I have a friend named Elliott, who is a disabled, radical, working-class, Jewish, lesbian-feminist activist. She wrote an interesting article about the political implications of the contents of the supplemental dictionary of her word-processing program. The supplemental dictionary is a file that allows the user to customize the spell-check program by adding words that are not in the default dictionary that came with the program. Here is a partial list of words from Elliott’s file:
ableism
ableist
accessibility
Ashkenazic
assimilationist
batterer
classism
classist
clit
dyke
Eurocentric
feminisms
futon
heterosex
heteropatriarchal
homelessness
ism
lesbophobia
miso
mythologize
sephardic
sizeism
tampax
tempeh
therapism
yiddishe

Obviously, the words that are critical to Elliott’s defining her experience—not only her day-to-day reality, but also her identities and her oppressions—are missing. The point of Elliott’s article was to make visible the usually invisible process of marginalization. What does it mean when “tits” is in the dictionary, but “clit” is not? What does it mean when there is a term for hating queers, but not one specific to the combination of homophobia and misogyny? What does it mean when “ablebodied” is in the dictionary, but “ableism” is not? What does it mean when every conceivable category for christian sects and denominations is included, but the words descriptive of Jewish ethnic origins are not? What does it mean when all the pejorative terms for poor people are in the dictionary, but “classism” is not?

Elliott’s printout of the contents of her supplemental dictionary file makes visible a process that is usually hidden. The printout not only exposes a mechanism of exclusion, but it also suggests connections and patterns of oppression among her diverse identities.

What is missing from the traditional canon of dramatic literature? Turning to the supplemental file of my own canon of plays, I find that nearly all of the archetypes I use are absent from the traditional canon: the avenging mother, the survivor of sexual assault who is believed, the angry young woman, the ambitious winner, the fiercely loyal sisters, the venerated crone, the lesbian lover. My archetypal narratives are also missing: the sanctioned patricide, the woman’s resurrection through rage, the recovery of memory, the shifting of paradigms, the de-colonization of the body, the furious re-invention of the self, the reconstruction of the ruptured mother-daughter bond.

There are many archetypes in my lesbian-feminist culture that are missing from the traditional canon of dramatic literature. As with Elliott’s supplemental dictionary, I find it instructive to examine these omissions for what they reveal about that mainstream canon. These archetypes include the rejected older woman who, instead of becoming consumed with revenge like Medea, liberates
herself joyously from the entire heterosexual paradigm that would put her out to pasture at menopause. In the patriarchal canon, the archetypal survivor is Cassandra, whose ability to predict the future is seen as a curse, not a strategic advantage, because no one will believe her. In my culture, the survivor of male atrocities uses her second sight to heal herself and to rescue and recruit other victimized women. In our epic dramas, the daughter, unlike Elektra, sides with the mother against a perpetrating father, and our goddesses, unlike the motherless Athena, endorse the patricide of the perpetrator, not the matricide of the avenging mother. Our Antigones, longing for a voice in the political process, are not satisfied with impotent and self-martyring protests against a sadistic, misogynist system, but seek out the alliances with other powerful women. We have a literature
replete with warrior women from long lines of unbroken matrilineal bonding. Why are these rich roles and archetypes missing from a canon that purports to be universal?


I suggest that it is because of the censorship of incest as a subject fit for inclusion in the canon. If we believe the statistics that tell us one third of all girls are sexually abused before the age of eighteen, usually by a male caregiver, the case could be made that incest is the central paradigm for women in patriarchy. Incest is the template for a woman’s experience of betrayal by her fathers and her brothers. When the mother is forced to choose between the interests of her male partner or male offspring, and the interests of her daughter, she will most often align her interests with what will give her the most stake in a male-dominated system. Sadly, most mothers will reject their sexually abused daughters. And here we see the Cassandra who cannot erase her memory of trauma, but who cannot find the women—or the men—who will believe her. Here we see the Clytemnestra, who, in
avenging the murder of her daughter, falls victim to another daughter and a son who identify with the perpetrating father. Here is Medea who avenges her sexual rejection on the younger woman and on her own children. Here is Athena, defining the father as the true parent, the one who provides the “seed,” and the mother as only the empty carrier, the borrowed womb.

When incest is not named, when the incest story is not told, it becomes the accepted paradigm, part of the default lexicon for defining accepted reality.
In preparing this paper, I asked the members of my theatre newsgroup for titles of plays that dealt with child sexual abuse/incest. I say “child-sexual-abuse-slash-incest,” because, in my experience of working with survivors, the two are most often synonymous, or, at least, very closely related in terms of scenarios and syndromes.

The first thing I noticed from the list of titles was that the “slash” has disappeared. There is almost no connection at all between the portrayal of incest and child sexual abuse in the majority of these plays. Incest as a titillating scenario of adult desire is a recurrent theme. Child sexual abuse is all but absent.
A sampling of incest titles from the traditional and contemporary canon include: Oedipus Rex, Phaedre, Pericles, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Desire Under the Elms, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Ghosts, Fool for Love.

Lots of stepmother-stepson adult attraction, lots of half-brother-half-sister adult attraction, and a couple of cases of adult parent-child, mistaken-identity attraction. I know and have worked with hundreds of incest survivors, and not one of our stories even remotely resembles any of these. In fact, I don’t know anyone whose story resembles these. The popularity of these models for incest must be attributable to either the fantasies or the subconscious fears of the male playwrights who employ them as plot devices.

Moving away from incest to plays that deal with child sexual abuse, we find the field thins out considerably. Almost all of the plays in this category are recent ones. One of the oldest is Turn of the Screw, with its suggestions of sexual abuse by a tutor and a governess. Part of the much-touted mystery of this play, however, is the fact that audiences never know if the story is true or just the neurotic, projected, sexual fantasies of a frustrated spinster. There are two contemporary plays about child sexual abuse set in all-male environments, focusing on the fate of the perpetrator in prison communities: Lilies and Short Eyes.

Two of the suggested titles finally dealt with experiences of child-sexual-abuse-slash-incest. The first is Nuts, a play by Tom Torpor that was made into a feature film starring Barbra Streisand—a film which, unlike other Streisand films, received almost no critical attention. The protagonist is a prostituted woman who has murdered a john. During the course of her trial, she recovers repressed
childhood memories of paternal incest.

And then there is How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel, which has just won a Pulitzer. In this play an older girl is sexually abused by her uncle. What does it mean that a play on the traditionally taboo subject of incest has been officially recognized by being awarded the Pulitzer? Is this a sign that the silence about incest is being broken, or just a subtler form of censorship. In order to answer
that question it is important to look carefully at the depiction of the survivor in How I Learned to Drive, and it is also important to understand something about the process of a child when she is sexually abused, especially by a trusted adult or caregiver, as is the case in Ms. Vogel’s play.

The experience of the sexually-abused child is this: “This can’t be happening to me” and “This is happening to me and I can’t stop it.” There is a variation on that second part: “This is happening to me and it’s going to keep happening to me, night after night, for years and years and years, and I can’t stop it.” Obviously, “This can’t happen” and “This is happening” are mutually exclusive propositions. To accommodate them in one body, the mind splits off the second part--the
unthinkable, the unspeakable part. Some children literally experience themselves rising up to a corner of the room and watching it all from the ceiling. Others spontaneously repress the memory as it happens. In the case of Marilyn Van Derber, a former Miss America who was raped by her father for years, she had a “day child” and a “night child” identity. The “night child” had no communication with the “day child,” until Van Derber was in her 30’s and began to recover her
memories, the recovery apparently triggered by her daughter having reached the age at which her own abuse had begun.

Some children experience displacement. A typical episode of displacement involved a child who was raped by a friend of her father’s while her father held her down. During the rape she focused on a poster of a rock star that was on the wall, and afterwards she “remembered” the abuse being perpetrated by someone whose description tallied with that of the rock star. She successfully displaced the identity of the rapist to protect herself from information too dangerous to access.
In some cases, the child does not travel to the corner of the room, but instead, she merges her identity with that of the perpetrator. In this syndrome, referred to as “fusion with the perpetrator, “ the child identifies with him during the abuse, adopting a pornographic perspective toward her own body as “other.” Because of her complete lack of agency, it is safer to identify with the experience of the perpetrator than with her own. The child who experiences fusion during the trauma learns, as a survival skill, to become aroused by her own pain, fear, and humiliation.

Most survivors split off not only the incest, but also various emotional affects associated with the experience. The child whose natural instinct would be to fight off or even kill her assailant is obviously in a dilemma if this assailant is a primary caregiver on whom her survival depends. In cases of incest, normal healthy emotional responses can jeopardize the life of a child and she may develop completely various dissociative states to store these taboo and life-threatening emotions and behaviors. Rage at her rapist and grief at the betrayal are two of the strongest and most taboo emotions for the survivor, and it may be very difficult for the victim to access these, even later in life, because of her early association of these emotions with life-threatening conditions.

Getting back to How I Learned to Drive and the Pulitzer… Ms. Vogel’s play is an accurate depiction of a certain type of incest, in which the girl is older and the perpetrator is not violent and poses as someone supportive of her interests. In situations like these, it is common for the victim to feel complicitous, to mistake the perpetrator’s predation for a “relationship,” and to romanticize or sentimentalize the experience. Her confusion stems from the still-necessary repression of rage and grief.

Does this have anything to do with its official recognition? I maintain that it has everything to do with it. The key to that Pulitzer lies in what is missing from the canon: the incest play from the perspective of a recovered survivor—the survivor who has integrated her rage and her grief and who understands her experience in the context of a male-dominant culture dependent on the sexual subordination of women.

