Miss_Dagny

Thank you for your kind comments. I am humbled that someone would think of me after I haven't drawn anything here for quite some time.

There are many reasons for that, chief among them being my art is too dark these days to share with most people. The once shining light has been extinguished by the pervasive evil that masquerades as a good Christian man who prays every Sunday in front of his community, never asking his god to forgive him for raping me and an unknown number of other women.

My faith in humanity, organized religion, and bright creativity were stolen along with what hope I had of getting this monstrous being convicted and put away. What I have now is too dark and graphic to share with the community here.

Should you (or anyone, really) wish to contact me, you can do so here: lisa.galt@gmail.com

chelydra

Miss Dagny,
This is certainly a shocker but probably not unlike the experiences of many others, judging from news and personal stories. The rage is hard to process, but all the harder in isolation, facing the injustice alone. As in cases of victims in the Catholic Church scandals, joining up with others who've had similar experiences may be crucial for starting to heal as well as for eventually making the criminal justice system respond.

I first became aware of the power of Robin Morgan's prose when I was a target of her wrath (being one of the male cartoonists she was helping oust from an underground newspaper way back in January 1970) and her essay in the first issue of "Women's Rat" did a lot to wake me up to the effect thoughtless, even innocent, sexist imagery can have on women's sense of who they are. (My wife tells me I'm still a male chauvinist pig at heart, but at least I don't plead ignorance now.) Many years later I saw Morgan's book The Demon Lover on sale, and found that her words were as incandescent as ever. The book opens with an unforgettable chapter describing how most woman may feel most of the time walking alone at night, terrorized by the mere presence of any man who might be following.

When I was teaching a creative writing class for recovering mental patients in London I found that some of my students had been driven over the edge by experiences much like yours. One woman's attack had come from a self-righteous Muslim elders in Pakistan — and when she was my student, this woman was going mad all over again with worry about the ways her own young daughter might be victimized while runnng loose in the streets of free, secular London. Other religions and no religion can promote and protect sexual criminals just as effectively as Christianity. I loaned her my copy of The Demon Lover, which gives voice to that rage and despair, and it seemed to help. I found another copy on sale later and both were usually circulating among my students for several years.

One of the slogans of women's movement was "the personal is political" — it might even have originated with Robin Morgan — not as funny, but far more useful than "If we can send a man to the moon, why not all men?" or "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle." The point is that what's devastating and paralyzing when suffered in silence, alone, loses its fatal power when victims come together to share their stories, and to fight back, openly and publically. This private nightmare has to be seen as a problem like unjust war, economic exploitation, environmental abuse, etc., which will never be eliminated, but can be described and analyzed objectively, and sometimes much reduced by the force of rational argument, legal action, and political campaigns.

A first step might be to return to ThinkDraw as an active participant, and see if those dark images you can't imagine sharing don't speak to some of the other people here. (Sorry, that would be a second step. The first step was starting this forum, obviously.)

I was never a victim but when those stories of the Catholic scandals emerged (with some help from Sinead O'Connor's career-ending tirade on Saturday Night Live) I remembered a long evening I spent with my Episcopal Sunday School teacher at age twelve, at a movie and then at his apartment, and remembered how reluctantly he came to his senses and sent me home before anything happened. Perhaps if my parents had been less influential in the church and the community, he wouldn't had those second thoughts, and I would have spent years feeling confused and ashamed, painting nightmare images and showing no one.

