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.

Warning: Some graphic descriptions of violence against women.

Prostitution Narratives: Stories of Survival in the Sex Trade, edited by Caroline Norma and Melinda Tankard Reist, contains nineteen testimonies by women from around the world who have survived the sex trade, with three commentaries, a prologue by Rachel Moran, and an introduction by the editors. These are the voices of women who have been trafficked, used in pornography, worked in legal brothels, worked on the street. Some of them were addicted, some were sexually abused as children. All of them survived.  

Reading this book, the question that kept coming up for me was, “How can anyone believe that prostitution is a legitimate job?” I believe the answer lies in the fact that most people will believe what they are incentivized to believe. Long-time abolitionist Melissa Farley is cited in the introduction:
 
“There is an economic motive to hiding the violence in prostitution and trafficking… prostitution is sexual violence that results in massive economic profit for some of its perpetrators… Many governments protect commercial sex business because of monstrous profits.”
 
But what about the average person on the street… the average liberal, perhaps? I am reminded of what Hitler wrote about the “Big Lie:”

“… in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily… they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”
 
It is this belief in the Big Lie that enables governments and organizations like Amnesty International to overlook the truth about prostitution, and it is actions like the writing in Prostitution Narratives that will render that Big Lie unsustainable.
 
Rachel Moran, who wrote the Prologue, speaks about the lying at Ground Zero… in the victim’s own consciousness. (A footnote on Moran: She is the author of the astounding memoir Paid For: My Journey Through Prositution. Her memoir performs the near-miraculous feat of describing in detail the emotional state and psychological syndromes and strategies associated with the violations of prostitution. Her courage in writing that memoir reminds me of Harriet Tubman, who didn’t just get herself out of captivity, but who retraced her steps back to hell, over and over again, in order to bring out others.) So here is Moran:

“… I lied to others about what prostitution was; I did not lie to myself…  My deepest compassion is with the women who must mine deeply within themselves to uncover the subterfuge, go through the pain of examining its shapes and edges, and find a way to squarely look at the thing it was designed to conceal. In this process they must acknowledge the carnage of their own complicity.”
 
“The carnage of their own complicity.” And, the carnage of all our complicity.
 
The only way I know how to do this book justice in a blog is to give the space over to some of the voices in these pages, starting with the writing of Jacqueline Gwynne, a woman who was a receptionist at an upscale brothel in Melbourne. (In Australia, prostitution is legal.)
 
“My job title was ‘receptionist.’ I had a brothel manager’s license. But in reality I was actually a pimp. I had to sell women…
 
When I started, I was pro-porn and pro-sex work. At first I thought it was cool and exciting. I had read many books and watched films about the sex industry. It is glamourised in the media. But, in reality, the men are mostly fat, ugly, mad, old, creepy, have poor social skills, very few sexual skills and appalling personal hygiene. They generally can’t have normal relationships with women because of these reasons and they also have no respect for women. Any man that walks in to a brothel has no respect for women…"

I was only allowed to call the police if a client got angry about the service he received. I could have called the police numerous times, but abuse, intimidation and sexual harassment were all just part of the territory. The owner didn’t want us calling the police. We were expected to handle it all on our own…
 
The men would request exactly what they had seen in porn and wanted the girls very young and blonde. They would request extra for no condom: that would happen every night. I have no idea if any girls did, there were rumours of it happening. When you haven’t had a job all night, can’t pay your rent, it’s 4am and some guy offers you $500, what do you do?...
 
Being paid for sex is not what I think of as consensual sex. If you met these guys elsewhere you would not want to have sex with them. Prostitution is virtually paid rape…”
 
Rhiannon in “Didn’t Come to Hear Bitches Recite Poetry,” elaborates on that theme:

“When a person is paid for sex they are being paid precisely because of the fact the sex is unwanted. Sexual autonomy cannot exist when a person is sexual for any reason outside their own desire, for their own pleasure. The sacrifice of my bodily autonomy was precisely what I was paid for.”( p. 72.)
 
