I’m not able to write about the typhoon in the Philippines. I am overwhelmed by the devastation of my homeland.
I am devastated by this calamity.
Stop. Breathe. Run In A Dress
Last week I had a work meeting at a site away from my usual office. The morning colors of the fall day were distracting. It was so bright, so clear, the sunshine setting everything on fire. Leaves, trees, and bushels seemed to be on fire from the inside out.
I made it to my meeting and afterward, although I had much work to do, decided to linger the grounds. There was no one around except a caretaker trimming a bush. I saw four deer ambling about in the woods. My knee high boots had a wooden heel and clomped loudly on the paved areas. Although I would never consider myself a fashion expert, I do have some common sense for attire. That day, I donned my tan zip up boots with a loose cream vintage looking dress with a blue floral print. Over the dress, I worked in a short navy blazer so the slightly casual dress was sharpened with a modern cut jacket.
I looked around to make sure no one saw me. In my car that day I had packed my gym bag with a plan to attack the gym after work. I grabbed my New Balance sneakers and slipped off my boots, and slid my feet into the comfortable flat shoes that had conformed to my feet.
I ran.
In my dress, I ran like the wind down a path and into a kingdom of autumn. I passed majestic trees, swishing wind by my ears, and filtered the golden sun on my skin.
I had never been to this place. I had never worn sneakers with a dress. I couldn’t believe that I went running through an unfamiliar path dressed as I did. Whatever compelled me to race the wind was too strong in me. I had to burst open into a run to spend the energy and endorphins that delivered a joy I couldn’t measure or explain.
I couldn’t remember the last time I felt that way. So I took a picture to remember this particular morning, a slice of perfection to last me until I forget what it feels like to sprint in a flower dress.
Imbalance Should Never Be Normalized: On Mothers, Writing, and Choosing Your Partner Parent
I’ve been thinking a lot about how much time I read and absorb the life advice from other writers. It’s soft addiction. Articles about the challenge of motherhood and writing smell like dessert, and I devour each one as if I’ll find myself in someone else’s once kept now open secrets.
Who you choose to build a family with and how they view your writing life is kind of a big deal. So often it’s the children – how many to have, whether serious writers have children (whaaat) – who are blamed as the prime distractors to women writers. Here’s the thing though: a billion things distract or consume a writer’s time. But another adult in the household is capable of helping create and sustain a productive and balanced writing life. Right now, in most heterosexual relationships with stereotypical gendered traits, the partners, spouses, or lovers of women writers can help (he drove the kids to soccer, he made dinner one night) but its still the woman who does the majority of the child lifting. As long as that is the model, balance will not and cannot be struck.
If I could tell young writers anything it would be to cultivate as close to a sustainable writing life as early as possible so you can choose a partner well and the expectations are clear from the start. She or he doesn’t have to completely understand the demands of writing, but gets the jist that for as long as you’re in a committed relationship with writing, the primary human relationship won’t look like other relationships that are used as a barometer for success, happiness, or even peaceful.
Nick sometimes struggles with my struggle to be fully and absolutely present to him on weekends, our sacred hours together. My fingers begin itching for a pen or a keyboard, my mind starts forming rebuttals and imaginary characters (depending on what I’m working on), and my eyes widen or narrow in reaction to my thoughts, as if I’m having a conversation all by myself. Which, actually, is the painful truth for partners of writers.
Who you choose to parent with, how you set up that situation is one of the most underrated areas in the debate of women writers and finding balance. Nick gladly picks up most of the domestic duties when he is home because he knows that I need to focus on writing when I can. He disappears with Isaiah for hours at a time so I have a quiet office in the house and only interrupts to see how I’m doing, to rub my back, look over my shoulder and make a short quip about turning out a bestseller so we can retire. (My usual reply is a laugh, “With the content I’m interested in? Hardly going to make us rich.”) But more than that and what usually carries me is that he gets it. He sometimes doesn’t like it but he gets it. He gets that writers often wonder away to love a character instead of a human being next to you. He gets that I spend a majority of my time doing unpaid work and picks up the slack, watches our budget, and takes on more because of the understood covenant between mother writer and her work. He gets it and the balance, the ever so fragile balance, is sustained when your partner understands the psychological, emotional, and financial sacrifices that need to be made in the name of creative work.
The community, village, partner, and family we create is just as critical to the food we put in our bodies, the amount of sleep we try to get, and the oxygen we take in for creative work. Emotional support is amazing, but the practical resourceful help that partners give – without tricks or guilt trips – cannot be overstated in the mother writer role.
