This was originally published at The Rumpus on August 22, 2012.
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In a bar, with friends, listening to a man I’ve admired for years saying this: “Enough with the sob stories, ladies. We get it. If I hear one more story about some fucked up sad violent shit that happened to you, I’m going to walk. You win! You win the sad shit happened to me award! On behalf of my gender, I decree: We suck!” Laughter. The clinking of glasses. Again the secret crack in my heart. Stop telling.
The first time I saw my father’s specific sadistic brutality manifest in physical terms, I was four. My sister was flopped across his lap, bare bottom. He hit her thirteen times with his leather belt. I counted. That’s all I was old enough to do. It took a very long time. She was twelve and had the beginning of boobs. I was in the bedroom down the hall, peeking out from a faithlessly thin line through my barely open bedroom door. The first two great thwacks left red welts across her ass. I couldn’t keep watching, but I couldn’t move or breathe, either. I closed my eyes. I drew on the wall by my door with an oversized purple crayon—large aimless circles and scribbles. Not the sound of the belt—but her soundlessness is what shattered me. Still.
The second time I saw my father’s naked brutality he came at my mother—I mean the second time I physically witnessed my father looking more animal than man, his embodied rage—he threw a coffee mug at her head. Hard. He once tried out for the Cleveland Indians as a pitcher. That hard. He missed, and the mug punched a hole through the wall in the kitchen. My sister was long gone—the escape of college. Afterward, there was dead silence in the kitchen. I know because I held my breath. Even air molecules seemed to still. I’d recently written a fifth grade school report on hurricanes. It felt like we were in the eye.
My father never struck my mother. She told me it was because she was a cripple. My mother was born with one of her legs six inches shorter than the other. She said, “He wouldn’t dare hit me,” the lilt of a southern drawl and vodka in her never-went-to-college voice, some kind of messed up trust in her too blue eyes. Instead, he molested his daughters.
Our legs were perfect.
Baseball.
Purple crayon.
When I was sixteen a boy older than me asked me out on a date. I was as sixteen as a girl could be. Barely able to breathe with the incomprehensibility of my own body. The heat and pulse and lurch. When he drove me home, and parked outside my house, we kissed. Because I was stupid and sixteen I thought we were alone. I got out of the car, and leaned back in through his open driver’s side window to kiss him some more, my mouth, his mouth, wet heat and tongue of youth sliding into youth, and my father, who was standing behind me there in the dark, grabbed me by the ear and dragged me all the way back to the house. My ear became more than red and hot. Then ringing. Then pain. I thought he would pull my ear off. Briefly, I saw the boy step out of his car—did he mean to save me? I shook my head wordlessly, no. Or maybe it was just in my eyes through the dark. No. He got back in his car.
That night my father hit me with language. Slut. Over and over again.
Purple Crayon.
Belt.
The second time I was molested I was twelve. I was on an out-of-state swimming trip with my swim team. Nebraska. Even now, I understand, the hormonal chaos of all of us half-naked in the pool every day of our lives, six to eight a.m., four to six p.m. pushing our corporeal truths up and out—I understand how hard it was for our bodies to find forms for things. A seventeen year old boy named Robert asked me to come sit by him on the plane and share his Walkman earphones—to hear a song he liked. He had one in his ear and he put the other in my ear. The song was “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty. As I leaned in closely, he reached up underneath my tank top and fondled my barely there tits. I kept stealing glances at the airplane barf bag. But I didn’t move. I remember being terrified to move. Not the terror of violence. I didn’t think he’d hurt me. It was the terror of my own body. My nipples responding to this thing that made me want to throw up. Or just die there in the seat of the airplane. Crashing, crashing. Wishing for it. “When you wake up it’s a new morning/ The sun is shining, it’s a new morning/ You’re going, you’re going home.”
To this day if I hear “Baker Street,” which is mercifully almost never, I can vomit.
To this day, I would rather have taken ten plane trips sitting next to Robert than live with my father growing up.
Baseball.
Coffee mug.
Walkman.
Barf bag.
The first time a man came at me with a fist I was eighteen. I passed out. Not from his fist though. I’d passed out drunk. When I woke up all my clothes were on the floor, my legs were spread eagle on his bed, and I was wet and sticky and sore between them. There was a bruise between my shoulder and my breast. He was snoring, asleep back in bed. I stood up and watched him sleep. I remember thinking he is beautiful. He had long blonde feathered hair and an astonishingly fit body. He did Karate. Competitively. In fact his power and beauty were what made me go home with him from the bar. I mean I went out of my way to catch his eye, wag my ass, throw my huge mane of blonde lioness hair around. I pretended I didn’t know how to play pool—which my father had taught me when I was ten—so he could “teach” me. He had blue eyes. Standing there watching him sleep, my legs shaking some, I thought, he is beautiful, and I am not, I am stupid, and drunk, and I deserve this and more.
Then I called my roommate from college at 3 a.m. and she and her boyfriend came to get me. I couldn’t find my underwear. I waited for them in the dark and cold morning on the front lawn. He came out before they got to me and punched me in the jaw—not hard enough to call the cops, not soft enough to keep my ear from aching, saying, “You tell anyone you crazy little bitch, I’ll find you.” He smiled. He handed me my underwear.
I waited for my roommate to pick me up. I heard a dog bark. I smelled cow shit from Lubbock stockyards. I picked at a scab on my arm like a kid. You’re no victim if you are a drunk ass slut. I didn’t cry. I swallowed it whole.
I didn’t tell anyone. In fact, later that year? I went home with him again. On purpose.
Purple crayon.
Coffee mug.
Vodka.
Underwear.
The second time a man hit me I was in college. The man was a poet. A pacifist. A hippie. Somehow I believed things like that could matter. But he had a hair trigger rage in him. His father had been career military and hit him all through boyhood. The rage in him sat like the crouch of dead dreams in his fingers. Poems came out. And that shot to the bridge of my nose. Probably that’s what drew me to him. It was familiar.
Twice in my life I’ve been homeless, both times the result of emotional trauma. Both times I woke up under overpasses with no pants or underwear, vomit everywhere, a throbbing pain between my legs extending to my asshole. I’m assuming I was raped. But where do you put the story of rape when there’s no man to blame? I put it the only place I knew how to. I put it back into my body.
Belt.
Barf bag.
Baseball.
Purple Crayon.
I’m trying to tell you something here, but it’s starting to sound like what I’m saying is that I deserved these violences. Let me be clear. I did not. No one does. Ever. But when women tell how it is for them, when they self narrate their ordinary lives, it’s instantly sucked up by the culture—there’s already a place waiting for the story. A place where the story gets annulled. It’s 2012 and I’m still reading about what the girl or woman was wearing that night. Or how she should hold aspirin between her legs. Or how she shouldn’t say the word “vagina” on the floor of congress. Or how a friend at a bar wants the sob stories to end. What I’m trying to tell you is that violence against girls and women is in every move we make, whether it is big violence or small, explicit or hidden behind the word father. Priest. Lover. Teacher. Coach. Friend. I’m trying to explain how you can be a girl and a woman and travel through male violence like it’s part of what living a life means. Getting into or out of a car. A plane. Going through a door to your own home. A church. School. Pool. It can seem normal. It can seem like just the way things are.
To be honest, the first reason I understand the complexities of male violence against girls and women is that I went to college and read a shit ton of books—and even that wasn’t enough education—I went to graduate school, where finally, finally, the books that I read and the films that I watched and the art that I experienced and the teachers that I had showed me just how not normal male violence against girls and women—or boys and men—is. Ever. And yet at the same time, the more conscious I became, the more I also understood that the pervasiveness of that violence has saturated the entire culture. It’s both omnipresent, and unbelievably invisible in its dispersed and sanctioned forms. So many times the cult of good citizenship covering over the atrocities of girls and boys. Mothers who go numb. Counselors who ask the wrong questions. Coaches and priests and teachers whose desires are costumed and sanctified by their authority. Neighbors who go blind and deaf. Paying bills. Drinking lattes.
The second reason I understand is that I am alive. Still. Differently.
It wasn’t that I did not understand the violences against me were wrong. I did. Even at three years of age. It was that I thought I deserved it, and possibly worse: that deserving it, I could withstand it. Mightily. Heroically. You see? As a righteously indignant defense. I could take it. As good as if I was some body’s son. It was a choice.
When my father raised his hand to me in our garage at eighteen, I said, “Do it.”
When the poet punched me in the nose in my pick-up truck at a stop light, I said, “Get the fuck out of my car or I will kill you.” And I meant it.
I’m telling you this because I know I’m not the only one who came of age like this. Up and through male violence. I’m telling you because there are all the things that need to be done “out there” to stop it. But then there are also all the things that needed to be done in me. To stop it.
Listen, these are not the sad stories. Worse things happened to me. Those aren’t the sad stories either. These stories don’t carry the pathos to signify culturally in my culture. These stories I’m telling you are commonplace. That’s the point. They just happen and you live them and as you go you have to decide who you want to be.
Victim.
Slut.
Bitch.
Crayon.
Baseball.
Belt.