“He told me he had $200 and I followed him to his apartment. In the world I lived in, the sum of all I was worth was $200. That fact filled me with more pain than I could contain. In his bathroom I took the rest of the pills left in my bag, found his razor and used it to cut my wrists, then removed my clothes and went and lay down on his bed with blood sticking to the toilet paper I had stuck on the cuts. He only had a hundred dollars, he said. It was all he could find. I insisted on clutching the cash while he used me. This man felt it was worth paying a hundred dollars to have sex with a woman who had a tear-stained face and bleeding wrists."
 
Was that kind of callous or sadistic indifference an exception?
 
Caitlin Roper cites from a study done by Melissa Farley and colleagues, “Comparing Sex Buyers with Men Who Don’t Buy Sex:”
 
“Two thirds of both the sex buyers and the non-sex buyers observed that a majority of women are lured, tricked, or trafficked into prostitution” and that “41%... of the sex buyers used women who they knew were controlled by pimps at the time they used her…  The knowledge that women have been exploited, coerced, pimped or trafficked failed to deter sex buyers from buying sex.”

Linda explains what that looks like:
 
“A lot of them [johns] seem hypnotized, like they don’t know that the whole thing isn’t real. A lot of them say, ‘I love you’; a lot seem normal, but not many realize that you are there because you were initially desperate and then you just got lost in the money or drugs or whatever. It’s inconvenient for them to think about our circumstances.”
 
So why aren’t more survivors speaking out? 
 
Here’s Tanja Rahm:
 
“A lot of women around the world have been trying to tell the truth about prostitution and what is going on in prostitution. But when you speak out, you take a high risk. You run the risk of being threatened, hated, being told that you are weak, weren’t strong enough, that prostitution isn’t for everyone, that you chose it for yourself, that you got a lot of money from prostitution and are therefore a whore. What the pro-prostitution lobby tries to do is frighten women into not telling the truth about their experiences, so that you won’t be able to hear the truth. The fact you don’t hear from [survivors of prostitution] very often is not because they are not there. It is because they are not ready to confront society’s neglect of their experiences.”
 
But some of these women do speak out… and here is Simone Watson’s experience:

“Yes, those memories linger whether I am meeting with politicians, or trying to be heard among the cries of ‘sex worker rights’ in the media. Or intellectuals who calmly look at me as an interesting subject—who view it all as a sociological phenomenon of interest. Rather than violation. Rather than agony. Rather than urgency. And when traveling all the way, with the resultant PTSD, to meet politicians in my own or another state in fear and desperation that another generation of human beings will endure what I went through, and telling them I am a survivor. Then going back to the hotel room to sleep and being woken several times sweating and suffocating. Feeling weights on me. Crying, then feeling stupid. Checking the internet for news from home and finding another person telling me they hope I die and that I am feminist scum and a man hater and too ugly to fuck. That I needed to get raped and that would sort me out.”
 
Finally, I want to end with the writing of Christine Stark, a friend and fellow author. I reviewed her book Nickels: A Tale of Dissociation a few years ago. In her essay, “When You Become Pornography,” she tells of her experience:

I'm so grateful these women survived and I am in awe of their courage in telling their stories in Prostitution Narratives. I'm grateful to the editors, to Rachel Moran, and to Spinifex Press. I encourage women to take this book and not just read it, but deploy it. 

Order here.

 PROLOGUE
 
As a child, I collected Classic Illustrated Comics, and every time there would be a new release, I would pester my mother to buy it for me. I remember the day in 1967 when the comic book adaptation of  “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” appeared on the drugstore shelf.  As usual, I asked my mother to buy the latest comic. When she saw the title, she suddenly became very frightened and, lowering her voice, she explained that it was a story that was very popular in the North, but that it was hated in the South. Born in Connecticut, my mother had fallen in love with a Southern sailor on leave in New York, married him, and moved to Virginia after the war.  Pegged as a Yankee, she had initially been viewed with suspicion and snubbed socially. Apparently, my mother was afraid that someone might see her now, twenty years later, buying a children’s comic book, and that this could destroy her hard-won acceptance into Richmond society.
 