Ms. Vogel’s play was praised for the “humanity” with which she treated her subject. She was also praised for depicting the “complexity” (read “mutuality?”) of incest, the fact that is not always so “black and white.” They praised her even-handedness in the sympathetic portrayal of the perpetrator, the confusion of the victim. In other words, the majority of the critics were not noticing that the point-of-view was pathological, that the victim was still deeply dissociative. But in order to
notice this, they would have to notice the lack of anger or grief. I submit that her critics did not miss the anger or grief at all, and, furthermore, I submit that she received the Pulitzer precisely because that anger and that grief were missing. She told an incest story in which there is not political context, in which the act itself is as isolated as a tree falling in the woods, in which the perpetrator is not a sadistic predator, but “merely” a loser. Her survivor is resigned, superior, moving on. How poignant, how handy.

How I Learned to Drive is not the only dissociative narrative being valorized as the whole story. There are several well-known performance artists, women and self-declared survivors of horrendous sexual abuse, who tour to colleges and universities where they take their clothes off and even recreate scenarios of sexual abuse in the name of sexually liberating themselves or protesting the
objectification of women. Performance art critics have written tomes of theory about these artists, none of which incorporates a shred of theory about trauma and recovery.

What if these “radical porn feminist activists” are actually partially-recovered survivors still in the “acting out” phase of early recovery? What if the replication of traumatic scenarios under these more controlled and therefore subjectively more empowering circumstances (no pimps, no johns) is part of their process in integrating? What if the audience is watching an unrecovered survivor
parade her pathologies in front of us in an articulate, but still incoherent attempt to tell her story and integrate? What if these are not sexually liberated adult women at all, but women who are still slaves to their traumatized childhoods?

One sure way of finding out would be to compare their performances and their narratives to the work of recovered survivors, whose narratives incorporate anger toward the perpetrator and a full sense of the lost entitlement of safety and agency, with the cultural context in which their abuse occurred as subtext. But these narratives are conspicuous in their absence. The story of the fully integrated
survivor is missing, even as the survivor who sentimentalizes her perpetrator or who recreates her own abuse for mass consumption receives the official endorsement of the mainstream.

Why aren’t more women noticing and protesting this absence, this censorship? Well, let’s imagine we are at a play right now. And let’s assume that those of you who are listening to this paper are the audience. Let’s break it down: Half of you are women. For every three women in the audience, one will have been sexually abused as a child, most likely in a situation involving incest with a male
perpetrator. Let us consider that those women, those women who comprise one third of the female audience. Do they remember at all? Many will not. If these women do remember, how have they dealt with it? More to the point, with whom are they sitting? Probably with family. Would those seat companions be there if she remembered, if she told? If the companion is a spouse, would he welcome the inevitable disinheritance, the stigma, the disruption of childcare arrangements, the
awkwardness at family gatherings? Is he up for the financial and emotional demands of the healing process? If she’s there with parents, would she lose one? Both? And how many siblings? Most of these women will have tried to forget or ignore. Frequently they are helped out in this by dissociative disorders which keep the memory conveniently disconnected from the emotions, which have been hermetically sealed off in other parts of the psyche. And here How I Learned to Drive, with its deeply dissociative heroine, will provide reassurance and validation. This play will be much more comfortable for the woman in denial than a play about a recovered survivor.

If these survivors in our audience are inclined to be religious, they can mistake this dissociation for forgiveness or transcendence, as did the critics of How I Learned to Drive. Forgiveness and transcendence are both endorsed as feminine virtues in ways that anger or a sense of entitlement are not.

But maybe these women in our audience have forged an entire identity from their fusion with the perpetrator. Maybe they experience themselves as sexually liberated, because they revel in the recreations of scenarios of their abuse. Certainly a pornographically-inclined partner will not be likely to complain. In fact, mainstream culture will endorse the woman who enjoys acting out sexually against herself. One could, in fact, make the case that this is the point of incest. If this third
of our female audience is still experiencing fusion with the perpetrator, they might enjoy the work of performers who treat their own bodies as “other,” and who arouse themselves with self-violation.

But what if this audience is not identified with the perpetrator? Then they are likely to react to this kind of “performance art” with sexual shock, retreating into the various dissociative states to which they have become habituated. Or maybe they are further along in their healing than the performer and they are feeling anger toward the rest of the audience for their exploitation of an obvious survivor. But if these women express this opinion, if they protest what is going on, or if they walk
out of the theatre, they will be labeled puritans, members of the sex police, feminazis. They are greatly at risk of calling attention to themselves as survivors, which is very dangerous in a situation where sexual predation is being encouraged. She may feel trapped with dangerous perceptions she
cannot articulate. If she is on a road to integrating, she may be forced back into splitting, and this is tremendously destructive of the healing process.

What is my point?

My point is that the canon is skewed, that the depictions of child sexual abuse that are allowed serve an agenda to marginalize the voice of the recovered survivor. My point is that we cannot possibly understand what we are seeing on the stage, nor can we theorize about it, until we have allowed all the voices of incest survivors to be heard, and especially the voices of those who have integrated
their experience and who can make the larger connections between a culture that looks the other way when girls are raped and then turns around and markets their damaged sexuality as role models for all women.

[Originally presented at Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference, Toronto, 1999.]

 The bathroom has been a site of "gender anxiety" historically, as well as a battlefield, and, although it is tempting to write this off to ignorance about gender and fanatical, knee-jerk policing of the "gender binary," the issue goes deeper than this.

Rapists do choose public bathrooms as sites of sexual predation, and the presence of men in traditionally female spaces is often dangerous. On the other hand, there is a biological and cultural gender continuum among humans, and a gender binary is oppressive and dangerous for people who are not easily identified, or who do not identify, as male or female. Transgender women and masculine women are harassed and humiliated when we attempt to use public facilities. What is the "politically correct" attitude toward gender presentation when the ability to identify a stranger's biological sex in an isolated environment can be a question of life or death? What happens when queer theory butts up against the intensely polarized reality of male violence against women?

These were the questions on my mind when I wrote The Ladies' Room, a six-minute play about a bathroom confrontation. The play opens in a ladies' room at a shopping mall. A woman has just gone to report to the security guard that there is a man in the bathroom. The "man" is actually Rae, a teenage, lesbian butch. Angry and humiliated in front of her partner, Rae is hurling taunts and insults directed toward the woman complainant. Her teen girlfriend, Nicole, is uncomfortable about the dynamic, and the two begin to argue.

When Nicole expresses concern that public bathrooms are the third most common public site for sexual assault, Rae ridicules her for buying into an urban myth. As Nicole defends herself, it becomes apparent that she has been a victim of a stranger rape in a public space. Rae is emotionally overwhelmed by this information. At this point, her accuser is seen returning with the security guard, and Rae has to make a decision about how to respond.

Responses to the play have been strong and personal, especially by women who experience frequent challenges about their sexual identity. In my play, Rae chooses not to run away at the end, but to go out to meet the security guard and voluntarily offer her gender credentials in the form of her driver's license. Several women took exception to that ending, feeling that Rae was enabling of her own oppression in making that gesture. One of my critics, who has experienced humiliating official pat-downs in airport bathrooms, expressed the belief that the women who challenge her appearance are not concerned about rape, but are just trying to impose their class-based sense of a "gender dress code."

Another masculine woman, who actually lived a passing life as a man for several years, took a different approach. She was a victim of a gang rape, and she told me that when she is confronted in bathrooms, she draws attention to the fact that she has breasts and is a woman, and then she thanks her accuser for her vigilance. This woman identifies as a radical feminist, and, for her, it is a priority not to shame her confronters or in any way, punish them, or make them uncomfortable for their vigilance about the possibility of a man being in a woman's space.

The two actors who performed the play this summer at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival shared their own recent experience with unisex bathrooms. They had attended a large conference for queer-identified youth, and one of the first things the attendees did was to convert all of the bathrooms on their hotel floor to "gender-free." The actors commented that women using these bathrooms were constantly exposed to the sight of men's genitals, as the men were using the urinals and also leaving the doors open to the stalls when they used them. The women reported their feelings of shock and discomfort, noting that it would not have been safe for them to express these responses in the context of the conference, which was focused on the safety of trans youth.

The controversial ending of The Ladies' Room was not intended to represent a solution. In the play, the character makes the gesture as an attempt to remedy her perceived insensitivity to her partner's rape history. The play is designed to initiate dialogue between feminists and genderqueer allies.

[Originally published in On the Issues: The Progressive Woman's Magazine, August 18, 2009.]

I’m just going to put this right out there:  I did not like Fun Home: The Musical.
 
I liked the original graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel’s  Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. I thought it was brilliant, overwhelming, honest, searing… and a masterful execution of graphic art. I thought it deserved the American Book Award and the Lambda Literary Book Award.
 
So why did I feel so differently about the musical?  To be perfectly honest, I have not worked that out yet. But I do have some ideas. First, musical theatre is a very different genre than a memoir, even when that memoir is an illustrated one.
 
Theatre has its own conventions and tropes. The American family is a familiar subject for American theatre: Raisin in the Sun, Fences, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Little Foxes, Fifth of July, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Awake and Sing, August: Osage County, Death of a Salesman, and so on. The yearning for connection with an emotionally unavailable parent is a frequent theme. These family dramas are filled with bittersweet nostalgia for a bygone era and the lost innocence of childhood.  And of course infidelity and broken homes are also common themes.

Plays transpire in real time and in real—and restricted—space. You can’t turn down the corner of a play and come back to it later. This reality dictates a structure with suspense, momentum, audience identification, and investment. Good live theatre has much in common with spectator sports… because of that “actual bodies in actual seats in real time” thing. The art of playwriting is the art of compression. Biographical/ autobiographical material has to undergo a lot of pruning and grafting, because real life rarely has well-defined plot points and resolutions.
 