When I was thirteen, in Jr. High, my best friend Emory was beaten and sodomized in the boy’s locker room at school by some sadistic members of the football team. Because he was gay. Or at least that’s what they were aiming at. In truth, Emory had not yet finished discovering his own sexual self. Like my sister, Emory suffered rectal damage the rest of his life. They used a baseball bat. Emory says, I’ll never be in any kind of relationship. Emory says, my chance at being with anyone, a family, feeling OK, died that day. Emory was also a swimmer, and so after swim practice, sometimes we’d sit in the parking lot waiting for our moms to pick us up and drink vodka from a flask an older girl swimmer had bequeathed to me. I never knew what to say about what happened. I didn’t even understand it until we were adults. I’m only glad we are still in contact – writing. The tether of words when the world isn’t safe like it was supposed to be.
The boys who committed this brutality were never charged. Emory couldn’t bring himself to tell anyone, and anyhow, at that time, there were no laws on the books to protect us anyway. Also, he was instructed by his father’s lawyer that the term “rape” was not available to him in this situation.
Baseball.
Purple crayon.
Barf bag.
I’m a writer. It’s all I really know how to do, besides being a wife and mother. I consider myself a success story. Because I am alive I mean, and because I think writing and books and art are the reason. As a writer, I’m not so sure I see much difference in the storylines for women and girls who enter the field. I see that some art is rewarded for being “universal,” and it is written by men. Other art is deemed confessional. Or sentimental. Or too subjective. And it is written by women. I see that straight white men are published in prestigious venues more often than women. I see that women are told by editors and agents and publishers to take explicitly sexual or violent or subjective language out of their work unless they can bend the language toward the culture in a way that will sell. These are gendered terms, laden with a force as real as my father’s. I write my heart out. I do. For better or worse. I write my heart out because my heart, well, she was almost taken from me. Every year of my life until now. It’s something I can “do.” A verb. Something that has at least a chance of interrupting another girl or boy’s story with other options. Write. Make art. Find others. It’s a choice.
Listen, I know this is a bit of a dreary story. But whenever I get told that, by friends, or agents, or editors, or publishers, I think, if this dreary story is hard for you to live with, how are we supposed to live with you?
When my father was thirty, he had all of his teeth pulled. Just bad genes with regard to teeth, I guess. Early dentures. When he came home from the surgery he turned all the living room lights off, became part of the couch, and turned the television on. It was a horrible week waiting for his mouth to heal. I don’t know how to say it—things went too dark and horribly submerged. If my mother or I spoke, he yelled, but we could barely understand him. Laughter and crying kept getting caught and confused in my throat. My mother made soup. Mashed potatoes. Ice cream. I drew on the walls in my room. It was like his rage had gone underground, under the beds, the house, the dirt. But we could feel it, pulsing. Pervading everything.
They sent his teeth home with him. I never understood that. I just know I stole one. A molar. Off white as a baseball and like a wrong pearl. I have it still.
Sometimes I think about the children that didn’t come out of me. Four. Three of them were zygotes. The zygotes were sucked out of me in what can best be described as a process involving a hoover upright old-school vacuum. That’s what it always looked like to me. Though medical technology has advanced since I was in my teens and twenties. And yet it’s 2012 and I keep reading about ideas like forced sonograms where the newly or barely pregnant woman is made to watch. I saw a congressman interviewed who actually said, “Well, no one can really be made to ‘watch,’ the woman could just close her eyes.’” While a camera wand is shoved up her. It makes me think of the film A Clockwork Orange. It makes me think how yes we are forced to watch, every day of our lives, we are forced to watch how our culture still doesn’t get what it means to live every moment of a life in the body of a woman.
Baseball.
Purple crayon.
Underwear.
Belt.
The zygotes that did not become children—I think about them. Who would they be? Would they have lived? It’s a question I feel I’ve earned the right to, since one of the children who came through my body died—nothing wrong with my body or hers, sometimes babies just die. Though for more than a decade I believed it was my body that killed her. My body I’d made into a war zone to mirror the culture as I saw it. When Christians in particular talk to me about “killing babies” and abortions, in my head I think, trust me, I know the difference between a dead baby and a zygote. Once a white Christian woman with shellacked blonde hair and the smallest green eyes I’d ever seen told me I was going to hell on my way in to Planned Parenthood. I thought to myself, lady, I’ve been there and back. Only it was called “family.”
Those zygotes, would they be boys? Girls? Would I have survived? I had no money during that part of my life. I stole food and did things I’m not proud of so that I could eat and have shelter and go to school. I also worked three jobs. And still I needed food stamps, just to stay alive. What would they have eaten, the three zygotes, where would they have lived? Would there have been a man under the beds, house, down in the dirt, his rage and violence waiting? Would I have let him in the door, his face so familiar I couldn’t recognize it?
I carry deep shame in my body for the zygotes. I don’t know a single woman alive who is “happy” to have had an abortion. Or two. Or four. And it’s not just me. Other women. Republicans. Democrats. Unaffiliated women. Atheists. Christians. Muslims. Buddhists. Armies of us walking around carrying our body secrets. Our shame over the zygotes. Or maybe there’s something deeper than shame—maybe there’s a second self I had to kill in order to live. The Lidia who believed she deserved it. Could take it. Should. It was a choice.
My father’s tooth is in a pink plastic box that was my mother’s. Inside it too, a lock of my hair and two of my baby teeth and that little bracelet they used to give babies that spells out L-I-D-I-A. I’m the one who put my father’s tooth in there after my mother died. I don’t know why. Sometimes I get it out and look at it—hold it in the palm of my hand. So small. The man who terrorized us. His DNA. So large the culture that let him.
I am a survivor of sexual abuse and male violence. I’ve had three abortions. I also had one baby girl that died the day she was born. I have a husband and a son now. My husband plays cello, and makes films and writes, and in the evening he hits the heavy bag; he’s proficient at Muay Thai and Jiu Jitsu. My son can’t throw a baseball properly to save his life. His favorite color is purple. He draws and draws. Me, between them, I am alive, unflinchingly.
***
Executive Order—Preventing and Responding to Violence Against Women and Girls Globally
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:
Section 1. Policy. (a) Recognizing that gender-based violence undermines not only the safety, dignity, and human rights of the millions of individuals who experience it, but also the public health, economic stability, and security of nations, it is the policy and practice of the executive branch of the United States Government to have a multi-year strategy that will more effectively prevent and respond to gender-based violence globally.
154 responses
this stirred up a lot of dormant shit inside me. thanks? i think so. i look forward to reading your new book.
warrior writing.
You are amazing. I wish we could compel our representatives to read this and other stories like yours. Compel them to understand what you went through, to understand on a visceral level just what exactly we are expected to accept and deal with.
<3
Jedi hugs if you like them.
standing ovation <3 thank you for this
Incredible piece. Thank you.
What you expose needs to be passed on to the next generation, namely, this can happen, it should be addressed, talked about, and reacted to. My daughters will know about “bad things”, my wife and I will teach them about safety and compassion, and about how not to discount another person’s experience.
Well done and thought provoking piece, Lidia, excuse the cliche here, but thanks for digging into your wounds and showing that healing is possible.
This piece is so painful–particularly this: “Listen, I know this is a bit of a dreary story. But whenever I get told that, by friends, or agents, or editors, or publishers, I think, if this dreary story is hard for you to live with, how are we supposed to live with you?”
This is something a dear friend-and fellow survivor-and I talk about constantly. This piece means so much. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Thank you, Lidia. Not just for some of us. For all. Because such stories belong to us all. Not just some. “Warrior writing” someone said, above. Well. Maybe. But I’d rather just call it holy. Warriors make war. The culture makes wars, in the minds, in the hearts, on the fields. And collectively we tolerate it and train it. But telling truth ain’t war. It’s a part of art.Holy.Whatever that means, to anyone, to each. xx,margo
thank you beautiful humans for swimming in words with me. humbled to be near you, humbled to be alive, humbled to get to write. it. out. xoxo
Nearly made it all the way through without crying. Until i saw “I am alive, unflinchingly”.
This is heartbreaking and powerful. Thank you.
So grateful that you have not stopped telling.
Wow, thanks….this hurt/helped/hurt/helped///////////really gave me a jolt. Even at 55, I can feel so incredibly vulnerable and naive and all alone. I was more than once a victim, not so much of physical abuse, but sexual and verbal. It sometimes led to pathetic self esteem that led to piss poor choices and even more self loathing…a cycle that did not break for a long long time. I breathe and cry tonight, but I guess maybe I do not cry so much as I used to. I found a man who loves me, warts and all, a mom I finally forgave and love, warts and all, and a life I can accept, warts and all.
And I totally totally dig your writing!
Wow! Powerful, inspirational, it makes me want to write a piece telling my stories too, lets tell all of the sob stories of our bodies experiences of violence at male hands until your friend and everyone like him are the ones sobbing and only then will they see our strength. And we will not stop fighting or telling or reporting or sharing because at the very least we have each other, the women that know, the ones that dont victim blame and accuse us for whats happened to us. The culture will change, there is a war going on against us XX bodies but only if we work together in and out of the system, through politics and public art will we be able to wake more of us up.
