Rape is very different from showing a breast or two, or two people making love.
There are many illustrations of murder which include the psychological impact on the victims. I really haven't found any material that empathizes with me, as a rape victim. Instead, every rape and sexual assault scene in Hollywood is 1-5 minutes long and triggers me into wanting to cry and rock back and forth.
I haven't seen any of his work regarding sexual violence, but there is a lot more depth to it than just the illustration of it. People who write about it who have never experienced it nor researched it sufficiently will not portray rape in a way that demonstrates the impact it has on the victim. It is often exaggerated and minimized as 'part of the life' of the character that endures it. The reality is that it is like your life was made of glass and rape is the bullet that was shot through it, creating cracks that continue to crack in everything that is connected to it, and sometimes the whole thing shatters and you can't ever imagine how to go back to the person you were before you were raped. You don't know how to put the pieces back together and neither does anyone else. But yet you are expected to keep on going. Happiness without sadness is a thing you don't understand, and you acknowledge that you may never understand. Fear is your best friend and your worst enemy. You might become repulsed by your own body. Your identity may fracture and your sense of reasoning and rationality may twist and warp. Labels follow you everywhere. It is a violation of life.
It's been 10 years. I have objectively gotten better, I take better care of myself. Even when I feel like I can not go on, I still get out of bed and I do my daily routine, whether it is going to work or going to the gym and doing my chores. I've hidden in the bathroom at work to cry, and I've had many nights where I've gone to sleep wishing I would not wake up in the morning.
I have had some wonderful conversations with people online, and that gives me hope that I will be able to feel happy and be able to recognize it when I feel it. I make art, I make music, and I take great care in learning about computer science and code, and making improvements in it. I have an interest in philosophy and a love of knowledge in general, and I often think it is amusing to me that I use abstract maths to distract myself from traumatic memories, a bit of a quirk that I like about myself. I have my moments where I feel like I think I might love myself and I know who I am, few and far apart they may sometimes be. The last 5 or 6 years have been like a hurricane for me. I still struggle with a lot of things, but I think it has gotten better.
That's rough. No one deserves this much anguish and suffering.
You mentioned lack of relatable narratives in the media, I think I know one you might find close: "CSI: special victims unit". I only watched one episode, but I found it touching so there is hope the rest of it is close too.
Perhaps more importantly, there must be a way for you to have your feelings acknowledged by real, live people. Is there a sex crime victim support group where you live? If there is, I encourage you to attend it, both for you own sake and for the sake of the other people there - they need to be understood in their pain as much you need it. More broadly, what you describe sounds close to PTSD, and anyone who's gone through that hell will readily relate to your story.
I know I should, but for right now talking on the internet about it (with the ignorance about whether I am truly anonymous blanketing me) is the most I can do. I have had bad experiences in group therapy, I did not find it helpful.
I have been diagnosed with PTSD, I know I show many symptoms of it. It makes me upset that it may have held me back in achieving goals in my life, but I just know that regardless, I need to take things slowly. I have too many emotions that distract and cloud my ability to think clearly about things I consider very difficult (mostly stuff in computer science and math).
So I just go really slow, as slow as I need to, and I wait for things to click, and then they do. I just try to forget that the rest of the world is still rushing by, and I remind myself that none of that matters to my own personal understanding about the things I want to learn about. I get discouraged a lot, and sometimes my mind can really feel completely clouded, and nothing I do seems to help it, and I can become very afraid that I will be lost in confusion forever. That I am either past my prime, or that I never really was smart, or that I'm too damaged to really persist and actually see the fruits of my labor. Sometimes I think it is good enough to be convinced into persisting despite knowing that I never will actualize, but that thought saddens me in an exceptionally destructive way.
I know I am strong and that if there's anything that really keeps me wanting to live day to day, it's being able to experience learning in the right way, and I consider myself lucky that I get to do that even though I work.
I have, I met with a licensed psychologist who did this in my area, but we didn't proceed because my experiences as I described them were things he did not think he would be the best with helping.
Well, have you been raped, or are your opinions purely formed from a third party position?