Also, authorship is important. The writer of a memoir is telling her own story, often with a motive just to get it out and on paper. The musical-theatre adaptors of a best-selling memoir have a different motive. It’s not their story, clearly. They are incentivized to tailor the material to the genre. I may or may not agree with the memoirist’s perception or interpretation of her experiences, but I appreciate that she is entitled to her confusions, her “in-process” status as a human being. She is inviting me to look over her shoulder and I am aware that this is a privilege.
 
Musical theatre is something different. It is an incredibly powerful medium, and I am acutely aware of when and how musical theatre can be used to manipulate emotions and reshape values.
 
So… at this point, let me just move on to my objections…

So here is the story of Fun Home, memoir and musical,  in a nutshell:  The protagonist of the play, Alison, grew up in a town in rural Pennsylvania, in a dysfunctional, middle-class family filled with secrets. The biggest secret was that the father was a stalker and sexual abuser of children. He was also a closeted gay man and an adulterer. But the serial, pedophilic predation is—or should be—the most significant of the secrets.
 
In the musical, three actresses portray the different incarnations of the protagonist at different ages in her life. “Small Alison” is a little girl, “Medium Alison” is a budding lesbian in her first year of college, and “Alison” is an adult cartoonist in mid-career, in the act of  creating the memoir that is the basis of the play. The plot turns around all the Alisons’ relationship to the father.
 
In the musical, the child sexual abuse is obliquely alluded to, but only presented factually in one line of a song sung by the mother. The song is a lament about her husband’s adultery and the line is,  “some of them underage.” That’s it. The pedophilic predation is presented as a footnote to the father’s infidelity and his homosexuality. It’s also presented as a victimless crime. The reactions of all the characters are consistent with those of a family who discovers a history of cheating by the patriarch. It’s a play about a cheater, not a criminal sexual predator. It’s about adultery, not child rape.

At the point where his history is unmasked, Medium Alison is in her first year at college, coming out as lesbian, and in her first relationship. She comes out to her parents. She brings her girlfriend home. Her mother tells her the truth about her father. Shortly after this visit her father steps in front of a truck in what appears to have been a suicide.
 
I get it. All of this must have been overwhelming for a nineteen-year-old. I see why it took decades for Bechdel to be able to write about it. I see why there are so many conflicting emotions, so much confusion in the telling. These are all reasons why her story makes for such a powerful memoir. And they are all reasons why it should never have been shaped into a mainstream musical about a dysfunctional American family.
 
Here is my question to theatre audiences who love Fun Home: What if the family secret was that the father had been stalking and murdering his students and his barely-legal, former students, but the dialogue had remained fixated on his cheating and the daughter’s desire for connection with him?  Would that have changed your experience of the play?
 
I ask this, because, for me, as a survivor of child sexual abuse, I experienced the father as a kind of serial murderer. He was a murderer of childhood, a soul murderer. I sit in meetings with grown men who were the teenaged victims of men like Mr. Bechdel. I hear how they were confused, how some of them believed they were consenting or participating at the time, how it took them years to remember, to sort out the shame, to figure out what their sexual orientation was, or even just to recognize that they had been victimized. It took them decades to trace their self-harming behaviors and addictions back to the betrayal by their trusted teacher, priest, parent, and so on.

I am going to answer my own question here: Yes, my experience of the play changed when I understood the father was a soul-murderer of children. I could no longer relate to an adult who was still obsessing over her failure to connect with her father. I no longer sympathized with the wife/mother who was solely focused on the pain of being abandoned. And the ending of the play, sentimentalizing the rare moments of tenuous, father-daughter connection, left me stone cold. I was watching a nest of enablers, a system of incest, in a theatre of folks who were feeling uplifted by this indulgence of sentimentality.
 
When one is in a family, a difficult family with complicated and damaged individuals each struggling with their personal demons… and then it is revealed that one of them is a child-raper, the entire paradigm should shift. Every memory should become subject to  revision, every emotion cut loose from its moorings. Trauma occurs. Something utterly unthinkable, completely unacceptable must be thought, must be accepted. But it can’t be. But it must be. But it can’t be. And that schism, that impossible conundrum, that trauma, is what happened to me in the theatre, because the writers of the show chose to elide the criminal behavior with sexual orientation and adultery.
 
Here is another question: What would Fun Home look like if the members of the family came out of denial and responded appropriately to information that the father is a pedophilic predator?

Well, how about this for a potential scenario:  At the moment where the mother sings the infamous line, “some of them underage,” the lights are cut, the music stops mid-lyric. A single spotlight comes up on the adult Alison. She is surrounded by darkness, in sudden limbo.
 
She sings a song, “Oh, my god… I didn’t know… and yet… those boys… those boys he taught… Oh my god… I didn’t know… And yet my mother did… And yet my mother stayed… And those boys… those boys…”
 
And then we see Small Alison and Medium Alison appear. They are both frightened. Alison puts her arms around both of them.
 
And then the Boys appear, one by one. They each sing a song about the time Mr. Bechdel picked them up when they were walking on the road and how he offered them beer, even though they were underage. They sing how he said he would take them home and then drove them somewhere else, to “get to know them.”  They sing about the  time he hired them to work in his yard. They sing their stories… and then their adult selves appear and sing about the years of doubt and shame, the nights of terror, the secrecy, the sexual confusion, the self-hatred, the shattered relationships, the addictions. 
 
The Boys fade into the shadows and Small Alison starts to sing a song she opened the show with: “Daddy! Hey, Daddy, come here, okay? I need you/ What are you doing? I said come here…” Alison stops her and sings about how she, adult Alison, will take care of her now. She tells Small Alison that her father is gone forever, but that she doesn’t need to be afraid, because adult Alison will be her parent now.

And then Medium Alison starts singing “Say something! Talk to him! Say something! Anything!”  This is a song from a car ride she had with her father right before he died. Again adult Alison stops her. She sings to her that her father can’t talk to her, because he is a very sick man, because he has sexually abused children. Medium Alison is confused and wants to talk about how he is gay, like her. Alison says that his being gay has nothing to do with his being sick and raping children. Medium Alison, still confused, wants to talk about how he betrayed her mother and the family. Alison tells her that his cheating has nothing to do with how he is sick and a pedophilic predator. Finally she tells Medium Alison that her mother knew he was harming children and was an enabler of his crimes.  Medium Alison puts her fingers in her ears and starts to repeat “Say something! Talk to him!” Alison tries to interrupt, but Medium Alison shoves her and runs away.
 
Alison and Small Alison end the show standing together. Alison explains to the child how they can never go home again, but that they can go forward and help the children like the Boys their father victimized. She sings about how they can tell their story to help victims be believed, to show that they don’t need to feel ashamed about what happened to them, but that they can find other survivors and build a different world. She tells her that it is not up to them to find a way to patch up or save the family. It’s gone.
 
Would my version make it to Broadway and win a Tony for “best musical?” No, of course not.  For starts, there is a huge continuity problem. It’s actually made up of two completely different plays: the slightly comedic, dysfunctional dramedy and then the shocking paradigm shift. Which is the experience of child sexual abuse. Welcome to my world.  The perpetrator’s suicide is not only not the dramatic climax, it’s not even relevant. There is nothing bittersweet or sentimental about the situation. The closure must occur outside of the family, in affiliation with other survivors.

I am saddened that this first major musical with a lesbian protagonist had to hitch its ride to Broadway on the coattails of denial about the seriousness of sexual abuse of children. I am shocked to see the intentional blurring of lines between pedophilia and sexual orientation. I was angry, but not surprised, to see the wife/mother framed as a tragic and damaged victim, instead of a very active enabler. Finally, there was a very charming subplot about the daughter’s coming out that deserved a better vehicle.
 
In conclusion: We need to hear the voices of survivors. #MeToo is old news to most women. The only thing trendy about it was that men are believing us for the first time. For all the publicity and Congressional hearings about rape in the military, sexual assaults are at the highest levels ever this year. And no, it’s not about “better reporting.” Stop that. Child sexual abuse and trafficking are big business globally, and the Pope has still not mandated reporting child-rapists to civil authorities. That’s an outrage. Broadway’s response to sexual harassment in the academy was Oleanna, a play about those manipulative lesbians in Women’s Studies encouraging false accusations against innocent men. Broadway’s response to the priesthood scandals? Doubt, whose title says it all. Prostitution? How about Best Little Whorehouse in Texas?
 
We all have to speak up. We really do. And it’s always going to feel scary. Do what you can. I gave Fun Home a standing ovation, because I was in a post-traumatic panic attack when the curtain went down, and I felt it was the more dangerous choice to draw attention to myself by staying seated. But I am home now. I have gathered Small Carolyn and Medium Carolyn and all the others around me, and together we are writing this blog.
 
Love to all my survivor brothers and sisters. You are not alone. “We must say to every member of our society: If you violate your children, they may not speak today, but as we gather our strength and stand beside them, they will, one day, speak your name. They will speak every single name.”—Marilyn Van Derbur

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Thanks to Eleanor Cowan, the author of A History of a Pedophile's Wife: Memoir of a Canadian Teacher and Writer, for her feedback on this blog. Click here for my blog about her book. I have several blogs on the subject of child sexual abuse and incest.

This was originally published as "Sermon on Stories" in Sermons for a Hot Kitchen From the Lesbian Tent Revival.

