but I never believed it. I still don't. I am still not close to really understanding that concept, although I understand now that it was lost on me all those years ago.

There's been some internet drama lately that's really affected me, because in some of these writing communities I'm in, girls' writing is being trashed and just picked over with a fine-toothed comb and people are laughing like fucking hyenas about it, even though these girls are young (I'm talking pre-teen young) and couldn't possibly fucking deserve to be treated the way they're being treated (a note: I don't actually think anyone should be treated poorly and flamed because they're bad writers, and I don't think people deserve the abuse they get on the internet. The flimsy excuse used by most of the people who are assholes in these communities is that these people know what they're getting into when they get on the internet, but that's not the case for a child. It just isn't). And why does this have to happen to girls? They reach a certain age and all of a sudden all the potential is just squished right out of them, so they can either become ... what can they become? I don't want this train of thought to be derailed and become a diatribe about high school subcultures and cliques and shit, so I'll just leave this part of the discussion at this, because when I started thinking about this, I was thinking in terms of what girls could choose to be, and I boiled it down to this:

This all seems so obvious as I'm typing it. Obviously high school is much more multi-faceted than the portrayals of rigidly-defined cliques you'll see in stupid animated sitcoms or less-stupid movies (I'm looking at you, The Breakfast Club and Mean Girls - I love both of these movies, especially Mean Girls, but honestly, is this really an accurate portrayal of Anywhereville High School?), but I feel that girls essentially have a choice between being the popular girl here, who pleases everyone but herself and is rewarded for it, or they can be the girl trying to please herself only to be punished for it. In my overly-simplified list of options, it's down to Connie D'Amico or Meg Griffin for girls entering junior high and high school. Connie D'Amico, that stupid self-absorbed bitch (*snort, high-fives*) is, of course, verbally pwned by Brian Griffin here, 'cause she's a skank, you know? Meg isn't treated much better in the show, either, but you know that if you watch an episode or two of the show (adultswim.com even has a fucking countdown entitled "Meg's Top 10 Most Humiliating Moments" for fuck's sake). So you're either Connie D'Amico or Meg Griffin, but either way you're still screwed. You can be the most popular girl in school or arguably the least popular, and either way the men around you are going to completely fucking devalue you and degrade you and make you cry and make you feel like you're absolutely nothing for their own amusement and self-aggrandizement.

Like I said, this all seems obvious. But it's been in my head for days now, especially because of the internet drama I mentioned. I've been thinking about why it goes wrong for girls, and why girls are the ones perpetuating all of this aggression against girls (Connie D'Amico often antagonizes Meg on Family Guy - who doesn't antagonize Meg? - and the people tearing young girls apart on the writing communities I mentioned are girls and young women). Patriarchy is a simple answer, but I want a solution.

When I was a kid, I wasn't exactly confident and I didn't really have the best friends that lots of little girls have, but I felt that my family loved me, and I knew that was pretty good. I was in love with Sailor Moon - this was when I was nine. I was so completely enamored of the idea of a girl superhero. Actually, it was five girl superheroes, and while there was a guy around every now and then, he wasn't the one saving the god damned universe, now, was he? Cartoons like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? had strong women and girls in them, but relationships between girls were mostly nonexistent; it wasn't like Sailor Moon, where a group of five girls saved the universe constantly and loved each other so much that they would (and sometimes did) die for each other. There are fewer girl-positive cartoons now (Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends is my favorite, and Goo is one of my favorite girl cartoon characters ever), and I can't think of any that show relationships between girls in the foreground - and I watch a lot of cartoons (yes, I am 21 years old). There are live-action shows for younger teenage girls that do show relationships between girls (iCarly seems as if it might have potential - because unlike, say, Hannah Montana or The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, the girls depicted are not wealthy or heiresses or whatever, and they're depicted doing something interesting [the concept that drives the show is the girls' video podcast] although the little bit I've watched makes the characters seem absolutely boy-crazy), but girls need exposure to that when they're younger, because girls need to not be something that girls hate. I hate hearing women my age saying that they don't have friendships with women, that most of their friends are men, because women are so catty, and they're such bitches, and I can't stand being around other women. I hate hearing that, because if you don't like other women, how do you feel about yourself, and who are you doing to turn to when the men around you degrade you and devalue you and make you cry? Another man? All he'll tell you, overtly or covertly, is that you deserved it, for whatever reason. Sure, Connie D'Amico has some tragic personal issues (side note: who wants to bet that the people she was giving handjobs to when she was twelve weren't other twelve-year-olds?), but she's such a cunt that it totally overshadows her deep-seated fears that no one will love her unless. She's castigated for engaging in the exact behavior that every male character on the show has engaged in. She is the painfully-thin supermodel on whom we blame the rise in eating disorders among girls and young women, while the men behind the scenes get virtually no mention at all. She deserves to feel like nothing.