My dearest, strongest, loveliest, noblest sister, I read your words and close my eyes and my breath is just…gone, because I have had this happen to me,too. I’m very afraid that almost all of us – even, perhaps, the rapists – have had this violence happen to them, for all we know.
Your story is awe-ful (awful) beautiful and inspiring, and I want to wrap you up in my arms and give you a good hug and say, “Every little thing’s gonna be all right,” even though we both know that it may not be all right, but it’s just nice to stay hopeful, to just keep going, keep breathing, keep going, keep breathing, and hope that things will, must, change and get better for our children. It just has to.
Lidia, your work awes and inspires me. You swim in prose as gracefully as you must swim through water, body propelled in motion, cutting through resistance, pressure, stillness. Still. What a word there. Your words are healing, and together, our stories I hope will recreate the culture of tomorrow – for our daughters, sons, grandchildren, ourselves. With much love and oodles of respect, another daughter of Eve.
i. just. love. you.
I just finished The Chronology of Water and was blown away. This blows me away, too. And I’m glad for The Rumpus, for offering a home for such powerful writing!
I want to print this out and give it to my brother. I want it to be everywhere on the internet so that it stirs the minds of those filled with rage or complacency or the belief that whatever, it’s cool, things are alright and whatever happens just happens. But I think more than anything, I want what your words, your stirring, painfully true words say and beckon readers to do to turn into the action of thousands of people standing up and doing what’s right for themselves and others regardless of the politics of their religion. I’ve lost a lot of faith in people the last few years or so as I’ve watched the news and read newspapers and listened to the stories of violence my friends tell me and remember the violence I’ve experienced but your words or even just walk down the street and see it in the faces of strangers and the way they walk, leaden with their anger and shame. This essay helps. It’s a reminder to keep pushing against all the absolute shit that leans its weight upon me, upon my friends, upon my family, upon the people I walk by in the street; a reminder to be at least one more person who does put your words into my heart and turn them into action.
Lidia,
This is so powerful and so heartbreaking that I can barely swallow past the lump in my throat. Thank you for telling it like it is. And thank you for your beautiful writing.
Thank you for having the courage to share your story. You give others the courage to share theirs. And we all need to hear them.
I do not know how to fit this into my life. Perhaps that is a good thing. It doesn’t fit because it can’t fit neatly, it is an impossible task due to my gender and viewpoint (straight, Asian, male). It is an awful, terrifying thing to confront and absorb. It’s not like I’m unaware of how preposterously one-sided our culture is when it comes to violence of all kinds against women. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, something that has been constantly lingering the back of my mind whenever a male friend makes a sexist remark, whenever a female friend tells me an awful story about her past. I feel like because of this I am constantly fighting, between how I want the world to be and how it is, between what I think in reaction to these things and what I actually do…
This is the burden of knowledge. In my case knowledge gained through reading and observation, but in the case of many, many others knowledge gained through the trials of experience. I can never understand this knowledge the same way you to Lidia, the same way other women in my life understand. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, to be honest. Sorry, this has turned rather rambly, like I said it’s something that has been on my mind for quite awhile now.
I guess I just want to say thank you for telling your story and to offer solidarity. I am lucky, incredibly lucky, to receive the benefits of our culture that women do not. I wish there was a way to convey how much I appreciate what you have written, how it pulls this from the back of my mind and to its forefront where it rightfully belongs, where it lives for so many people already. I guess just…thank you.
Please keep on writing, keep on creating good art, keep on putting your voice out to the world. It is doing good that we will probably never be able to quantify, but it is most certainly there.
men and boys, girls and women, bodies and voice. we all have heartsongs. we can sing them louder than death culture, we can. till bones ring.
Wow. This is so powerful. You’ve articulated so many things that I’ve been unable to– thank you.
I came across this randomly on stumbleupon… after reading this, I believe this wasn’t a random act but a synchronistic event. Your story has now become intertwined within mine, in some strange way I cannot explain and for that I thank you. It’s insane how we can forget our stories, even if we understand the manipulation and propaganda that goes into allowing people to feel as if these problems are “personal” problems and somehow prove our “weakness”. At least we can see and feel these intense issues, at least we’re not blind to the hatred and ignorance of the world. Keep writing, it’s the only way I know how to let it all go too.
Specifics aside, I recognise “I made myself deserve it”, I recognise that rationale from ym own life. You say terrible things very eloquently. I wish people were capable of listening as well as you are capable of speaking.
When I think of your writing, Lidia, the first word that comes to mind is “Truth.”
Fuck yeah Lydia. TRUTH!!!!
Potent, powerful, lovely, brutal… Thank you.
Yes.
So grateful that you exist at the same time as me on this planet. Your words a salve. LOVE YOU LIDIA!!!
Great. Enjoyed this.
Curious about the specificity regarding “male violence”. Is that to indicate that you have not been a victim of female violence, or is that to signify your focus of this essay on the male violence in your life? I would be very curious to know the general perspectives of “female violence”, etc.
Because of random good fortune, I’ve never been on the receiving end of a violent act (or the giving end, for the record). But I have my own list of images that bring up traumas I’m still trying to survive. It’s hard to live in a world of baseball bats and barf bags; they can pop up anywhere, tear you down at anytime. Thank you for reminding me that living in this world is worth the effort nevertheless.
@robert: love you back, twinkle. @MJ: yes i have written on female violence as well — just not the aim of this essay. “female violence” is a realm of deep reflection, writing, exploration, discovery, purging, imagination, creation, destruction…have spoken recently with Vanessa Veselka who wrote ZAZEN on “female violence” over at VIDA…
Very powerful writing, Lidia. I commend you and I’m right there with you. My story isn’t as violent but it will be written also. Good luck to you and I can’t wait to read your book.
Lidia, from my book to your essay, here’s a FUCK YES, RIGHT ON –
The Forest of Molestation Clichés
It’s an unforgivable literary sin, the hurt girl cliché.
The critics call it MELODRAMA, spit the word
out all half-chewed and globby, into their napkins or
onto the floor. Maybe they’ve been eating free-range
organic New Yorkers their whole lives and need to keep
that light tight taste in their throats forever. Not too
tart, not too fatty.
Save the fake yellow cheese for the poor.
Or maybe they just prefer stories of men doing things
that men do, getting drunk and climbing buildings, the
first time punching another man, or driving around
in their cars so alone, leaving the woman they loved
because she cheated on them with their so-called best
friend. Walking the train tracks for miles. Leaving
it all behind. Pulling another swig from the bottle,
passing it, saying “fuck yeah,†on the rooftop with
friends.
Or the inanity, the pressure from all sides, there’s no
way out and you just keep going. Whoa, it’s crazy,
you’re trapped, there’s a nurse with great tits. Problem
solved! Just get through the noise, just tune it all out,
describe it, tell on it. They laugh so hard they fall out
of their trees. They meet each other on the ground,
rubbing their bottoms and howl with laughter. How
pointless it is, they say, but so funny really, so fucking
absurd. It’s these small quiet moments that make for
great story.
That’s what life is, these small alone times.
Keep things believable, the critics remind us again
and again.
Jesus Christ, if you HAVE TO have fifty girls slinging
gash at the sex-clubs, making some money but still
disgusted with their own bodies, AT LEAST make
sure no more than ONE of them, ONLY ONE, has
a creepy stepfather in her past. Give her a wicked
stepmother instead. It’s just not believable after a
point. God FORBID one’s got a case of RITUAL
abuse, DEMAND YOUR MONEY BACK if more
than one of them does. That’s just taking things way
too far.
DEMAND YOUR MONEY BACK ANYWAY.
Take the whole cash register, write a letter to the editor.
Teach them to make their stories more ACCESSIBLE,
less attacking. No reader likes to feel accused. What
matters is heroes and sidekicks. Tell them to make
us laugh.
Teach them a lesson, they need a lesson, ignore them,
ignore them, and they’ll go away. Ignore them, ignore
them and call them cliché.
It’s like a fucking bad joke, the judges say to each other
again. And listen, nobody’s laughing.
This is so fucking beautiful.
Wow, this stirred up so many emotions I had left behind. Brought back feeling of guilt and embarassment. I thought I was over that. You are amazing for putting this out there.
Thank you for taking the time to put a small portion of you life in writing. I’m sitting here in tears because even though I don’t know you, you have left a massive impact on my day. Thank you for putting to words what most of us never will.
This made me cry, but in a good, cleansing way. Thank you for being brave enough to share your story and make art out of it.
Brava. And wow. And long heartfelt hugs.
bodies. we have stories. all of us. it’s ok to keep telling whether or not it’s selling. xoxoxoxo
Thank you for this. I just sent a copy of the link to my daughter.
Thank you so much for being strong and brave and enough to share this.
Your essay’s genius, Lidia. Thank you.
Well this was incredibly powerful. “Thank you for sharing” just doesn’t seem like enough.
I don’t want to rank these men or say that one is more horrible than another. But in my mind the friend in the first paragraph who makes himself the victim by having to hear our stories… as if it’s more tiring to listen than it is for us to live through them. Shame on him. SHAME.