Stories are great things. Stories can be maps. They can be templates. They can be guidebooks. They can be cautionary tales. They can be mirrors. They can be latitude and longitude. They can be spiritual vitamins. They can be precious heritage. Lesbian poet Muriel Rukeyser said, “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” That sounds kind of poetic until you look hard at what we call reality, at quantum physics. Then it’s actually pretty scientific.  And here’s poet Maya Angelou: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Which brings me back to that great quotation from the Gospel of St. Thomas, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” 
 
Now you can bring forth that “thing that is in you” in poetry, or painting, or dance, or theatre, or music, or story. And if you bring it forth as story, it may be a story that only you can interpret, and that’s okay.
 
But stories can also be propaganda. That’s why we’re going to synapse around the whole thing of “story” today. Because the propaganda stories can get us thinking along lines that will cause us to betray our own best interests… and often, in scrubbing off the layers of falsehood in popular myths, like fairy tales or folklore or patriotic myths, we can recognize some life-saving truths that underlie the distortion or the appropriation. Kinda like when you find a masterpiece underneath that painting of dogs playing cards.
 
So that’s what we’re doing today.

We’re going to look at a very popular story in the colonization of America. We’re going to look at the story of Sacagawea. Most of us will remember that she was the Native American woman who accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition in their efforts to locate a route across the western half of the continent, to the Pacific Ocean. She’s a big heroine in American history, and her image—or some artist’s idea of her image—is on a dollar coin, and she’s been on a postage stamp, and folks love to tell the traditional story about her, because it’s about a strong woman on a bold adventure, and it’s also about interracial harmony.
 
Now, those aren’t bad reasons for telling stories… except that in the case of Sacagawea, they aren’t the whole truth. And the parts of the truth that they are hiding are really, really important parts of the story. And there is also a story underneath that is not being told.
 
So, let’s get out those tools for scraping off those layers of cultural whitewash and mansplainery,  and see a little bit more of what’s really going on in this story.
 
Sacagawea was born into the Shoshone tribe in Idaho around 1788, and when she was eleven or twelve years old, she was in a Shoshone hunting camp near what today is Three Forks, Montana, that was attacked by the Hidatsa, a Siouan tribe of Native Americans. In this raid, four Shoshone men and four Shoshone women, and several boys were killed. Sacagawea was taken captive and enslaved. Remember, she’s eleven or twelve years old. And these Hidatsa force her to walk with them back to where they live in North Dakota, which is about five hundred miles away, as the crow flies. So here’s this eleven or twelve-year-old child who has survived a massacre of family and friends, and she’s now enslaved, and she’s having to march for hundreds of miles back into North Dakota from Montana, and when she gets there, she is—you know—she’s still an enslaved child.

And then, one night, there is this French trapper who shows up in the village, and he plays some kind of gambling game with the Hidatsa, and he wins. And to pay off their debt, the Hidatsa give him Sacagawea. Who is twelve by now, or possibly thirteen. So now she’s his slave. He already has bought another Shoshone captive girl, “Otter Woman,” from the Hidatsa. He calls these enslaved children his “wives.” It is a formalized child-rape arrangement brokered by adults.  And, sisters, remember, every single time you read or hear something about Sacagawea’s French trapper husband and you do not raise hell, you are actually participating in legitimizing this child-rape arrangement. He was her owner, her captor, and her rapist. Period.
 
Sacagawea conceived around the age of fourteen, and the reason we know this is because she was pregnant in the winter of 1804-5, when Lewis and Clark showed up in the Hidatsa village and started negotiating with Sacagawea’s perpetrator for his services as a guide. Lewis and Clark were the two men leading this expedition commissioned by the US government. They were leading twenty-nine white men and one African American man, who was enslaved. Sacagawea’s perpetrator told Lewis and Clark that the pregnant child was his wife, and he negotiated a fee for her services as a Shoshone translator—a fee that would be paid to him, of course. As her captor’s so-called wife, Sacagawea never received a dime for her services—or any form of compensation—for the work that she did.

So here we are, with this fourteen-year-old, pregnant girl, in the company of thirty-two men, most of whom speak a language she can’t understand. She is the only Native American among them, and the only female. She gave birth en route, and, according to Lewis, who attended the birth, it was a very painful and violent delivery. Afterwards, she became desperately ill with what, from Lewis’ journal notes, appears to have been a severe pelvic inflammatory infection, possibly due to her enslaver’s continual postpartum rape of her. In his journal, Lewis expressed a suspicion that she was a victim of a transmitted venereal disease. She came very close to dying, but she managed to recover. She spent the rest of the trip with her baby strapped to her back.
 
Sacagawea trekked on this expedition for two years, four months, and ten days. Sisters, she walked eight thousand miles with these white men and the African American enslaved man… with a baby on her back. She forded rivers and climbed steep mountains and crossed deserts and swamps in snow and rain and sweltering sun. She translated for the men, she foraged for them, she cooked for them, and she did the sewing, mending, and cleaning of their clothes… you know, the “women’s work.”
 
There have been whitewashing and mansplaining efforts to downplay her work as a guide, but the truth is, she was responsible for pointing out the pass they should take through the Rockies and the pass they should take into the Yellowstone basin… the Bozeman Pass. Kind of a big deal, locating these passes.

Oh, and by the way, the only reason we have the record of this expedition is because Sacagawea had the foresight and agility to rescue Lewis’s journals when they were tumbling out of a capsized boat. For her pains, she had a river named after her. But no pay.
 
One of the greatest services that Sacagawea provided was protection. By this time, Native American tribes had come to assume, and assume rightly, that any group of white men traveling into their territory probably constituted some kind of war party. They had learned that it was better to attack first and then try to figure out who they were later. But the fact that this group included a Native American woman with a baby was taken as evidence that these men came in peace. In other words, Sacagawea saved all their lives and probably many times over.
 
So, eventually, the expedition gets to the western part of Oregon, to the coast. And they set up a camp and start sending parties down to the beach to see the actual ocean. And these parties are reporting that some kind of “great fish” has washed up on the beach—possibly a whale. And, unbelievably, these men were not going to allow Sacagawea to leave the camp to go see it. Unbelievable. She had to beg and plead with them, and this was so unusual on her part, that Lewis wrote about it in his journal. And it really pisses me off that she did all this enormous work, as a child, with a newborn, involuntarily, and then when they finally reach their goal—the Pacific Ocean—where there’s this magical, giant fish, this eighth wonder of the world, they make Sacagawea beg and plead just to be able to see it. If there is ever any historical doubt about her degree of autonomy on this expedition, that should lay it to rest finally and forever. She had none.

Sacagawea was dead by the age of twenty-five. Still with her rapist/captor, she was living at a fur trading post in Montana at the time of her death. She was very sick and wanted to go home to her people. She reportedly died of typhus, a disease transmitted by a human body louse—a disease associated with conditions of poor hygiene and sanitation. But, if Lewis was correct in suspecting that Sacagawea had been infected with a venereal disease by her rapist, she may have died from a fever associated with that. We know that she left behind an infant girl, and the typhus or the venereal disease may have taken hold during postpartum weakness. The daughter appears not to have survived. The son was taken in by Meriwether Lewis, who paid for his schooling.
 
I know. It’s a horrible story, isn’t it? Sacagawea was obviously heroically strong, but she was a victim throughout her short life. From age eleven, she was separated from her people and enslaved. She was a victim of ongoing rape from puberty and subjected to involuntary pregnancies. 
 
It’s a story of endurance, but it’s not the story of multi-cultural diversity in the early years of the US. Sacagawea is not the poster woman for biracial marriage.  She was obviously powerful, but she was not empowered. If there is any multi-cultural story to be told here, it is a shameful story of the collusion of powerful men—French, Hidatsa, and Anglo American—in the exploitation of an enslaved, female child. It’s a disgusting tale of adult males bonding through the bartering for forced labor and victimization of a Shoshone girl. However divergent their cultures, these men were all in agreement in their misogyny. They all colluded in characterizing the formalized child-rape arrangement as a legalized marriage.

But, there is another story… one that is very important. It’s actually found between the lines in Lewis’ journal.  Let’s take a look… Bear with me, because we’re going to have to backtrack a little bit in the story before we get to it…
 
So at one point in their travels, the expedition ended up camping at the very place where Sacagawea was captured and abducted by the Hidatsa as a little girl. This was the place where she lost her tribe, her family, her history, her culture, her freedom... and, sadly, her childhood. This was the place from which she was forced to undertake a journey of a thousand miles with her enemy.
 
So, when the Lewis and Clark Expedition arrived at this former Shoshone hunting camp, Sacagawea told them the story of the massacre and here is what Lewis wrote in his journal: “I cannot discover that she shews any immotion of sorrow in recollecting this event, or of joy in being again restored to her native country; if she has enough to eat and a few trinkets to wear I believe she would be perfectly content anywhere.” 
 
He seems to be describing her as someone who is kind of shallow or emotionally under-developed… “primitive” in the sense of being in some early stage of evolution or history. He appears to be comparing her affect to that which he believes he might experience, had he been in her shoes… which is as ridiculous as it is unfair. As a white, male colonizer, he has absolutely no context for understanding the trauma of her past, or the context of her ongoing rape and enslavement. He does not appear to understand that he is complicit in enabling her ongoing enslavement.

It sounds to me like Sacagawea was experiencing very severe post-traumatic stress syndromes. She sounds numb, possibly experiencing dissociation from her situation, or maybe even depersonalization… which is a post-traumatic syndrome where your own thoughts and feelings seem unreal, or like they don’t belong to you.

Depersonalization is a kind of complete loss of identity, which makes sense when you consider that her trauma was far from over. And when we consider that this is what Lewis wrote in his journal, it’s a description of Sacagawea that lets him off the hook.  Since she doesn’t seem to register any kind of emotional response to this terrible massacre and abduction… he doesn’t have to feel bad about not paying her, or pretending she’s a married woman, when he knows damn well she’s a slave. It’s kind of convenient for him to see her as someone who doesn’t feel any pain…  It’s like the way they tell you that lobsters don’t feel it when you drop them in the boiling water. What they mean is we don’t have to feel it.
 
