Academics sure are bad at talking about abstinence, huh

lol nothing like a little academic reading on “purity culture” to reopen some old baggage

[cn: conservative Christian talk, anti-ace stuff, discussion of rape (fictional and political)]

on sexual abuse and the direction of imperatives

Hi, folks. If you don’t mind, let’s sit down and have a talk.  An actual, honest talk, if you will.

This is a post about the target audience of imperative grammar (i.e. command words) in the context of talking about abuse in relationships. It’s also a post about making moral-grounds proclamations about sexual violence. It’s also a post about the internalized obligation to have sex. It’s also a post about that thing that we usually call victim-blaming. It may even be a post about rape culture in the guise of fighting rape culture? And, basically, yelling at abuse victims to stop getting abused.

Seahaven

You know something I think is interesting?

Whenever I’ve watched The Truman Show with anyone — and I’ve watched it with a few different people, several of whom had some demonstrated victim-blaming tendencies — no one has ever asked why he didn’t figure it out sooner.

No one expresses bewilderment at his gullibility or admonishes him for not seeing through it all.  No one complains that what Christof was doing to him “wasn’t that bad.”  No one argues that Truman was wrong to reject his “idyllic” life.

This despite the fact that it took until Truman was a grown married man for him to break free and escape.

This despite the fact that not even a lone rule-breaker literally telling him the truth to his face was enough to make him understand.

This fabricated world he lives in, this island town of Seahaven, is the only world he’s ever known, its actors and supporters of the system the only people he’s ever known — and it’s amazing to me that people watching this movie get that.

Maybe it’s the dramatization and physicality of having a town literally encased in a giant dome, I don’t know.

But it’s interesting to me that there are viewers willing to accept this as plausible.  Not just the set and the technology, which is ridiculous, but this idea of living in a world that’s an illusion, and not being able to quite tell that it’s an illusion, and being gaslit when you try to tell anyone about your suspicions when you actually begin to notice the cracks where something doesn’t add up.

The Truman Show isn’t a reality but what is a reality is that a lot of us have our own little Seahavens, our own Christofs, our own tensions with people loyal to Christof, who will all encourage you to believe you’re not the victim, you’re the “star.”

When confronted about his exploitation, Christof claims, “He can leave at any time.”  And I guess it’s also interesting to me that whoever wrote the script for this movie knew that’s how they talk, people like him.  “He can leave at any time.”  And then when he does try to leave, Christof tries to hunt him down and would sooner kill him than let him get away.

No one I’ve ever watched this movie with has called that a plot hole or inconsistent characterization or anything.

When you see the excuses and handwaves and justifications and distractions the actors come up with to keep Truman away from the truth, in addition to the way they’ve collaborated to condition him to be afraid of risks, to be afraid of exploration, to be afraid of drowning (as someone living on an island) — I guess when you see it spelled out like that, it’s easy to see how they were able to keep him in the dark for so long.

And when you’re the pet project of someone like Christof, the denizens of Seahaven will try to do the same to you, too.

 

*casually leaves this here*

thatdiabolicalfeminist:

I think the particular kind of “goodness” that my mother aspired to – that so many of our mothers aspired to – is not actually goodness at all.

Her concept of goodness was a person perpetually sacrificing everything important to her for the comfort of others, even with no acknowledgment or thanks.

The perfect person, to my mother, was gracious in the face of cruelty and had bottomless wells of love to give even if none was given back. Her only joy should be the knowledge that she had given and given and given, her only triumph over those who would hurt her should be a quiet, unspoken sureness that she Had Done Right.

This is not goodness. This is not something a real, living person can safely try to achieve, I think. This is what you attempt to become in order to survive brutality.

This is a recipe for the perfect victim, the victim who has made herself so small and given so much that there is now, finally, no reason to abuse her. This is the image cruel people would have us try endlessly to become, so they can more easily take and violate and control.

They want you to be not just meek, but the kind of person who strives always to be meeker. Someone they no longer have to bully into anticipating their wishes, because you have not just honed this skill but made it your life’s purpose. They want you to see your fury and bitterness and self-pity and desire to escape as faults to be overcome, instead of valid reactions to being hurt and controlled and taken advantage of.

It’s a way to survive what you can’t escape, and in that situation alone it has value. Even in that situation, though? This ideal can never be achieved, even if you somehow destroy every shred of self-respect (anger, desire to escape, etc.) you find in yourself. You can never be the perfect victim. There will always be a “reason” to abuse you, even if you are careful not to provoke, because the reason was never you. Abusers like to abuse.

