Legitimate

CAUTION: This post deals frankly with the topics of sexual assault, self-injury, and suicide. If you are likely to be triggered by these topics, please, take care of yourself and read with caution or come back next week for another post.

Rite of Passage

After my third sexual assault, I just quit caring. I thought of my body like the pin cushion on my grandma's sewing table, attacked again and again without ever changing much. Rape was all around me. At a young age I knew the terrifying details of my mother's molestation and of the attack which lead to my conception. Sexual abuse was a rite of passage. All the young girls went through it. Like menarche and pimples came the eating disorders and self cutting, symptoms of our common disease.        Our trauma was common, but hardly communal. Each girl suffered in her silent world of shame and fear and self loathing. Each thinking she'd asked for it, had it coming, deserved it. After all, it happened to all of us. And though quiet confessions, me toos, were made, no one admitted feeling anything besides the pain when a hymen is ruptured.      Few, if any of us knew the difference between being raped and having sex. We twelve year-olds entered adulthood with a vicious thrust. We knew our place as young women. We were walking warm respites. We were dens for serpents. We were holes to be fucked.          This story doesn't turn to a happy ending. Therapy and group hugs, Vagina Monologues and Take Back The Night rallies do nothing for our shame, our hatred, our distrust. It is no big surprise when a woman is raped. And no matter what the feminists say, she was asking for it, by having the brash audacity to have a sheath between her legs, instead of a sword.

The words above were written in collaboration with women who have survived the unthinkable. Each broken and shattered by her attack. Each struggling to collect the pieces and rebuild. Each has recoiled at her lover’s gentle touch. Each wept, shook, and flailed in her sleep as she relived the attack in her nightmares. Each felt her pulse quicken with every knock on the door, every shadow on the sidewalk, every wandering thought that lead her back to where happened. Together they have paid in full for a new car for their therapists, as they learned to trust again and fight back menacing shadows.  None were wrestled to the ground, or knocked on the head. All were acquainted with their attackers. Some were drugged. Some were coerced or threatened. A couple were unconscious when the attack started. All were, inarguably and absolutely raped.

There are some groups and individuals who believe that these women made it all up. That it wasn’t real. It wasn’t so bad, could have been worse. That their pain was not “legitimate.” But I have seen the cigaret burns on their ankles. I have cleaned the blood from their forearms. I have ridden in the ambulance when they have OD’d. I have held them while they wailed at two pink lines. The people who minimize and dismiss this torture, I would like to call monsters. I would like to rail and rage at them all. Shout at them “go get raped and report back!”  Instead, I gather my sisters, my sorority of shadows, to love each other, and support each other as this debate in the headlines brings our pasts to surface again. Then, in silence, and to my own surprise, I am glad for Akin’s comments, ignorant, misogynist and cruel as they are. I am happy for his ignorance, because in a country where the danger of sexual assault is as present as the danger of a sunburn, it means no one he loves has been through what we have. And I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

**This post is dedicated to the brave women who shared their strength with me to make this piece possible. Our words and experiences are blended into one voice, because when one woman is attacked, every woman bleeds.