This part of the story tells a sad truth about much of human nature. We are incentivized to see and hear what will benefit us. That is a fact. Which is why we, should spend  time working to reprogram our brains so that we can make a primary commitment to the truth. We do that reprogramming by learning to incentivize ourselves against the grain of a culture that will punish us for knowing or speaking the truth. We do this because any time the truth is not a primary commitment, we are greatly at risk of not seeing it, of deluding ourselves… because this is patriarchy, and knowing the truth, our truth, women’s truth… well, that can get you killed.

But let’s get back to the truth about Sacagawea, who is most often depicted as a grown woman making her own choices about helping these heroic white pathfinders, blazing a trail that will “civilize” the West… We, as a nation, are not much incentivized to adjust that soft-focus lens to bring into sharp definition the fourteen-year-old slave child on a mission that will spell defeat for her people. And one of the reasons why we love that grown-woman-in-charge-of-her-own-life narrative is because it tells us she is choosing—sisters, choosing—to help men. There are no other women anywhere in sight for most of those eight thousand miles. A Native woman choosing to help the white men… and even though she has a baby, she takes total, complete responsibility for him. Straps that baby on her back and never skips a beat while she does all the domestic work of caring for these thirty-three grown-ass men. And then she turns her paycheck over to her “husband!” What a fine example. Look at what she did!  Now, surely women today, with all the conveniences of modern civilization, can take those three days of maternity leave and turn their kid over to day care and get right back to work. Be like Sacagawea! Don’t be thinking of motherhood as a second job or a sacred responsibility! Don’t be missing your women friends! Don’t be hoarding that paycheck! Don’t be complaining and comparing! Do it all and don’t take any credit for it!  Be like Sacagawea!
 
Story is everything. It’s the web of synapses we weave to make meaning. As astrologist Caroline Casey says, “Imagination lays the track for the reality train.” It surely does, sisters. And a story is like a line on a railroad… like the Long Island Rail Road or the Staten Island Railway. The story is a route with a destination. We take these stories in when we hear them. We pass them along. We put them in our toolkits for how to live our lives. Story is everything. We have to think critically about the stories we are given. Who is doing the giving and for what purpose? Who is going to benefit from them? We have never had so many stories. Not just books… but Hulu and Netflix and Youtube and cable and movies and podcasts. So many stories…  But how many of them tell our truths?  Women’s truths? Lesbian truths? 

African American author and activist Toni Cade Bambara wrote an essay titled, “The Issue is Salvation,” and in it she says, “I work to produce stories that save our lives.” That’s what we should all be doing.  And if we can’t write them, then we can go into uncovering the truth about the ones they hand us.

And that’s exactly what we are going to do now. We are going to go digging for that story that is hidden between the lines of Lewis’ journal. And keep in mind that Meriwether Lewis’ journal… the one that Sacagawea dove into the water to rescue, is five thousand pages long. That’s a lot of pages. But the part that we are are digging for is just two sentences. Two sentences out of five thousand pages. Kind of like a needle in a haystack. But, sisters, if you know what you are needing to hear, if you have a pretty good idea of what these patriarchs are trying to hide… you can find that needle. It’s going to be like a magnetized needle… a compass needle, pointing us to the truth.

So here they are… Here are those precious sentences from Meriwether Lewis’ journal… the needle in the haystack…  This was on August 15, 1805. Lewis is talking about when the expedition came to the camp where Sacagawea’s people lived… where her tribe was—her family—before that massacre and abduction when she was eleven. And keep in mind, she’s been enslaved this whole time. She’s never been back to her people. This is the first time she’s seeing them in four years.

“We soon drew near to the [Shoshone] camp, and just as we approached it a woman made her way through the crowd towards Sacagawea, and recognizing each other, they embraced with the most tender affection. The meeting of these two young women had in it something peculiarly touching, not only in the ardent manner in which their feelings were expressed, but from the real interest of their situation…”

I like that Meriwether Lewis is noticing the “real interest of their situation.” And I like that, after describing Sacagawea as pretty emotionless and shallow, he is now going back on that completely and describing a scene that is ardent… which means passionate, and tender, touching and overflowing with affection. Obviously, Sacagawea had been keeping her emotional life sacred… for another female and a woman of her tribe.
 
So who is this other fifteen-year-old Shoshone girl who is embracing Sacagawea so ardently?  Well, her name was Pop-pank. She and Sacagawea grew up together, and they were at that hunting camp together when the massacre happened and Sacagawea was taken prisoner. Pop-pank had jumped into the river and, leaping like a fish, had managed to get to the other side and escape capture.
 
And here she was when the Lewis and Clark expedition showed up to try to buy some horses on their way to the Pacific. And here she was seeing again her beloved girlhood friend, Sacagawea… now with a baby and enslaved. And this is what Lewis recorded: the reunion of these two girls—and they were both still girls—embracing each other, tender and passionate at the same time.

We can hold onto that story as tightly as Sacagawea held onto Pop-pank. It is a story of an authenticity that resists colonization, of a memory that resists the distortions and erasures of trauma, of a bond that defies appropriation in the colonial narrative.
 
Let us not be fooled by the fact it only warrants two sentences in the journal of Lewis, or that it was only a few stationary minutes out of a journey of hundreds of days and thousands of miles. It is a glimpse into reality, into eternity. It shows up the colonial, patriarchal, misogynist pageant for what it is: an utter sham.
 
I think of something that 19th century feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman said… She said, “Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time.” And every now and then we can part the curtain and catch that glimpse. Maybe only a glimpse, but it contains all that we need.
 
Sisters, let us hold close those two sentences that Meriwether Lewis wrote, not understanding even as he wrote them, because they illuminate the pages of history more than all the rest of the words in his journal.
 

This week there are lots of folks weighing in on the hearings about the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court… political pundits, women’s rights advocates, lawyers, and so on. So I thought I would throw in my two cents as a professional actor. Because it was quite a performance.
 
So, one of the first principles of acting is “Don’t play the problem. Play the adjustment to the problem.”  In other words, don’t worry about impressing the audience with what your character is feeling. Focus instead on solving the character’s problem. That’s what makes a performance believable, because that is what people do in real life… and audiences recognize that.
 
Let’s say you want to portray an innocent person who is being accused by a powerful group of people of something they did not do. That’s a serious problem. It’s a dangerous situation. The innocent party needs to tread carefully, be thoughtful, weigh her words. Because she is innocent, she has the truth on her side, and her best defense is a straightforward presentation that allows the facts of the situation to come through, untainted by emotions or editorializing.

Seriously? This is just plain bad acting. Kavanaugh is showing us indignation, attitude, and outrage, instead of taking the actions to solve the problem. Why? Because, unlike Anita Hill, he is actually guilty. He imagines what an innocent person in his shoes might do. In his mind, that person would be feeling angry and oppressed, and so he is showing us that. Again… the difference between a trained professional and an amateur. I have no doubt that Anita Hill felt angry, facing that brotherhood of wealthy, arrogant, white men… men who had passed specific legislation to grant themselves, as Senators, indemnity from sexual harassment charges.  But, as I said, she was focused on solving the problem. Displaying her outrage was only going to taint the presentation of her facts and be seen as evidence that she was unstable. It would have been counter-productive. Displaying outrage is a function of privilege, and a luxury that few falsely accused folks can afford.
 
But Kavanaugh chose to perform indignation, attitude, and outrage, because the truth was not on his side and also because he was vulnerable to fear, guilt, and shame.

And here let me interject a word about outrage. It can be very, very useful in overriding and masking less flamboyant emotions. Outrage pretty much trumps them all. I learned this hitchhiking. If I was in a car with a driver who began to behave in a threatening manner, I would erupt into an emotionally violent tirade against a fictional boss, and I would keep this rant going until I was able to get away. It kept those icy fingers of fear from making inroads into my psyche. It gave me the floor. It shut down whatever scenario he was attempting to initiate. Let me be clear: a performance of outrage would not work on a Ted-Bundy-type predator, but, at least in my experience  with more garden-variety potential perps, I found it effective.
 
So Kavanaugh played outrage. And so did Lindsey Graham. In fact, Graham’s performance was even more transparent, as he used the display of anger to derail a specific line of questioning that was not going well for Kavanaugh. Because outrage carries the overtones of emotional violence, it disrupts discourse.  People confronted with outrage have a visceral response. Their choices become “escalate” or “appease.”
 
Kavanaugh’s display of outrage worked to solve his problem:  that of a guilty man attempting to defend himself when the facts do not support his case, when he is under oath and afraid to lie, and when he is fending off tell-tale emotions of guilt, shame, and fear. To a trained actor, Kavanaugh's performance of outrage was an admission of guilt, pure and simple.

The #MeToo campaign is causing a revolution, and I want to make sure that the other, huge percentage of women impacted by these sexual predators are not forgotten. I call us the "#MeNeither women." Read on!

In October of last year, the online #MeToo campaign went viral on international social media sites. The hashtag phrase was created by Tarana Burke, an African American civil rights activist, who coined it in 2006 to raise awareness of the pervasiveness of sexual abuse and assault in the culture. Last fall, white actress and activist Alyssa Milano boosted the signal by posting a message on her Twitter account, encouraging survivors of sexual harassment and assault to post #metoo as a status update. She did this as a supportive response to the actresses who were coming forward with their stories of harassment and assault by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.

t#MeToo marks a cultural watershed. In a nutshell, women are being believed.
 
