There’s No Bigger Betrayal Than Women Shaming Other Women About Their Assault
By: Felicia C. Sullivan
Tags: Rape, Mental Health, Culture, Women, Writing

Few things “trigger” me. I was born of a generation where we were told to shut up and deal with it. Bury your pain as far down as it will go. Lock it in a box and swallow all the keys. Keep smiling through tears, through sadness. Never let anyone see you cry, my mother once said. Because tears were a weakness one could weaponize. Our Achilles was our collective vulnerability, and part of me wonders if this is why it took forty years to get diagnosed with severe clinical depression.

When my psychiatrist spent two sessions mapping out my life, depression was the omnipresent specter that refused to leave. Motherfucker pulled up a chair, lit a cigarette, and smoked it down to the filter. So, I’d found creative ways to dull the edges. Drinking, obsessive perfectionism, and eating disorders were my shovels burying trauma and sickness so far beneath the ground it couldn’t breathe. Schrödinger’s cat gasping for air and whatnot.

And then there were the doctors who hailed from a generation where mental illness was something you fought your way through. Also, women were hysterical creatures. It’s no secret I see doctors who are younger than me.

All of this to say — I know how to cope. How to deal with it. How to get rid of the body. But still. The one thing that sends me into a blind rage is how people talk about the traumatic experiences of others in a way that perpetuates and upholds stigma and shames us into oblivion.

And there’s nothing crueler than seeing women — often women of my generation or older — essentially blaming us for why we got assaulted and how we handled it. As if there’s a correct playbook for dealing with unimaginable violations. As if we asked for this.

For all of our warring, while she was alive, my mother was as strong as they come. She was the epitome of a survivor having raised herself after her mother had abandoned her. Defiant, calm, you could put a gun to her head and her pulse wouldn’t break seventy — she wouldn’t even set down the cigarette perched at the edge of her mouth.

When I was small, she lived with an enormous man, a man who stalked and towered. A man who smashed her head into walls and wood furniture. A man who painted her the color of a constant bruise. A man who did things to me. A man whom she finally, after two years, made a plan and summoned the strength to leave. Even if it meant we’d live on the street because it was better, she realized, than living with him.

There’s much I will never forgive my mother for, but I would never fault her for not leaving a man who beat her. Because I understood what it was like to feel like you deserved it, that this was as good as it was ever going to get. That maybe he’ll get better. He loves me.

A month or so ago, I read an article where a woman strutted her strength in 800 words. She couldn’t fathom the kind of woman who stayed with a man who abused her. Everyone’s playing the victim these days, she mused. The kind of woman. And I think of the street I grew up on in Brooklyn. The kind of woman who. A place where the trash was picked up faster than the bodies.

The kind of woman who stays.

Where I hid under the kitchen table as my mother’s face was being slammed into wooden tables and chairs. The kind of woman who stays with a man. Until blood stained her teeth and the carpet. All because he had been the first man who said he loved her. All because the women we came up with didn’t know any better. We heard the beatings, the thumping through the walls, but minded our own. How could we leave our world? Where would we go?

The kind of woman who stays with a man who abuses her.

Who can judge what you’ve never experienced first-hand? Who can judge even if you had? Who the fuck are you to rewind the tape and dictate how you would deal with the hand my mother had been dealt with? It’s easy to issue your bold decrees and faux Popeye strength from the confines of your computer screen and your considered gentility.

Had you ever considered the real strength lies in staying alive and maybe plotting and planning and hopefully one day getting out? Of course not. You’re too busy telling us we’re victims for staying. We’re weak.

Honestly, who the fuck are you?

But good on you for judging the complicated lives of strangers. Hold on while I grant you a doctorate in psychology.

In 2013, I resigned from a job that had been slowly killing me. That summer, I was lost and sick and confused and my cat was dying from a disease no one could diagnose. Her convulsions were violent and I finally did the humane thing and let her go peacefully in my bed, in my home.

I don’t handle loss well. I spent the next few weeks sobbing on subway platforms and day drinking. I couldn’t say the words aloud, but I blamed myself for not seeing how sick she was sooner because I was forever on a plane, in the office, attached to my laptop, stressed out by work.

I felt I deserved punishment. And in 2013 I experienced a form of it, in my home, in the bed where my cat’s final breath sputtered out.

