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.

Wow. A lot of confusion about rape in the news these days.

We have Congressman Todd Akin telling us that “legitimate rapes” don’t result in pregnancies. We have Senate candidate Tom Smith comparing pregnancy from rape to “having a baby out of wedlock.”  Last year, Paul Ryan co-sponsored a bill in Congress that would ban federal funding of abortions except in cases of “forcible rape,” a term which he has refused to define, because, as he insists, it’s “stock language.” We have all kinds of liberal folks (seriously… Noam Chomsky?) insisting that Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of the whistleblowing website Wikileaks, who has been accused of rape and sexual assault, should not have to respond to Swedish police questioning, because—you know, he’s one of “our” guys. 

 Whoopi Goldberg has gone on record (never retracted) declaring that it was not a “rape-rape” when Roman Polanski drugged and vaginally, orally, and anally assaulted a thirteen-year-old who claimed, “I said, ‘No, no. I don't want to go in there. No, I don't want to do this. No!’, and then I didn't know what else to do.” This week the Guardian ran a story with this headline, “How do we teach young people what sexual consent really means?”

My sisters, this is a boatload of confusion. 

And, I would submit not just confusion on the part of the perpetrators and their allies. I remember teaching an Intro to Women’s Studies class not all that long ago, and I conducted an anonymous survey. Turns out that all of the women in the class (they were all under twenty-two) self-reported as sexually active and not having orgasms. When I attempted to teach a workshop on how to communicate with partners about what one enjoys in bed, I discovered to my chagrin that none of my students had the slightest interest in this. Apparently, what they were having was not really “sex-sex.” One had to wonder whether or not it might be “rape-rape.”

Later on, teaching at an elite private college, I began asking questions about the experiences of the young women I was teaching. When asked if they knew of cases of date rape on campus, they expressed uncertainty as to whether or not their experiences with men would qualify. Since studies have shown that one in four college women have either been raped or suffered attempted rape, and since studies have also shown that one in twelve male students surveyed had committed acts that met the legal definition of rape, and since studies have also shown that one third of males surveyed said that they would commit rape if they could escape detection, and since one fourth of men surveyed believed that rape was acceptable if the woman asks the man out, and the man pays for the date or the woman goes back to the man's room after the date… well, I don’t think it's going too far out on a limb to suggest that a significant number of these confused young women had, indeed, been date raped.

The problem here appears to run deeper than “No means no.” Looking for the source of the confusion, I believe that I may have found the culprit.

It’s the word “sex.” Check it out:

In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, sex is defined as “sexually motivated phenomena or behavior.” Not too helpful. Kind of like looking up “tennis” and reading that it is a  “tennis phenomenon or behavior.”

Looking up “sexual” is not much help either:  “having or involving sex"...  which of course leads us back to “sexual.”

Sex, like “forcible rape,” appears to be “stock language.” Nobody needs to define it, because we all know what it is.  But--see above--apparently not.

I am a writer, and like under-celebrated, African American  genius Toni Cade Bambara, I believe in “acts of language.” I’m going to commit one now. I’m going to suggest a new word for sex. And it’s going to be a gynocentric, subjective word, referencing the clitoris not the vagina.

I’m going to propose the words “cypriate” and “cypriation” for female genital activity initiated by the subject, for the primary intention of experiencing a pleasurable arousal of the clitoris. For example, “Last night, next to the waterfall,  I cypriated with my partner.” Or… “Cypriation at the full moon can be especially intense.” 

I admit, I am taking my cue from the late, great Monique Wittig, whose acts of language opened my eyes to wild possibility. In her Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary, she and Sande Zeig coined the word “la cyprine” to refer to the vaginal secretions that signal sexual desire.  [“Sécrétion vaginale, signe physique du désir sexuel. Une agitation trouble l'écoulement de la cyprine.”]  The derivation for her neologism is the island of Cyprus, legendary birthplace of Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

Obviously cypriation does not refer to many of the acts that are considered sex or sexual in the heteropatriarchal world. In fact, it probably refers to only a tiny minority.  But adopting the use of this word will require that the subject own her agency, and it will also validate her own pleasure as something of primary, defining significance.