The balance of parenting, for those in partnered relationships and nuclear families, has to be shared. It must be shared. I’m not convinced that balance can be struck without actualizing that in your family. And I simply refuse to normalize a state of imbalance; it is not an option for me. What turns that refusal into a lived reality is a partner who refuses gendered imbalance as well.
The Slippery Slope of Writers Using Social Media: What I Learned from Shutting Down and Going Offline
Social media had sunk its teeth deep into my flesh.
I noticed that I was spending more time reading my colleague’s work, reading articles about writing, absorbing top ten lists of famous author practices, shaking my head over the latest news about Pope Francis, and laughing over clever memes and looking over quickly written haikus more than I was doing the process of writing; that space where your hands pause, your mind lowers into a deeper spot, and lips slightly part in anticipation of a clearer word to use. That space was filled with links, GO HERE commands to read the latest brilliant quote from Junot Diaz, a MUST READ with my name tagged in it from an activist group, and then there was my offering community support to others: dropping off a few dollars via PayPal for activists and writers whose rent and grocery bank accounts were low, reading breakthrough essays from emerging writer friends in Salon, The Paris Review, or the The Rumpus, passing on information on crowdsourcing projects for independent films and memoirs about Caribbean girlhood, access to clean water, and protecting Indigenous rights. There are petitions to Free Marissa, animated videos to learn about Syria or the government shutdown, and applications for writers’ studio time, grants, and artistic residencies. All opportunities, all good, all of my life swirling into one screen on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, GoodReads, and Google+. I started noticing my attention span was getting shorter and shorter and perhaps social media was contributing to that frenzied jump from link to link.
So I booted myself off social media. It was time. My attention span was like a connect the dots map with no lines connecting for a big picture. It became apparent one embarrassing moment the other day when I raced up the stairs to use my computer to get directions before my family went out and when I sat down in front of the screen, found an open tab, and quickly sunk underwater in an article about postpartum depression, then about the origin of the magazine it was published under, then about its founder, then about one of the zines she had once written, then about … then… click. click. pause to read. click. click. Several minutes passed and then I heard a voice from downstairs, “Did you get the directions?” Nearly 20 minutes had passed. I glanced down and saw my scribbling: Research PPD across racial and cultural lines. Possible legal implications in cases involving custody disputes or child endangerment? How has women’s mental health research changed in the past 30 years? How much of that accessible to patients with prenatal care? How effective are ob-gyn physicians in identifying severe PPD?
Even though no one could see my face when I realized how long I had taken to get directions, I blushed. Have I no sense of time, respect, discipline to seek out one thing and close myself to all the other distractions?
As I cooked dinner that night night, I thought more about my struggle to be a balanced, modern essayist, a mother, with my fervent love of all things new, wordy, and smart. As my hands grazed the bottles of Hoisin, sweet chili sauce, and Sririachi, and I made a new concoction for a marinade, I smirked at the culinary comparison that came to me as I prepared the marinade. Some writers absorb and process like tofu. Splat some cubed tofu into a bowl of sauce and it will rapidly inhibit the spices and flavors of its saucy environment. Within minutes, the soybean curd will reveal a combination of tongue-pleasing goodness that any foodie would appreciate.
But I am not like tofu.
I’m like the thick piece of poultry that needs a few days to trust and then gradually swallow the Italian spice, or the adobo seasoning, or to deeply kiss the depth of the curry. I need time. I’ve always been a slow reader and writer. Slow, as in, I frequently put a book down to think about what it conjures up. That happens quite a bit. Somehow, though, over the past few years, that patience has left me.
If you ask me if any of the things I’ve recently read online have really moved me, I have to be honest and say with the exception of one essay, I don’t remember the others. Out of the hundreds of things I’ve read through social media, I only remember one. It’s a reflective essay from David Sedaris about his sister who committed suicide. And, as only David Sedaris could, the essay brought me to audible mmhmm and hearty laughter. Yes, the essay was about his sister’s SUICIDE. Who can do that?
That is the work of a writer. To take the reader into an unexpected place. I’ve been busy, but I don’t know how much work I’ve been doing that has contributed to my own craft.