This has been on my mind because I'm realizing that it's painful to be a girl. Because the girls in the writing communities I watch have found that writing is fun, that it's something they can do that they enjoy that doesn't cost any money, that they don't have to leave the house for, and that they can define completely on their own. Building a whole world of people and places is a satisfying feeling - just ask all the dudes who make lots of money doing it, huh? - and these young girls have found that. And then someone comes along who is older, and has nothing but horrible things to say about it, because the writing is bad and she deserves no fucking slack just because she's young. And then more people come, attracted to the smell of blood and fresh meat, and before you know it this thing that was so satisfying to her before becomes a source of shame and embarrassment. She stops writing. This happens offline, too, when people grab a girl's diary or the story she's been writing. People laugh. She's humiliated. At any rate, she learns not to write for pleasure again.

So I've been thinking about Francesca Lia Block, and why I never got that girls are important until it was way too late to help me avoid doing the things I did for love and attention when I was a girl. I've been thinking about girls and superheroes and writing and girls writing, and the more I think about it, the more frustrated I am with where I am now: broke and in college, no means to support myself or the million things I want to do. The idea that's been kicking around my head the most has been writing workshops for girls. Young girls, preteen and young teen girls, teenagers. I think about how cool it would have been and how it might have helped me if I had had access to that when I was a girl. I think about how cool and amazing girls can be, and how that's stunted when girls are basically brainwashed into being boy-crazy and girl-hating. Why didn't I ever have a girl-superhero-friend who I loved so much and who loved me so much that we would die for each other? Is it because I was shy and afraid of the other girls, or was it because I was too busy playing with the boys? Why was I playing with the boys?

Right now I am reading Violet & Claire, a book by Francesca Lia Block; I just finished another FLB book, Echo. These are not the books I read repeatedly in high school; those were Dangerous Angels, Girl Goddess #9, The Hanged Man, The Rose and the Beast, and Nymph. (The last one is a book of erotica - sssh!)

Sexual harassment, child sexuality, sexual abuse, and the internet (OR: personal history is personal)

Warning: this is going to get rambly and disjointed, and probably uncomfortable. If children's sexuality is something that makes you uncomfortable - and I would hope it makes you at least somewhat uncomfortable - then you probably should not read this. Also, this is a potentially triggering post regarding sexual victimization. If you might be affected by something like this, you might want to turn back, too.

I was sexually harassed when I was ten years old.

I didn't know what to call it. I was a sexually precocious child (not a phrase I take pleasure in constructing - more on that in a minute), and I knew what sex was and I had the impression that maybe one day I would come to enjoy it. This was before I could (probably because it was before I should) enjoy it, and before feminism had come to represent something important to me, and before I really knew what sexual harassment even was; I knew that there was inappropriate touching involved, and I knew that it was bad.

I tried to tell my mother, but I couldn't tell her all of it, and I wonder if she knew that. I just told her he was telling me that I should date him, that he had given me his phone number and that he wouldn't stop saying it. I didn't tell her about the tongue-waggling, or the hair-touching, or the fact that he sat behind me on the bus whenever he could. I couldn't tell her those things because it made me uncomfortable to do so, in the way that kids are uncomfortable discussing sexuality with their parents, in the way that "I have experienced this thing that you perceive as immoral, and I didn't do anything to stop it." But there was something else I didn't know how to tell her, and that was how fucking filthy it made me feel. How fucking filthy he made me feel. (In these cases, you have to be careful to frame your language so that it's obvious who is to blame.)

He was a seventeen-year-old junior in high school; I was ten, and in sixth grade. (In the school district I was in, there wasn't enough money for separate school buses for the middle and high schools, so middle- and high-school students were bussed together; this, perhaps unsurprisingly, caused a lot more problems for the middle-school students, who were already fucked up anyway, because middle school is just the time for kids to be fucked up.) I heard the things he said to his friends, who sat near him (and thus near me). I remember one asking him if he really liked me, if he really wanted to go out with me. He said no, he just wanted me to think he did. And I thought for a long time that since he didn't mean it, that it somehow meant that what he was doing was less punishable.

When I told my mother about it, I told her that part too, and she said no, it didn't.

(I have decided to say fuck it; I'm going to tell you his name. It's Lee. He was a seventeen-year-old named Lee. I don't know his last name, and I'm not sure I'd give to you if I did. I just don't know.)