In other words, these young women who are unclear about whether or not they are experiencing date rape will have absolute clarity as to whether or not they are experiencing cypriation. Furthermore it will facilitate their understanding that any interaction with their vulva that is not cypriation is a potential form of violation and not acceptable... unless, perhaps, the woman's primary incentive is achieving pregnancy.

There should never have been one word that could be used to refer to pleasurable, welcome sexual activity for women and, at the same time, any and all violations or torture of her genitals. There should never have been a word for sexual activity that confused an act designed for procreation with an act designed for a woman’s pleasure. There should never be a word that can be taken to assume that actions pleasing to men and their genitals are or should be pleasing to women and our genitals. Sex and rape are only synonymous for rapists. Vagina and vulva are only synonymous where the clit and the woman’s pleasure are incidental or irrelevant.

What has happened is that women’s experience and women’s anatomy and women's pleasure have been stolen in a linguistic equivalent of three-card monte.

Sisters, take back the clit! Occupy the dictionary! And as our great foremother Sappho would sing, “We shall enjoy it/ as for him who finds/ fault, may silliness/ and sorrow take him!”

This week, the Department of Veteran Affairs announced some good news. They are reforming the rules for claiming veterans’ benefits for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  The military is easing the burden of proof that has been required for veterans seeking this diagnosis.  No longer do they have to have witnesses, documentation, etc. regarding the incident that caused the trauma. Now, all they need is a VA-approved psychologist or psychiatrist to affirm that the vet’s trauma story is “consistent with the places, types, and circumstances of the Veteran's service.”

The bad news is that these new rules will not apply to veterans (mostly women) whose PTSD is a result of  have experienced Military Sexual Trauma (MST).

I’ve been trying to figure out why this is. Maybe it has something to do with how the military defines the situation… 

These are the words of Virginia Woolf in her brilliant essay Three Guineas, which is more radical (therefore more reviled) than A Room of One's Own...

They are also the title of the word collage I presented last night at a literary event here in Portland (Maine), titled "Patriotica." I was one of two women reading in an evening filled overwhelmingly with readings by, for, and about men... illustrating Woolf's point beautifully.

During the evening, I thought of a quotation by Native American activist Winona LaDuke, "I would like to see as many people patriotic to a land as I have seen patriotic to a flag." Sadly, "treehuggers" are usually seen as unpatriotic.

Anyway, here is my contribution to the evening. I want to add a footnote.. In the piece I quote Colonel Janis Karpinski, who was a whistleblower about a military rape coverup. Karpinski was demoted from Brigadier General in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, and she courageously went on to write a book, One Woman's Army, about how she was scapegoated to protect higher-ups. She tells how the prisoner abuses were perpetrated by contract employees trained in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay and sent under orders from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. There have, of course, been attempts to discredit her, but, tellingly, no lawsuits.

Another footnote is that the epidemic of rapes in the military was the subject of a Congressional investigation in 2008.  As a result there was an admirable military  PR campaign, "My Strength is for Defending," which, sadly, appears to have been just so much window-dressing. The raping continues, the suicides continue, and the coverups are ongoing.

One of the thoughts I had in researching this piece was that, if a situation like this had come to light in the 1970's, I believe that women's groups would have organized all over the country to picket and leaflet every recruiter's office, to let these very young, very vulnerable, often low-income women know that they had a 50/50 chance of sexual assault if they signed up, and a 90% chance of being discharged if they report, and an 85% likelihood they would be ineligible for VA support for the PTSD after the involuntary discharge. If they had a prior history of being sexually victimized, that would be used against them in their (mis)diagnoses.

Why isn't that happening today? Many reasons. The economy. Women simply do not have the luxury of activism. Also, a generation of women who seem to think that  naming and resisting oppression is what makes them victims... (WTF, literally) Lesbians having the option of insemination and adoption, so that we are no longer a predominantly childless community, and our priorities, for better or worse, reflect this shift.

I have written an essay titled "Medals for Military Sexual Trauma:A Proposal." Medals would be far more effective than a poster campaign, because the awarding of medals would necessitate a profound shift in the military mindset... a shift acknowledging that "women" and "soldiers" are not mutually exclusive categories, a shift acknowledging that an enemy soldier is a soldier who assaults any US military personnel, a shift acknowledging that that rape constitutes wounding and that PTSD is a wound.

So here is "As a Woman I Want No Country..."