Fast-forward nearly forty years. The university theatre department in the city where I live is in an uproar. There had been a public reading of the dramatic adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a collaboration between a drama lit class and a pop culture class. Some of the students felt that they had been compromised, because they had not been adequately informed about the historical context and controversy of the work before agreeing to participate.
 
I saw that reading… and here, as a playwright and an activist, is my reaction: 

Preaching to the choir is not a bad choice for a playwright. In fact, it can be a radical act if one is writing for a marginalized community who rarely see representations of themselves or their lives in the mainstream.
 
But what if a playwright wants to preach beyond the choir, to write a play for an audience that may actually be hostile to the message or paradigm being presented?
 
To answer that question, I am going to look at a play that is more than a hundred and fifty years old and still requires a trigger warning: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, based on the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe and adapted by George L. Aiken.
 
Yes, I know that this play is considered the fountainhead of toxic stereotypes of African Americans that have poisoned the well of American drama and continue to seep into plays and films. I know that these stereotypes are so prevalent and so pernicious that the titular character’s name has become synonymous with “an epithet for a person who is slavish and excessively subservient to perceived authority figures, particularly a black person who behaves in a subservient manner to white people; or any person perceived to be complicit in the oppression of their own group.”

But, as a dramatist who attempts to effect social change, I cannot ignore the fact that this abolitionist play was being performed somewhere every single night, continuously, from 1852 until 1933-- by both African American and white theatres.  As a dramatist, I cannot ignore the fact that it was seen by three million people, ten times the number of the book’s first-year sales. Most of all, I can’t ignore that President Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator,” is supposed to have said, upon meeting Stowe, “Is this the little woman who made the great war?”

Apocryphal or not, the play Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with its forty-two translations and four-generation track record, put the subject of abolition at the heart of the popular culture of its day.
 
Here is the irony: The very same dramaturgical strategies that enabled the play, back in the day, to preach so effectively beyond the choir are the reason why the play is vilified today.
 
African American writer and activist Toni Cade Bambara wrote, “The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.” She did not say that the job of the writer was to make sure that whatever strategies she employed in this work would remain revolutionary two hundred years later.
 
Stowe and Aikins managed to make sabotage, destruction of property, escape, armed resistance, and passive resistance irresistible to a population that would be the targets of these actions. They made revolution irresistible.
 
How?

Let’s break it down by the categories:
 
1) Escaping. This is the least confrontational response, and therefore the one least threatening to white audiences. Stowe maximized this potential for identification by having her escapees legally married and light-skinned enough to pass. In other words, these characters would look like her audience. The couple has an infant son, and the family is threatened with forcible separation at a slave auction. The wife will be forced to submit to repeated rapes. Something we may forget today is that, up until the twentieth century, white audiences banned any representation of serious love between dark-skinned characters—just as they rejected the presence of Black actors in classical dramas. The denial of romantic or family ties was an ideology critical to the logistics of the slave auctions. This romantic, committed relationship at the heart of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was revolutionary in 1852. Stowe got away with it, only because she scripted it for light-skinned actors.
 
There is an adage in theatre that there is no right or wrong; there is only "boring" or "compelling." Aikins put Eliza’s flight across the semi-frozen Ohio River on the stage. With her pursuers and their dogs close behind, the distraught mother clutches her infant to her breast as she leaps to freedom from one chunk of ice to the next. Irresistible.

2) Sabotage and destruction of property. This was going to be a tough sell for anyone with servants—not just the enslavers. Clearly Stowe was going to need a different strategy than the one she used for escape. Audiences will not identify with the perpetrator of these actions, but they may be compelled to laugh with her. Stowe created a comedic character that today is considered one of the noxious stereotypes: Topsy.
 
