Me Too, Truth, Reconciliation, and Survival

Me Too

Elissar / Creative Commons

I started seeing the #MeToo hashtag in social media in October. November contained revelation after revelation about abuse, harassment, and inappropriate behavior.

I kept remembering getting free of an abusive relationship (MANY years ago.) How hard it is! So much sympathy for those who are struggling. So much hope for you finding the person who is just as perfect for you... and who doesn't hurt you!

October was domestic violence awareness month. The #MeToo campaign swept through FaceBook and Twitter, with the complex dynamics about who wanted to and who should participate.

#MeToo invited people who move through the world perceived as feminine to indicate that they had been sexually harassed, attacked, molested, or otherwise subjected to the power-ploys of people turned bullies and our pervasive rape-culture.

As Dana Milbank put it succinctly in a recent Washington Post opinion piece: "sexual harassment and sexual predation are, at core, about the abuse of power. Not all bullies are sexual predators or sexual harassers. But most sexual harassers and predators are bullies."

Consent Culture

A nice cup of tea. By Laurel F from Seattle, WA (Tea)
 [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

We all have much work to do to transform our culture into a consent culture. Let's say it again: What is consent culture? "Consent culture is a culture in which asking for consent is normalized and condoned in popular culture. It is respecting the person's response even if it isn't the response you had hoped for..." (onlywithconsent.org/blog/consent-culture)

As a British video puts it... Consent culture is listening for the answer when you offer someone tea. If they say, "no" you don't serve it anyway. If they say "Maybe later" you don't insist. If they fall asleep you don't pour tea down their throat.

Transforming from rape-culture to consent-culture is happening in big ways as perpetrators are being exposed and called to account. It also needs to happen in small ways, in the daily interactions we have. Those of us indoctrinated as "nice women" need to undo that training, and stop passing it down! 

Fine, Just Fine

creative commons

How did I get into an abusive relationship? How did it happen that I thought it was OK to have my movements controlled and my friendships monitored? My mother is a strong woman and my father is a respectful man. I grew up surrounded by academics and small-business-people in a small college town in Oregon.

I do know it crept up on me as I made excuses, but I still can't completely answer those questions. I think the answer lies in the culture, not my particular story. We in the US of A have all been complicit with bullying or had moments of being bullies and we are all survivors of bullying, in varying degrees and ways.

As the Pagans say: As above, so below. The macrocosm is reflected in the microcosm. And as the feminists say: the personal is political. Our national identity and history is reflected in our family and community culture. As long as our economic system is capitalism... As long as our political system is rule of the rich and privileged disguised as Democracy, As long as our foreign policy is based on colonialism and exploitation, and our domestic history is founded on un-atoned for genocide and enslavement, we will be complicit in rape culture. (This is not to say that the USA is uniquely this way, just that I can only speak for my own context.)

The night I came to my senses and fled the relationship, began as a nice night together with friends. Later in the evening, when my partner was a little tipsy, it turned violent. I was bitten, scratched, thrown, and punched. I remember thinking to myself, in a dazed sort of way "Wow, that's why cartoonists draw stars and birds spinning around someone's head after they are hit in the head." A kind neighbor allowed me, barefoot and pajama-clad, to make a phone call. My partner sipped another vodka and orange crush and spat, "I'm fine, just fine" bitterly at the police officer and me while I packed a bag and left for a safe place. The hospital patched up my bites and bruises. The DA declined to prosecute because my injuries were not "gory enough." The Order of Protection was not terribly effective as I was stalked at bus stops, at work, and through the mail.

A mutual friend (Let's call them "Sam") cluelessly offered to "mediate our lover's spat." That failure to believe me is the moment that pains me the most to this day. Yes, my partner was damaged by a history of family violence, sexual abuse, and alcoholism - and participated in the rape culture we were enmeshed in. Yes, my partner was weak and wrong and trespassed against me in a heinous way. Yes, I needed to get away and keep myself safe. Yes, I had to work with a therapist who told me many times that I could have a relationship with all the joy and connection and WITHOUT the abuse. And, yes, I now have that relationship. But not to be believed, to have my experience minimized, for Sam to imagine that they had an ability, and a right, to try to bring an abused woman back to her abuser - that horrifies me to this day. Let us not enable!  (Here's a link to an interesting post about premature forgiveness, the blogger is an evangelical Christian who is working to stop domestic abuse and violence in the church - fascinating!) 

Truth, and Reconciliation

Source: Wikipedia Creative Commons

As revelation piled on revelation in the past months, my spouse and I kept saying to each other. 'DUH! of course!' Franken and Rose and nearly EVERY man socialized as an American (and probably almost every) man has had a moment when he lived out the demands of our dominant culture. Maybe it was only when drunk or high. Maybe it was only once. Maybe it was comparatively less egregious, (and if so, thank goodness for small favors) but are we surprised?

It takes ACTIVE WORK to NOT participate in the culture you are enmeshed in and trained to. Same goes for every one who lives within our racist, capitalist, sexist, able-ist (etc.) culture. There is no shame in occasionally being tired, or inattentive, or clueless. There's a difference between being a jerk and being a predator. Though both are something to be grieved and changed. There IS shame in not believing those who are harmed/oppressed, and not taking responsibility, apologizing, making amends, and working to make it not happen again. We are human, not monsters, nor angels. We FAIL. We must call each other to do better. We must individually and collectively commit to FAIL FORWARD.

We cannot create consent culture by simply punishing people we have identified as devils or bad people. Universalist theology, faith in the future, requires that we find new ways to move forward together. In that way we earn forgiveness and create our future. We need justice. We need compassionate justice. We need to know the truth and we need Restorative Justice.

Or Not

This detail scene, from the Papyrus of Hunefer
(c. 1275 BCE), shows the scribe Hunefer's heart being
weighed on the scale of Maat against the feather of truth,
 by the jackal-headed Anubis. The ibis-headed Thoth,
scribe of the gods, records the result. If his heart
equals exactly the weight of the feather, Hunefer
is allowed to pass into the afterlife. If not, he is eaten
by the waiting chimeric devouring creature Ammit
composed of the deadly crocodile, lion, and hippopotamus.
Vignettes such as these were a common illustration
 in Egyptian books of the dead. 

Sometimes we can separate those who cluelessly slip up now and then, and those who intentionally abuse, hurt and humiliate women (and men) as an expression of their power. I think the litmus for making that separation has to do with how they respond when faced with the harm they have caused. Are they able to take responsibility? To make amends? To take steps to make the world, and their behavior different?

There's also the dimension of how the IMPACT of an 'innocent wolf whistle' will be WAY out of proportion to the INTENT for a woman who has been terrorized, harassed, etc. Which is why our justice system, that depends on a jury of peers, instead of the victim themselves, to determine justice, is better than the alternative. I would not want, nor would I expect a survivor to emulate blind, compassionate justice.

When I found myself face-to-face with my abuser, 10 years later, I realized I personally was not ready to reconcile. I may never be. I hope that she has done her work. I hope that the relationships she has include consent and respect. It has been ten more years now. I hope that she has been held accountable and gone through the most important actions as a result of being an abuser: that she has found the ways she can make consent culture a reality in her sphere of influence. I am clear that my job was to do my work, not hers. I needed to begin learning how NOT to participate in rape culture. Sometimes I have been a bully. Sometimes I have participated as the victim. Often I am a survivor. Usually I am healing and growing. Always, I am failing forward in my own way.