But the discovery over the past several days has not been about the writing, reading, or even the processing. It was the renewal of self-confidence that came with being socially quiet and emotionally attuned. Social media for writers can be the port to community, resources, networks, and community that every artist needs for creative survival, but it also comes with an alluring temptation to spend one’s time in observation rather than creating. There is a safety in observation. An endless excuse for learning more. But the deepest learning a writer can do is not through reading, it is through writing.
As an extroverted writer with an insatiable addiction to intellectual stimulation, the internet is an infinite playground. Social media is unhinged door with no threat of closing. Even though it is a digital New York City lifestyle with its endless temptation of distraction, an endless conversation with myself that often leads me to a blank screen and endless drafts, I miss it.
I want both worlds. I want the buzz and the quiet. I want community support and the isolation to work.
This afternoon, as I got off the phone with my publicist about my book, she reminded me to grow comfortable in getting “out there;” in establishing my voice and testing how it sounds in public spheres. Pitching to more places. Writing more articles on the subject matter. Using my voice means strengthening it for the long term. A part of that strength training is using social media effectively AND writing more for public consumption.
I felt fearful to return to social media. What if I waste my literary life? What if I can’t control my attention span? The demand for writers to produce original work requires mental space. That sacred real estate is precisely where social media coyly conspires to set up permanent residency. The reality for published writers is that a platform must not only be created but also sustained. Social media is the primary and most effective tool for doing just that. Thus continues the quandary, the tightrope walk balancing platform maintenance (which quickly can slide into general entertainment and social meandering) and producing creative work.
Over the past several days, I picked up my SLR camera more often. I texted love poems to my partner. I snuggled with my son without wondering if I should take an Instagram pic of how cute he looked. For the billionth time, I started another morning prayer routine hoping I can make it sustainable. New meals were served on the dinner table. My mom was surprised to hear from me a few more times than normal. I was present to others more, but what surprised me most was how much more I was able to be present to myself. I read books with pages, turned the pages with my fingers. It felt authentic. I felt authentic.
That cannot be downloaded.
When I licked my lips and logged into my old friends named Twitter and Facebook, I find, not surprisingly, that the pace felt dangerously hurried and wonderful. I could feel the tide tugging at my legs as I waded in knee deep. It’s strong, the pull shifting the sandy ground under my feet.
I am staring out into the abyss of the ocean, afraid again. I see a buoy ahead. I straighten my shoulders, take breath, and wonder if I can swim with one arm.
Processing Sexuality & Spirituality: On Queer Identity, Love, and Un-Identifying
There were two rather unexpected events that took place yesterday. If I look closely, I see how these two seemingly different events perfectly illustrate my life and my identity right now.
At two o’clock yesterday, I went for spiritual direction. Spiritual direction is a form of spiritual practice where you typically spend an hour or so with a trained and certified spiritual director to help you more clearly recognize grace, God, and love in your life. The reasons and methods are varied, similar to psychotherapy, but it’s not therapy. It’s like you become your own personal theologian over your own life. You investigate the joys, struggles, and thoughts and process them aloud with a director. They ask questions, dig around, and reflect back what they hear from you. Quite a simple method, yet very few people utilize this form of practice. The last time I went for spiritual direction was nearly a decade ago. My director’s name was John and I still think of that relationship every few months. It was that impactful.
I went to see Fr. Don Cozzens. A prolific writer, a progressive thinker, a graceful challenger to the modern US church, I sat with him for an hour to talk about my relationship between writing and my faith. Specifically, I came to him to talk about this hard stone of fear sitting in my stomach. A fear to write about what I truly want to write about because of my identity as a Catholic. I feel uncertain and off balance. At times I felt unsure how to answer his questions about my identity as a Catholic, as a women of color, as a feminist, as a writer.
He spoke at length about two things: ego and courage.
On one hand the ego of the writer is always pushing. Ego is always afraid of what others think, even when in hiding – which could be mistaken for lack of confidence – but is really about ego. (That took me a while to understand.) But it makes sense. On the other hand, it takes the “chasm of courage” to put yourself out into the world, to open up oneself for criticism and challenge. He remarked, “The challenges you reference – the hierarchy, clericalism, triumphalism, patriarchy of the church – these are big pieces to the block in your writing as you are describing, but I think there is something else. Something that is not church.”
Oh.
Well, I sat with that for a while.
He was kind and smiled warmly, “Forgive my arrogance. I’ve only known you less than an hour and am telling you what to do with your life. But here I go: there is something much deeper than the church you are fearing. Your friend who lost is job because of his progressive beliefs? It goes deeper than that. Your fear of being the Catholic community not understanding you? It goes deeper than that. So just sit with that.”
