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Authors: Friedman,Jaclyn Friedman,Jessica Valenti

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BOOK: Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape
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If you want to read more about RACE RELATING, try:
• Invasion of Space by a Female BY COCO FUSCO
• When Sexual Autonomy Isn’t Enough: Sexual Violence Against Immigrant Women in the United States BY MIRIAM ZOILA PÉREZ
 
7
 
What It Feels Like When It Finally Comes: Surviving Incest in Real Life
 
BY LEAH LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA
What You See on Oprah
 
The common incest-survivor trope goes something like this: You run from it your whole life until you finally have to face it. But then you go to therapy. You make it to a support group, where you cry and hold a teddy bear. Life is crazy for a while; all you can feel are flashbacks, rage, crying, and throwing up. You’re a mess, visibly damaged to everyone who sees you.
 
Add more teddy bears and pastels for the soap opera version. For the queer-feminist version, add more cultural lesbianism, plus the day you send the letter to your parents and then never talk to them again. Add to both versions, maybe, that you join the system: You become the caring, burnt-out social worker (in a nice pink hospital clinic for the soap opera version, in the underfunded feminist collective for the other one).
 
Finally, there is a blurry, Vaseline-smeared image of the new you, where somehow those horrible memories fade into the background. Life is pink and happy and simple. Do you have a new body, or did the bad memories somehow fade? How do you fuck? How do you live? What do you do with the terrible knowledge that you carried, that became even bigger when you realized that it wasn’t just you? No one really can say. The smallest section of
The Courage to Heal,
the incest survivor’s bible, is “Moving On.” “Eventually, you find that things stabilize. You think about the incest, but it no longer dominates your life. There is room for pleasure, everyday activities . . . ”
 
One Real Deal, or My Incest Story
 
I look like your last four girlfriends, the girl on your block or on the bus. And I always had flashbacks to when I was a kid, a really little kid. When I was four, I had this thing I called my “baby feeling,” where I would suddenly feel in my body like a baby. My pussy would feel tiny and young, and I’d feel something probing it or stimulating it in a way that felt wrong. Growing up I was depressed, freaked out, anxious, terrified. When I was eight, even though I didn’t know the word “disassociate,” I knew what it was to leave my body, and wondered why the other kids didn’t seem to know how easy it was to make your eyes blur and go someplace else. I bled when I had penetrative sex, and had vaginismus from childhood to my late twenties.
 
My parents look just fine to the untrained eye. They are just fine. Some abusers are total monsters, like they look in the movie of the week, but the vast majority of the folks out there who are overstepping boundaries with kids’ bodies are pretty normal looking. My mom looks like a nice white lady, taught junior high school English for years, and loves gardening, the library, and trips to Cape Cod. What’s also true is that she’s a survivor of an alcoholic dad and a mom who didn’t like girls, or her, very much, as well as of a pretty horrible Polish Catholic school where a lot of bad stuff happened. There was hitting and there was probably other stuff, stuff that she never told me about with words, just with how her words would trail off and she’d give me a meaningful look when we were talking late at night on the stairs. My mom got away halfway from that family, that town, and that life, but she never had enough of a chance to talk out all the stuff that happened. Stuck in a pretty shitty marriage, she loved me and took me to the library; she also had huge depressions, was totally paranoid about my walking outside on our block or going to the mall with my friends, and called me every day more than once after I left home. She said I was more like her friend than her daughter and touched me casually in ways that didn’t feel good, on my ass, my hips. I wasn’t allowed to keep the door to my room closed. There was no room to talk about it. There was Normal World and Secret World, which you couldn’t talk about.
 