Trying to be the perfect victim broke my mother, and it’s fucked me up pretty badly too. I wish I could go back in time and warn her. I wish I could tell her:

You cannot give endlessly; no human can, and you shouldn’t have to.  It is not a virtue to suffer endlessly. It is not proof of love to allow someone to destroy you.

You deserve someone who doesn’t expect your suffering as proof of love. You deserve someone who gives back joyously, who feels your pain as part of their own and hates to cause it. You deserve to be surrounded by people who value you and all you think and want and are. You have worth. You deserve respect. It doesn’t have to be like this.

AA: Questions on Health/Healthism

Em wrote in:

[cw: brief discussion of abuse, with specific examples]

things I’ve been thinking about

To make you feel good — a post by swankivy about touch & coercion and her personal experience with a manipulative boyfriend.  I feel like this could provide some context for why I have misgivings about the phrase “enthusiastic consent.”  I know what it’s trying to get at — genuine consent, non-coerced actual consent, consent consent and not begrudging uneasy hesitant agreement to cave — but I feel like tacking on “enthusiastic” just creates the expectation of emotional performance, which hits a nerve for me as someone who’s been put in that position a lot as a kid.  Maybe more on that another time.

Why “Just Leave” Doesn’t Work — an explanation for those who take the “just leave” approach to abusive relationships.  Really important stuff to understand.  Also relevant to the simplistic “it’s not abuse if they accept it” excuse I kept encountering as a way to handwave critical thinking about D/s.

There’s a War On (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7) — an old series on BDSM and abuse (!).  I’m excited to have found (re-found?) these posts because I’ve been looking for something adequate on this topic for a while now.  Trigger warnings on this like whoa; it’s about harm and consent violations (of sexual & nonsexual kinds) and at times gets pretty graphic; there’s discussions of and mentions of basically all the terrible stuff you can think of.  I’m pleased to know this series exists, because it’s needed and the commentary ranges from actually decent to even good, but I’ll also note that the main point can be basically summed up as “There is abuse that happens within BDSM contexts and the community is crap at dealing with it.”  It seems to be written for an audience who wouldn’t agree or take that statement at face value, or who are seeking more details about what exactly goes on and how exactly the community is failing.  Important writing, but again, it’s rough.

This post by aceadmiral and the recent reblog chain discusses representation of nonsexual relationships and same-gender relationships as a site of conflict.  I have Thoughts and I want to write a whole post on them but that may or may not have to wait, and for now I’m just linking one of the posts here.

a stock example of abusive twisting

So with all the bad ace advice I’ve seen… sometimes I worry about y’all’s critical thinking skills.

Maybe one day I’ll write a more in-depth guide to these things, but for now, here’s an example of a hypothetical abuser defending their actions, written by a man with years of professional experience with abusers.  If you want to read this, I can walk you through the kind of overlooked signs I’m talking about.

TW for abuse, naturally — verbal and psychological, in this case.

[pedophilia/rape tw]

Remember when I talked about sexual content in class required reading?

It gets weirder and weirder to me the more I think about the fact that the entire plot of The Crucible revolves around the jealousy of a fifteen-year-old child who “committed adultery” with a thirty-year-old man.

And she’s the villain of the piece.  And he becomes the noble hero.  And everyone that dies, dies as a result of her lust for him.  And nobody in class ever pointed out that there’s something kind of fishy about villainizing the child here, like she’s as much an adult as he is and it doesn’t matter.  Nobody ever said a thing about that.

And I’m unnerved to think about how much I loved this book.  For several years of my life, I thought its final scenes were an example of great writing.  It was one of my favorite books.

And in the two separate classes that I read it for, no one ever breathed a word about how there’s nothing to differentiate that “affair” from statuatory rape.

Hoo boy,

Remember that Christian girl I mentioned is in one of my classes?

Today, uh.

Today she indicated that she believes that illness is caused by sin.

I hadn’t met one of these people in person until now.

Men Should Respect Themselves

TW: rape culture, victim-blaming, general all-around fail

As I read this post [edit: it appears the post has been deleted] I went from confused to disgusted, and it reminded me of yet another post I’ve been meaning to write, but maybe it would be better to just deliver the short version: You know that whole “women should respect themselves” idea as applied to sexuality, with the implication that self-respect = not having sex?

Why doesn’t anyone ever say that to men?

Stop using that “lost control of myself” excuse and man up, men.  You’re a disappointment to God.