These are the words of lesbian author Virginia Woolf: 

“... if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or “our” country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or to protect either myself or my country. For,’ the outsider will say, ‘in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world."

According to the website of the Military Rape Crisis Center, one in three women in the military will be sexually assaulted. Two out of three women in the military will be sexually harassed. Congresswoman Jane Harmon from California has done the math: “A woman who signs up to protect her country is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire.”

Over 90% of all females that report a sexual assault are discharged from the military before their contract ends. From the 90%, around 85% are discharged against their wishes. Nearly all 
of the 85% lose their careers based on misdiagnoses that render them ineligible for military service and ineligible for VA treatment 
after discharge.

"... in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world."

In a startling revelation, Colonel Janis Karpinski testified that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former senior U.S. military commander in Iraq, gave orders to cover up the cause of death for some female American soldiers serving in Iraq.

Karpinski testified that a surgeon for the coalition's joint task force said in a briefing that "women in fear of getting up in the hours of darkness to go out to the port-a-lets or the latrines were not drinking liquids after 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and in 120 degree heat or warmer, because there was no air-conditioning at most of the facilities, they were dying from dehydration in their sleep."

The women were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women's latrine after dark. The latrine for female soldiers at Camp Victory wasn't located near their barracks, so they had to go outside if they needed to use the bathroom. According to Karpinski, "There were no lights near any of their facilities, so women were doubly easy targets in the dark of the night." "And rather than make everybody aware of that -- because that's shocking, and as a leader if that's not shocking to you, then you're not much of a leader -- what they told the surgeon to do is don't brief those details anymore. And don't say specifically that they're women. You can provide that in a written report, but don't brief it in the open anymore."

Sanchez's attitude was: "The women asked to be here, so now let them take what comes with the territory."

“... in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world."

Sept 2009 The report by the Defense Department’s Task Force on Sexual Assault in the Military Services, based on 15 months of work and interviews with more than 3,500 people at 60 locations around the world, said the department’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office is not providing policy or oversight for key responsibilities, or interacting with military officials in the field who are accountable on this issue.

“... in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world."

“Administrative discharge.” The words stung, like I had just been slapped or spit upon. I couldn't follow the rest of the lieutenant colonel's words. Only that the man who raped me was being given an honorable discharge. 


The rapist would keep his rank and his benefits. His record would be unblemished. He could reenlist the day after his discharge. “With all due respect, sir,” I said with the intensity of barely controlled fury, “that isn't acceptable to me. I don't ever want to see this man wearing this uniform again, leading troops again, or dishonoring another veteran at their funeral.” 


The lieutenant appointed as my advocate told me that she had once been raped, but decided not to file a criminal report. 

“It was easier to just forget about it,” she told me, and implied that I should, too. This is how life is for women in the Army. 
When I rejoined my comrades, no one would talk to me. Not even the women. They all faulted me for breaking up the unit, for getting the rapist taken off of the deployment. The rapist had a long history with the unit, while I was the new girl. 
A few days after I rejoined my unit, we reviewed some video footage from training. At one point, the rapist’s face filled the screen. I was paralyzed, lightheaded with fear and nausea. I ran to the bathroom and vomited. Minutes later, a female I had trained with and lived with came in to use the bathroom. As I sat on the floor heaving with sobs, she stepped over me to wash her hands, survey her hair, and leave. I was alone. To her, I was worthless.

During my deployment, Major R often accused me of being promiscuous, of spending too much time with men (which made up about 85 percent of the post's population and my entire office), and of putting myself in dangerous situations. He once said this must explain the rapist’s actions. With tears and anger, and no regard to military bearing, I rebuked the major. 
“I have done nothing wrong,” I shouted. “He made his own decision to rape me.” The major cringed at the word “rape,” then stared at me with contempt and told me to leave his office.

“in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world."

There is no set reaction to Military Sexual Trauma. You may feel fear, shame, anger, embarrassment, or guilt. You may have a response right away, or it may be delayed for months or years. You may feel sad or scared months or years after the assault.

After Military Sexual Trauma you may:

• Avoid places or things that remind you of what happened.
• Avoid your friends, family, and other people.
• Have trouble sleeping or have nightmares
• Feel numb or feel nothing at all.
• Have relationship problems.
• Think about death or killing yourself.

“... in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world."

Wow... check out this headline from my hometown: "Penis Hacker Loose in Portland."