My teenage survivor years were fueled by Riot Grrl, the ’90s punk/anarchist/feminist movement. Early-’90s feminism was all about female rage at sexual violence coming up from underground. From
Hothead Paisan
comics to Lorena Bobbitt jokes, from WAC (Women’s Action Coalition) to WHAM (Women’s Health Action Mobilization) to Sapphire and Dorothy Allison’s writing finally getting into books you could buy at Borders—all that whispered rage was finally on the table. When I first read an article in
Spin
magazine about Riot Grrl, I filtered out the bullshit and went right for the part where they wrote about the “rape wall” at Brown University—a bathroom in the women’s room that girls in 1990 had filled with notes about boys who raped, boys to stay away from.
 
Growing up, I’d always known that there was the world where everything was fine, and there was the world we knew, us girls who walked through the school hallways so out of our bodies, the girls who wore tight clothes and makeup or hoodies and baggies. The boys who fucked that girl out on the edge of the football field, all the secret whispers. There was nowhere to go but to live to grow up and get the hell out. If you told a parent, you’d get yelled at; if you told anyone else, you’d get ignored, yelled at, or sent to foster care, where it would keep happening, but worse.
 
Riot Grrl was an answer to the questions so many of us had always known. In response, zines like
Babydoll, Fantastic Fanzine, UpSlut, Construction Paper,
and
Smile for Me
filled the Riot Grrl Press catalog.
Body Memories: Radical Perspectives on Childhood Sexual Abuse,
a slightly older zine out of the Bay Area, talked about fighting back, whether it was by leaving our bodies, cutting ourselves, or waiting till we got old enough to get out—or, in the case of Ellie Nessler, by shooting the man who’d raped her daughter. Instead of the grown-up incest survivor narratives, these zines, xeroxed and mailed to one another through penpal networks, told the stories of what it felt like to be a survivor while you were still surviving it. Zines were the first place where I read girls like me writing about multiplicity, leaving your body, struggling with sex, the exact terrible feeling of how it felt to be in the house when your dad was building up to hitting your mom. Not as “clients,” not as second-wave-feminist grown-up women who were going to support groups posted at the 1980s lesbian coffeehouse, but real, raw, messy, and now. We were the experts on our own lives, and we were saving one another by writing it all down.
 
I was a total failure at the social part of Riot Grrl and punk; even after I left my parents’ house, I was too socially awkward, depressed, and intimidated to be that popular, even among the freaks. Instead, I spent a lot of time roaming the streets, reading books in my room, smoking, and fighting depression. Even before I could name why, being in a room full of all white, suburban girls felt weird; the time I spent with other brown girls on full scholarship at our weird school, organizing the mass mid-’90s student protests against Giuliani’s budgets cuts, felt better. But I loved grrl zines and the books, and read them dog-eared on my single mattress in my $300 room on the Lower East Side. I loved how the music felt like incest survivor rock, and locked myself into my room listening to Babes in Toyland’s screams of rage from their gut and baby-girl sarcasm about “I won’t ever tell,” and Bikini Kill sneering, “Daddy comes in her room at night/He’s got more than talking on his miiind. . . . ”
 
What was in all the zines and seven-inch vinyl records was this: If we all said out loud how common the secret catastrophe was—that all of us knew girls who’d been raped or fucked with, that “every single person I know is a fucking survivor” feeling—what would it mean? If all the rage and memory and experience of what we’d lived through came screaming out, wouldn’t the world split open? What would the world do with the reality that maybe more than one out of four girls, one out of six boys, were sexually abused before we could vote? That the world was built on incest?
 
Maybe the revolution would come and there’d be no more hitting or incest, and I would be healed there, in final freedom. Maybe everything would all fall apart and we’d all be lucky enough to survive in the cracks, like in
The Fifth Sacred Thing.
What would it look like if the world changed a little bit, not all the way, if some things changed, nothing changed? What would it look like when that youth movement grew up?
 
The After-Party
 
Ten years later, I’m thirty-two, being paid to perform my one-woman show, a lightweight number about long-term healing from incest, to brilliant and freaked-out eighteen-year-old women of color at Sarah Lawrence. I am cranky and tired and miss my girlfriend. At the pub that doesn’t have alcohol (it’s a cafeteria), the brilliant and freaked-out eighteen-year-old women of color are asking me burning questions. Questions like, “Can you talk about healing? Like, what did you do?”
 
