Thinking too much

You know, in thinking some more about the issue of comments it has occurred to me that it's an example of exactly the power imbalance described in Schrodinger's Rapist. That is, that my friend's (Hi, Dave*) complaint, that he couldn't comment on my blog, treads on the idea that I get to set my own risk tolerance, ignores a signal I might have been sending by limiting the sources from which I want to receive comments, and is to some extent or another, kind of the electron version of this one, that his desire to interact trumps my right to be left alone -- or, in this case, my right to feel safe.

"So if you speak to a woman who is otherwise occupied, you’re sending a subtle message. It is that your desire to interact trumps her right to be left alone. If you pursue a conversation when she’s tried to cut it off, you send a message. It is that your desire to speak trumps her right to be left alone. And each of those messages indicates that you believe your desires are a legitimate reason to override her rights."

So I have to think about this. Dave's a little older than me, and has always considered himself a feminist in the sense that he likes strong, smart women, encourages them in the workplace, and doesn't infantilize them. He's my friend because he's encouraged my career since the 1980s, and because he helped me move out of the apartment I shared with a physically abusive mate. Not, you know, one of the bad guys. Without wanting to make his argument for him -- after all, I opened the blog to comments so he could make his own arguments here if he wants -- I think his relatively unprotective ideology has to do with the idea that treating women like delicate flowers is likely to limit their opportunities and is its own form of disrespect. But, oh, you know, there are shades of gray in here that don't lend themselves to polemicizing. I tried for a very long time to be as strong and tough as men, to compete in the world without special accommodations for girliness; but it hasn't protected me from violence, sexual and otherwise; and weirdly enough it has gotten in my way professionally, where people really wanted something a bit more deferential and conventional. Something in heeled pumps.

Nonetheless, there are also the issues framed in Schrodinger's Rapist, the Kathy Sierra case, and elsewhere. I do, actually, appreciate that it is not very nice, if you are trying to be a Nice Man, to feel that you must always be under suspicion. But it is something worse than not very nice, if you are trying to be a responsible, self-sufficient woman, to know that some significant percentage of people are going to see nothing about you but your sexual availability or lack thereof. What I have carried with me ever since I was raped is the sense that nothing I had achieved, created, felt, thought, made of myself, or inherently simply was, none of it mattered. For me, that was what was soul-killing about rape -- that no matter what, I was just nothing but a thing that could be fucked. I had tried for ideological reasons to imagine that rape was not a big deal, as the only way I could think of (forgive me, I was young) to actually protect myself from the psychological damage. It didn't work. I felt erased. And because of the circumstances -- but it's hard to imagine a rape without equivalent circumstances -- it was also impossible to avoid the fact that the rapist might just as easily have killed me. I was obviously not human by reason of being female; he had demonstrated control of my body and the complete irrelevance of everything else about me; and so the difference between rape and murder was, like the rape itself, merely a matter of the direction his whim took. And I didn't know I wasn't going to be killed until I wasn't. I always try to honor that experience by reminding people that rape isn't just unwanted sex; it's unwanted sex with the threat of murder.

Now, I know that admitting I've been raped will be grounds for a certain percentage of readers to just discount this post -- oh, she is damaged, her reactions are extreme. But if 1/6 of women will be raped in their lifetimes, um, that's a lot of women whose thoughts on the issue -- of women's safety -- would be discounted. They are also, logically speaking, the women whose thoughts might be the most pertinent, since they have direct experience of sex-based violence. Instead of dismissing survivors of violence as outliers, maybe they should be embraced as experts. And instead of feeling falsely accused, perhaps Nice Men could feel enjoined to help create a climate of increased safety for women, both the twitchy ones who have already experienced sexual violence, and the others who don't know if or when or how they may be fated to join that sorority.

And, you know, if you can e-mail me to complain that there's no way to comment on the blog, um, couldn't you say what you have to say in the e-mail?

By the way, this is an attempt at irony, like, if there's no harm in being publicly identified, then no problem with using your name, eh? And yet, not really, as "David" was the sixth most frequent male name given in the decade 1940-1949. Some 22,257 Social Security records from the age cohort sport this given name.