Got my attention, too.  I actually was at the opening of this gallery show yesterday evening, and one of the artists was telling me about the incident. He told me that there had been a controversial nude sculpture installed, but that there had been complaints about it, and it was being removed from the show. In fact, that morning, the artist had arrived to pick it up, but when she got there, she found that the sculpture had been "defaced." In fact, it had been "de-penised."

So, I was listening to this story, and I was seeing images of the famous "Mannekin pis" in Brussels, or Michelangelo's David, and so on, and thinking, "Really, Portland? Really?"  But then suddenly, the light went on. I turned to the artist, who was male, and asked, "Was it an erection?" And, indeed it was.

So, now,  the kaleidoscope of my brain turned again, and the patterns of my thinking rearranged themselves. This time, I was remembering Sylvia Plath's tombstone... and notice I say, "Sylvia Plath." The tombstone, which had been carved with her married name, "Sylvia Plath Hughes" had a history of defacement. Apparently fans of Plath's work have repeatedly chiseled off the name "Hughes." Some have attributed her suicide to her husband's affair with another woman, whom he would later marry, and with whom he would father a child. Hughes' second wife would also commit suicide, but, unlike Plath, she would murder her child first.

So I'm thinking about that. I am also thinking about Georgia O'Keeffe, who wrote how, at the Art Institute of Chicago, she was required  to take a course in anatomy that entailed the painting of nude male subjects. She had had a strong emotional response to the situation, and an even stronger response to her experience of the first class session. Apparently traumatized, she gave serious thought to dropping out. This did not seem to be to be about squeamishness or Puritanism. It seemed to be a survivor's response to a situation that would restimulate the trauma, the exposure to a naked man (and his genitals) being the probable trigger.

I am also thinking about a former girlfriend, who expressed a similar discomfort with an live-modeling art course. She actually went to her professor with a request for an alternative arrangement for passing the course. If I am remembering rightly, he did begrudgingly offer an alternative, gave her a poor grade, and maintained a somewhat hostile and distant attitude toward her for the remainder of her time at the school.

I am thinking of all of these things, around this "defacement." The suffusion of blood into the male organ appears to be, in the public mind, the difference between art and pornography, anatomy and indecency. Had the sculpture's penis been flaccid, I doubt it would have been excised. First, it would not have been such an easy target, and second, I doubt it would have triggered such a powerful response.

And, yes, it could have been a college prank. It could have been a group of frat boys (the gallery is located on a campus). But I can't shake the feeling that the vandal (activist?)  was a woman, or women, and that the action was political... a response to iconography that appeared to be celebrating something that  she--or they--had experienced as a weapon.

And all of this is going through my brain in a few seconds. I'm in the middle of a conversation. To backtrack: I have just asked if it was an erection. He says "yes." And everything stops for me. He stands there, puzzled. I'm not sure what he's waiting for. What I do know is that I have nothing to say. Because I have too much to say. Is it vandalism to chisel out Hughes' name? After all, Plath had chosen to publish under her maiden name.  Who was doing the disrespecting? Who owns history? Who is the dead poet's family?

And O'Keeffe... we all know her flowers and her canyons look like vulvas. Was this a response to a situation where she had been forced to make a choice between her career or her safety? Was this her revenge... that the world must now focus on, write commentary about, celebrate the vulva in order to deal with her as an artist?

And, of course, I am remembering my girlfriend. I am remembering how difficult it is for two artists, who are both women, to fight for our lives as artists and still have the resources to support each other.

I am thinking about how, as a heavily censored artist, I will probably be expected to register outrage at this act of vandalism and censorship. But I know how celebrations of the phallus traumatize and silence survivors. That is the censorship that concerns me. I know that if I express ambivalence toward, or support for the defacement, I will be miscategorized ("sex negative"). I know that to try to explain how the depiction of an erection in a public place can feel threatening... like a racial epithet in grafitti, like a swastika, will bring down even more contempt on my head. I know it will prove that my "unfortunate" and "atypical" (1 out of 3 women!) experiences have warped my perceptions, embittered me, and rendered me an enemy to freedom of expression.

If he was paying attention, my artist conversation-buddy might note the eloquence of my silence. I am inviting him to demonstrate alliance. He must know that the ball is in his court. I cannot open the survivor files without a password. