The Line Between Clarity and Nakedness

It’s strange.  As a person who naturally seems able to put the occasional tricky thing into words that real people can grok — the basis of my talents, such as they are, in both science fiction and philosophy, I suppose — and as someone whose youth and sexual identity was framed, to a degree, by sexual assault, I feel obligated to talk about it sometimes, to cast my dice and see if I can lend a hand to the overall clarification of a ridiculously sticky topic.

But I quite often do a terrible job — a far terribler job than I usually do with subjects that seem like the ought to be harder.

But I’m coming to realize, it’s a HARD topic.  And not because it’s “touchy”; I can handle touchy.  It’s hard because almost everything about human history and the development of our language(s) is colored by not just misogynistic ideas, but also racist and classist and all these other unhelpful ideas, ideas that are dug so deep and go back so far that it’s almost impossible to avoid stepping in them or mixing them in with your otherwise-quite-reasonable arguments.  Even if you’re trying your hardest to say something rational and humanistic and helpful about (say) rape, very often you realize (often thanks to the anger of someone listening) that you’ve somehow excluded poor or colored or GLBT or third-world women from benefiting from your conclusions; or conversely, that you’ve spent so much time framing your argument in terms of the plight of Congoese women that you’ve said something that completely cuts off the white middle-class women who’re suffering too.

Anyway, I say all that, not because I have anything profound to say myself today, but because I wanted to properly introduce and compliment LJ user “shewhohashope” for her sterling ability to navigate this ridiculous morass of prejudices and systematic control and emotional backlash and all of it.  I read her article “On Rape Culture and Civilization” today, and though it wasn’t exactly free from “feminist-studies jargon” (not that *I* can write something relevant that is), it certainly was clear and it addressed a lot of what makes the whole topic so difficult very well.  Here’s an awesome little exerpt:

If rape is about power, then the way rape is framed in the dominant discourse works to maintain the already present paradigmatic model of femininity/masculinty, enforcing the already present structure. Thus we see advice on how to avoid rape is primarily (almost entirely) weighted towards what women do, rather than what men do. Then, (the threat of) rape is used to regulate (primarily) women’s sexual behaviour, as well as to punish those who step outside appropriate patterns of behaviour and/or do not fit into the standard model of what a woman should be like.

WOOT.  Damn nicely put.  And maybe knowing that, and knowing that concepts like power and behavior and civilization are thus useful, will help me say a little more, a little better, in the future.

Also, if you’re into a little more not-so-light but very enlightening reading, also don’t miss this article about the effects of everyone’s tendency to “worship virgins” and its effect on the virgins themselves.  (It’s looking at this primarily from the context of african-american women, but I can say from experience that that’s not where this problem ends.)  Another Exerpt Of Niftiness:

We need to talk to them about healthy, guilt-free sex—when I read that teenagers who take chastity pledges are less likely to use birth control methods, it made perfect sense. Birth control requires forethought, an admission that you plan to have sex, something many teenagers who have simply been told “don’t have it,” can’t do.

We need to tell them that no matter how many times they’ve “been touched,” or how many partners they’ve had, they still have bodily autonomy, the right to say yes or no. That the language used to fetishize virginity—”saving it” or “giving it” to someone—is not accurate. Their sexuality, their bodies are their own.

Damn right.  As a mom, and someone for whom an early assault led to years of ridiculously low self-esteem in all things, you’d better believe I’m memorizing that passage.

And on that cheery note, I bid you kungfu.  ;)

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(That doesn’t mean anything particular; it’s just a more fun construction of “bid you adieu”; apologies if I confused you!)