Topsy is a wild child. She is paired with a racist, “Miss Grundy,” white, spinster stereotype. Her scenes are comprised of stock vaudevillian turns, where the working-class, down-to-earth stock character puts one over on their prissy and clueless, supposed “betters.” Topsy lies, cheats, steals, and intentionally destroys property… and audiences roar with delight every time she does. She gets an ovation for her standard defense: “I’m wicked, I guess.”
 
Topsy can be seen as a white fantasy of the unchristian savage, untamed and untameable, justifying the harsh abuse of enslavers. Both book and play, however,  derail that interpretation by making explicit that Topsy was sold away from her parents as an infant, “raised by a speculator, with lots of others.” If Topsy has no loyalties except to herself, it is her enslavers who are to blame. Audiences are not allowed to forget that she has intentionally been deprived of any intellectual or moral instruction, and subjected to emotional, physical, and mostly likely sexual abuse.

3) Armed resistance. Southerners, even non-enslavers, lived in terror of uprisings by captives. It was going to take more than skin shades or vaudeville to sell this to a national audience. In the book, Stowe resolves the issue by having the escaping husband push one of his pursuers off a cliff and then, with his wife’s urging, take the man for medical treatment to a Quaker settlement. Aikins must have realized that, if he built the scene effectively, the errand-of-mercy turnaround would give his audiences dramaturgical whiplash. Wisely, he departed from Stowe’s text.
 
Aikins pairs the escaping husband up with Phineas Fletcher, a white, working-class man who has recently converted to Quakerism in order to please his Quaker fiancée. Phineas is in the tradition of Shakespeare’s “rude mechanicals,” and his struggle to follow the pacifist teachings of the Quakers is a source of ongoing mirth for the audience.  In the course of aiding George’s escape, the two men set up an ambush for their pursuers. George shoots one of his enemies, but audiences never know if the wound is fatal, because Phineas wrestles the man off the edge of a cliff. The killing is scripted as a moment of high comedy, because Phineas, mindful of his new religion, remembers to call out, “Friend, thee is not wanted here!” even as he heaves his enemy off the brink. White audiences roar their approbation.
 
What Aikins did was brilliant: The escaping captive shoots his enslaver, and does it onstage. The coup de grâce, however,  is delivered by a white man sworn to a life of non-violence. The audience can choose where to put their focus. It doesn’t hurt that the scene, set in a mountain pass, is staged like a Western melodrama.

4) Civil disobedience. This actually posed a greater threat to the enslavers than armed resistance, as Gandhi and King would have understood. Civil disobedience goes to the root of oppression, challenging the legitimacy of white supremacist doctrine and entitlement, and because of this, it would be the toughest sell of all.
 
Civil disobedience is no laughing matter, and so Stowe and Aikins turned to pathos. And hence the genesis of one of the most hated stereotypes in American drama: Uncle Tom.
 
Stowe and Eakins took pains to depict Tom as an enslaved man whose conversion to Christian ideals of loyalty, forgiveness, and meekness is absolute. His enslaver boasts that he can send Tom on errands to free states and count on him to return.  Tom appears to be the ultimate white fantasy of an utterly subservient person of color.
 
But what people forget today is that, for all his over-the-top deference and humility, Tom is murdered for defying orders in the name of  loyalty to a higher law. His first act of civil disobedience is refusing an order to whip an enslaved woman who is resisting the sexual advances of her enslaver. As a result, Tom is tortured. His second act is refusing to betray the escape plans of another enslaved woman who is faced with being sold away from her child. This time Tom is murdered. White notions of chivalry and Christian morality are pitted against audience members’ identification with being law-abiding citizens. When they approve of Tom’s defiance, they are assured that his disobedience is not motivated by self-interest or even disrespect. They are assured of this by the extravagant lengths to which Stowe went in characterizing Tom as a living saint.