The next day I woke, shaking. I showered. I called a friend and told her everything but what had happened. She only knew that I’d been mourning and drinking too much. We spent the day driving around Brooklyn in her car, and I wanted to tell her what happened but I couldn’t speak the words.

Because, for a minute, I felt like I had deserved it. If you read these words back to me in 2012 and all the years that had become before and all the years after, I would’ve laughed at you. I was the woman in college who stood up for a friend who had been date-raped. I shouted no means no. But assault isn’t about strength or knowledge — it’s about circumstance and power.

I remember saying no. I remember fighting back. But he was stronger. And I remember that summer in 2013, that brief moment in time when I believed I deserved it.

After, I did what I knew best — buried it in a box. Forgot it. Moved on. I didn’t want to deal with it, I wanted it to go away. I adopted a new cat and promised I’d be better this time. In the seven years I’ve owned him I’m much like those helicopter parents everyone jokes about.

I changed my life. I dated. I laughed. I strength-trained. Got bigger and better clients and, in a strange way, it did go away. It was as if the summer of 2013 had ceased to exist.

I read an article written by a woman who admonished women for not reporting their assaults, that they, in fact, were the reason other women were potential victims. It’s an interesting argument because for a moment this woman has empathy for future victims until they are victims and then they’re blamed for being victims. Sort of like an ouroboros where we’re choking on our own skin. And it’s an argument where she fails to understand that women don’t ask to be raped. We don’t wave our hands in the air and shout, PICK ME!

It’s funny, not haha funny, but funny how a man could attempt to murder me and I’m not shamed or second-guessed or vilified or cause for suspicion or called an attention whore for reporting the crime. Yet, somehow rape and battery grant us a backstage pass to become a complicit accomplice.

When we do report it, we’re given a jury trial before the rape kit is even complete. When we do report it, we’re ruining a man’s life. Especially if he’s white, monied, and well educated. When we do report it, people wonder what we did to cause it, deserve it. When we do report it, people treat us differently. Handle us like we’re strange, fragile objects — circus freaks. Will we break? Don’t get near them, they’ll break.

When we don’t report it, we’re the reason he raped someone else.

I wonder — why are we always implicitly the perpetrator? When will women stop being blamed for what men do? When will women stop vilifying other women for what men do?

When will women, who boldly stomp their little feet and say “I’ll never allow this to happen to me,” realize rape or abuse or battery is not something you prevent or allow when up until the 1970s it was legal for a man to rape his wife? In the early 1970s, the only way marital rape charges would stick would be if the husband and wife no longer lived under the same roof. Women couldn’t get jury trials and punitive damages for sexual harassment claims in the workplace until November, 1991. We’ve been carrying the weight of history that undermines the power of women in service of what men do.

And suddenly, fifty years later, the stigma and second-guessing and shaming have magically disappeared because a few laws have changed and we have a movement? What Disneyland are you living in? We have progress, certainly, but not betterment.

But let me pause and catch my breath. I don’t want to tell the story of laws, the patriarchy, and women’s perceived notions of equality and power. This is not that story. This is not a social justice rant.

This is my story, how I feel when I read articles and women bantering in the comments blaming me and my mother for what men did to us, for actions we didn’t invite, consent to, or deserve. Perhaps it’s naive to think women would understand, be on our side, and have empathy for our point-of-view, but ours is not a Pollyanna world. We are blamed and labeled weak by the very people to whom we seek refuge.

It’s no wonder we find it hard to speak out — we feel as if there are no safe spaces.

Inside us, there’s an equal measure of beauty and ugliness, and the two, like warring siblings, claw and connive their way to the surface. Sometimes, our ugliest side comes to bear and other times we are compassionate, calm, and kind. The one that abides is the one you feed most. While the other will often worm it’s way up and through, it’s what you feed that rises to the surface.

No matter how much we abide by the “correct” playbook, someone will make us the villain. Someone will remind us of our place, which puts me to thinking that maybe you’d prefer us to keep our mouths shut so you can feel good about blaming us when we do.

Maybe that’s how you exercise your power.

I don’t know. I don’t have a neat and tidy reply. All I do know is the greatest feeling of betrayal is women who eagerly and willingly blame other women for their assault.

That’s the thing that breaks my fucking heart.