I did. I sat there.
He ended with what he began, “Write. Come what may.”
Four hours later, I left this priest who wrote controversial books for a living and drove to another college campus. At Kate State, my friend, Daisy Hernandez was giving a talk. The subject of her lecture was on feminism, women of color, sexuality, and Latina experiences. It’s hard to not praise her presentation when she gave a shout out to my work. (Insert any gif of shameless dancing.)
One of the things that caught my attention was how many college students brought up the word “queer” which Daisy used to name her sexual identity. I saw many college students nodding as she spoke and I saw even more wait for her after the lecture, standing there awkwardly, shifting from foot to foot waiting to ask her more about her queer identity. It was a word I am familiar with as many of my friends who date and love and partner with men, women, and gender non conforming people. Queer is a word to me to describe the natural continuum of loving, or being attracted to, or being in relationship, or just plain wanting another person. It’s an everyday word for me. Like “the.”
I thought about how and why I not feel the need to name my sexuality. I stopped identifying as anything several years ago. It was a personal decision I came to after years of examining my life, reflecting with my partner, choosing what felt most right to me. And what felt right was not to use any identifier at all. I didn’t reject anything, I just didn’t find anything that encompassed my experiences.
The decision to un-identify as heterosexual and my decision to not identify with anything else came shortly after an upsetting experience with a group of friends who questioned my life choices. Shortly after I was engaged to my partner, I made a comment that I knew I was ready to commit to one person because I realized what love meant. I didn’t love his gender. I didn’t love his sexuality. I didn’t love parts of him. I just loved him. That totality and consumption of another human through love wasn’t blind to these parts of his identity, it just didn’t stand out that way anymore. The more I understood how I loved him, the more I understood how to love others in general. Gender didn’t matter. I fell in love with a person who happened to be a man. Even with all the socialization, the cultural and religious influences in my life, I came to understand that love, for me, was not contingent upon gender, or sexuality, or labels. I shared with a friend that “it didn’t matter if it was a man or woman. I knew that I could have dated or not dated anyone and I would have been fine. I could have loved anyone. And in realizing that, I knew I was free to love whom I choose. And I chose him.”
In sharing this in an unsafe place, the comment was deduced to a cheap conversation about sexual attraction and dating history. My insight was lost in the torrent of questions if I was gay, straight, queer, bi…or what?
It took a few years to tell that story and I look back and shake my head because I still feel the same way. Why the need for label? Why the desperate grab to smack a word on my forehead so you know how to treat me. Why not just get to know me? Why not get to the know the person I fell in love with?
I fell in love with this person who, at one time, when he was employed as a minister, would dress in his finest suit to attend funerals for people he didn’t even know. Whether the service was overflowing or just a smattering of people in the pews, he put on his best clothes to pay tribute to someone who died. He attended because he believed in the inherent worth of every human that walked the earth. He wore his best suit because he believed that was the least he could do for the one person who came to say goodbye to their brother, father, sister, mother, or spouse.
I have these hazy memories of waking up and seeing him dressing in that black suit and knowing he was on his way to a funeral. “You don’t have to go, you know,” I reminded him. “No one would ever know the difference.” He’d catch my eye in the mirror and flash me a smile that I always found made my heart thunder away, “I’d know. I like going. I want to be there. Someone should, must be there.”
Someone that held that kind of perspective of human life, relationship, and wasn’t afraid to be made vulnerable by the emotionally heavy nature of a funeral is the kind of someone I continue to love to this day. It’s why I chose and continue to choose to build my life with him and why love is the only door I leave unlabeled.
I don’t need it. I know where I’m going.
* * * *
Fr. Donald Cozzens. Ms. Daisy Hernandez. The two faces of Catholic and feminist agitation yesterday. It was quite a day.
Ecdysis: A Free Write on Snakes, Skin, and Necessary Growth
I was 22 years old and pouring out my heart to a priest who would eventually marry me and the man who was the reason I was pouring out my heart. But I didn’t know that then.
I poured out my heart because I didn’t know how else to deal with its leaking. The embarrassing drops of naivety and innocence that can only be squeezed out of the heart by the cracks of first love. I didn’t know that was what was happening.
I didn’t know a lot of things. I still don’t know a lot of things.