The stereotype of Uncle Tom that has come down to us is a corruption of the original trope. Tom gave up his life to stand in solidarity with enslaved women of color whose oppressions were specific to their sex. 
 
The horrific sexual violation of African American women is the engine that drives the play. From Eliza’s flight to Topsy’s wildness to the actions that precipitate Tom’s murder, the book and play portray rape and women’s subsequent lack of ownership of their children as the great evils underlying the institution of enslavement. Too often the abuse of African American women has been entered as an historical footnote to the Black Freedom Movement, if entered at all.

2011 saw the publication of  Danielle L. McGuire’s book, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. For the first time, there was a history book that wrote this violation back into the record. Few know that long before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, she was engaged in advocating for social justice for black women who were the victims of sexual violence at the hands of white men. The previously unwritten history of the Montgomery Bus Boycott is a story of horrendous, ongoing sexual harassment and assault of Black women in these public conveyances.
 
Was this focus on women a passion of Stowe’s, a plea for historical accuracy, or a strategic device for recruiting audience outrage?
 
As a playwright, I come away from a study of this play with a different perspective on it, with a better idea of what it takes to preach beyond the choir, and the sobering realization that this preaching must engage with stereotypes and caricatures borne of my audience’s prejudice--in the risky hope of transforming them. This appears to be the price of making revolution irresistible.

What does it take to confront a rich and powerful rapist?

It would be easy to think of Andrea Constand as a kind of Wonder Woman who brought Bill Cosby to justice with her Lariat of Truth.

That’s just it. It would be easy. Easy to believe that heroines are born that way, that they have an extra chromosome for courage or fearlessness.

I think of a quotation by Albert Einstein: “It's not that I'm so smart; it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

What if Andrea Constand was not Wonder Woman? What if she just stayed with the problem longer?  

Let’s look at the temptations she faced, temptations that face any victim who attempts to confront her perpetrator. Constand didn’t always meet them successfully. Sometimes she wavered, hesitated, fumbled, backed away… but she  always--eventually--came back, and when she did, she came back stronger, with more support, and with greater clarity.

So here are the Seven Temptations of Andrea Constand:

1. The temptation to believe it never happened, to doubt one’s perceptions, to blame oneself.

Cosby was not a new acquaintance, nor was he a date. Constand had known him for two years, since 2002 when she came to work at Temple University as the director of operations for the women’s basketball program. Cosby, a member of the Temple Athletics Hall of Fame was a frequent fundraiser and honored guest. In his sixties, he had positioned himself as a mentor to her, inviting her to dinner parties, and then to private dinners, at his home outside of Philadelphia. He would talk to her about basketball, her career, and spiritual beliefs. He met her family and cultivated a relationship with them. He had groomed her patiently for victimization.

The night of the rape, Cosby  invited her over, to “offer her assistance in her pursuit of a different career.”  She testified that he gave her three pills, claiming they were herbal supplements for stress. He insisted that she take all three.

Constand was drugged. Her memory of the incident was impaired, filled with blackouts, vague impressions, and she experienced enormous disorientation when she recovered consciousness. She remembered  waking up on a couch at four in the morning, her clothing in disarray and Cosby standing over her in a bathrobe. Confused and mortified, her initial response was a kneejerk, socially conditioned one:  She expressed embarrassment over her disheveled state. He gave her a muffin and took her home.

2. The temptation to get on with one’s life, to distance oneself from the episode, to attempt to normalize the situation and/or relations with the rapist.

Four months later, she left her job and career, moved back home to Canada, and began studying to become a massage therapist. She stayed in contact with Cosby, and, several months after returning home, she took her parents to see his show at a casino in Ontario.

3) The temptation not to tell anyone.

Constand did not tell anyone for a year. This is not uncommon. She was in survival mode, in flight. What eventually brought her back to the rape was the emphasis in her massage classes on a code of ethics around touch.