"Yeah, I heard it's not so bad", is probably one of the most careless, senseless, benevolent quips you can possible make to someone who has been raped. No wonder the judicial system is so flawed when it comes to the victims of this horrible crime.
I am so sorry to topoligel who has to read your comment. I'm so sorry to topoligel, just in general. I wish there was something I could do myself, to make things better, other than be a kind, caring, empathic person, and try to do as little harm in my life as possible. I am so sorry the above comment was even uttered. No rape victim needs to hear something like that again
I know this is a popular anti-intellectual position, but it's simply wrong. It's possible to reason about the world even without having experienced a specific phenomenon.
I've never experienced life at the nanoscale, but that doesn't mean I can't reason about semiconductor physics. I've never experienced outer space, but I can still reason about it.
The fact that some people have a negative emotional reaction to certain ideas is unfortunate, but ultimately the onus is on those people to avoid centers of intellectual discussion like HN.
Being able to reason about matter is another thing entirely to being able to reason about what it is like to have a particular (very negative) personal experience.
We're not talking about an abstract negative emotional reaction to an idea we're talking about a concrete emotional reaction to an experience.
Why do you feel like you have to show people the door because they don't agree with your particular concept around 'intellectual discussion'?
Enimodas is discussing people's reaction to it, in entirely objective and measurable terms. His specific, empirically checkable claim: some people respond differently than topoligel.
The emotional reaction I was referring to is to enimodas ideas. Specifically, if some people are unable to handle certain ideas (such as the ones enimodas expressed), it's not the responsibility of the world to suppress those ideas.
Yes, he was. But you're not. You're labeling those that challenge him to verify he has that particular experience as either anti-intellectual and/or simply not welcome here.
Yes. The people challenging whether he has had a specific experience are attempting to distinguish a privileged group of speakers/thinkers, and and wish to deny the right of anyone not part of this privileged group to use their intellect on this topic.
I don't know how else to categorize that as anti-intellectual.
See also, "only priests/prophets/etc can reason about theology" or "only muslims suffering the shame of being related to a rape victim can reason about honor killings". Same idea - if you aren't part of the privileged group, your intellectual reasoning is somehow suspect.
No, that's not the same. You can reason about it all day long but you can't simply pretend that not having the experience puts you on an equal footing with someone who has that experience. So it helps to know whether or not the person speaking has the experience or not. Just like talking to an astronaut about experiencing space flight is probably going to give you a better SNR than talking to someone who has been stuck in a mine all their lives long.
As for priests and prophets, they're all talking to themselves and on that front everybody is equal.
The honor killings bit is related to the ethics of killing which is something we all have way too much experience with and touches on the 'you have the right to extend your arm as far as my face' bit so that also doesn't apply.
A person with experience may have some specific piece of knowledge, but no one claimed enimodas was incorrect for that reason. Nor did enimodas claim his knowledge was coming from a particular experience that he lacked.
As for priests and prophets, they're all talking to themselves and on that front everybody is equal...The honor killings bit is related to the ethics of killing...
Wait - are you using reason without having the specific experience or being a member of the privileged group? How does that work?
> I've never experienced life at the nanoscale, but that doesn't mean I can't reason about semiconductor physics. I've never experienced outer space, but I can still reason about it.
>Well, have you been raped, or are your opinions purely formed from a third party position?
Do you mean anecdotal evidence triumphs statistics, or for lack of being able to find statistics about this, the difference of human experience?
>"Yeah, I heard it's not so bad",
You must have misread. I did not diminish her experience anywhere, I only said others can have different experiences, and quoted one.
Next to that, I asked a question. I know most people interpret those kind of questions as a more 'polite' way of saying something they already believe, but I seem to be in the minority of people who don't make judgement calls about everything and anything, and I don't know of some special sign (like the irony sign or a /s) I can put after my question to let the reader now it's an honest question.
People might have multiple ways of thinking about their own experiences, and some of these ways are collected from people around them, the culture they grew up in. Some of these ways are truths that reside within themselves - their own feelings. The truth that an individual knows inside of the themselves can only talk about themselves, it can not describe how another individual feels about their own self awareness.