In my mind, the people who silence us, who make us feel like we are “too much.” Who feel inconvenienced that we aren’t only composed of rainbows and butterflies… these people — men AND women — are also a part of this culture of explicit violence.
I was raped at 17 while another friend in the room “slept,” and physically assaulted by a stranger at 21 in the street with at least 10 people watching, and the bystanders who did nothing to help me… sometimes I think the onlookers hurt me more than the actual men who physically harmed me. Their looks said, “I don’t want to get in the middle of this.” Your friends words in the bar said, quite literally, “I don’t want to hear this.”
People don’t have to have the answers or a magic wand, but please don’t require that we contain these atrocities. It’s bad enough that they’ve happened to our bodies, don’t require our bodies to hold them so you can continue your day without losing any sparkle in your step.
I think men often feel powerless on behalf of the atrocities committed by their gender. Simply acknowledging what has happened can do a world of good. Or at least minimize the harm, making us feel less alone.
Lidia, you’ve made me feel less alone today. This was brilliant.
@lauren, boy howdy do i get it. yes. yes. yes. none of us are alone. i’m not good at giving advice, or acting like MY story is THE story, i only know if we join like rivers or a braid of beautiful hair with our individual stories we have a fighting chance. and i’m old. well not OLD OLD — pushing 50 isn’t old — and you couldn’t PAY ME MONEY to go back — but i’m done with the zipped lips. forever. the thing too is though, boys and men have equally important stories to tell about how they have had to live up and through death culture. my hope is that women stepping up helps all of us join the oldest form in the world — sharing stories to keep one another alive. love you.
I wanted to become a writer who was able talk about violence against women in a way that men would listen to. I’m not sure if I have succeeded. But I think this essay speaks about this subject in a powerful way. Thank you for writing it.
Lidia — as James said, this is warrior writing. Bold, fearless, unflinching. All cliched words in the face of what you’ve done. I recently wrote a piece called, “I’m Pro-Choice Because I Love My Children.” I saw what happened to unattended, unwanted children in my own childhood. They didn’t survive and the ones who did are in prison and perpetuating the cycle of violence. Thank you for your words.
Lidia,
Wow. Thank you for sharing you story and raising your voice. While I did not experience physical or sexual abuse, (other types of abuse, yes) many of my close friends did. Your strength and bravery are so encouraging. Some days it is overwhelming and it feels like the culture will never change. I love your comment earlier though, about singing louder than death culture. Yes, this. I’m raising my voice too.
thank you, lidia, for this thoughtful bit of writing. i’ve given the subject quite a bit of thought too. “Why ARE men the way they are?” i asked. “Trauma… they’ve all been traumatized.” i heard. “?” i asked. “Circumcision.”
that started me on an adventure that is still ongoing. i learned i too had been circumcised as a little WASP girl in kansas. now THAT was violence – and yet i see that those who are violent now were violated long ago and so i am now trying to end the violation of little boys, which is still occurring in the USA.
Every word of this had me nodding in agreement.
But tonight, as I attempt to write my memoir and find myself burdened with sexual shame that popped out of nowhere, I especially needed this:
“I see that women are told by editors and agents and publishers to take explicitly sexual or violent or subjective language out of their work unless they can bend the language toward the culture in a way that will sell.”
To me, that encompasses the culture we are in. Dainty women, controlled by powerful men. Even in our own stories.
Thank you for not being dainty. Thank you for being powerful. Thank you for moving me to not be dainty. Thank you for inspiring me to be powerful.
pink wooden hairbrush
cold black and white tile
dashboard vent/ hot hot air
the guts of broken electronics
(I would love an entire art installation of different women’s lists of focal points/portals/ how you leave when it is happening/ the thing that brings you back there.)
Thank you for writing, Lidia.
Has left me breathless…..
It’s almost unbearable to me how lucky I feel after reading a piece like this. First I am moved to tears, then I feel lucky—and then I feel scared.
My father is the best man I’ve ever known. He’s not perfect, but you don’t have to be perfect to be the best. Whatever psychological and emotional abuse I’ve suffered has been at the hands of my mother, and even from that, my dad has protected me as best he could. The men among my parents’ friends have always, as far as I’ve known, loved me, maybe even cherished me. Certainly, they’ve never hurt me. The boys and almost-men I’ve called my friends and sometimes more have by and large been good albeit occasionally (frequently?) disappointing people. No one has assaulted me, abused me, or taken advantage of my moments of uncontrolled vulnerability.
So I’m lucky? I feel lucky, and I hate the relief of feeling lucky, and I rail against the idea that NOT being a victim is somehow exceptional enough to warrant even thinking the word lucky. And in an unhappy corner of my mind, I’m so scared, because no one is lucky forever, and I exist in a world that is dominated by people who hate who I am and don’t want me to be lucky.
I’m 26-years-old. I’ve probably lived one third of my life. Maybe less. There’s so much time left for me to be not lucky. I’m not trying to be maudlin or perverse, it’s just that this is something I think about in the same way I think about mortality. It’s a fact of my existence as a woman.
Not only that, but I’m 26-years-old and I know that I want to have children. More specifically, I want to have daughters. It wouldn’t feel dishonest to say that I NEED to have daughters. At the same time, I’m terrified by the improbability of being able to keep any daughters of mine safe. I want to email every parent I know and ask them how it’s possible to be engaged with the world without feeling crushed by the constant reminders of how dangerous it is for their children, their daughters. I want to know how to overcome the worry that it’s entirely selfish to want to give life to a creature who, at best, will be lucky, but never safe.
I want to scream at every man I know who makes light of my anger and my terror, even as I continue to have faith that they would stop if only they were capable of empathizing, just once, just a second. I want to go back to bed and sleep until someone figures out how to trigger that empathy. I don’t want to feel lucky.
Lidia, your writing is beautiful and true, and even though I’m struggling not to give in to that urge to just go back to bed, I think I, like everyone else who reads this essay, am a better person for having read it. Thank you for living, unflinchingly.
Lidia, thank you for this essay. I’m in awe.
The thing in this essay full of remarkable things that hits me is that the experiences you are sharing are more commonplace than people want to admit. As you say we live in a culture that treats male violence against women as if it rarely happens rather than acknowledge how it runs through everything. It is the river that runs straight through a woman’s life and yet as you say it is remarkable how women turn what has been done to them upon themselves.
I admire this writing.
Wow. Thanks so much for writing this. It really expresses what is so difficult for me to say when I am attacked with defensiveness from men in my life about this topic. I am re-posting.
Beautiful and supremely powerful writing. Thank you for sharing this with the world.
Lidia,
Thank you. XO.
A
“It wasn’t that I did not understand the violences against me were wrong. I did. Even at three years of age. It was that I thought I deserved it, and possibly worse: that deserving it, I could withstand it. Mightily. Heroically. You see? As a righteously indignant defense. I could take it. As good as if I was some body’s son. It was a choice.”
It took me a long time to realize that the pride I had in “being able to take it”, was just a coping mechanism because I could do nothing to stop being mistreated.
Takes my breath away. Thank you for cutting through the BS. Loved the imagery of the intrusive. Chinese finger trap for me. Not being able to tolerate other people’s sad stories sounds like a personal problem to me. Just finished Dora a couple of weeks ago; that was amazing!
Thank you so much, Lidia, from those deep, and often so dark, places within me that struggle so hard to put words to the feelings and the experiences that male violence have left in my being.
I am left speechless by the courage it must have taken you to write this and share it with the world. Thank you.
Great piece. Just great. Just: Great piece. Great.
just wanted to say thank you for your amazing willingness to be in these words with me. you are all superb and gorgeous (yes, i can tell even without seeing you). x o x
I am flooded with emotions and thoughts so confusing that I feel unworthy to respond to you. Maybe I’m not smart enough; don’t write well enough; haven’t had enough horrible things happen to me in comparison; am weak again and depressed again as I have always been since I was a little girl and should just STOP IT. I wish it would end, after years of therapy, it just won’t fucking end. And I’m tired of it. Now at 61 I feel like a little girl again – little Patty. God it would have been so nice to have a family and world that told me I was alright just the way I was. That I was good and smart and sensitive was not a dirty word.
I know you know how I feel. Thank you for knowing how I feel.
@patricia: you are perfect the way you are. you are good and smart and sensitive. you are alive. i’m pushing 50. yup, it’s all still there, but more and more i can let it pass THROUGH me. like water. we are alive and kicking and we can still sing god damn it. i’m off key but loud. xoxo
I’m grateful to women (and men) who tell their stories in the hope that my daughters will not have to experience the depth of depravity engendered by our culture’s tolerance of violence and misogyny. Thank you.
This essay and horrible and beautiful. Thank you for sharing it.
I do have one point of contention, however.
“I don’t know a single woman alive who is “happy†to have had an abortion.”
I am. I’m fucking thrilled that I had an abortion, and was deliriously happy that I had the option at the time. And I know I’m not the only woman who has felt this way. So, now you know one of us, sort of.
Thank you for lending your voice to those of us who cannot speak.
