Cunt (28 page)
Authors: Betty Dodson Inga Muscio
I still cry when this memory comes up.
I am crying now.
Life is so complex.
Since writing
Cunt
, my position on sexual assault and violence toward women has also evolved considerably.
In
Cunt
, I limited my focus to the rape of biological women, but I have since realized that
rape affects all segments of the population. Rape isn’t just about men raping women.
It is about the powerful raping the powerless.
Every day one can read reports of children being stolen, raped and killed. The media
tends to showcase stranger abductions, although the proclivities of Catholic priests
have recently come to light. Neither of these situations addresses the likelihood
of children being sexually assaulted by adults they know, love and trust. How many
children in this world live with the horror of rape in their daily lives? How many
grown-ups have buried deep the terror of “visits” in the night? Of getting up for
school the next morning and facing a playground of kids, many of whom may have also
had similar visits the night before?
We live in a culture that rapes its children.
Think of this in terms of, oh say, a college anthropology textbook on ancient Mayan
culture. Here is a line from a hypothetical textbook called
United States Culture Five Hundred Years After Columbus:
One trait of twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. culture was the widespread rape
of children. According to research done during the time, anywhere from 826,000 to
three million children were abused in 1999. Abuse was categorized as “neglect,” “physical”
and “sexual.” As many as one million children were reported as victims of sexual abuse
during that year. At the time, this number was equivalent to or more than the
entire population
of many major cities, such as Seattle, Detroit, Houston or San Francisco. Exactly
how many went unreported could never be substantiated.
Something called “child pornography” also featured in the socioeconomic relationship
between consumers and the business sector.
I can’t think of any other culture that manages to rape so many of their children.
I think it is weird to live in a culture that does this.
Of the four biological men I have been closest to in my life,
all
of them have been sexually molested and/or violently raped either as adults or as
children. In other words, 100 percent of my closest biological male friends and ex-lovers
have experienced varying degrees of sexual assault. This overwhelming percentage does
not include the two male relatives in my family who were molested as children.
Every time
I speak at a Take Back the Night rally, two or three men come up to me afterward
and tell me, often for the first time in their lives, that they were raped, or thwarted
a sexual assault, or have never spoken of their childhood ordeals of molestation with
anyone in their lives.
Every time I speak, a few men muster the courage to break their silence, shame and
fear clouding their eyes. I always wonder how many men were not yet ready to say anything.
Thanks to the anti-rape movement, many women feel freer to speak out about rape. This
is still difficult for many women of color, Muslim-American women and women raised
in poverty, but some improvement has been made. It is not generally acknowledged that
men can be in positions of powerlessness, so it is even more difficult for them to
speak out.
Rape is often viewed as a “punishment” for defying norms, as a way to ensure silence
and conformity, so if biological women think we have it bad by being cast as “whores”
who must have “brought on the attack,” imagine the
veritable field day
lawyers, doctors, judges, reporters and cops have with those who endanger society’s
stagnant ideas of gender identity.
I have heard from many people, and read in books and articles that gender-variant
women are forced to give police officers blowjobs as a matter of course.
Sylvia Rivera mentions this phenomenon in an interview with Leslie Feinberg:
When drag queens were arrested, what degradation there was. I remember the first time
I got arrested, I wasn’t even in full drag. I was walking down the street and the
cops just snatched me. We always felt that the police were the real enemy. We expected
nothing better than to be treated like we were animals—and we were. We were stuck
in a bullpen like a bunch of freaks. We were disrespected. A lot of us were beaten
up and raped.
Transgendered and/or effeminate men are victimized on a whole different level of power
and control, as the well-publicized murders of Brandon Teena and Matthew Shepard horrifyingly
illustrate.
Gender-variant people suffer untold humiliations in emergency rooms, courthouses,
police stations and morgues. For transgendered folks who are sexually assaulted and
live to tell about it, there is no end to the brutality at the hands of community
officials.
One cannot assert that biological women suffer from sexual assault
more
than anyone else. Biological women are the only ones for which even non-conclusive
statistics
exist.
There are no widely published rape statistics on transgendered women. There are no
children’s crisis hotline numbers explained and handed out at schools. There are no
readily accessible resources for biological or trannymen. In this regard, biological
women have it a lot better than other genders and children—which isn’t, I assure you,
saying much.
So, the focus on biological women being sexually assaulted no longer serves me. In
this country, children, adolescents and adults are all raped, molested and sexually
victimized.
According to my calculations, if I throw in everybody who is affected by the sexual
assault of a loved one, this adds up to pretty much the entire population.
Much, much,
much
furthermore, it has become impossible for me to make distinctions between the rape
of a human being and the rape of the earth.
