On abused consent

Hey guess what I’ve been thinking about again also.  Did you guess CSA rhetoric?  Because the answer is CSA rhetoric.

grooming & power talk

[cw: sexual abuse]

Periodically, Dr. T would remark on how much power I had in our relationship. This statement invariably confused me, since I felt like I didn’t have any power and couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. Sometimes he’d remark on how much sexual power I had—that he couldn’t resist me and had no discipline around me. He seemed to think I should find this flattering. (I didn’t. I didn’t want his inability to control himself to somehow be my fault.) Other times he would remind me that I could report him and cause him to lose his license. Horrified, I would protest that I would never do that, how could he even think that I would do that… And once again, he would be reassured of my loyalty. Of course I would never betray his trust.

—Surviving Therapist Abuse: “Don’t Call It Consent: Being Groomed for Sex”

……three guesses what this reminds me of….

abuse spans all

Okay yeah and branching off that last post, how about this wild idea: Abusers… are… unreasonable.  They do unreasonable things.  They have unreasonable expectations.  They are unreasonable.  So I’ve got no clue what some people are on about whenever they say something like “imagine a parent getting mad at their kid for X, that doesn’t happen because that’s just ridiculous.”  Hey, real fun fact: “it’s ridiculous” has never been enough to stop humanity from doing cruel and violent things.  Holding that expectation at all is ridiculous.  And more importantly here, it begs the question: Why are you expecting abusive behavior to be reasonable?  Why are you talking like there exists any abuse where you’d look at it and say, “oh, yeah that makes sense”?

Do me a favor and pay attention to that.  If someone’s position is that real abuse is “reasonable,” that’s the kind of thing that calls a person’s entire politics into question.

watch your hyperboles, thanks

Would have been nice to not start the new year first thing by seeing someone say that “ghosting” is “the worst thing you can do to someone,” because apparently it’s just too much sometimes for people to remember that abusive relationships exist and that picking up and leaving doesn’t make you worse than the people who mistreat you enough to drive you to that.  And sure whatever the point was that ‘it hurts to be on the other end of that,’ but this kind of practice of just assuming the people who need it will read an unwritten asterisk into what you say is hands down a Bad Practice and I’m already having a hard enough time sticking to my decision and figuring out the future as it is, thanks.

*

me: *takes a picture of the card my mom sent me*

me: cursed image

Fun fact:

People who say “sincerely believing that ________ is abuse is an insult to real abuse victims” are an insult to real abuse victims.

Optimistic Suggestion

[text: Instead of saying “There are aces who have been abused for being ace!” what if we started saying “If you don’t believe abuse survivors who are ace, you don’t support abuse survivors.”]

☄

Supportive Words for the Gray Areas

More than a year ago I wrote this post on “gray area” violence that has now made it onto the RFAS Recommended Reading page.  Reflecting back on that now, I’ve got some thoughts on how to give reassurance to people whose stories set off those kinds of red flags for you — when someone relates a past experience that sounds, to you, exactly like rape, sexual assault, or abuse, but they themselves explicitly communicate that, for whatever reason, they see it as more of a gray area.

Here’s a rough outline of what’s been helpful and unhelpful, in my experience, from on both sides of the problem.

support survivors, even the ace ones

(context: [cw for BS] link link )

You know……  How shallow is your support/allyship/solidarity/whatever the in-crowd is calling it, when it doesn’t even seem to occur to you that the person you’re talking to might well be a trauma survivor themselves*?  How limited is your willingness to understand the stories of survivors beside yourself, when you think it’s “insulting” for a trauma survivor bring up the #seriouslysurvivor and #actuallytraumatized tags as a point of reference, in a way that’s genuinely relevant to the argument being made — because the argument being made would be say that those are bad and wrong and stealing?

What use is that, to finally concede “I’m not saying there isn’t overlap” [between being ace & being traumatized and/or abused] but to persist in treating designated online ace tags as an Offense — while pretending that isn’t an invalidation to some survivors in and of itself?

What good is that?  Why act like having trauma and wanting designated ace safe spaces can’t possibly be related, as if there’s anything trauma can’t be related to?

Just… blows my mind, that someone, ostensibly thinking they’re standing up for/prioritizing trauma survivors, can think they have the moral high ground by placing that ideal second to criticizing those dirty, icky aces.

*I checked and yes, at least one of the people I’m reacting to w/ this is a survivor themselves.  Doesn’t change my mind, since that doesn’t make anyone infallible, but yes I did bother to confirm this.  And my thoughts here are more in general about how these conversations go down than about these specific individuals.