Suddenly immediate action is being taken to remove and replace these predators, without the women needing to win a case in court. For decades powerful men have gotten away with rape and harassment, because they could count on their victims having fewer resources and connections. They could tie up these women in court for decades with costly litigation, as well as smearing their names and destroying their careers. In fact, Weinstein hired private security agencies to collect information on the women who accused him and the journalists trying to expose the allegations. These agencies included Black Cube, a business run largely by former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies, with branches all over the world. According to the New Yorker Magazine:

But in October, all of this changed. Women are being believed. We celebrate their courage as well as the international housecleaning that is going on as these predators are being fired and replaced.
 
But there is a hidden side of #MeToo. I call it #MeNeither, to include the victims who are currently not being included in this historic moment. Not all the victims have been assaulted or verbally harassed. In fact, the #MeNeither victims, like myself, are the ones the predators would not touch with a ten-foot pole.

The men who were/are busy raping, coercing, groping, and blackmailing their victims were/are not going to green-light any films about strong women standing up to perpetrators and winning. They were/are not going to fund narratives in which men like themselves are depicted as the bad guys. They were/are not going to foster a culture where they will be called out for their criminal appetites and activities. They did/do promote pornographic narratives where women are objectified, raped, tortured, and mutilated. They did/do promote romantic comedies where the heroine will sacrifice all to stand by her man. They aggressively have/do propagate male supremacy in their enterprises. These predators have colonized our collective imaginations.
 
Here is a partial list (out-of-date the day after posting!) of these mogul predators who have been busted just since October. It speaks for itself. These are men at the highest echelons of the top entertainment and media institutions in the US. Some are also in our government:

So most of these are gone or on their way out. What's next? Nature abhors a vacuum, so let's make sure that their replacements are not just "meet the new boss, same as the old boss." Let's make sure that their replacements are drawn from the vast #MeNeither pool, packed with women whose talents have gone unnoticed for lack of opportunity and lack of resources. #MeNeither women have the narratives that are currently missing... and these narratives hold the promise of saving the planet.

At the age of thirty-five, I conceived the idea of a museum to commemorate the war against women. I was recently “out” and on fire with radical feminist theory, which electrifying my brain with new synaptic connections between previously isolated storage files of experiences and observations.
 
In light of the #MeToo movement, I thought I would dig up the proposal for this museum and work it into a blog. Reading through the documents, I have decided to just put them up, as they were written thirty years ago.
 
So… direct from 1988, The Women’s Rape Museum

I am enclosing a proposal for a project I initiated in 1988, which officially died in 1991.  It was for a national Women’s Rape Museum.  The project was inspired by and modeled after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.
 
I feel that we women have allowed men to establish the terms of debate on the subject of war, and in allowing them to define “war” in terms of military campaigns between nationalities, we forfeit our own experience. 
 
Andrea Dworkin points out that in the US, only seven women out of a hundred will not experience sexual assault in her lifetime.  Estimates for child sexual abuse for girls run between 30 and 40%.  Women’s art, culture, history, and spiritual traditions are largely censored in most parts of the world.  Certainly our values are not prioritized by governments who are run by men and tokenized women.  We are, in effect, all colonized by the foreign and hostile culture of men.  We are controlled psychologically by images which show women as perpetual victims of sexual terrorism. 

The literature by male veterans about their experiences at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington stimulated my interest in a memorial for women who have been victims of rape.  We are not allowed to define male aggression in political terms.   This is insane!  Women continue to define each act as a behavioral aberration on the part of some deviant male, when the truth is that our legal system does not seriously go after perpetrators, the entire culture teaches rape, and our economy is based on the appropriation of women’s resources.
 
The reactions of individuals and organizations to the Women’s Rape Museum prospectus was instructive, to say the least.  It is as if each woman has hundreds of examples of domination and terrorism in her memory - each hermetically sealed.  When a woman begins to unwrap these experiences and allow her brain to form synapses between them, she becomes terrified of the conclusion:  This is a war. 
 
It is my belief that until women seize the definition of war and begin to confront it in terms of our own experiences with male dominance and sexual aggression, then the more aggressive expressions -i.e. the military campaigns, phallic missiles, mass rapes, etc. - will continue to increase, while women wear buttons, join male-dominated peace organizations, and in general adopt strategies which have proved ineffectual throughout history.
 
And finally, I want to make a point about veterans.  This is another word that men have appropriated.  According to male definitions of war, there are very few women veterans.  When women redefine “war,” most of us will achieve the recognition and status of veterans.  This identity would require a radical restructuring of our experiences, giving meaning to our suffering and establishing a bond, instead of a barrier, to intimacy between women.  The current vocabulary for rape is one of individual shame and confusion.  When the rape victim understands that she is a veteran, she suddenly has access to a rich tradition of activism, authority, and respect within her community

Exhibits with Practical Information:
 
The Myths about Rape:  This would be the first exhibit to greet the visitor to the Memorial.  This exhibit would challenge immediately the myths about who gets raped and who does the raping.
 
If Someone You Know Has Been Raped:  This is a display of “do’s” and “don’t’s” for friends and family of victims.  Well-meaning attempts to make light of the event or to encourage the victim to get on with her life often result in permanent alienation at a time when the victim needs support. 
 
Reporting Rape: the Legal Steps:  This is a fifteen-minute film about the procedures a woman can expect if she chooses to report the rape.  The film will show a hypothetical rape victim from the time she contacts a friend about the rape, through the process of reporting at the police station, the medical examination, and her return home.

Post-Rape Syndrome: Steps to Healing:  This is a table of steps victims go through in healing, along with a first-person narrative of a victim, describing her reactions.  The steps include her need to talk about the incident repeatedly, her panic attacks and possible agoraphobia, changes in her sexual responses, and disruption of her work activities.
 
Women And Weapons:  This is a display case of weapons which women might choose to carry.  The display carries information about the advantages and the drawbacks to the various guns and sprays, and the laws that pertain to obtaining and carrying them.
 
Self-defense Strategies:  This is a live demonstration/workshop offered at set times during the hours the memorial is open.
 

Historical Displays:
 
The History of Rape Laws in The U.S.: (or other host country) - This exhibit would be a wall mural with a time line depicting the changes in rape laws and landmark cases in the Memorial’s host country.
 
Historic Rape Resisters:  This display would have pictures of women who fought back, physically or legally against their abusers.  Visitors could press a button to hear the courageous accounts of women like Joan Little, Phoolan Devi, Inez Garcia , and Dr. Elizabeth Morgan.

The Burning Time:  This would be a display about the genocide of nine million women in Europe during the Middle Ages. The exhibit would show the implements of torture, excerpts from the Malleus Malefactorum, and trial transcripts and narratives of women who were murdered.

Religion and Rape: Representation of rape in the Bible, the Koran, and other religious writings. The priesthood child-rape epidemic.

The Medical Profession and Rape: The history of medical misogyny, and especially the misdiagnosis of PTSD in survivors of rape, especially child rape. The cover-up of incest by theories of "Oedipal" and "Electra" complexes, misdiagnosis of venereal disease in children, and pathologizing of victims.

 Slavery And Rape:  This is an historical display about the rape of enslaved Black women in America.  The display includes first person narratives including Linda Brent’s story of hiding in a garret for seven years to avoid rape by her master.  Rape of enslaved women was a special horror in a system where the rapist had rights of legal ownership of the victim’s children.

War And Rape:  This display will focus on recent and current wars. This display will document the rape of women in Vietnam, the mass rape/suicides of women in Bangladesh, the Japanese "comfort women,” and the rapes of women in Bosnia. Rape as a method of torture. "Ethnic cleansing." Rape in the military and the denial of benefits to survivors of Military Sexual Trauma.

Trafficking and Prostitution: Historical and current. Paid rape.

Pornography: Statistics about the industry. The harm of pornography. The teaching of rape and the propagation of rape culture.
 
The Art of Survivors:  This display would include samples of the work of artists like novelist Virginia Woolf, painter Artemisia Gentileschi, and poet Chrystos.
 
The Culture of Control:  This is a display of articles used for the cultural control of women.  It would include traditional foot-bindings from China, the chador worn by Islamic women, chastity belts from the Middle Ages, high-heeled shoes, boned corsets, and various styles of dress (hoop skirt, hobble, mini-skirt, etc.) that reflect a cultural control of women. This display would also include the implements used to excise the clitorises and infibulate the vaginas of women in Africa.

Resources:
 
Rape Survivors' Library And Resource Center:  This would be a reference library with a reading room for women who want to read about some aspect of sexual aggression towards women.  The librarian could refer visitors to other legal and therapeutic agencies, both in the community and internationally.
 
Counseling Room:  The Women's Rape Memorial would have a trained therapist on staff who could respond to requests for help from visitors who are experiencing emotional distress during their visit to the Memorial.  This therapist would be able to provide references for legal advice or therapy.
 
The Rape Narrative Archive:  Women who visit the Memorial may have the opportunity of writing or telling their story on tape in privacy and leaving it in the archives of the Memorial as a testimony to their own personal courage as a survivor.  They may or may not choose to make the narrative anonymous or to have their story available to other visitors to the Memorial.  Testimonies will be preserved and valued without judgement.  The survivor's story, in her own words, is accepted at the Women's Rape Memorial.

The Ritual Fire: There will be a fire that burns perpetually where rape survivors can bring clothing or other artifacts associated with the violation and throw them into the fire.
 
The Rape Survivor's Memorial Garden:   This will be a quiet garden area where survivors and their friends and family can come and pay tribute to the courage of the women and children who have been raped.  The garden provides a place for leaving poems, photographs, and flowers.

Something significant happened today. 
 
Today a senator resigned because six women who claimed he had harassed them were believed, and thirty-two senators of his own party—the Democratic party—called on him to resign. Thirteen of these were female and nineteen male.
 