People may share empathy between similar feelings, but this does not mean that one person should try to project their way of having emotions onto another person, as if there is a 'right' way to have emotions and a 'wrong' way to have emotions. Emotions are not actions, they are emotions.
For me, as a rape victim, being raped affected my feelings in a way that was traumatic. No one else can tell me what my feelings were from the experience I endured. So now that we can take this as a fact, instead of an opinion, we are getting somewhere in understanding how to define rape objectively, using subjective (but qualified) terms. The reason I feel those feelings is because I was raped.
You don't have to make a judgement call. But some things can only be known on an individual level, and it is up to you to decide whether you believe that person, and that is all you can do as far as 'knowing' anything about it without experiencing it. From that, you can direct your life and how you interact with and understand the world. But that is the limitation you are at.
I do not know what it feels like to be a rape victim who does not feel like it harmed me significantly. I do not know how I would communicate with them because I have never had to. I have never met anyone that has been raped and brushed it off like it was the same as eating cereal that morning instead of toast. So I have no perspective on this.
>I have never met anyone that has been raped and brushed it off like it was the same as eating cereal that morning instead of toast. So I have no perspective on this.
I think you might be misunderstanding the perspective quoted there. It's not about the rape being trivial so much as being no more a salient feature in their life than breaking a leg or some other traumatic but ultimately temporary pain. I'm sure somebody who felt the way you described exists but they're an extreme outlier.
I know that for me, the thing that feels most like reliving the experience is going through the calculus of whether I've suffered enough to be able to accept my own experience as legitimate. Retelling the story triggers that feeling rather than the feeling of the actual events.
I tried for several minutes to write you advice, but couldn't be confident that anything I might say would help. I hope your inner life gets better and you find peace.
I can understand the first paragraph perspective as being a valid one, but I can not understand how that would prompt a rape victim to complain about rape victims who want to shed light on rape as a crime. I know some people are immature and think that it's a grab for attention, but I think that these are immature and / or unresolved coping methods.
I had a therapist suggest to me that that was what I was doing to myself, re-traumatizing myself every time I remembered it. I do not think so. I think having a parent scream at me that what I experienced was not rape, was traumatic. I think having a parent prod and poke until I described my rape in detail was traumatic. I think my rape was traumatic, I felt violated. I think it continues to affect me sexually, to the point that I am almost hopeless in having a normal sexual life.
I do not desire living a life of suffering, but I allow myself to feel the sadness and the emotions that trauma caused. I have had people mock me and call me cruel names and say very cruel things, some people I was very close to, over the incident. I was convinced that I hated myself because of it, because of the whole thing. It was painful to accept that I had been raped, but it was not as painful being raped. I had almost been brought to believe that remembering being raped was suffering that I willfully brought onto myself. For me, beginning with that premise was mental hell. I could never resolve the feelings I had, I couldn't explain why I was crying all the time for what seemed like no reason. Everyone around me wanted a reason, but the reasons I gave when I had them weren't enough.
For me, talking about my rape when it is relevant helps me. Feeling like I have firm position and understanding of what happened to me helps me. Feeling like I am emotionally and intellectually strong despite my past (and how my past has affected me) helps me. I am genuinely sorry for what you experienced. In a similar light, I can not be confident with anything I can say to you to help, because maybe you have already found inner peace and balance. I'm just okay. I'm sad, but I'm okay with being sad, because there are lots of things that happen in life that are valid things to feel sad about.
Thanks for articulating what I felt when I read that comment. I would have responded, but just about everything I came up with would have violated the site guidelines.
Yes, I have. There's a certain resentment that comes with this question. Because it means that to comment on this issue my rape must in turn be deemed legitimate for my words to be legitimate. To be short on details for reasons that I hope a compassionate person might understand, it first started with things that probably don't fall under the category of 'rape' so much as molestation. Sexual assault is the legal term. But I was a child and had to live with this person for years, one half of the family knew and the other half denied everything.
I spent years locking my door every night, because if I didn't I had to worry about them coming into my room, waking up with their leer hovering over me. I've definitely been traumatized by this aspect. To this day I'm afraid to sleep with the door open. I rationalize it to myself as a fear of malevolent spirits but it's fairly obvious what the true fear is.