chelydra

That part was pretty easy to write and post, saying all the right things and taking a public position that was basically just common sense. A couple of hours later, a friend emailed to say that although what I said was okay, it might have been better as private email, since that was clearly what Miss Dagny had in mind. I replied that unpunished rape is a plague and the whole point is to pull it into the public arena, except for whatever personal details are too uncomfortable to share. I added that right now, a teenage girl is facing legal action in the UK because she defied a judge's order to stay silent after he gave slap-on-the-wrist sentences to the lads who had assaulted her when she was too drunk to fight back, and passed around a video of the event at their school.
But if everything needs to come out in the open, wasn't I forgetting something? Isn't there's another point of view to consider openly: the rapist's? Why? Because there's often a very murky line dividing consensual sex from rape, and if people were more conscious of that murkiness, and of how easy it is to stray over to other side, the world might be a happier place.
This part is a lot harder to write, and I have no idea how to say it wisely or well. But it may be more useful than the first part, because it's not about how to deal with the crime afterwards, but before, and not as victim but as potential perpetrator.
I've never been accused of rape, publicly or privately, or of any crime other than traffic violations. But long ago I was with a girlfriend, getting impatient. I don't think I said "C'mon we both know you want it as much as I do" but that was the general idea. She was saying no, but I knew she meant yes. We'd had plenty of giggling wrestling matches on plenty of dates, all in good fun, every step of the way towards this night, and those laughing nos really had meant yes. This time we wrested some more, she said no some more, and I didn't notice that her laughter had died away while her wrestling was as energetic as ever. Once the deed was done, she didn't seem to mind terribly. She never complained. On subsequent dates we went all the way. But she wasn't in the exuberant good spirits I felt I had a right to expect. Some of the joy had gone out of our relationship, though it went on for a long time and we shared some genuine love and laughter. It would have been better for both us if there hadn't been a vague sense of resentment hanging in the air, that didn't seem to have any particular source or solution. About thirty years later, articles started appearing about "date rape". Back when it happened, it would have been called free love or cherry-popping or just sex. We didn't worry about all this political correctness, or finding new ways to claim victimhood we could sell to magazines and talk shows. But then a little bell rang faintly in my mind, which of course I could safely ignore because nobody ever accused me of any such thing. Would Miss Dagny's attacker describe how he felt about what he'd done all that differently?
I guess the only rule of thumb is that if you don't feel 100% certain that the decision is 100% mutual, it might be a good idea to stop what you're doing and have a chat about it.
Posted with great reluctance. This isn't the kind of image I want on TD. But if the personal is political and public airing of feelings and experiences is the only way to deal with such things, there isn't much choice. It's either this or my own milder version of the sanctimonious hypocrisy Miss Dagny's describes as if it were as bad as the crime itself. I asked my old friend how she felt about a "date rape" definition of that night, and she seemed to think I was being a bit silly. But I do remember that joylessness and vague resentment, and a shadow that seemed to fall over the rest of our time together. I wasn't accused, but I still paid for it, and so did she.

clorophilla

dear chelydra, you've been brave to post it. Hope it could help to a better understand of these matters, because the way to the hell (not religiously talking) is made of little apparently not-so-evil steps.
There many shadows, mirroring one into another, in this dark path. I wolud like to say many thing, but it's difficult not being my mothertongue, fearing to be misunderstood. Well I try.
first of all, we all in our society are been trained not to trust in ours and others feeling.
all this not-means-yes/tes-means-not it's so cofusing, but is a paradoxical way to accomplish to a paradoxical task: to be a prudish girl, and yet to please, to comply, to soften the person we are dealing with, because it has teached to us (as a woman) we must never oppose - or we lost love and tendress.
On the other side, it has teached to male persons that women are "prey" that want to be catched but there is a game that has to be played.

I'm sure I has been not able to say exactly what I wished to say... only a part.

I want to add another thing. My scope as a psychologist is parenting, and I'm fiercly again some detached approaches as behavioral educational methods and similars.

I often spent many times and energy fostering trust and empathy as a good way of parenting. Often parents are forced to ignore their feelings and not to trust their children when they say "yes" or "not" to something: parents are forced to think childrend do not know what they need, what os good or evil for them; so we reproach them because they don't want to eat more, or to put on their overcoats, or to kiss the uncle and so on... We teach them to mistrust their own feelings, to not listes their inner rightness, to think adults are always right and consequently their feelings are wrong, they are wrong.
We teach them to please and comply, no wonder the same children, as young (women or men) could feel confused when suffering abuses, and send confusing messages to the abuser (who is already confused in his own way).

Our society pave the way to abusers and abused people, and hide the crimes with the code of silence, because it's not only a matter of assaults or offences: it's a matter of challenging all the social framework of a social paradigm that endorse the control on feelings and wishes, the endorsement of a subtle violence that lead up to the gross one.