My mother said Lee was sexually harassing me, and I didn't believe her. I said no, he's not, he's just fucking with the fat girl, trying to make her think he likes her. I'd gotten a lot of shit for my weight at that point, and I knew enough by that point not to believe anything anyone close to my age said to me. She told me she would call the school, and tell them to do something, but I begged her not to do it. I told her I would take care of it. I don't exactly remember now if I really thought I could do anything, or if I was just telling my mom what she wanted to hear, but I said it, because I knew, as most kids do, that when I told an adult about the bullying I was being subjected to it would only make everything worse for me. So I convinced her not to make any phone calls. And the harassment continued, because I didn't do anything either. Maybe, I thought, maybe if I just ignore him, he'll stop. He didn't. Maybe, I thought, maybe if I just suck it up for one more day, that'll be enough. It wasn't. Every day I let him touch me, and I never said anything. I just kept reading my book (or playing at reading my book, anyway, because it's hard to focus when someone won't stop touching you) and trying not to cry.

It didn't stop until he stopped riding that god damn bus. I didn't stop crying every day once I got home until he wasn't there anymore. I remember hoping he was dead.

I guess, if I'm really honest about it, I thought I deserved it. That was because I'd done some things with some boys that I shouldn't have done. Here's where that sexual precocity comes in. Because I'd experienced something I perceived as immoral, and I didn't do anything to stop it. I didn't stop it because I liked it. So I sucked them off in the woods, on this old couch someone had dragged out there. I asked them to tie me up. I let them touch me. And I liked it. And that made it feel worse. And when I heard them talking to their friends on the bus about me, about what I'd done and about what a slut I was, it made it worse, because we had shared something and I felt horrible about it, and I needed some way to understand it, and I thought that they were the only ones I could really turn to for help on that, and they didn't need the help. They didn't give a shit, actually, and after it was over I was the one stuck with the guilt while they were the ones bragging about what a whore I'd been. About what they'd done to me. I was just dirty and disgusting anyway, I figured. Maybe Lee heard what we'd done.

Maybe that was why he did those things.

When one of them came to my house and looked at me with the same expression that I would later recognize on Lee's face, I felt like the lowest piece of shit on the planet. I felt so exposed, even in my sweatshirt and jeans. That was when I learned, I think, to stay hidden. That while I shouldn't use my body for my own pleasure, even I still had the ability to use it to get what I wanted out of people. And that while I was doing that, I needed to stay unavailable, and unreachable.

That concept was clear enough, but I never actually understood how to use it, which is probably a good thing.

But even that wasn't the first thing. The first thing had occurred over the internet, which is really lame, I know. I had the internet when AOL was still a big deal, when everybody who used the internet used AOL. I was nine, and a Sailor Moon nerd, so I hung out in Sailor Moon chatrooms a lot. And I met someone: a twenty-seven-year-old woman. And we talked about a lot. And eventually "a lot" included sex. She told me how much she loved me, how she couldn't believe I was only nine years old, because I was so mature and so smart. We talked about sex, and we talked about fucking. She showed me porn. And I'm looking for a delicate way to put this, but there's no other way to put it: we were in a relationship. (I've only told two people about this [both of them are people with whom I'm romantically involved], and both times I've felt like such an idiot for talking about this, but I think I need to talk about it. So let me disclaim this, mostly for my sake: I know there are people whose introduction to sexuality is much much worse than this. I am not attempting to compete in the Sexual Abuse Olympics. I am not doing this for attention. It is okay to talk about this.) We were in a relationship. She asked me where I lived. We found out that she was only a couple of hours' drive away from me, and she told me that if I ever wanted to meet her, we could.

She was grooming me. This has just become apparent to me recently. She was grooming me, and this could have turned out so much worse. I get chills when I think about what could have happened if I had disobeyed my mother and given her my information. Best-case scenario, we'd have had sex eventually - god, what am I saying, you cannot "have sex" with a nine-year-old. She'd have raped me. God, how do I tell you that I wanted that? How do I say that the nine-year-old me had sexual desires and fantasies surrounding this woman? I was consenting, or I would have, but a nine-year-old can't give consent. She'd have raped me. Best-case scenario. Worst-case scenario, I could have been dead, or tortured, or whatever else fucked-up people do to kids. She could have killed me. Neither of these things happened, because I didn't tell her where I lived: I said it would be hard for us to meet.

That was a lie. We could have met, because my mother worked long hours. I could have skipped school. There were ways I could have met her. But I was afraid. Not of her. I was afraid of my mother, afraid of getting in trouble. To me, the whole situation was bad because I knew my mother would be angry about this, not because I felt like there was anything inherently wrong with it all. I wanted to give this woman my information, I wanted to meet her, I wanted to do the things with her that she talked about, I wanted her to do things to me. I trusted her.