That's probably not good enough for you, and for that I resent you further.
Ultimately upon reflection I find that it wasn't so much the molestation itself that was particularly bad, at one point in high school I noted to myself that I'd rather re-experience it once every three days than experience three days of school. (I wasn't particularly bullied, I just despised school itself that much.) What was absolutely traumatizing was what happened after. The denial, living with this person that's not being held accountable for their actions.
Having to deal with the fact that you're not allowed to talk about what happened or you're a dirty liar, or you'll start a huge argument, or this or that will happen. The one thing you want most is validation, and validation is in short supply. Even for the victim of a more 'traditional' rape we can see this in action. How your friends are forced to take sides because of the huge weight of what a big deal this is. (http://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/370ayh/ever...)
I didn't want things to be a big deal, I just wanted them to acknowledge what happened and take steps to make sure it didn't happen again.
(As a final note of pedantry, that's not what benevolent means.)
Thank you for your response. I have developed the strength to be able to respond back to comments like that, or to ignore them. I have heard them all my life. People like you existing and continuing to have the strength to exist like that is enough. I try to be a person like that too. Make sure that you are kind, caring and empathetic to yourself.
Your comment has echoes of how people used to think about child sexual abuse - it only becomes a problem for thechild if the adults make a fuss.
We know now that child sexual abuse can be very harmful to the child even with optimum adult reaction to that abuse. We can see changes in the size of bits of the brain, for example.
The problem is that people who say "Oh my rape was no big deal, I'm fine, you should get over it" are a) likely deflecting their own trauma and b) not being at all helpful to the "whiners" who have experienced trauma from rape. I found your comment to be marginalizing, at best.
There is no excusing rape or calling it anything other than it is: a violation. Anyone who marginalizes rape, even your anecdotal victims, are 100% wrong. Even if one person is able to walk away from a rape without significant, crippling trauma, there are still dozens of others who will never, ever be the same.
Similarly the stigma associated with rape victims (although its improved markedly in the developed world, it still seems a problem and even more-so in some middle eastern countries). I can't help but think our puritanical attitudes toward sex and its attendant 'cult of virginity' contributes to that stigma; the notion that the victim is somehow existentially damaged.
> soft music & get mother's to form an emotional bond with the product.
What if it turns out that people have a finite amount of 'emotional bond chemicals' available each day, and by isolating that feeling and associating it to a product instead of to the baby, well, let's suggest for some people the newly constructed relationship between people and objects is (mother's emotion -> object, object -> baby's emotions, baby's emotions -> object, object -> mother's emotions) , and it doesn't work as synergistically efficient as you might expect? What if you don't even know how to measure stuff like that?
What if there is a measurable loss that isn't obvious? What if it's linked to the most random of things, so it isn't even predictably rational in how it affects the system it operates within? The problem with advertising and emotional manipulation is that the information only flows one way. And a constant stream of increasing revenue doesn't mean people are happy, it just means they are buying stuff.
There are many illustrations of murder which include the psychological impact on the victims. I really haven't found any material that empathizes with me, as a rape victim. Instead, every rape and sexual assault scene in Hollywood is 1-5 minutes long and triggers me into wanting to cry and rock back and forth.
I haven't seen any of his work regarding sexual violence, but there is a lot more depth to it than just the illustration of it. People who write about it who have never experienced it nor researched it sufficiently will not portray rape in a way that demonstrates the impact it has on the victim. It is often exaggerated and minimized as 'part of the life' of the character that endures it. The reality is that it is like your life was made of glass and rape is the bullet that was shot through it, creating cracks that continue to crack in everything that is connected to it, and sometimes the whole thing shatters and you can't ever imagine how to go back to the person you were before you were raped. You don't know how to put the pieces back together and neither does anyone else. But yet you are expected to keep on going. Happiness without sadness is a thing you don't understand, and you acknowledge that you may never understand. Fear is your best friend and your worst enemy. You might become repulsed by your own body. Your identity may fracture and your sense of reasoning and rationality may twist and warp. Labels follow you everywhere. It is a violation of life.