Looking back at that time, when this priest listened to my yearning to move on and out of my early 20s conventional lifestyle, I see that restlessness not as a period of my life, but I identify now as a permanent marker of my identity. The grave dissatisfaction with unfulfillment. The sudden uptake of bravery to do whatever it takes to make transformation possible. The tunnel vision. That wasn’t a phase, that’s Me.
The priest commented that my restlessness was likely a sign of “moving through something, like a shedding snake with new colors on its skin.” My lips pursed in repulsion. Dry, dead skin of a snake. Interesting comparison. It made me itch, physically. I’m not drawn to crackling and lifeless skin trails. It haunted me though because, despite my shuddering and itching, it felt true. New colors. Finding hard, uneven ground to slither my body so I could more easily rid myself of useless layers? Hunting rocks to scratch myself against to help the process? In this profoundly odd way, it was perfect.
Some months later after the dead skin talk, I played Scrabble for the first time with a group of friends. And when a controversial play called for a dictionary validation, I picked up the heavy green reference to look up the word and immediately lost my grip with my left hand. It fell, split open to the floor and that’s when my eye say it at the top of the left page: ECDYSIS. A shedding. A moulting of an outer integument of skin. Like a snake shedding its skin.
There it was. A word to describe the process the priest told me I was in. I just didn’t know it wasn’t a process. It was my life.
I took a mental photograph and flipped the pages to validate the disputed word and went on with the game. But as I outwardly continued with Scrabble, yelling at and even wrestling Mike one of my roommates, over the use of the word “navajo,” for the win, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something larger was being conveyed. And it came through the accidental drop of a dictionary.
Although I consider myself both spiritual and religious, I largely put my faith in people. I think humans reveal more about truth, sanctity, and creativity than any symbol or natural element and that placement of faith leaves me with a touch of skepticism when people say “it’s a sign” is used to describe a curious encounter. But when ecdysis flopped itself open with a Webster, I wasn’t so sure that crumbs weren’t being laid so I could find the loaf.
The next twelve years were cyclic like that. The shedding was constant and followed a pattern. Pain, lesson, implementation of lesson, enlightenment. Restlessness. Repeat.
I find myself today, twelve years since that dictionary fell out of my hand, ruminating on ecdysis. My literal muse. It’s taken me that long to metabolize its enormity and helpfulness. Restlessness is not a state of unhappiness, or lack of joy. Quite the opposite. The joy of everyday life – my loves, my struggles – fuels the desire to pursue more and it’s taken me twelve years to accept that without shame. And now that I’m here it seems ridiculous that I was even hiding. I hid the fact I was unsatisfied. (Some in my life would say I hid it poorly.) But I didn’t want to insult others. I didn’t want my dissatisfaction to hurt others. I didn’t want others to think they or my relationship with them didn’t or doesn’t give me joy. But fulfillment is much larger than singular threads of relationship with others. Fulfillment is about relationship to one’s own life, one’s own practice of living and pursuit of meaningful existence.
And it took awhile and several rounds of partner dialogue with Nick, strategic therapy sessions investigating emotional and cognitive patterns (aka “Why do the same thoughts keep surfacing?), playful cuddling sessions with Isaiah, face down in the pillow crying sessions followed by and face up in the pillow staring sessions to digest another basic survival tool: we end up living a template if we don’t create our own design.
Snakes shed their skin at different frequencies. I don’t remember the last one I went though of this magnitude. The ecdysis I am currently experiencing is moving me to new terrain, bigger rocks…and this time, I’m giddy with anticipation.
Life and love share a common cosmology: time changes everything.
Thank ecdysis for that.
Today’s Top 10 Epiphanies
1. I worry, extensively and probably needlessly, about expectations.
2. I define friendship and closeness by how comfortable I feel when we are together in a new place.
3. Negativity. I don’t do it. Don’t want to be around it. Can’t explain it but I know it when I sense it.
4. Contrary to gender stereotype, men grieve. And it looks like a dam bursting when they allow themselves the emotional release of expressing it outwardly. More than dam. A bomb.
5. I care about what others think until it sounds ignorant.
6. Compassion is growing more and more extinct while bullshit terms like tolerance keep growing in popularity.
7. The more we forgive ourselves, the more we forgive our parents.
8. The more I love, the freer I feel.
9. Physical movement can be a prayer.
10. God doesn’t care what you look like.
Racism and The Catholic Church
Below is an incredibly brief processing of the conference I went to a few weeks ago, “Amazing Grace,” the Cleveland Archdiocese’s Forum on Race and Faith….