In January 2005, Constand finally broke her silence and told her mother. Immediately after that, she reported the rape to the authorities where she lived. They passed the case on to the police in Pennsylvania. 

4)  The temptation to accept an apology as sufficient.

Three days after the report to the police, Cosby and his people began to call her. Constand and her mother stated repeatedly that all they wanted was an apology. Even Cosby admitted this. According to the filing, he told the police that she had not asked for money, “but had only asked him to apologize to Plaintiff and her mother, which he did.”

He apologized several times. On the phone, not in writing.

5) The temptation to accept money in lieu of accountability.

Offers of money are standard ploys for predators with resources, especially when the victim is not wealthy.  Cosby called Constand’s mother and offered to set up an “educational trust” for Constand to attend graduate school, provided she could prove to him that she was maintaining a grade point average of 3.0. He later admitted he had done this for another accuser.

Constand turned it down.

6)  The temptation to give up when the police refuse to file charges.

The District Attorney, declining to file charges, stated, “I think that factors such as failure to disclose in a timely manner and contacts with the alleged perpetrator after the event are factors that weigh toward Mr. Cosby… Much exists in this investigation that could be used to portray persons on both sides of the issue in a less-than-flattering light.”

Constand’s actions were consistent with choices made by trauma survivors in the immediate aftermath, but juries and judges are rarely trauma literate, and it is easy for victims to feel ashamed for not being better plaintiffs. At this point, many victims give up, and Constand might have done that, except that Cosby began a campaign to discredit her as an extortioner.

After offering Constand an apology and money, Cosby and his reps went to the tabloids with a story about how Constand’s mother had demanded money from him even before Constand had contacted the police. Cosby insisted that the relationship had been consensual. As a second and then third woman came forward with similar stories of being drugged and raped by Cosby, he gave a personal interview to The National Enquirer, in exchange for them killing the story of the third woman.  In the interview, he described Constand in such specific detail there could be no question about her identity.

Six days after the Enquirer story, Constand filed a civil suit in federal court--
under her own name, her anonymity already having been compromised by Cosby’s interview. She accused Cosby of “battery, assault, intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, defamation/defamation per se, and false light/invasion of privacy.” Because of all the publicity—much of it propagated by Cosby himself—ten other victims contacted Constand’s legal team to offer corroborating testimony.

Constand’s team requested a protective order to shield the identity of these women from the press. This was not unusual. What was unusual was that the Cosby team also moved for a protective order that would seal not only his testimony, but that of his accusers. This move caught the attention of the Associated Press. What was Cosby attempting to hide? The AP made two separate attempts to force open the court records, and Constand sided with them.

7)  The temptation to say “enough,” to tell yourself that you’ve gotten everything that you’re going to get, to let it go short of full accountability.

Cosby settled with the usual terms: neither party is ever allowed to discuss the case or to disclose the amount of the settlement.

But Cosby continued to defame Constand. When even more women began to come forward, Cosby’s website posted  a statement in clear violation of the settlement agreement, that “decade-old, discredited allegations against Mr. Cosby have resurfaced. The fact they are being repeated does not make them true.”

Immediately Constand forced him to publish a retraction, which he did: “The statement released by Mr. Cosby’s attorney over the weekend was not intended to refer in any way to Andrea Constand.”

And, finally, as the AP continued to push for disclosure of the court records of her civil suit, a federal judge ordered the deposition unsealed. He stated that Cosby, in posturing for years as a “public moralist,” had forfeited his right to privacy. The world could read for itself Cosby’s admission that he had obtained nine prescriptions for Quaaludes to be given to women with whom he wanted to have sex.

Constand is now urging the unsealing of all of the testimony from that trial, and there are several civil suits pending, as well as a criminal investigation. It’s all over for Cosby. He may even go to prison.

All because Constand just stayed with the problem longer.