Thank you for giving voice to the cloak we wear as women. “Be a good girl”, “Dont’ stay out late” “Be careful”. As women we grow up with these words and we accept and we live. It has been a long time since I thought about what it would be like to be free of that responsibility; free of worry…….Thanks for reminding me.
I knew what I was going read before I even clicked. If you’ve felt it you can tell when it is coming from others. Thank you for your generosity of spirit, in sharing what I know must still bring some heart thumping thoughts and images. I also wish we could make every man and woman read what you wrote. I too came from that place and even today sometimes I look back in my mind and see the things I let happen to me, because, no one ever taught me to say no. I did not at that age (s) know that I could say no. “Children are seen and not heard.” We never questioned an “Authority” figure.
I am 45 years old and through many books, therapy and life lessons, my husband and I are teaching our son (14) and daughter (8) that they have a voice, that they have the alienable right to say no. That they each deserve to be treated with respect, care, love and consideration by every person around them. As well as, give the same to those around them. In my early 20’s we started calling it breaking the cycle of violence and alcohol and drug abuse used to get through just one day of life.
I wish I could break the cycle for every person on this earth. I do know that when a woman comes forward with such a typical version of life it should be shared.
Again, thank you for putting your life out there for everyone to see.
May God’s Love and Grace surround you and your family. Amen
I am with you, and in you. Thanks for letting some of both of us loose!
Preach, sistuh. The power of personal testimony has rarely been so elegantly, so eloquently demonstrated.
Lidia, I lived some of what you did. I have been molested, raped, choked. Your narrative unfolded over me like trauma. I cannot read your book. It is too close to home. My mother would have killed me had I drawn on the walls with purple crayon.
Lidia, thank you. This was a beautiful written piece, and an honesty far lacking in this culture. Just thank you.
Thank you and YES!!!
“It was like his rage had gone underground, under the beds, the house, the dirt. But we could feel it, pulsing. Pervading everything.” I spent most of my childhood (ages 5-15) with a very similiar version of this ‘man’. My step-father carried this rage with him everywhere he went. Although never physically violent with me (only because I outran him the one time he tried) his emotional violence scarred me for life. Someone who has never been there would only see/hear vivid imagery, could never realize that your words really do live, breathe for those of us that have experienced any of these atrocities. Thank you so much for writing this. It reminded me of when they divorced, when he moved out, when I actually sensed the stress leaving, when I could breathe, really breathe the lighter, happier, fresher air that at that moment surrounded me. I’m now pushing 50, too, and your words took me right back to that moment when I first felt free of his black cloud.
I have learned through grief that the only decent thing to do is to listen.
My mother had an abusive father. From my earliest years, she taught me never to hit a girl. I am a kind and loving husband and father, and I raised a kind and loving son and a daughter who grew to expect only kindness and love from strangers. She was killed by a stranger – a woman who drove drunk. I know who drove the car that killed my daughter, but I do not know what drove the woman that drove the car that killed her. I can only imagine…
Luminous. Thank you.
@dejah: i hear you. i respect your choice to not read. i do. i understand it deeply. in fact that is why i so carefully titled the piece and provided the buffer of the opening paragraph, so that anyone could make that choice. wishing you love and tender and ocean and swarms of blue butterflies.
The first time I was raped I told everyone. I called the police, I had a rape kit with plan b and antibiotics a neat little leaflet on local rape hotlines. I told my parents, my friends, and my co-workers. I told my entire family, I told aquantances. I might have done it because my nose had been broken and my entire face was black and blue. I might have done it because when you are standing in a parking lot wearin a shirt and shoes covered in blood, carrying you pants you figure, whoever sees me is gonna ask what happened, and they are going to want to call the cops and if you tell the cops you gotta tell your family and so on.
But I told myself that I did it because I was strong. I was doing the right thing. . . Unlike the women he had done this to before, whom I blamed for allowing him to remain free. Who were responsible for what happened to me. Just like that, I blamed the shameful bad irresponsible thoughtless women who were not strong enough to stop me from being raped. As time went on, and I started to realize that I too was perpetuating the cycle I decided it was unfair to blame. After all my rape was a “real rape” with kidnapping and violence and a knife and blindfolding and death threats and blood and DNA and a really nice pair of jeans sealed up in a plastic bag labled: evidence. I knew my rape was a “real rape” when I went to a rape survivors meeting at the free clinic and I was told not to share the details of my story as the other participants may find it upsetting. That and people always asked ” did he have a weapon?” and when I said yes, they seemed wholly satisfied that I was permitted to call this rape and granted a pardon for not fighting back. I felt sorry for the women who were date raped, because I knew that virtually no one beleived them.
The second time I was raped I said nothing.
I called in anonymity to rape hotline and asked if there was something inherantly wrong with me because I had been raped a second time.
She assured me, this was common place.
That fact alone created a sadness in me that was deeper than any loss I have ever know. I will never want that misery to have company. I will never find words to describe the agony of speaking out to deaf ears or the hopelessness of being choked by silence experinced seperately but both in conjunction with an everpresent rage at a culture that permits this pandemic crime, in all it’s forms to continue in perpetuity.
hot tubs and mimosas in a gardenia garden for everyone! and dark chocolate.
I read your story here twice. The first time, I was a bit surprised by the lack of my reaction to it. The second time, I read it outloud to my husband and it took everything I had to not cry. As others here, I also am a victim of abuse, although not to the same level of yours. I thought I was mostly over it. Then I realized just a few months ago that it had a lot to do with my social anxiety. And last night, I was awake in the middle of the night (shuffling dogs waking me up) and it hit me, at 330a, that I am actually angry, too. Angry at the way people, male and female, took advantage of me because I was a tender-hearted, kind, compassionate person. Angry that the using and abusing stripped away my tenderness and has made me a hard person. I recognize that my yelling at the injustices I see going on around me is how I’ve been expressing that anger about my abuse and my loss of innocence.
Thank you for this, for this beautifully written bit of poetry about the ugliness you lived through. Thank you for taking your story to others. I hope that your story softens some of the hard hearts out there. I’m sure it will, if they take the time to read, and to listen with their hearts.
Tears for my zygote. So much truth about the pain and loss even though it was a decision. Still can’t over come the shame within. Thank you for these words.
Thank you. I read it, read the comments, and read it again. You are a gifted writer. These stories must be told, and you are excellent at doing so. Thank you.
Thank you. For surviving, for writing this, for loving and living and producing life. You’re a warrior.
Enjoyed this.
The men in our family carry the violence “gene”, snuggled right up next to the alcoholism gene. I didn’t escape the effects of either. Still trying to sort it all out in my head and write about it, the story keeps changing the more I dig.
If my kids ever write a memoir, though, they won’t have to write the abusive dad one, or the alcoholic-rage-dad one. So I guess there’s something I did right, even if I never finish writing my own story.
Lidia, your courage is remarkable. Thank you for sharing your sorrow and suffering. I’m struck by the effects of abuse on your psyche – that for many years you also inflicted violence on your own body. Four abortions in an age of accessible and effective birth control suggests that at least some of these unwanted pregnancies could have been avoided. Yet for whatever reason you didn’t care for yourself enough to address your own reproductive health. Perhaps this is symptomatic of the self-loathing that accompanies abuse and addiciton. I’m not a psychologist, so I cannot say for sure. What I can say is that this kind of suffering is difficult for anyone who has not felt it to comprehend and this is why victim-blaming is a common response.
Thank you Lidia for telling it like it is! And for doing it so exceptionally well.
Leah. How arrogant, ignorant, hurtful and inappropriate your (victim-blaming!) assumptions about birth-control are on this holy page. You think you can give a psychological diagnosis about the ease of pregnancy (holy shit) to a woman who is finally very much in charge of the truth and who leaves OUT the details that would even allow you to make such a comment? They are not there! Which means you are projecting a story (yours) and a victim-blaming world view ON TO the text and the situation, and, very obviously THE WOMAN. You need to look deep into your self and your own past to find out what made you make this comment, and make up this story. Because it perpetuates something that this whole page is trying to work against. We need you on our side. Which I think you DO realize. We need everyone, man woman child on one side, i.e. in the world.
Powerful, wonderful writing. It’s difficult for me because I understand my gender has a greater propensity for physical violence and the male dominance of power leads to this being belittled and sidelined as a non-issue in so many, dreadful, ways. However, and forgive me if someone else has said this in the comments, as a victim of emotional, psychological and physical (fortunately not sexual) violence at the hands of a woman (my mother and given the repetition compulsion caused by trauma, subsequent partners I subconsciously ‘sought out’), I think it worth pointing out that the reverse exists, is little reported and rarely given much sympathy. You could argue that my mother’s tendencies were a result of trauma she’d received at the hands of my Grandfather and her subsequent choices of partner, but the idea of one gender being the birth place of all violence is surely divisive? I suppose my point is this: violence is delivered at the hands of both genders, that the trauma, hurt and disfunction has been handed down like an heirloom over generations and it’s our collective responsibility to challenge it. I’m not trying to down cry the abhorrence or frequency of male violence, but I don’t feel I should apologise for my gender, instead I feel sorry for my species and the cruelty with which we treat each other, regardless of sex.