The mindfuck of all of this is that there is no past tense about those things. I still trust her. I still want those things. I know I should hate her, but I don't. How could I? She was my closest friend.

Such was my introduction to sexuality. Nine years old, in love (it was love to me, I guess) with an older woman who, now that I can think rationally about it, was probably grooming me. For something. I experienced something that I did not perceive as immoral, and I don't know how I would eventually come to think of it that way. I still didn't do anything to stop it. I still liked it.

Now that I think about it, it might be a bad idea to post this. Because I can see this being seized by rape denialists who say that some ten-year-olds just ask for it. I can see them saying that I, as a girl who had recently become sexually active, was no longer someone who could be victimized because I had given consent to someone before, and that was why Lee could do what he did. I can see them saying that, because I was an active participant in what happened to me, that all young girls in a situation kind of like mine are, too. That the people who do these things to them are blameless, that little girls are just too tempting for them to be expected to resist. I can see them saying that I didn't feel that I didn't think it was a bad thing until I had reason to think otherwise. I liked it until I became aware it was supposed to be a bad thing, and I liked it even after that. Clearly, I was asking for it.

I was convinced that if I went to someone about the whole thing, Lee would bring that up. Someone would bring it up, because everyone knew. How could they not, when Shawn and that other kid - who was Lee's brother, Jesus, that must be it, why Lee chose me and not someone else - talked about me the way they did? I didn't know it, but I was experiencing the same thing that adult women do who have been sexually harassed, crushed with the knowledge that my sexual history and reputation would be evidence against me. I didn't say anything.

I've never told my parents about these things. I can't imagine how they'd feel, knowing that their daughter did these things when they weren't around. I imagine they'd be angry at me, though. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't want to find out. I don't want them telling me it was my fault, too. Over ten years since this happened and I'm still in its thrall, in that ugly Venus flytrap guilt that says it was my fault.

I am not saying this is what happens to all children who are sexually victimized. I don't pretend to know what happens. But I don't think I'm the only one who feels a guilt she can't put a name to. I don't know why I'm making this post. Part of it, I think, is because all of this is coming back to me, and I want to express it, so that I can be done with it, so I don't have to bury it and all the things I experienced and felt and said and did, only to have them return years later. Because every time it comes back (it's done so a couple times) my head is really messed up. I don't like that. I want to let it go, and if I can't do that, I just want to be able to say I've thought rationally and clearly about it. I want to make it make sense to me.

Reading all of this over and over again, debating whether I should post it, it all seems too dramatic. It seems like story material. And that's probably because films and books and television make sexual abuse into a plot device rather than a very real thing that happens to so many kids. It seems like fiction because it's fodder for fiction all the time.

I also find myself wondering if maybe I am blowing this all out of proportion, if maybe the people who point to my enjoyment of it would say that I only feel this way because someone told me I should. That the first thing happened online, and the fact that worse things happen invalidates my experience. That the second thing happened because I let it, because I wanted it. That the third thing happened because I was asking for it. Intellectually, I can say that that argument is a product of patriarchal culture which hates women and girls, which is full of men who want their rights to fuck little girls with impunity. Emotionally, that doesn't do much for me at all. I still feel like shit. I still feel like maybe I don't have a right to my own feelings.

And I don't know what to say about the anti-homo bigots who would point to the fact that the person who introduced me to all of this was a woman. I know that someone will use that as ammunition, say that homos do abuse children, and that homos were sexually abused as children. I can only say that I don't perceive my sexuality as something bad, or something to which I'm a prisoner. I am not queer because something bad happened to me, I am queer because I like it. I like men and women and people of indeterminate gender. It is something I share with people I trust. People to whom, as an adult, I am capable of giving consent. People who give freely and to whom I give freely. Fuck them for making me afraid to share my story. I should be able to talk about this. It should be okay to talk about this. I shouldn't have to worry about repercussions to a community of people about which I care deeply. I shouldn't have to worry about them appropriating my story for their own sick agenda.

I know I'm buying into the culture of confession we've built. The culture which demands everything and gives no privacy. I know I'm trying to fight a power structure here, one which has given me the very tools I'm using to fight it, and that it won't work. That being silent and refusing to confess are the ways to function outside the system, but what will that accomplish? How do you fight a power structure by being silent?

I realize this is one of the least coherent things I have ever written, and if you stuck it out, thanks. This all happened over ten years ago, all around roughly the same time, so it bleeds together, and my head is confounded with feminist theory that I'm not entirely sure I understand. I don't know how one comes to terms with abuse, if that's even possible or what the phrase even means.

And I think that's what feels the worst. Confessing and telling and laying myself out and knowing that I'm making myself open to criticism, all to try to fight a structure of power with the tools it's given me.