Many folks felt that his offenses were mild considering that the current President has bragged about “grabbing women by the pussy” and has been accused of all kinds of groping, voyeurism, crude remarks, and assaults. This same week there is a Republican candidate running for the Senate who has been credibly accused by multiple women of child sexual abuse.

But still, the senator resigned.
 
Many people felt it was a shame because he supports feminist causes and because he is an outspoken liberal in a time when conservatives are controlling both House and Senate.
 
But still, the senator resigned.
 
I want to remind people that we are still living in patriarchy. What that means is that, when women are abused, there will always be something more important going on. There will always be a reason why women should set aside our issues and our grievances to work for some greater good or more urgent need. Always. I mean always.

In this country, women had to wait for suffrage until all men could have the vote. In England, the Suffrage Movement was completely derailed when its leader, Emmeline Pankhurst ordered her followers to redirect their zeal in support of recruitment for the frontlines of World War I. Suffrage could wait. It was not the time.
 
Today, between 9 and 33%  of women in the US military report experiencing an attempted or completed rape during military service. Let me emphasize the word “report.” Consider that this year, 58% of victims who reported experienced reprisals or retaliation. Congress has been holding hearings on this for decades, but nothing changes. Why?  Because the military is focused on the “real” enemy, the “real” violence. These women reporting are disrupting chains of command, generating divisions and distractions, and undermining morale in a time of war. Now is never the time or place to accuse a fellow soldier or commanding officer of sexual violence.

I remember watching Ted Kennedy at the Clarence Thomas hearings when Anita Hill was being called on to describe in detail Thomas’ harassment of her. Ted Kennedy who had, according to him, been driving a campaign worker to the ferry to get home after a party… only the worker had left her keys and her purse at the party and Kennedy was not driving on the road to the ferry. In any event, he drove off an unlit bridge into a pond.

He got out of the car, but she did not. He waited ten hours to report the incident to authorities. In the meantime, she was struggling to survive, contorting her body to catch the last pockets of oxygen… no doubt waiting for Kennedy to get help and rescue her. Some estimates say she survived more than ten minutes.  What she did not understand was that now was not her turn. The priority was protecting the senator from scandal.
 
And Anita Hill was also told that now was not her turn. There was an African American man up for the Supreme Court. That was the priority, not his descriptions of Long John Dong pornography. 
 
But Anita Hill had not waited her turn, and after the hearing that confirmed her harasser (who referred to the hearing--including her participation--as a “high tech lynching”), there was a very serious effort to have her academic career destroyed. Fortunately, a “We Believe Anita” grassroots campaign was birthed to counter the attacks.

Sexual harassment is, like rape, largely an issue of male aggression against women. Congress is predominantly male.  Not surprisingly, they have made their own rules about the handling of sexual complaints against members and staff, passing laws that exempt them from practices that would apply to other employers. Let’s look more closely at this.

Since 1995 a law has been in place allowing accusers to file lawsuits only if they first agree to go through months of counseling and mediation. Counseling?  For “False Memory Syndrome?”  Or perhaps projection of unresolved daddy issues?  Mediation? As in a case where two parties cannot reach agreement?  What would that look like?  She said he did it; he says he didn’t. In mediation they agree that he may have done it, but has amnesia, or she agrees she experienced it, but it might have been a lucid dream?  Fortunately for We the People, a special congressional office is charged with trying to resolve these cases out of court.
 
And, yes, it appears that even with all this counseling and mediation, settlements do occur… but the members of Congress do not pay them from their own office funds. Unbelievably, confidential payments come out of a special U.S. Treasury fund.
 
Actually, this is not unbelievable at all. Again, these are important men, elected by their constituents, to make the laws that run this country. Aides and interns need to understand that now is not the time.

I remember the protests and the boycotting of the film The Color Purple, because Alice Walker had had the temerity to depict an African American male abusing an African American female. This was so not the time. The New York Times quoted the editor of a Black Chicago paper: ''No, it is not just a movie. It is a statement made out of context used as a pretext to take one more lick at society's rejects.'' 

But I have a personal ax to grind. An arsenal actually. I was sexually abused as a child by a man who was an attorney and then a judge, a man who served on boards, taught in a law school. I was sexually abused by a man who, after his death, had a chair named in his honor at his law school, whose funeral service was packed with hundreds of colleagues, and who was honored with a joint resolution passed by his state legislature, mourning his death. When I named him as a perpetrator, I was not believed and I was discredited and disinherited. It was not the time. He was one of the good guys.
 
When I taught at an elite college, one of my students reported to me that she had been raped by a student on campus. Turns out this was not the first, or even the second report for him. But he was still there. He was an athlete. It was his third time, but, still... it was not the time. Obviously he was a credit to the college. Better she should leave.

My housemate was raped a knifepoint by a man who had stopped his car and begged her for directions. His wife and children sat by him in the courtroom, smiling. He was a middle-class man. My housemate was a hippie student. Not the time. He was a productive member of society, a family man. The issue was her boyfriends.

I was harassed by the head of the theatre department at my university. The year was 1970. Sexual harassment laws were six years away from being on the books. I dropped out for ten years. I never even attempted to report it. I absolutely knew that it was not the time.
 
As a teaching assistant, I had a student react poorly to feminist perspectves of Shakespeare. He sent me a pornographic/slasher paper on “Desdemona, the Cunning Whore of Venice.”  I was terrified. I took it to the professor for the course. He met with the man and then removed all the male students from my class. These young men were protecting their right to an education that reflected their perspective. This was not the time for me to make them sounding boards for my pet theories.
 
Well… I could go on. I have worked  almost exclusively with women for more than thirty years, because I was running out of oxygen waiting for my time.

But here’s the thing:

Today, there was nothing more important that the women who were claiming to have been harassed. And thirty-three senators made that clear.
 
This is huge. I know, I know… there are millions across the country who are wringing their hands that this is not the time to lose a senator with his liberal record. There are millions who are trashing these women and their selfish priorities for not realizing that this was not the time. 
 
I know that. But still…
 
Today, a group of powerful women said, “Nothing is more important and now is the time.” And, miracle of miracles, the harasser stepped down.
 
Nothing will ever change for women as long as we keep believing that our pain is not as important as protecting the so-called good guys.
 

So… Milo Yiannopoulos.
 
I don’t want to spend one second more time on this subject than is absolutely, bare-bones necessary to interject the perspective of a survivor of child sexual abuse who has spent three decades working with the art and culture of other survivors in recovery.
 
In a nutshell, Milo is a British journalist and public speaker.  He got in a lot of trouble this week  when  a conservative website posted excerpts of a video that he made in a January 2016 episode of the podcast Drunken Peasants. 
 
Here is a transcript from that video from the website heavy.com.:

 
“It sounds like Catholic priest molestation to me, another man says, interrupting Milo.

Milo: “And you know what, I’m grateful for Father Michael. I wouldn’t give nearly such good head if it wasn’t for him.”
 
Other people talk. “Oh my God, I can’t handle it,” one man says. “The next thing in line is going to be pedophilia,” says another man.
 
Milo: “You’re misunderstanding what pedophilia means. Pedophilia is not a sexual attraction to somebody 13-years-old who is sexually mature. Pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty. Pedophilia is attraction to people who don’t have functioning sex organs yet. Who have not gone through puberty. Who are too young to be able..” [audio unclear and cut off by others]… “That’s not what we are talking about. You don’t understand what pedophilia is if you are saying I’m defending it because I’m certainly not.”
 
Another man said, “You are advocating for cross generational relationships here, can we be honest about that?”
 
Milo: “Yeah, I don’t mind admitting that. I think particularly in the gay world and outside the Catholic church, if that’s where some of you want to go with this, I think in the gay world, some of the most important, enriching and incredibly life affirming, important shaping relationships very often between younger boys and older men, they can be hugely positive experiences for those young boys. They can even save those young boys, from desolation, from suicide…” [People talk over each other] “… providing they’re consensual.”

In this interview, he was asked about the charges of pedophilia against Hollywood director Brian Singer. He disavowed any knowledge of Singer, but said he had attended Hollywood parties by other celebrities where he saw things that “beggared belief” where “some of the boys there were very young…  very young.”
 
So that was Milo a year ago. Also last year, he showed up for a college booking wearing a clerical collar and opened with, “Thank you, thank you. Aren’t you kind. I know what you’re thinking. If every priest looked like this, those little boys would stop complaining.”
 
As of this week, he has just he has just lost a quarter-million dollar book deal, his job as a Breitbart editor, and an invitation to speak at a national conference. It appears that his career may be ended. So… here is the damage control from yesterday’s press conference:

“Between the ages of 13 and 16, two men touched me in ways they should not have. One of those men was a priest. My relationship with my abusers is complicated by the fact that, at the time, I did not perceive what was happening to me as abusive. I can look back now and see that it was. I still don’t view myself as a victim. But I am one. Looking back, I can see the effects it had on me. In the years after what happened, I fell into alcohol and nihilistic partying that lasted well into my late 20s.”

Let’s parse that paragraph…  The relationship to the abusers is “complicated,” because he had been led to believe that what was happening was not abuse. That’s pretty standard. But, good for him, he can now look back and see that it was. But then: “I still don’t view myself as a victim.”  Hmm… That would appear to be a pretty huge disconnect. And then, “But I am one.”  Sounds like the first tentative step toward a long and fraught recovery.
 
He ends with, “Looking back, I can see the effects it had on me. In the years after what happened, I fell into alcohol and nihilistic partying that lasted well into my late 20s.”
 