The darkness of human nature aside, I take great comfort from reading of other people’s recovery and the capacity with which we can look at ourselves and say, ‘the cycle stops with us’. I commend you, Lidia, for overcoming such adversity and for having the strength to share your story so that others will either think twice about their actions or to be inspired to not let their past destroy their future or those of their children they choose to have.
Unbelievably moving. That is all I have the presence of mind to say. Thank you.
Thank you for your words, Lidia. Thank you for your bravery. Thank you for the inspiration. Each time I read something of yours, I’m changed. With this especially. The day before I read this article I sat, as I often do on Wednesdays, with a group of lovely women writing, sharing, and talking about writing and our world. I wrote a poem—one that I never, ever, not ever, planned on sharing with anyone. It was too personal, too tragic, too revealing. On Thursday I read this post and was struck by so many things, but especially by the eerie similarities between your experience watching through the doorway as your sister was beaten and the poem that I had written the day before describing my own experience watching my sister being “disciplined†for the first time at three years old. We even used much of the same language.
I took the words from the closed, dark pages of my notebook and typed them up. I pasted the poem (titled “Dear Sisterâ€) and a link to your article and shared both with the Wednesday women. By sharing that secret that was never mine to keep and by saying, in a small, safe controlled way, violence is not okay and it is only speaking out, speaking up that will change things, I was changed. I felt a small piece of my soul return to me in that sharing. I felt cleansed by the tears I shed for two days. Tears for my pain, for my sister’s pain, for yours and for all women who’ve suffered even the hint of violence (and I don’t know any who haven’t). Thank you. Thank you. I am grateful. I am thankful. I am changed.
Oh Lidia, thank you for this. I wish 1/4 of the truth in this essay could somehow be transmitted into the core of those oblivious, selfish, insufferable people who can’t bear to hear another “sob story.”
I live on words, my fuel is other people’s stories .. to make some sense of everything has happened in my own life, among other things, and I don’t see how we can change a single broken thing about humanity without SEEING that humanity, however sad. Even though reading this essay brought up old wounds and turned me queasy-green, it is important.
In part because for all the stories told, there are so many more untold. I sometimes feel as though almost every woman alive has suffered some explicit violence, and many men as well. Often a complete degradation of their being, left to pulse under its own dirt.
How do not we talk about that? How can you bear to let someone suffer in silence? I don’t know the answers to those questions and I’m glad I’m not the only one.
On Wednesday evening my lover and I are talking after making love. The talking was more intimate for me then the love making. She told me about in passing that as a young woman she had gotten an abortion. As I reflect on this, I am sad not that she got an abortion but that she had to make that decision. She like so many women are put in a position that what ever they do causes pain. I am sure my friend feels she made the right choice. It sads me that no mattere how supportive the man is it is her choice, a choice she has to live with the rest of her days. It angers me that there are people out there that will damm women for choicing abortion. Calling her a slut, that they will be sent to hell. Yet none of them are willing to provide health care, child care, any support.
Thank you for a wonderful written story.
Thank you. Thank you so much for telling this. That seems barely adequate as a response, but it’s all I can manage. Thank you.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
Lidia:
So important, such an important message for us, our girls and nearly most importantly our sweet boys. Anyone with a baby boy knows the tenderness, the incredible soft love bugs that are our little fellas. I grieve, worry, and stress terrified of the aggressive/repressive ‘men don’t cry’ culture that pervades our world glorifying violence, conquest and domination. It ruins our boys (I truly believe that men who are violent are also miserable) and threatens our girls.
Domestic violence and abuse is the worst-keep, albeit fiercely guarded secret there is….talking about it, denouncing it until we are blue in the face is one way forward. Well done.
…i feel a purple crayon revolution coming on here. x o x o
Marc: I totally understand where you’re coming. I don’t think any of this is meant to be exclusionary, although like you sometimes I feel like my story is never in these except somewhere between the lines. But it’s not intentional. Male victims of violence, whether we received the blows or witnessed our mothers taking them on our behalf, we’re in this too. And if we don’t see ourselves in these stories that are being told, we don’t have to feel resentful or left out. We can tell our own stories, and add their weight to the pile. There’s always room for more.
I don’t know a single woman alive who is “happy†to have had an abortion.
Hi. I am a woman, I am alive, and I am happy to have had an abortion. I have never felt a single moment of regret or shame. I am not happy that I needed an abortion, but having needed one, I am happy that I had one. It was an unreservedly good thing. I am not the only one who feels this way.
Now you know we exist. Stop saying you don’t know any, please.
Lidia you’re writing with fire. Keep on going! This is important.
the comments here are just as interesting as the content of the article.
mary – i too have been raped twice, although it was different circumstances (but isn’t it always?). and the second time was worst then the first, because you always swear it will never happen again, and then it has. i wonder why. do we wear invisible signs after the first time? or is rape just so common-place that it’s almost inevitable it will happen to us again?
just to say: i respect every single body story here. we are not all the same, but we all live by and through our bodies, and in THIS discussion, no bodies are erased or made to feel wrong. corporeal representation.
I truly respect the way that you tell your story while stealthily recognizing that men also live in the same culture and have the same objections and same prohibitions against expressing those objections.
I’m not sure how to subtly emphasize, rather than hide, that man who told you to stop telling him your stories likely has been a victim of domestic and/or sexual violence, experience abuse as a minor, or some other similar tale. In a fair game of ‘Ain’t it Awful’, the people who least want to play are most likely to be able to win.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
@Decius: yes, i know what you mean…had the same thought at the time…that’s why i still love and respect him and all the men in my life — we all live up and through what i’m describing. we all make our choices, huh. much love. ly
To add my two cents… I am a poet aka “Spoken Word Artist” and feel like most of the women in this social circle have felt this even more than in regular groups …
This: “I didn’t tell anyone. In fact, later that year? I went home with him again. On purpose.” was the sentence that for the first time in 9yrs opened the “I’m not alone” door in my soul… it also made me realize that my 9yrs of NOT telling my story have robbed so many people of that moment they may have needed. I *still* don’t feel strong enough to speak about it from a stage, but I will whisper it fro time to time by putting it my blog or on facebook… reading this did inspire a poem about this idea of male violence being a norm. I call it COMING UP NORMAL and a few lines of it were taken directly from this article (with credit given of course)…
https://www.facebook.com/NiccoleaPoetry/posts/423457151022847
Thanks for this, Linda. I hope the fellow from the bar gets to read it sometime soon…
Lidia, my name is Angie. I had an abortion on October 1, 2010 and I am beyond blessed that I made that I made that choice. I have been more alive… felt more emotion in my life in the days since. I am a better person because of my abortion. I am (I know this may come as a surprise to you) HAPPY that I had an abortion. Women like myself exist. Please open your mind to that concept.
I hear what you are saying, Angie, and I deeply agree with you and respect your point of view. However, I can’t help but think you misread what Lidia was trying to say about not knowing any women who are happy for having had an abortion. The way I read it, Lidia was suggesting that she doesn’t know any women who are happy to have been put in a situation, not that the effect didn’t eventually bring a better, happier life later on. Likewise, I believe that it would be inaccurate if I suggested that you were filled with joy having originally been put in the situation, and it would be incorrect if I suggested that happiness washed over you while you underwent the procedure. There are lots of ways to be pro-choice, right?
Thanks for this Lidia. I’m a male who has witnessed violence against women aka as a child against my mother. There is something inherently life changing that happened the first time one witnesses said violence. I’d like to think, in my case anyway. that every time a male sees that as a child, he grows up to be extra sensitive and spread goodwill towards women. Statistically, that doesn’t likely bear truthful but one can dream.
I liked what the last post said about the aboration discussion. When I finished high school the Vietman War was going strong. I faced some diffcult choices, I go into the miliatary, I go to another country, or I go to jail. I believed the war was wrong. I choice for a number of reasons to join the Air Force. I am happy that I made that decision. My life is better because I choice that. I would have been happier if I wasn’t put in that situation. I am sure that many, I hope most women, are happy that they made the decision to have the abortion. I know my friend is. It seems to me to it’s sad that you often through no fault of your own, to be into that situation.
hello all — i respect the corporeal experiences of every body. so glad this discussion exists openly and not trapped behind some shame door, is part of my point. for the record, i’m probably the most pro choice woman i know. the choice is rising again as radically important to claim as ours — women having the rights to their own bodies — along with human rights choices for all men and women — as current attacks on the bodies of women, children, minorities, poor people, teachers, workers, and lbgt people are again raging. body stories. we need them. love lidia
…and not enough room here to tell you what i think of the cultural inscription of the “soldier’s body.” boy howdy. all respect, lidia
Lidia, Thank you for your powerful writing and speaking the “unspeakable”. It is awful that I am another “past 50” woman with tales of rape that I never speak of (why? Is it so “ordinary”, not worth speaking of?). But it was heartbreaking when my daughter described to me being raped by a man taking advantage of her being drunk (or worse giving her drugs in her drink). She woke up wondering if it had happened while the evidence was between her legs. This is so TRUE, so COMMON, so AWFUL! Thanks for your potent words.