I recently had the pleasure of attending a conference, “Amazing Grace: The Diocese of Cleveland Forum on Race” two weeks ago. There were provocative keynote addresses and rich breakout sessions to discuss the impact of race in our world and in our faith.
How race and ethnicity affect our world is a complex matter and there’s no way to address such complexity in a few hundred words. The most effective and powerful way to address the sin of racism in the church and in our world is to cultivate two paths of understanding: the path of self-awareness and basic functions of racism itself.
We all come from stories of belonging and exclusion. All of us. All of our stories can be told with moments of pain and forgiveness, just and unjust conditions, but our commonality ends there. We are incapable of knowing the details of how discrimination has impacted others through power and privilege. It is not our responsibility to know every single story, but it is our responsibility to understand and believe that the world runs on a system that normalizes, standardizes, and distributes resources based on a racialized lens. Poverty, violence, and injustices often come to the most vulnerable and least protected. These are often communities of color who are disenfranchised by society. To deny this fact in our faith is to deny the message of Christ.
Jesus’ order to “love one another” is a clear, holy, and discomforting commandment. It love, to truly love one another is not to pretend we are all the same, it is to regard one another with radical humanity, fully embracing the differences between us. We are called to love one another. We are not called to be a “post race” mentality or be color blind to the reality of the shades of our skin.
To live out this commandment, it is not enough to love others the way we want to love them. Racism pushes communities to look for sameness and present difference as frightening, wrong, and unlawful. Love defies all these tendencies. But it must begin with understanding that love in action, us humans trying to live out God’s love will make us uncomfortable. And that discomfort is a blessing.
Transforming Rape Culture from Steubenville to Anywhere, USA
Crossposted at The Feminist Wire
I usually beam when Ohio makes news. Usually. In presidential election years, the inner grin shows its teeth when I hear the famous phrase, “As goes Ohio, so goes the nation.” Over the past several months however, as a writer living in the Buckeye state, I have found this saying applicable as we continue to survey the damage in the aftermath of the Steubenville rape case.
Ohio, famous for being the mirror of the United States, reflects the healthy tension of the American populous. We boast an almost even distribution among liberal, conservative, and swing opinion. Our medium sized cities are connected by the rural roads lay flat for both the Amish buggy and eighteen wheel semi-trucks transporting goods in every direction. There’s support for and against gay marriage, reproductive rights, and every social issue you can battle. In other words: what makes us special is our perfect average-ness. We’re the middle. Our breath is often staked as the wind in which the direction of the nation will go. We are the political battle state that rests with the burden of revealing the civic psyche of the most powerful nation in the free world. Meaning, what happens within our state lines can be an indication of what the rest of the nation is doing. So, what do the events of Steubenville, Ohio mean for our country? It means what happened in Steubenville not only could happen anywhere. It already is happening everywhere. It means rape culture is alive and well.
As the abhorrent details of how two male teenage football players were found guilty of raping and disseminating nude photos of a 16 year old girl made headlines, writers and bloggers have asserted advice and coverage based upon their own ad hoc subcultures of parenting, activism, sports, and politics. From the cloying, maternal columns suggesting we teach our sons to “be kind” to fiery debates on how we need to “teach men not to rape” to victim blaming, to learning “enthusiastic consent” before engaging in sexual activity, to boycotting CNN for their rape apologist reporting, there is no shortage of opinion on rape culture. But there isn’t much on how to transform it. Perhaps what makes it so difficult to pinpoint is its powerful yet amorphous nature.
Rape culture is like smoke. Insidious, it hangs in the air, getting into everything, staining and deteriorating whatever it touches. It’s highly adaptive, cunning, clever in its ability to morph into whatever context it is placed. Rape culture prices and prioritizes human dignity, as if it’s something to earn and not inherent. Rape culture sets behavioral prescriptions and if one does not adhere it them, they are deserving of violence or, at the very least, somehow responsible for it. Rape has no age, transcending language and time. It has been a part of the human conversation since the beginning of recorded story-telling found in religious texts and even mythology. It’s long standing presence in our history gives indication of one glaring social failure: we have yet to envision, let alone achieve, radical equality.
The Steubenville rape case, with its vile details possesses an eerie, almost scripted horror story that begs to be used for confronting teen issues: acquaintance rape, sexuality, gender essentialism, alcohol, bullying, jock and sport pathology, hyper-masculinity, social media, judicial justice, consent, decision making, bystander mentality, moral codes, and accountability.