And I realize that this is the flipside of being finally grown. Looking at them, I see how, at thirty-two, I can’t even play that I’m a youth anymore. I have a responsibility to share what I know. But what I know is hard to package.
 
This is what healing looked like for me:
 
I get on a Greyhound when I turn twenty-one and graduate college and go to Toronto, a national border away from my family. I fall madly in twenty-one-year-old love with a queer Latino ex-punk rocker/prison-justice activist, who ran away from being beaten by his dad when he was fourteen and had been bouncing from Vancouver to Toronto since. Instead of the loneliness I knew in New York, my life fills up. There are potlucks at the prison-justice house, where we soak used stamps in rubbing alcohol to mail out the paper; $3 DJ nights with friends, narrow crooked streets filled with bikes and cheap food, the queer-of-color bookstore that lets us hang out, reading the books we can’t afford to buy, for hours.
 
My life fills up with love and safety, and then with memory. I try going to Incest Survivors Anonymous meetings, but the people there look so old and broken that I don’t go back. Instead, I get friends for the first time in my life, real friends, and we sit up talking, drinking tea, and eating cornmeal porridge with brown sugar and cinnamon. We talk about everything, including abuse. Share strategies for surviving. One friend gives me cedar oil that I smell to stop leaving my body, and it works! Another gives me the phone number of the weird leftover hippie counseling center, where for ten bucks you can rent a small room and beat up pillows with tennis rackets and scream really loud. Others pass on the knowledge we’ve skimmed off those few survivor self-help books: breathing exercises, telling yourself five things you see around you when you’re fighting disassociation, numbers for the cheap, non-fucked-up therapists.
 
I get really sick with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. I read Susun Weed herbology books, and even though she’s a crazy white lady I drink tons of nettle tea and take comfort in her assurance that the human body is designed to regenerate itself. I let myself sleep as long as I need to. I need to sleep a lot. I find a therapist who feels right and who barters sometimes, and even though eventually that gets funky, for a year it’s a sacred room where I can talk and talk out all the shit inside me. I do exactly what my insides tell me I need to do, whether it’s planting a garden or going out dancing and having lots of sex. My lover and I are two crazy survivors together; sometimes he knows how to hold me for hours when I am freaking out, and sometimes he gets freaked out by my freakout. Often it’s a huge mess.
 
I write my parents and try to say, this is what happened and I don’t want to never see you again, but I also want you to get real. When they say I’m crazy and need help, I don’t go home. I do yoga taught by a mixed-desi queer girl who teaches yoga for people of color, who believes that it has the power to heal and decolonize our bodies. I do stretches and breathe into where I can’t feel, where my hips still turn in to protect my pussy. I breathe into where my legs shake when I try to raise them an inch off the ground. I bleed when I get penetrated, so I don’t. There is so much knowledge inside my body.
 
Later, I’ll find INCITE’s life-changing writing and activism on women of color’s interwoven experiences of violence, how colonialism is connected to incest is connected to mental health, and how it all lives in the stories our bodies tell. In the meantime, I read my Chrystos and Sapphire books. I come bit by bit back into my body through words that tell me stories that sound like mine, of how racism, violence, and abuse are all wound together; about how denial of childhood sexual abuse and denial of systemic oppression feel the same.
 
The Slut’s Guide to Surviving
 
I take a long break from fucking anyone, take a break even from my body. For the first and only time in my life, I boy out, leaving femme behind for T-shirts and hoodies I can shove my head all the way to the back of and stick my hands in the pocket of as I go for long walks by myself down Toronto’s pretty alleys. I don’t have the strength to negotiate femme, the strength I used to have and will find again to be bulletproof when I walk down the street half-naked. I shut the door on sex just like I shut the door of my apartment, where I am ecstatic to be by myself. In that privacy and time of no time, I rebuild my body.
BOOK: Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape
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