Trigger warning: rape, abuse.
A few months into my freshman year of college, I was on a date with a friend of mine who I thought might be able to become something more. We watched a movie and had dinner and eventually made our way back to the dorms where we both lived as first-year students on campus. We kissed, and I didn't mind that.
He made a move to go further, and I stopped him. I wanted to take it slow, to enjoy the romance. He laughed at me and started kissing me again. Then he kept going once more. I told him no, I didn't want to. He kissed me to stop me from talking. The kissing was starting to feel less comfortable.
I remember trying to get him to stop by making another excuse, something like that my roommate could come in so he should leave, but he didn't listen to me. Then my mind was blank, and I didn't say anything else. I never said yes.
The next year, I moved into a dorm room with a friend from high school. We started drifting apart when I realized how often she lied to me—about nothing, about small things, about big things. She constantly lied. I realized later how effective her lies were at manipulating people. She was charming and funny and beautiful, and people wanted to believe her. But she lied.
She drew me into her web of people so that everything I did revolved around her. I lived with her, I went to school with her, my friends were her friends—she was the center of my entire world. Everything came back to her.
She was charming and funny and beautiful and she had a temper. Not a temper that would hit you in the face or leave bruises. A temper that was cold and sharp and came off the tip of her tongue. She turned every move I made against me, telling our friends that I was the one abusing her until many no longer spoke to me. If I got angry or upset with her, she would apologize, but she would tell me that I was wrong, that it hadn't happened that way, that I was crazy. I already disbelieved my own mind, so I believed she was right. I tried telling some of my friends, and they asked me why. Why would she do that? What motive would she possibly have?
When I finally got away from her, she haunted me. I couldn't be near anyone who reminded me of her. Even after I was able to move out and cut off contact with her, I had difficulty maintaining relationships with women. I saw her face in the faces of other women, and I ended up back in the closet, unable to face calling myself any kind of queer when queerness was associated with her.
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I didn't call what happened to me rape.
Growing up in Oklahoma, the only thing I was told about rape was that it was when a man forces a woman to have sex. To me and many others, "force" clearly meant something like the knife in the back alley scenario that is so common in popular culture. That wouldn't happen to me.
When I was raped by someone that I liked, I didn't call it rape. I didn't call it anything. A few weeks later, my rapist was dating a friend of mine (I'll call her Mary) and I still didn't have the words to tell her what happened to me. I vaguely tried to tell Mary to avoid him, but it didn't work. They dated for months. I avoided them during that time, partly afraid to see him again, but mostly afraid that my inability to warn Mary would cause the same thing to happen to her.
A little while after they broke up, I ran into Mary. I asked her about him, and eventually told her what he had done to me and why I had tried to break them up initially. She was horrified, but thankfully he had done nothing like that to her. I'm still haunted by the what-if, though—what if my lack of words had caused my friend to be raped by the same man?
I didn't call what happened to me abuse.
In a lot of places, it still isn't referred to as abuse. My abuser was a woman. The fact that she was a woman affected my relationship with sexuality for years, closeting me, making me afraid to be around women who reminded me of her.
Kate Abramson's "Turning Up the Lights on Gaslighting" speaks to me for many reasons. It gives me words to talk about what affected me the most in my abuse, about how my abuse worked so well and so devastatingly. Gaslighting is a way of manipulating people into believing that they are crazy, that their own minds can't be trusted (10). I was already vulnerable to this. Abramson importantly points out that gaslighters don't always have the goal of making their victims crazy, they don't always even consciously know what they are doing—but it doesn't mean that they aren't doing it (2). I believe this is true of my abuser. I don't think she had a particular goal in what she did to me, but she did it anyway.
We know the importance in rhetoric of building relations and constellations (an extremely important goal that should be supported), and we also know how abusive behaviors and histories make these relations difficult to uphold. They can tear down the networks we build as quickly as we create them. Therefore, creating space for people to resituate themselves—to talk, to heal, to commune—after and through abuse is a rhetorical necessity.
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