How To Rule The Entire World
Posted: October 20, 2012 Filed under: Empowerment | Tags: breaking the silence, emotional pain, freedom, happiness, healing, honesty, self-worth, shame, silence, trauma Leave a commentDon’t ask for permission to be who you are.
Don’t ask for anyone’s approval.
You don’t need to be sexy or nice.
You don’t need to be anything to anyone.
Say what you want to say.
You are not the cause of anyone’s feelings.
Nothing outside of you is the cause of your feelings.
You are worthy of everything you need and want simply because you exist.
You are choosing your state of being at every moment.
The world means whatever you want it to mean.
No one is going to give you anything.
If you want your freedom and happiness, it’s yours for the taking.
~ “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” – Viktor E. Frankl
Dear Men, My Femininity Isn’t About You
Posted: October 17, 2012 Filed under: Dear Men, Rape Culture, Sexuality | Tags: compliments, creeps, femininity, honesty, rape culture, self-expression, sexuality, street harassment 1 CommentDear Men,
That sexy dress I wore in public wasn’t for you. It was for me. Because I enjoy being a woman and expressing my femininity. In choosing to wear that dress, you were not in my thoughts. I did not decide to wear it because I thought you might like it. I wore it because I like it. Do not share your uninvited opinion on how my looks are pleasing to you. Not only do I not care if they please you, but it’s both rude and arrogant to assume that I would. You are assuming that my self-expression in my choice of clothing has something to do with you, and it doesn’t. You think it’s a compliment to tell me that I am pleasing to you because you are making the wrong assumption that I get dressed in the morning hoping to please you. See how that works? Admire and appreciate if you like, but please save your “compliments” for women who have actually chosen to date you. See? It’s that easy to trade creepy for classy.
Thanks,
Courtenay
Why Men Rape: Part II
Posted: October 15, 2012 Filed under: Incest, Rape, Rape Culture, Sexual Abuse | Tags: abuse, breaking the silence, childhood, emotional pain, family, healing, honesty, learning to trust, memories, parents, rape, rape culture, rapists, revictimization, sexual abuse, sexuality, shame, silence, trauma 2 CommentsThis has been a difficult post for me to write. I intended to have it written a couple days ago, but I find myself in repeated resistance. Every time I write a few lines, I invariably find a distraction. This is a subject of immense interest to me in my quest to understand why I was sexually abused by my father, but for the same reason I find it a bit hard to stomach. I hope this is helpful for others on the same quest or for those who are simply trying to understand the question of “Why?”
This post is meant to clarify the reasons why men sexually abuse children. It is a continuation of Part I which discusses drug-assisted rape. The title, “Why Men Rape,” is appropriate when discussing child sexual abuse because rape was part of my experience of being sexually abused as a child, and also because I find it hard to call the involvement of a child in adult sexual activity anything but nonconsensual. The short answer to “why” is… because offenders made the choice to offend, albeit with a compelling feeling to do so. I wish to explore the common pattern for how men come to make that choice.
My main source of information has been a book by Douglas W. Pryor, titled Unspeakable Acts: Why Men Sexually Abuse Children. Pryor conducted a pioneering study of thirty convicted sex offenders, and gathered data on the thoughts, experiences, and behaviours of these men. It is the first in-depth, qualitative, and narrative-based study of its kind.
As was already established in my post on rape culture, the characteristics of the average child molester are virtually indistinguishable from those of the average man. The way they walk, the way they talk, they way they seduce, the way they objectify and sexualize others. However, one factor appears to influence which men choose to sexually abuse children – and that is experiencing sexual abuse in their own childhood but not understanding it as such.
This can mean having fond memories of being sexually abused, and framing that abuse as affectionate and/or erotic rather than traumatic. Offenders who did experience the sexual abuse of their childhood as “unsettling and confusing,” were typically blamed by parents or other nonoffending adults and made to feel responsible for the abuse, or they were simply ignored and given the impression that it wasn’t that big a deal. In any case, the perpetrator was not understood to be an abuser per se, and the victim was given no feedback to suggest that there was anything wrong with what the perpetrator was doing to them, and that is was their fault it was happening.
The larger cultural context of silence and secrecy around taboo subjects like incest and sexual abuse also do nothing to curb the young victim’s blurred sense of acceptable boundaries, sexual respect, and personal physical space with others.
So with their own abuse framed as not having been abuse, these men went forth into the world, and often when they were around children who were the same age as they were when they were abused, they experienced some unexpected sexual feelings arising in them. This was generally precipitated by a cluster of negative life experiences, which occurred in mostly random combinations, although there were only six general themes that those interviewed experienced: feeling trapped, sexual problems and boredom, loss of male authority, engulfment in masturbation and porn, major emotional shocks, and feelings of sexual inadequacy.
The men chose to cope with these challenges by feeling unhappy and disconnecting emotionally, and yet they still strongly desired an outer change in their circumstances. It is my observation that these men feel powerless in their lives and have no sense of being able to change their circumstances, or failing that, to change their own state of being in order to experience their circumstances differently. Many appeared to feel as if they had no choice in the matter of offending and felt that their urges were simply “uncontrollable,” and thus found ways to justify their actions so that they could live with themselves.
