For background on the #mooreandme campaign on Twitter, please see Sady Doyle's amazing, gut-wrenchingly heartfelt posts about what motivated her and why. Basically, Michael Moore and Keith Olberman mischaracterized the rape allegations against Wikileaks editor Julian Assange, and blew them off. Sady, who is amazing and brave and awesome, took them to task for it and mobilized the internetz. Michael Moore has since come out in support of taking all rape allegations seriously, and believing women.
This post comes on the tail end of all that.
I’ve been blogging as Polimicks over on Livejournal since 2005 (I had to go check), and rape awareness has been a big part of that blogging effort. As a survivor of sexual assault who did not press charges, I know why many, many victims don’t. Correction, I know why I didn’t. I was a terrified 15 year old who didn’t want her parents to know she’d “had sex” even if she hadn’t wanted to . The word “rape” wasn’t even part of my vocabulary, or if it was I was firmly in the “stranger leaping out of bushes with knife or gun” camp so far as the definition went. I had no idea that rape could include someone who told you how special and beautiful you were, right up to the point where he held you down and forced himself inside of you.
A lot of people who are raped never call it rape to themselves, let alone to anyone else. Because there is a magic in words, and if you don’t call it rape then it isn’t rape and you aren’t a victim. Even if your attacker locked you in their apartment, held you down and forced themselves inside you after (or while) you said no, as long as you don’t call it rape, then it wasn’t. Unfortunately, that’s not true and you know in your heart it’s not true, no matter how hard you pretend it is.
I didn’t call it rape for a long time, because, like I said, I didn’t have a vocabulary that would let me recognize it as such. Until the PTSD hit when I was 19. I started having (more) nightmares, panic attacks, flashbacks. I finally told someone after I had a panic attack at work, and my boss found me hiding behind the dumpster sobbing. And my boss told me about her own sexual assault, and we cried in each other’s arms standing behind a dumpster on a cold October evening.
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