And by “the earth” I do mean the plants, animals, waters, mountains and soil—but “the
earth” also includes human civilizations, languages, religions and traditions that
have been in existence for millennia.
Not long ago, I read
A Language Older Than Words
by Derrick Jensen. This book profoundly validated my entire existence, giving voice
to many thoughts I have had about the role of rape in our culture—thoughts I have
mulled over for years and years, but have not had the courage to articulate outside
my heart.
Please, please.
Read this book.
Derrick Jensen grew up in a “privileged” white setting. His father was a powerful
attorney and his mother, a homemaker. There are five kids in the Jensen family. The
attorney father regularly beat the oldest three, while he sexually assaulted Derrick
and his youngest sister on a regular basis.
Their mother was also routinely beaten and raped.
They showed the face of a happy, well-to-do white American family to all who witnessed
their lives.
I can see their toothy family portraits without even closing my eyes.
I have seen images of happy families so many times in my life.
Mr. Jensen got a degree from the Colorado School of Mines, but soon veered off the
path his background so effectively paves for him and his lot. He eventually became
a writer and environmental activist. With his (to me) impressive background in math
and science, he was able to look at the world around him and make precise conclusions,
based on fractalized sociological patterns.
What he came to understand and communicate so courageously in his book is that abuse
in a family operates under the exact same rules as abuse in our culture.
In March 2002, I read about the deaths of 250 million monarch butterflies in Mexico.
The “news” reports laid the blame on the weather. There was, evidently, a sudden freeze.
But if one scratches the surface of this story, one finds that all of the trees that
protected the butterflies from sudden weather changes were recently cut down.
The butterflies died because the forest was raped.
The trees, murdered.
This rape and murder was perpetuated by people who have been checkmated into poverty
and despair by NAFTA.
Some of the very few people who benefit from NAFTA are also the ones who bought the
trees from the checkmated Mexican community.
So we have here a situation where the abuser coerces the abused into abusing others
and we end up with 250 million dead monarch butterflies, a community of people who
have been thrust further into poverty and despair by getting shafted out of the tourist
money that the butterflies used to bring, and a “media” that “blames” all of this
on someone it whimsically refers to as “Mother Nature.”
The abuser (in this, and most cases, “the abuser” is an amalgam of the few people
who benefit from NAFTA, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Carlyle
and Bilderberg Groups and so on) is far removed from the situation, and people in
America are too “busy” to read through the lines and trace the blame backward down
the serpentine reality of cause and effect.
People in the area tried to describe the stench of 250 million rotting butterfly corpses.
If 250 million people in America died, that would leave us with roughly thirteen percent
of the present U.S. population.
But people are not butterflies, right.
People are, well,
more important than butterflies.
We have
opposable thumbs
, hello.
You can’t possibly compare the sanctity of a human’s life with that of a butterfly.
In our culture, you can and, indeed, must
quantify sanctity
, and butterflies have less than people.
When I was younger, I found a place by the ocean where the monarch butterflies stopped
in on their way to Mexico. Their stomping ground was a eucalyptus grove. It is hard
to describe the beauty of millions—do you understand me:
millions
—of butterflies all in the same place at once. They hang from the trees in magnificently
gigantic bunches, and the sky can barely peek through the fluttering of their wings.
I went to the eucalyptus grove all the time, and never saw another person there.
Nothing
boosts a teenager’s self-esteem like knowing they have a secret butterfly grove to
look forward to every fall. Millions of monarch butterflies gave me the strength to
trudge my ass through the high school years, but if I were to list them in the acknowledgments
of my next book, most people would think I was a fucken flaky-assed tree-hugging crystal
gazer.
I am, nonetheless, filled with a deep mourning and loss at the death of 250 million
butterflies.
It is no less painful than when my brother died.
It’s okay to be sad about my brother, but it’s not okay to be sad about the butterflies.
I believe this loss resonated in the hearts of everyone on the planet, whether they
were aware of it or not. And when people experience loss after loss after loss, but
never acknowledge that anything is gone, well it makes for a fucked-up population
that rapes and/or condones the rape of its children.
In Derrick Jensen’s family, there was much sibling resentment.
He considered himself “lucky” that he didn’t get the shit kicked out of him for the
slightest transgression. This is how his father maintained control over the whole
brood. The three eldest would never think to align their cause with the two younger
ones, and they, in turn, were too filled with shame to talk to anyone at all.
In the context of the butterflies, trees and the people in Mexico, people in the U.S.
are supposed to be considered the “lucky” ones. With our highly-touted full bellies
of food and semblances of education and health care available for our children, we
would never think to align ourselves with an environment and a population that has
suffered from the abuse of the few who benefit from NAFTA.