The moment of shifting in adulthood from being a nonoffender to an offender was clearly demarcated in the memory of nearly all thirty of the convicted sex offenders. They could pinpoint the specific moment and circumstances in which they made their “shift.” The fact that this is remembered so clearly indeed shows that the men were aware that they were making a choice which would take them across a moral boundary, but they could not deny the strong sexual feelings that arose in them, often for a specific child victim.
And this is the critical point of no return: the transition into offending is completed precisely because these men are able to reframe their sexual feelings for a child as acceptable in order to justify their actions, no doubt a remnant from their warped understanding of their own sexual abuse history. As Pryor notes, “without this interpretive bridge, the crimes reported by the men here would not have occurred.”
After making the shift and choosing to offend, multiple methods of approaching and engaging their victim were tested and locked into if compliance resulted. During their career as an offender, the men often felt guilty about their behaviour, but numbed it with busyness, alcohol, TV, etc., and some even projected their guilt onto the victim, lecturing them about their immorality. In every case they found a way to justify their behaviour, often putting the responsibility on the victim to stop the abuse.
It’s like their whole childhood repeating itself! And situations that bring up their pain will persist until these men heal from the abuse inflicted on them in their own childhood. I view their poignant moment of crossing the moral boundary into being an offender as their psyche trying to show them they have a wound to heal. The issues they have from their own childhood abuse are still with them and are literally reflected perfectly in their own reactions to life’s circumstances. Some men even chose child victims who had specific features that reminded them of their own abusers, such as hair colour. It’s really all just a convoluted effort to heal something.
These men put responsibility on the victim to stop the abuse since they were made to feel responsible for their own abuse. Their feelings of powerlessness, perhaps from not being able to control the abuse in their childhoods, led them to feel unable to change their circumstances, to feel like a passive victim of circumstances. This is really important to get. We all have the power to change our state of being if we don’t like the circumstances we’re in, and thus change the way we feel about the circumstances. Sometimes we can simply just change the circumstances, but not always. Still we’re all ultimately capable and powerful. The only thing standing in the way is negative beliefs. These child molesters had no life experiences to illustrate that they had this power, nothing to show them that they could choose to change their belief that they are a passive victim.
Silence and secrecy are what keeps this twisted little circus rolling, and branding offenders as monsters doesn’t help. The depths of my own anger surrounding this issue make it difficult to say what I’m about to say, but it is indeed the true that these men deserve some compassion from society. It is not to excuse, but simply to understand. In fact, it is in the best interest of child victims that we feel some compassion since the ugly stigmatization with which child molesters are branded can leave an offender feeling even more trapped and unable to reach out for help, which only exacerbates the issue and leads to more offences. This Louis C.K. stand up bit has been called a tasteless joke, but he is indeed on to something with his idea that we take it down a notch when it comes to “kid having sex people” because at least then “you get the kid back.”
~ “Every situation properly perceived, becomes an opportunity to heal.” – A Course In Miracles
We’re Not Really All That Different
Posted: October 13, 2012 Filed under: Addiction, Counselling, Drugs, German New Medicine, Rape, Sexual Abuse, Sexuality | Tags: addiction, breaking the silence, childhood, eating disorders, emotional pain, family, honesty, incest, learning to trust, revictimization, sexual abuse, sexuality, shame, silence Leave a commentEvery time I start to feel disconnected and alone, I’m going to remember tonight and last week. It’s amazing how many people say “me too” when I mention that I was sexually abused as a child.
Last week I met up with some new peeps who are also interested in German New Medicine. I had met one of them at the seminar a couple weeks ago, and she wanted to introduce me to these four very awesome ladies. We met in a coffee shop, and while discussing how I came across GNM, on one of the many tangents went on was my trip to Peru and the the subsequent address I made to my family regarding the sexual abuse in my childhood. I’ve been talking more boldly about it lately – it puts shame in it’s rightful place, and people never react in the negative or harmful way I thought they might (though ironically it was my own family, the people who are supposed to be there for me the most, whose response to my breaking the silence was the most damaging for me).
Two of the four women said that they had similar things happen in their childhood. It seems that although each story is unique in many ways, we have a common bond over our shared quirks and oddities. Eating disorders all around. Family problems. Learning to trust our own feelings. Revictimization. Problems with authority. Drug and alcohol problems. Sex problems. So much in our existence is the same and yet I often feel like I am out to sea all alone. Like I have to walk this road without help, because who after all is going to know what it feels like to be me. Who else is going to understand what it feels like to have a suicidal hatred of your body because 50% of its DNA belongs to someone who did unspeakable things to said body?
Tonight I met up with someone I haven’t seen in years, and it was the same story. In the process of catching up, I got into the nitty gritty again, and he said “me too.” As soon as he realized I understood what it felt like to be him, he couldn’t stop talking about his pain. He said he never really talked about it with anyone, not like we were talking about it. I could tell that it was an incredible relief for him to finally tell someone what effect the abuse has had on his life, and have them really know what he was talking about!
In talking about my experiences, both those from childhood and those of healing in the present, I have found nothing but relief as well. All the walls that first seemed to separate me from others began to dissolve and I feel I’m free to just be what I am, rather than play at wearing a mask. Keeping the subject taboo, keeps us shrouded in shame. It separates us further from the truth of who we really are.
~ “Honesty is the best policy.” – Benjamin Franklin