So the truth of the matter is that I should be in bed. Because I’m supposed to be at work tomorrow at nine a.m. and lately I’ve been staying up till seven in the morning and sleeping in all day. I’m on like . . . China time or something. But instead of doing that (and I WILL do it, okay? . . . yeah, in a dang minute so keep your pants on!), I logged on to LinkedIn, a networking site I have to admit I don’t really get yet. And there, believe it or not, as I’m browsing through Possible Connections in the Classmates section at Kent State University, I come across the profile of my first boyfriend.
JOLT.
It’s a pretty surreal experience. Firstly, because I’m sitting here in my underpants. (I apologize for the imagery.) And secondly, because he’s a jackass who I haven’t been interested in coming across in years and who, in effect, ruined most of my romantic relationships and might even be said to have gotten me into this mess in the first place.
He still looks approximately the same, sort of a cross between a Greek philosopher and a Great Ape. He’s married these days, isn’t that wonderful? I’m sorry. I’m being bitter. It is wonderful. It’s just so strange, and jarring, and off putting too somehow. It doesn’t seem fair. I suppose these kinds of things never do.
But this is a special case. And one I’m afraid that I’m too afraid to reveal much of here. It’s funny. I tell women all the time that they should never be ashamed of what has happened to them, only take responsibility for their choices. Did I have a choice at that time? I don’t know. . . I . . . I don’t think I knew enough then to know even that a choice was presenting itself.
I don’t guess I’m really that bitter afterall though. I mean, this is the plan, right? This is what’s happened. So what’s the use in thinking to myself that I should have that and he this? He should have what he has and be what he is. Because he has it, he is it. Maybe he’s changed. Maybe he hasn’t. Who am I to say what anyone else deserves?
But I wish sometimes that I’d never met him. I say it was because of him, and I don’t mean to imply that I was without agency or wasn’t making up my mind and choosing what I chose. But if it hadn’t been for him, if I’d never known him . . . wouldn’t I have been the blushing bride that Simon wanted? Wouldn’t I have had my children and raised them? Wouldn’t I . . .
Or would I? Is there any way to tell what might have happened if what happened was something else? All I know is that . . . trauma . . . trauma makes its mark on a body. Trauma changes a body’s course. Trauma makes a body forget that it’s more than a body, that it has more to offer. It makes a body think that a body is all it is.
Who do I blame?
I used to not blame anyone. I used to not admit it, even to myself. I wrote about it, briefly, when it first happened, and then I forgot. I forgot. I kept having these strange feelings, and these bizarre compulsions, and I forgot. I didn’t understand, because I forgot. I forgot and I kept forgetting and all the time I knew something was off. I found what I wrote. I’d forgotten how hurt I was. I found what happened, and suddenly things started to make sense.
Who do I blame?
Maybe we all blame ourselves at first. Maybe that’s the way to make sense of it when we don’t want to recognize what it was. Chalk it up to a mistake. My bad. Maybe I blamed myself for not being more savvy. For not “getting it”. For not understanding what was happening.
Maybe I blame him. For not recognizing who I was and that I was more than the summation of my parts. For not thinking about anything but what he’d been taught to think about. Maybe I think he doesn’t even remember that it was me he did this to. Maybe I think he didn’t even remember it happening just a moment later.
And maybe I blame the rape culture. Maybe I blame a culture who shows the world that a woman is a collection of pleasure ports and always available, that this is how she really likes it, that coersion takes the place of connection, that it’s easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission. Maybe I blame a culture that portrays man as subject and woman as object, woman defined by that which acts upon her, woman made into some thing that can be taken and then left. People make light of women’s bodies being used for profit, especially if it’s someone else’s profit. Other’s don’t get what the big deal is about watching women strip in “gentlemen’s” clubs or being sexed on film by strangers and all the while they are exposed again, and again, and again, and again, to this constant idea that where a woman is, there sex is also. Woman equals sex. And a woman who doesn’t does not compute.
A woman who doesn’t is treated like she does.
Tags: boy trouble, confession, insomnia, pornified culture, rape, sexuality
An old friend of mine recently claimed one of his old friends asserted that, “all women are a little bit gay”.
In relation to what you said here, I wonder if all men would be considered “a little bit gay” if they were portrayed in the same way women popularly are.
And I also wonder if men would ever knowingly contribute to a scenario which would undermine themselves in that way. Women certainly have. And I question which came first: the objectification and abuse from the outside, or the complicity. It bothers me to hear people complaining about their culture whilst gladly and dissociatively participating in it.
The world strains under the bridles of codependency.