Lidia, I find myself struggling to express my feelings right now. This snapshot into your own journey, brought to the surface with astonishing clarity, the sights, sounds, emotions, that I have finally begun to face, and put those events in their proper place. I find myself grappling with a pervasive ambivalence. My wife suggested I read this, and for that I feel yet more ambivalence. She is the greatest gift of my life. She met me when I was so sure that I had managed my own life experience, has loved me for the best of who I am, and has relentlessly used her rapier intuition to encourage me to continue my journey, continue to heal. I am grateful that women are making progress, sharing their experience, and hope. For men like myself in the twilight of their lives, this remains a dirty little secret, that we just can’t discuss openly. Sadly most of us are unable to accept that truth. It is just far to challenging to talk about, for fear of rejection, and the further demoralization that inevitably follows close behind. Keep speaking out Lidia, and where possible, help the men that suffer in silence behind their facade of normalcy. Thank you.
@robert: i can hear you. and i am glad you are alive and here in words with me. and i will try to help the men that suffer — i will keep trying — my son teaches me every day. thank you for sharing your story.
@Lisa G…. I totally understand what you are saying in your response to me, and I respect your words. You are right. The procedure itself did not make me happy (I don’t remember it), being put in that situation (my fault) did not make me happy, but making my choice did (make me happy). Now I am a lot more pro-ME.
I will say this- many facets of the experience of the abortion clinic made me more human, an entirely better person. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Small part of Lidia’s beautiful, honest, and raw words, just part that stuck and resonated with me.
There is nothing new to say about this, what you have done here- let me just add my two hands clapping, and my quiet standing ovation in my office. (Luckily no one can see me)
This is some of the most powerful and honest writing I have read in a long time. Should you write a book, or already have one published, I would love to read it. All my best.
I have goosebumps. Couldn’t stop reading 🙂 you’re a really powerful
Person
You are incredible. Thank you so much for sharing your story here. It is a stark and much needed reminder to me, as someone privileged enough to not be able to relate to any of the situations you have been in- that this world exists whether I have seen it first hand or not, that suffering of this magnitude almost certainly exists close to me, and if all I can do is lend an ear then I must never get tired of listening.
Your piece put into words many of the exact things I have felt in the last decade. Beautiful and extremely powerful. Thank you. <3
I got through the whole thing without one tear, but after reaching the last sentence, I burst into some long-overdue weeping.
I never know how to express my thanks for a piece such as this – written with such honesty, knowing how much pain had to be to make this possible – without sounding like a moron.
Despite never having seen the levels of abuse the author experienced personally, I found parts of this piece reflecting my worldview back to me almost perfectly.
Heartbreaking, gorgeous, and so candid it almost feels like exhibitionism – more women need to write pieces like this, that hit you in the face, and demand you feel something besides apathy.
Thank you.
I went through some similar experiences, and thought I was alone. Thank you for writing this… how awful it is that this is treated as if it’s “normal”.
Your voice is so powerful. Thank you for putting into words what a lot of can not. Looking to reading more of your work.
Amazing.
What’s most ironic is that if you read stories of women in the country we have been fighting in for 10 years, Afghanistan, and are soon to withdraw from, those stories are not that far off yours. People forget so soon.
While I sympathise and have my own stories to tell, I think it’s very important to have a strategy. Here are a few suggestions. I’d like to see more of this on all blogs where injustice is being described. No matter how well and bravely someone depicts abuse, without a “strategy” for action it is bound to continue. Sympathy will not stop it. Violent sexual offenders aren’t “persuaded” by sympathy for victims otherwise they would not have acted in the first place. Violence is perpetrated on the powerless or THINK they are powerless, and even to blame, as this article so eloquently points out. So here are some suggestions of how to use your power to fight back where it will deter abusers:
Walk out of movies when violence is being promoted as entertainment.
Do not buy literature (if we can even use that term) that sexually exploits people. (50 Shades of Grey, fashion mags etc)
Do not buy magazines that pick on women\(and occasionally men) socially (trash mags that have pictures of movie stars cellulite on them etc – gossipy degrading stories about KK or LiLo etc you know the ones)
Do not buy clothing from companies that use overly sexually or violent images of anyone (so many fashion companies do but there are a few good ones around so you won’t go nekkid)
Refuse to eat at restaurants where the staff are over exposed, uncomfortable (forced to wear heels while waitressing) or cold due to lack of clothing).
When you see someone bullied at work, do not join in.
Do not engage in malicious power gossipping at work or socially.
Tell the restaurant manager why – get their boss’s email, get their CEO’s email. Tell them why you won’t do business with them.
Tell the publisher why you won’t subscribe or buy a book or magazine.
Tell the fashion store manager and CEO why you won’t buy their clothes.
Get the email address of managers and directors and CEO’s of companies that offend you via advertising or the way the manage their staff, and email them why.
Tell the movie director why you walked out of their movie.
Tell the theatre manager why you walked out.
Tell your everyone why you won’t roll with the punches any more.
Tell everyone who offends you, why you don’t want to do business with them and you don’t want to give them your company.
Don’t worry if they don’t approve. That’s the point of violence and exploitation. To overrule your objection to it. The opinions of people you don’t respect should leave you completely undeterred.
If a new person in your life reflects a violent, sexual or otherwise degrading comment to you, tell them you object and why. If they become abusive in any way, tell them why over your shoulder as you leave. This especially applies to dating.
Stand your ground.
Vote with you wallet.
Vote with your feet.
Vote at the polls.
At first I thought this was going to be an article about violence and people’s lack of sympathy or ignorance, but I found myself siding with the opening guy a little bit more than I feel comfortable with. He seemed like such an asshole at first, but I think I was missing his point. He wasn’t saying he was a victim of women bitching too much. He was saying he’s sick of his entire gender being blamed for the actions of its members. The author says she was in a bar and people were laughing so his method of saying that was joking. Maybe not such an asshole. Especially after reading the phrase “male violence” constantly. I wanted to be on the author’s side, and I still am in a empathetic, human, we’re-all-in-this-together way, but it just felt a little sexists. I feel like a piece against violence overall would better suite her goals. In this form, most men would read this and say something along the lines of, “well here’s another extreme feminist declaring all men to be evil.” and miss some of the good ideas about compassion and empathy that this piece attempts to address. Also most of the violence described, I feel like, could just as easily be committed by women. Maybe it’s not statically high, but possible. Most of the men I know would condemn these acts of violence as well. I think she’s a bit biased having grown up with such an abusive father. That obviously sent her in a bad direction at a young age. She met and related to others that had experienced such lives and those people are a lot more prone to violence. I think this is obvious since she said it took her til grad school to realize such violence isn’t normal or that she doesn’t deserve it. I think if a man wrote a similar article and referred to something as “female violence” I would get really offended and not take the rest of what they said to heart. That’s my whole point, I guess. There’s a lot of violence in this world that needs to be taken care of, but this distracts from that by making it a “women’s issue” dividing us even further.
Lidia,
I have read “The Chronology of Water” and it changed my life. After reading this blog, my life again will never be the same and I will ask every woman I know to read this. You are an amazing writer and a warrior and a woman and a human and I stand in awe of your fearlessness and your generosity. A teacher and a great writer (Tim Hernandez, author of Skyntax) told me that all writers should contact the writers who have inspired them, who have driven them, whose power has a writer strikes a chord deep in our hearts. I am a writer, and I would be honored to exchange some letters with you perhaps in honor of Rilke’s “Letters to a young poet” or even if you had a moment to read my latest short story inspired by the tools Amy Hempel uses in her own writing, I would be beyond honored and incredibly grateful.
I too am a survivor. I too want to find the voice to tell my own story. Thank you for showing me that its not only possible, but necessary.
It’s important for people–men and women–who have been abused and who have gone on to continue that pattern of abuse, or addiction, or being hurtful to those they’ve encountered, to take responsibility for their own hurtful actions, no matter how painful that process might be; it is the only way to truly heal and grow. What ever happened to that pregnant woman on the road who was hit by a car driven by a drunk driver? How come we hear about all other sorts of pain in that book, but nothing about how the author felt about this? I’m sure the author had to feel terrible guilt about this, terrible sorrow. But it’s never explored. In a book that is raw, that is explicit, that is brutally honest. Nothing is shared about what that pregnant woman must’ve gone through. Nothing is shared about how did the author deal with this? Make no mistake,she is not the first or the last person who made a mistake; whose history of experiencing abuse and easing it with addiction led to the terrible moment/moments of hurting another person. But why didn’t she tell us how she dealt with it? Why didn’t she share her emotions or pain about how her choices affected a pregnant woman, or how she felt afterwards? How come she didn’t explore how that pregnant woman must’ve felt getting hit by a drunk driver? Where is the accoutabillity? This was a moment where the protagonist made a huge mistake, but she doesn’t explore it at all. It’s so troubling. It’s even more troubling that hardly anyone notices it. One day, I hope that the author will talk about it. Because many of us who have experienced abuse, many of us who have been addicted have made huge mistakes like that. We’ve missed out on the author’s experience of how she dealt with it and what she felt. It is a black hole in the narrative.