Again, good for him. Unquestionably three years’ of sexual abuse at the hands of two abusers would contribute to those behaviors. But what about his early thirties? (He’s currently thirty-three.) Does he believe that, without recovery and/or a substantial reframing of the experience, this history no longer influences his behavior?

He has built a reputation on bullying, race baiting, trolling, and instigating. He attacks Muslims, people of color, women (especially feminists), rape victims, fat people, trans people…. well… just about anybody who suffers marginalization for any reason. Having identified his targets, he then invites others to pile on, and in the age of the internet that is extremely dangerous. His actions have placed his victims at risk and have limited their freedoms.
 
I would submit that Milo has only begun to scratch the surface of the degree to which his sexual abuse has affected him. I believe that his identification with the interests and perspectives of cultural perpetrators across a vast spectrum of oppressions informs his identity, and that what he refers to as a career is actually a compulsion. In fact, he calls Trump “Daddy.”  This is all the more interesting in light of the fact that he has referred to his father as “terrifying.”
 
There is nothing edgy or courageous about deploying hate speech in a cultural climate that is fostering witchhunts on multiple fronts. There is nothing radical about bullying—especially when there is a bully in the White House.

What happened to this man when he was a child was an atrocity, but his inability to heal from it stems from a gay male culture in the late 1990’s where there was still widespread tolerance for pedophilia. The North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), formed in the late 1970’s, was not expelled from the International Lesbian and Gay Association until 1994. Throughout the 1980’s, the controversy over NAMBLA’s inclusion in LGBT coalitions and events raged. At a 1986 gay parade in Los Angeles, iconic gay rights activist Harry Hay wore a sign proclaiming, “NAMBLA walks with me.”
 
NAMBLA’s position was that male sexual predation on male children is integral to the Western homosexual tradition, “from Socrates to Wilde to Gide,” and that this predation was practiced in gay cultures from “New Guinea and Persia to the Zulu and Japanese.”  In NAMBLA’s view, child sexual abuse is central to gay male history and culture.
 
The argument that Milo presented in his 2016 video, that these “relationships” can be enriching and affirming was part of the standard cant in many gay male papers that framed anti-pedophilia activists as sexual puritans bent on denying children their “right” to "sex" with adults. Two of the founding fathers of post-modernism, Derrida and Foucault, both participated in a public campaign in France to abolish age of consent. Abolish, not lower.
 
Milo was victimized by more than just two sick men. He was victimized by a movement and by a community. And, after he came of age with this legacy of abuse and the toxic ideology that perpetuates it, he was further abused by a culture that has and continues to incentivize his dissociation.

And here I am going to step aside and give the floor to Judith Herman, author of Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, a book that has saved the sanity and lives of millions. Here is Dr. Herman:
 
 “Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom.
 
But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the task of early adulthood―establishing independence and intimacy―burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and in memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships.
 
She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma.”
 
And…

"The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called 'doublethink,' and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call 'dissociation.' It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . .”
 
And…
 
“By developing a contaminated, stigmatized identity, the child victim takes the evil of the abuser into herself and thereby preserves her primary attachments to her parents. Because the inner sense of badness preserves a relationship, it is not readily given up even after the abuse has stopped; rather, it becomes a stable part of the child's personality structure.”

And…
 
“...repeated trauma in childhood forms and deforms the personality. The child trapped in an abusive environment is faced with formidable tasks of adaptation. She must find a way to preserve a sense of trust in people who are untrustworthy, safety in a situation that is unsafe, control in a situation that is terrifyingly unpredictable, power in a situation of helplessness. Unable to care for or protect herself, she must compensate for the failures of adult care and protection with the only means at her disposal, an immature system of psychological defenses.”  (My emphasis.)
 
In an interview last year with Fusion, Milo explained how his media personality evolved: “I didn’t like me very much and so I created this comedy character." To the New York Times, he admitted, "I don’t have feelings to hurt.”

Several journalists who spent time with him have noted that he does not actually believe most of the things he says. I compare this with the words of African American author and activist Toni Cade Bambara: "I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion. I've seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges. I've felt them doing it... I'm careful about what I give voice to."
 
A child who is taught that his abuse is empowerment will have great difficulty achieving authenticity of voice--or "freedom of speech," if you will. It follows that the person who is still trapped in a paradigm of protecting his own oppression will have little empathy for the vicitimization of others. The followers of Milo who hold him up as a champion of free speech have been hoodwinked. His is the most censored voice of all, the voice of the child who has internalized the affect of the perpetrator. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose when words have lost their meaning.

So, Milo, if you are entering on a path of recovery as a result of this week's events--and I hope you are,  I challenge you to undertake an action that is authentically dangerous, taking these words of Dr. Herman to heart: 

"Those who stand with the victim will inevitably have to face the perpetrator's unmasked fury. For many of us, there can be no greater honor."

Two things are going on for me this week: PTSD and Martha Graham. The PTSD is from the constant headlines about the sexual predation of one of the leading candidates for the office of President. Martha Graham is from my work on a play about Jean Rosenthal, the lesbian who lit her performances for thirty-five years.
 
In the course of researching Martha, I ran across a Youtube video of one of her most famous dances, “Errand into the Maze.” It’s a recreation of the dance that premiered in 1947. You can see it here.

Twelve years ago, I had watched the video of this dance, but I didn’t’ really see it. At that time, I was mostly interested in it from a biographical perspective. Was this about Graham’s ambivalence about marrying Erick Hawkins, one of her dancers? I had accepted the analysis of the dance pundits that “Errand” is about a woman’s fear of sexual intimacy.

Watching it this time, with active PTSD, I arrived at a very different understanding of the dance. I felt I was watching a woman wrestle with retrieval and integration of a traumatic rape memory. “Errand” was suddenly personal and relevant to me.
 
The dance is based on the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. In the story, the warrior Theseus must slay the Minotaur that lives in a labyrinth. Adriadne, the king’s daughter, helps Theseus by giving him a ball of thread that he uses to find his way out. In Graham’s version, there is no male warrior. It is Ariadne herself who enters the maze and slays the monster.
 
What Martha Graham has done is take us into the internal landscape of the survivor and her memories. Every single beat of this dance was suddenly intelligible and relatable to me. As an archetype, it reinforces the map of a survivor’s terrain: You are here. You may find yourself here later on. And if you can manage to get here, you’re out of the woods.

The dance begins before the dance. Martha would lay out the labyrinth before she danced it. It was made from lightweight, flexible boning that dressmakers used. One could buy it by the yard. Boning, unlike rope or ribbon, has something of a mind of its own. It resists, and the dancer must dialogue with that. I believe this is important. I believe it is why Martha chose it, instead of rope. It has a will… as do traumatic memories. And I like that she would lay out the labyrinth as a personal ritual, before each performance. Dancers still do that today. The path back into our memories is profoundly personal, if subconscious.

So… the stage is set with a stylized moon, a path of boning, and a V-shaped sculpture at the center of the maze that resembles an inverted pelvis with both legs up in the air.  The dance begins with pelvic contractions… labor pains? (Martha suffered from agonizing menstrual cramps.) The dancer begins to move as if she is being compelled against her will… Some have said that the world is forcing her, but her spirit resists. I see the opposite. I see her spirit calling her, her memories coming to get her:  It’s time.  The resistance is her habitual self, the armor of denial or routine that has been her protection.

Traumatic memories arrive. Their arrival feels unbidden, intrusive, pathological. In fact, often they arrive to be healed. The psyche that has been hiding them may be suddenly ready. Sometimes there is a trigger, an event that replicates the trauma, and we are set on that path again, greatly against our conscious will. But in Martha’s dance, this struggle is set in motion by an action that archetypically marks the beginning of labor, of birth. Unbidden, intrusive, seemingly pathological… but necessary for creation.

So, bent double with the violence of the contractions, the woman begins her journey dancing down the path of the boning, dancing into the maze toward the memory. She arrives at the crotch of the torso, or the trees, where she appears to ground herself temporarily, and then pull away, and then return. “I can’t but I must; I can’t but I must.” And then suddenly the Minotaur appears, a male dancer, mostly nude, with horns on his head and his arms yoked over a bone/staff.

Here it is: The Memory. She shields her eyes from the sight. She turns her back. It menaces her. She finally, turns toward him, throwing up one arm in a futile gesture of resistance. He literally bends her to his will and the horror is accomplished. She pushes the memory away, refusing to look. In denial mode, she retraces her steps back into the maze, this time, pulling up the boning behind her and weaving it between the legs of the torso as a kind of shield, just as the Minotaur returns, looking for her.

She does not want to come out from her defenses. The memory is exerting a pull over her. This time, she collapses on the floor, not even attempting a defense. She rolls as he steps over her, appearing to kick her along. He pulls her onto his back and carries her curled up in a fetal roll. He drags her back when she attempts to crawl away. He swings her around by the wrists. The Minotaur/memory literally kicks her ass.
 
But all this time, she has been growing stronger. This time, when he leaves, she discovers a joy, a lyricism in her body. She discovers pleasure. The contractions return, but she is integrating them, owning them as part of her body—part of her process. They are no longer an alien force violating her. She participates. She experiences them as part of her strength. And when the Minotaur returns, she still doesn’t want to look, she still experiences the dread.  He gloats, he menaces, he taunts. She is avoidant, she tries to move away… He still frightens her, but there is a new determination. Her hands are over her uterus.

Suddenly, she spins around to face her tormentor. She grabs his hands and leaps onto his thighs, towering over him, wrestling him, staring him down. She holds her ground. He collapses on the ground, the stiff bone that held up his arms rolls away, and he dies.

She returns to the torso/altar and unwinds the boning, stroking the legs/bones/trunks. She is free. Her body is her own. The "errand" is accomplished.