But for those of us many years removed from football practice and August end-of-summer-no-parents-home parties, it is time to identify what is our responsibility in transforming rape culture so we let this story become not fodder for the next generation of perpetrators and survivors, but rather an entry point for nuanced conversation?
Rape culture is not a separate, external entity corrupting a few in Steubenville, Ohio. It is a deeply engrained and believable operating system in our collective conscience, whispering its influence into every aspect of life, at every stage of personal formation and development. Rape culture is not a separate culture from the one you and I are living in. They are one and the same.
The rape culture that formed Trent Mays’ and Ma’lik Richmond’s decisions to carry a girl from party to party, raping her at their leisure and entertainment is the same force that tells us which survivors deserve our empathy and which ones we ignore. How interesting it is to read the harsh judgment pointed at the bystanders for not intervening on what they were witnessing. One of the witnesses testified he didn’t know it was rape because “well, it wasn’t violent.” If we used the Steubenville bystanders as a mirror to our country, how many of us would see ourselves ignoring what is happening right in front of us because we didn’t see it as “violent?”
Rape is one of many violent forms of oppression – stalking, abuse, domestic violence, trafficking – but they come from the same culture. Rape culture thrives in any society that assigns and thwarts power according to prescribed traits, identifiers, and behaviors. It is intensified through lenses of race, class, physical and cognitive ability, and occupation among an endless list of factors. Some call this systematic assignment of privilege patriarchy. I prefer kyriarchy.
It even continues in the aftermath, in the determination of whose stories are deemed worthy and which ones are less significant. So before we throw stones at the ignorant teenager who claims he didn’t know what rape looks like, ask yourself if you know what it looks like. Not just for Jane Doe, and not just in cases of heterosexual aggression, do you know what sexual violence looks like for a queer or gay survivor? Or a trafficked person? Or an undocumented survivor? Or a transperson? Or a sex worker? What about what it looks like for an incarcerated survivor? Are you pleading innocent because you weren’t aware and couldn’t identify what it looked like?
Feminists, activists, and bloggers alike are taken with this concept of “training men not to rape.” In some ways, this plan can work. It tackles the Steubenville situation, but does it address rape as social construct? It may dismantle many of the problems, but it doesn’t transform it for everyone.
If we are to transform rape culture, for everyone, the salient thread is deepening our comprehension of how we view power, how we award and punish one another based on concepts of social-norming and acceptability. How we teach power – not how we give consent – is the core essence of rape culture. This is the task of writing a new prevention plan that leaves “no means no and yes means yes” behind. It is the most basic and daunting call because it requires we all, not just feminists and activists, become cultural workers in our everyday lives, examining the deep roots of our own agendas, dreams, and sense of safety. This calls for us to ask uncomfortable questions around justice (how we conflate judicial sentencing and incarceration with accountability and justice), healing (how and if communities respond in the aftermath of crisis), and violence (trauma and its lasting impact on survivors and their families).
We each must acknowledge and accept that we will not and should not come to a unified “how to” agenda to wage a global war to end rape. This is not a call to abandon all the work that has been done to address rape, particularly acquaintance rape, through the lenses of heterosexual rape and consent. These are important strategies to implement to prevent further crimes. Neither is this a suggestion to ignore the fact that women represent the majority of rape survivors. This is a call for expansion, not generalization. It is our responsibility to be mindful of the profundity of our goal to “overcome” rape culture. We’re not overcoming rape culture for some survivors, we are transforming it for everybody, and that includes not just survivors, but for perpetrators and bystanders as well.
To put my money where my mouth is, I looked at my own life as a mother to a young son, as a feminist writer residing in the “heart of it all,” as a woman of color cultural critic/worker, my responsibility lays in a multifaceted sphere. Steubenville serves as a dramatic guideline for how to shift from being a culture based on power to a culture based on relationship. In building upon the work of so many who have voiced their expertise on their own cultures and subcultures, here are a few of my own organically grown strategies for not only combating but transforming rape culture in a region whose social nervous system is held as the microcosm for the United States.
Transforming Biology as Destiny to Exciting Possibility
My 3-year-old toddler boy received endless comments for his physical attributes especially his height. Apparently his unusually high growth rate makes turns adults oracles, predicting futures that all include physical sport participation. “Do you want to play basketball when you grow up? You are so tall, but you gotta be fast, too!” While there is nothing inherently wrong with asking a child if they want to play sports, a repeated question, identical in assumption, sends a strong message of performance, expectation, and preference, and what it might take to please others.
