On the occasion of my 10,000th hit

On this, the occasion of my 10,000th hit, I’d like to take a moment to reflect upon how I’ve changed since the first hit on this blog last May.

• I’ve evolved my focus in this blog from “political and social issues both in my local community and the national/global community” (hi, non-committal) to wanting to fuck up the patriarchy, one blog post at a time.
• I’ve begun reading less mainstream news and more news from my blogging peers and alternative sources, like AlterNet and MoJo.
• I can only seem to write feminist reviews/critiques of movies and books anymore, and I have lost my touch with the “mainstream” (read: malestream) perspective.
• I’ve drawn my lines in the sand about what misogyny is (it’s not hard to find), what sexism is, what feminism is, and what misandry is (nonexistent)
• I’ve gone from personally wanting to be single forever to wanting to have open/multiplicitous relationships forever to being comfortable in my heterosexual, monogamous, living-in-sin relationship for as long as I can see.
• I’ve gone from teetering on the edge of sex-positivism and reading Feministing every day to dunking myself in radical feminism and reading the I Blame the Patriarchy forums every day.
• I’ve gone from laughing at idiotic and sexist movies to boycotting them altogether, even when I’m bored.
• I’ve given up on talking to evolutionary psychologists because I’ve learned that they are stupid and can’t do research.
• I’ve learned that true pro-feminist men don’t have to tell you they’re pro-feminist.
• I’ve learned that anti-choicers will go to serious extremes to control women’s bodies.
• I’ve decided that I fucking hate politics and don’t want to hear any more about who might or might not be the Democratic candidate ever again.
• I’ve decided to be a sex-neutral feminist.

I think the biggest change I’ve experienced during the time I’ve had this blog has not been online. I haven’t even talked about it on this blog at all, but it’s the thing that has inspired many of the changes bulleted above. (potential triggers below cut)

In 2006, I was sexually assaulted.

At the time, I was pretty much a sex-positive feminist, though I didn’t call myself that. I was just a feminist. I was often critical of media portrayals of women as objects while still consuming those images, and I used porn somewhat regularly. I was aware of male privilege, but I hadn’t yet seen how it played a real, quantifiable role in my life. Basically, I was a theory feminist, not a feminist activist. I didn’t have any reason to be one.

The man who assaulted me was my boyfriend at the time. He did something that I had previously asked him not to do when I was in no position to fight him off. Afterward, I yelled at him for it, and he apologized. I was pissed at him for a couple weeks, and for the remainder of our relationship, I was unable to sleep in the same room as him because he snored terribly, just like he did the night he assaulted me. Within three months (early 2007), I broke up with him because, well, he was an asshole who thought he could tell me how to live my life and do my job. I didn’t break up with him explicitly because of the assault, though I’m sure that it played a subconscious role.

A few months later, in mid-2007, I began dating my current partner. I wrote about the assault a few times — without naming it that — and saw more details and realizations about the reality of that night rise to the surface. I told my partner about it and I called it what it was: a sexual assault. Later, around the time that I started graduate school, I began to be unable to sleep because of my partner’s snoring, which, honestly, wasn’t and isn’t as bad as my ex’s. I struggled through it until my winter break when it got worse because I wasn’t doing anything and because I was doing some more specific writing about the assault. I began drafting letters to my ex and imagining what I could have done differently that night. Finally, in January, just before school started, I read Twisty’s posts, “The (new) page of consent” and “She said I know what it’s like to be dead” (linked in “Required Reading” on the right), and learned that I, indeed, had been assaulted. My ex had assumed that my repeated “No” didn’t matter. I learned that if I had truly been in a state of non-consent, he would have been less likely to do what he did, and even if he did do it, I would have been more able and willing to do something about it. I realized that I had had my bodily integrity, my right to control what happens to my body, stolen from me, right behind my back.

It hurt a lot to realize this, and I cried for a few days. I wrote a lot and cried a lot. I also pretty much stopped sleeping altogether.

Soon after these realizations, I found my ex’s profile on Facebook, as well as his current girlfriend’s profile. I looked back at the letters I had drafted and decided that I would message both my ex, to confront him, and his current girlfriend, to warn her.

So I did. And I thought I felt better. I slept that night. But I woke up the next morning and there was a message from the girlfriend that was so terribly supportive that I didn’t know what to do. She said she hoped I was taking care of myself. At this point, I was feeling so terrible that I was about to give up feminism. I thought if a mindset can lead me to such horrific realizations about my own life, my own fucking life, then I’m not sure that’s a mindset I want to have.

Then I looked at myself in the mirror and I realized that I really wasn’t okay and that I needed to talk to someone.

I’m lucky enough be in school and to live near campus, so I contacted the university’s counseling center and set up an appointment. They put me in touch with a counselor, E, and we have talked about six times since January. Our goal for counseling was to work toward integrating the experience of the assault into my identity — not to legitimize it or excuse it, but to be able to say, okay, this happened, and I’m still a whole person.

Friday was my last session with E, and I can honestly say that I’m feeling a lot more whole and normal than I did in January. I’m sleeping better, I cry about things other than my ex, and I have a whole new understanding and appreciation of radical feminism. During our sessions, I talked about how offended I was to read sex-pozzers ranting on and on about having the sex they want to have in the way they want to have it, even in the face of women like me (and many of them, honestly) whose desire for sex has been transformed into something gross and horrible that men use against them. I talked about how, if Twisty’s vision for a real state of continued non-consent were to come true, women would not have to go through what I’d gone through. I talked about how fucking entitled my ex obviously felt to my body if he felt okay with doing what he did and for only apologizing (and not killing himself or leaving) afterward. As if “I’m sorry” can just delete the fact that he essentially raped me. I talked about how his sense of entitlement showed in every single fucking thing he did, from his attempts to tell me what and how to teach to how loudly he yelled when he fucked up the pancakes. I struggled with feeling like an imposter in the community of sexual assault victims — did I really deserve to talk about this? am I taking away someone else’s space to talk by speaking about my experiences? — and worked to own my experience without justifying it.

In fact, I’m still working on it.

But I think sharing and talking about experiences like this will ultimately help other women see how often this bullshit happens. I mean, really, take a look at all the socially defined and unearned privileges I have. I’m white, upper-middle-class, educated, from a stable home, not addicted to drugs, able-bodied, and so on. I was having the kind of sex I wanted at that moment. I had communicated with my ex what kind of sex I did not want. I said no. And he still fucking assaulted me. I am the least likely candidate for this to happen, according to mainstream myths about rape and sexual assault, and yet I’m the mostly likely candidate by sole virtue of possessing a vagina.

The patriarchy still hurt me, despite my privileges and identity as a feminist, because I am not immune, and no amount complying or conforming or putting up with it would make me immune. The patriarchy hurts women because that’s what it does. Individual men hurt individual women because they can. The only retribution my ex endured for using my body as a fucktoy was an angry email and maybe a talking-to from his current girlfriend (no, she didn’t dump him — but she didn’t exactly defend him either). He may or may not actually feel guilty. I, on the other hand, have to live with the fact that I don’t really, truly own my body for the rest of my life. That’s my truth.

This is a really difficult truth to own. But I’d rather realize it than blame myself for what he did to me in the name of the patriarchy.

So this is where I am, 10,000 hits later.

I am a sexual assault victim. I’m both typical and not.

I am a radical feminist.

I talk back, and sometimes I’m rude. Often, I’m kind. In any case, my astrological profile says I’m inconsistent and difficult to pin down. I take pride in this.

I am L, and this is my blog.

This is my blog.

This is my life.