[TW: sexual assault, Aziz Ansari]"Not That Bad" - a good take imoSubmitted by toasthaste in general
The bits that stood out to me:
Women have already taken enough of a painful personal inventory to be able to say #metoo; I am not eager to go back over what I've come to comfortably accept as "crappy hookups," or "shitty sex," and come to realize that yes, that was sexual assault too.
If we begin to call all sexual assault what it is, we will have to voluntarily admit more pain into our lives, pain that we have up to this point refused to let in the door. If we call this kind of sexual encounter an assault, then women who have been weathering what they call bad sex will suddenly have justification for the icky feelings and shame that follows them home in the cab. And yet, we'd really rather just hit the showers.
What I'm realizing now, after reading Grace's story and the responses to it, is that when I shrink my own pain, I also shrink my empathy for women who feel the same pain and feel it full-size. I resent Grace for talking about her hookup as if it's an assault. I'm mad at her for talking about it at all.
But that's not because she was wrong to talk about it. And it's for sure not because she was wrong to go on a date, drink wine, or try to have a pleasurable sexual encounter. She wasn't. She wasn't wrong.
It's because if what happened to her is a violation, then we are all violated. And everyone is a violator. And that's a scary fucking world to live in. I don't want that to be the world I live in.
musou wrote
i think this hits the nail on the head. the widespread, longstanding denial about the ubiquity of sexual assault is not necessarily always motivated by a desire to protect abusers at all costs-- that's just the practical end result of a more complex set of psychological impulses. a lot of it is that people tend to behave in ways that accord with what they wish were true, even with a mountain of evidence suggesting the contrary.
i only bring this up because it's relevant, but i have been the victim of multiple sexual assaults in my own life. it took me decades to even admit to myself that they happened, and then years of therapy to make my peace with it all. it's like the old saying about eating an elephant, you have to do it a bite at a time. it took decades of chewing to get to the point where i can talk about it matter-of-factly, even pseudonymously on an internet forum.
and during that process, the biggest and hardest bite to swallow, for me, was realizing that i live in a world where all the people who do these horrible soul-destroying things are normal human beings, with thoughts and feelings and insecurities. they all have inner lives just as rich and varied as my own. they are just like all the people i already know. hell, statistically speaking, they ARE the people i already know. they are not uniquely evil monsters, born to be a villain in a story. we just live in a world where people have the ability to hurt each other in permanently debilitating, ineffably cruel ways, and do so regularly.
and that's too big and too scary of a reality for a lot of folks to face, especially if they haven't experienced that kind of psychological violence firsthand. it's so much easier to mentally inhabit a world where our psyches are perfectly elastic, and however much they temporarily deform under the stress of a violent collision with another, they always pop right back into shape afterward. but that's not the world we actually live in. and i kind of wonder if society is collectively even willing to make the effort required to accept that.