I’m echoing what so many others have already said so well: thank you for writing this. there is a truth that resonates deep within me, and I would guess almost all of us. your honesty shows me that paying attention and LISTENING (or reading) to women’s experiences is such a crucial part of men learning to understand the reality that we swim in. and that all forms and gradations of violence affect our loved ones negatively. Thank you again. I pledge to keep your words in my heart and mind – as a man, as a partner, as a soon-to-be father, and as a fellow human.
Thank you for writing this. 25 years ago when I was 15 my father and I were browsing at a bookstore. He kept standing too close to me and I just wanted to be alone. I rolled my eyes and walked away and something in him snapped. He followed me, grabbed my arm, and started screaming at me while shaking me so hard my teeth nearly rattled. A few feet away a line of half a dozen people snaked toward the cash register. All of them pretended nothing happened, and I still hate them for it.
Hi Kate, the woman was fine, in all respects. I followed up for two years. But that doesn’t change what I did that night. A person can learn the full lesson even without the most dire outcome. I feel like telling my own ugly was worth it.
Anon: one time in an airport I saw a woman smack her 4 year old kid in the face for making a public ruckus….I stood up, walked over to her, and slapped her in the face. I said how does that feel. Airport security descended. I’m not saying I’m proud of that. I’m saying it was worth it. I would have made a scene in that bookstore. For you. Xox
Lidia: Thank you. 🙂
It becomes an issue when it is man against woman. Maybe too many women feel powerless against it or not powerful enough. I am a woman and I have that rage inside of me. I broke my daughter’s Barbie van so I wouldn’t hit her. I didn’t hit her, but I used words against her, against a lot of people, a lot of times. I totally have used sex as a weapon and not owned my own sexuality. So there is probably a connection as so many attest. Someone said, “I take Welbutrin so I don’t kill myself.” I said, outright, unequivocally, “I take Welbutrin so I don’t kill other people.” I have been to many, many shrinks, counselors, social workers, psychologists, priests, friends. Some actually helped me confront me. I am very old, and I feel like a candle burned out in me, or maybe is softly flickering in the background, but I know me, and I feel no one else does. That’s okay. Some of them like what they do know and understand there is stuff they don’t need to know. I have some blank unfeeling places in my life, but I have some of the most amazing beauty. And, wow, I can see it.
I worked for ten years in a residential facility for emotionally damaged children where I saw the effects of both male and female violence perpetrated against children. We had both boys and girls who had been prostituted by their mothers at a young age. Others had been physically abused. Some were “only” psychologically abused. All of them were severely damaged by what they had gone through. Some were violent to others. More were violent to themselves. Many had addiction problems. Some we were able to help, at least a little. Others not. At least two of the children I knew committed suicide after they left us. There might have been more that we never heard about. One 17 year old boy who had been prostituted to men by his mother and her lesbian partner had only one goal in life. To kill his mother and her partner. He didn’t care what happened to himself after that. Life in prison or death, it didn’t matter. He felt like he had no life.
Extremely inspirational story. We need more writing like this in the world. I’ve been trying to explain that male violence is pervasive in the entire patriarchal Western culture, rather than simply being part of the individual experience. This combines both ideas brilliantly to show both the theoretical and personal perspectives. Thank you for this.
Wow…that piece of writing left me with the shivers, as all good writing should. I mean no disrespect, I understand it is your story and not just a story. Thank you for sharing that, it had the kind of clarity and bone-chilling honesty that rocks a person to the core. I really am sick of all of the shaming that is heaped upon people who have suffered abuse, especially women and LGBT people. It seems we are all ensconced in a culture where it is more important to find a reason that the victim deserved it than to stand in solidarity and love of those who have suffered silently. I think people do it to kill their compassion, so that they don’t have to feel bad, which is truly cruel.
To all of those who seem to take offense to the idea that ‘male violence’ is a problem, or think that there is something inherently sexist about talking of abuse perpetuated by men, I would say ‘get your head on straight’. Sticking your head in the sand doesn’t mean you get to ignore the problem. I’m sick of hearing about abuse as a ‘women’s issue’. It is not a women’s issue, it is a human issue, a man’s issue (dare i say it!). There is no point trying to teach women to avoid being targets, getting them to wear ‘rape proof clothing’, or dress more modestly, or not express their sexuality. Because guess what? Muslim women who are covered from head to toe get raped. Women and men who try as hard as they can to appear invisible to others through conservative clothing and actions also get raped. And saddest of all, those who were abused as children often continue getting into abusive relationships, because the abuse made them think that they deserve it, that they are worthless.
Stop blaming the victims for going off the rails from the pain of their abuse, stop blaming victims for becoming addicted to drugs, or falling on hard times from the pain of their abuse. Sure, many people who are abused get through it without hitting rock bottom (I guess), but why on earth would you not understand why some people don’t?
It makes me especially sick when those who refuse to even have the slightest bit of compassion are those who have had lives free from abuse. Women attacking other women. Is the gift of feminism only to be used for women to learn how to hate each other? We are all sisters and brothers, and to pull someone else down does not pull you higher.
I continue to be thankful for those who have the courage to speak, when the narcissists stridently claim your stories are ‘boring’. You are a brave woman Lidia, kudos!
Keep telling it. You have the power and the courage and the voice and the view from the frontline. Other survivors of those trenches will read you and realize that they can also tell it. And they will. When the unspoken becomes fully spoken, people like the man at the beginning of this piece will “get” that nobody wins, there is no award, and this is not a game.
Love to you.
Lidia you crawl into my head and say the words I can’t.
hello Kate, i have talked about it, i have written about it. the “black hole” you describe is left in the book as a wound, a marker of what i did without excuse. what i did is reprehensible. the woman and her child were fine. i checked on them for four years. but they might not have been fine, and i live with that. what i did. i also spend part of my life in women’s prisons writing with them.
I could pick from a number of violations, but this is the one that’s been haunting me the most lately. I was on the late night bus in the bay area a couple years ago, and I was tired and staring at my feet, waiting for my stop. Some guys got on and one of them came and stood near me, so that I could see his feet a couple inches from my feet. When I looked up, he had his jacket draped over his arm, and he was jerking off underneath it, literally about a foot from my face. I looked behind me, because surely the other people could see what was happening, but they all looked away and no one would meet my eyes. I waited for a minute, hoping he’d just stop and go away, or that someone would say something. No one did. I got up and moved to another seat. He followed me. No one would look at me, still. I got up again and moved to a seat in the front of the bus. He followed me again. All those eyes, and nobody did anything. I couldn’t speak. In a girlbody, you learn not to cause trouble, because people discount your experience, your fear, all of them time. All of the time.
I but my backpack next to me as a kind of barrier, because I could wait this out, because this is what we do, we wait it out. When he finally got off, I waited a couple stops past where I needed to get out, because what if he was out there, waiting? What could happen in the dark? At least it was bright inside the bus. I stumbled when I finally got out, I was shaking so badly. I walked over to a trashcan and retched, but nothing would come up.
Wow! The feels! I have been a “victim” of sexual violence since I was 4 years old.
Thank you, Lydia. You have written your story but your story is, I’m sad to say, the story of many women and men who have been violated by rape and torture and screamings and yellings and beatings and terrorizing and so many forms of abuse. I am the third of four generations I know of in my family of women and some men who endured this and sometimes got through it and found a better life but sometimes did not. I will be 80 soon. I became abusive to my young children but stopped when I saw the fear in their eyes. I learned, but I married someone who did not. So my children suffered more. Some of them learned to make their way to a better life for themselves and their children. One did not. His death was ruled an accident but I think he may have committed suicide. Violence begets violence–to one’s self or to others. When we are children the only choices are run, fight or freeze. Most of us freeze in helpless rage or fear, waiting it out until we are old enough to run or fight. By then, it’s often too little and too late. Still. There is hope. I am now a mental health therapist. I work with those who have had severe trauma. I offer what help I can. I’m doing this is the town where I grew up where my father and a group of his Catholic friends got together to drink and sexually abuse little children. There was a group of Lutheran men who did this too. Now there are others who think teaching girls age 2 and 3 to “twirk” is amusing. And I am sure there are others who go much farther with both little boys and little girls. Where it will end I don’t know. I do know that I can make a small difference. Sometimes hope feels damn shitty. Other times, it’s keeps me going. I connect to spirits who raise me up. I connect to a higher power. I connect to love. That’s pretty good.
I love you for writing your truth. Don’t stop.
Thank you. Thank you for the amazing writing, for making me cry, for making me love your courage. I am sorry, sorry, sorry all this happened to you. I am angry. But I am grateful you shared. I believe people can read this and know. They will know in a way they would never know until you shared.
Thank you for sharing. Thank you for enabling those who could not imagine this to imagine it, to begin (perhaps) to understand. Thank you for your courage and your amazing writing, for the honesty. May you know only know tenderness and love.
I love you Lidia. Swoon. Your words. Your words. Mom-Barb
Thank you for this.
Now the monster has taken form. Now we have a definitive, describable, discernable object to name. The first step in negation. Negate the objec. Find what it is not.
Whatever remains is the Object, the Explicit. Know thy Enemy as you know Thyself. Know the Violence is not your body, but the Objectified.
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