Using one arm, I open the space for him to think freely, opposing rape culture’s tendency to shrink masculinity to focus on physical coordination as a sign of worth by adding a tagline, “We definitely practice his free throw shots, but he really loves maps and he’s also dabbling in piano. We make rhymes, too, so maybe a future poet. Lots of fun options to explore.” With the other arm, I tweak the expectations of family and strangers alike, “It’s so exciting to think of all the things kids can try, isn’t it? Who knows who he will discover himself to be.”
Transforming Teenage Angst to Mentoring Opportunity
I wouldn’t be able to identify my 14 year old niece, a sprouting African American young woman, if her phone was not attached to her right hand, oscillating between holding her phone arm’s length away to snap another picture of herself or finger scrolling her friends’ pictures of themselves on Twitter. She shares details of 8th grade life, which include secret boyfriends and girlfriends, inside jokes, half-truths, and almost manic swings in friendship sagas.
It’s hard, but I put aside my temptation to place all my Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldua books in the most obvious parts of her room and ask about other parts of her life that don’t revolve around her social life. Trying to put focus and energy on her gifts that don’t receive as much attention, I ask to see her pencil sketches, create reasons for road trips, volunteer to be her Wii partner for Just Dance, and accompany her on retreats. With careful and appropriate disclosure, I share my own struggles as a woman of color remembering being a girl of color in the Midwest, providing a safe place to share her anger and confusion about racist and sexist encounters, and brainstorming self-care options. Just as I wonder if anything that I’m doing makes a difference, she casually remarks, “The other day I was really thinking about what you said and I try not to do that at school.” I give her a quizzical look and wait for her to elaborate. “You know, that thing you said about not dumbing yourself down for the sake of someone liking you. I see that in a lot of my friends. Yeah, I’m not going to do that.”
Transforming Buried Ignorance to Liberating Truthfulness
A few months ago, when delivering my phone to a technology service desk for a repair an employee asks me what I do for a living. I falter, about to give a generic answer to avoid discussion about writing. I go with honesty, “I write about feminisms, culture, and gender. Human rights, too. I try to anyway.” Immediately his face lights up and he says he finds this fascinating. We go back and forth in conversation. Standing in the middle of a store, he shares his story about his experiences as a transsexual man. He soon asks me questions, wanting to know my opinion about issues pertaining to the trans community. The pressure to nod and spit terms that I didn’t completely understand creeps up my face. I was embarrassed by my ignorance, but transparency wins. “Truthfully, I don’t know enough about trans issues or lives. I know it’s not your job to teach me. So, I need to know more before I try to answer.”
While he fidgeted with my gadget, the conversation grew from him sharing how he grew up knowing he was different from his peers, to sharing what it means to for him to be a transsexual graduate student in the engineering field. After our legs begin to ache from standing in one place too long, he gives me his card and asks to connect over Facebook. I leave, mystified and high off conversation.
For me, I don’t want to just end rape. I want to transform the mentalities that posit sexual violence as a sensible outcome of its logic. We must transform rape culture by wielding our own power in the spaces where we are most present: our workspaces, family, neighborhoods, businesses, relationships, religious or spiritual gathering places, and even our corners of the Internet. Think personal and local. Think relationship and specificity. Think human decency. Begin there. When we identify and name the spaces where we show up and are present, when we are charged with our own authority to claim and demand human dignity for ourselves, we begin to demand it for one another. We must choose our battles, yes, but we must respond knowing that no situation is too big or small for that charge. This is what it means to transform rape culture.
If we are to learn anything from Steubenville, it’s that Steubenville can easily be anywhere. Anyone can be Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond. Anyone can be Jane Doe. It is sobering to know that if this kind of tragedy happened on one random summer night in Ohio, similar tragedies are occurring a thousand fold across the country. If it’s happening here then it’s happening in your hometown as well. And who is better equipped to transform your hometown than you?
Notes on The Steubenville Rape Case: Addressing the Longstanding Issues
Things often come to me in bursts. Bursts posted here concerning the Steubenville rape case. This thread will be ongoing.
[Trigger Warning (TW) for topic]I’ve been writing about/following this case for months. My overall concerns with the Steubenville, Ohio rape trial is that regardless of the judge’s decision, there are longstanding problems that need to be addressed:
1. Redefining justice for survivors outside judicial proceedings
2. Incorporating the study of sex, gender, power, and violence into high school curriculum.