Personal Note / TUMBLRBINGE
So, when I was about eighteen, my best friend - the person I was closest to in the entire world - dropped out of college, and started stripping. I was in my Mary Daly phase. And I have to tell you, I slut-shamed the fuck out of that girl.
I mean, it was all done with the best intentions, of course. I was going to save her. So her makeup was “performing femininity in this really degrading way” and her sexuality was “attracting the wrong kind of attention from men” and her stripping was “throwing her life away” and I just couldn’t believe she would sell out to the Patriarchy like this, you know? And I said worse than that, I do believe. But it was always couched in “I love you, and I want the best for you.” I told her she needed better self-esteem - the only reason a woman would ever do this was bad self-esteem, right? Or brainwashing - at the same time I constantly criticized her intelligence, her ability to make her own choices, her body, and her life.
When she was sexually assaulted, she didn’t tell me. For a while.
“I was afraid you were going to get mad at me, you know?” Is what she said. “I was afraid you would tell me I brought it on myself by the way I dress or something.”
I mean, it makes me sick to tell you this story. This is a story I don’t tell pretty much anyone, and now here I am telling Tumblr about it. The friendship ended eventually. She sent me a letter, years later, in which she told me all of the terrible consequences that being my friend had on her self-esteem, told me I’d substantially made her feel like nothing, told me how very deeply I’d hurt her. She was right. I asked through friends if it was OK for me to contact her to apologize, and I did apologize, and we had a long talk, and then we never saw each other again.
We can talk about all of this: we can talk about the fact that I was abused as a kid, we can talk about the fact that my father in particular took an intense interest in My Developing Sexuality and told me I was a whore and would get raped a lot, we can talk about the fact that I actually was a survivor of sexual assault or attempted sexual assault by three separate parties by the time I was thirteen years old, which was fun with my dad calling me a whore the whole time, and we can talk about the fact that I absorbed a fuckton of messages that sex was evil, and sexual women “brought it on themselves.” But that is my intent, you know? This girl didn’t do any of that to me. She just got to be the recipient of the fucked-up attitude it created.
What do you do, when you realize what you’ve done, finally, and when it is this? You redefine your life, for one. You keep a close watch on yourself at all times. You read every sex-positive or pro-sex-worker book you can, and you work through this shit very very carefully and unsparingly, and you make the decision that the only way you can be there for this girl, retroactively, the only way you can repay her for the favor of being your friend, is that you have to be there for all the other girls this might happen to, every day, forever. You just have to. Nothing excuses the shit you said to this woman, the fact that you made her feel unsafe confessing her own rape to her best friend because you were such an awesome feminist. Nothing, ever, in the entire world. You just have to fucking commit to the path. If that means saying the scariest thing you’ve ever said, in public, because that is the best example you have of why slut-shaming matters and is bad, you say that thing, because you don’t value your own ass more than this path you are walking.
I don’t get mad about this, about slut-shaming, because it “hurts people” in some abstract way. I get mad about this because I have seen precisely how it hurts. I have been in the brain of a person who does it, it has been my brain, and I am telling you: it does not matter what goes on in there. What matters is what you do. So do the right thing, right now, because there is a high price to pay if that is not your choice.
yes. thanks for sharing.
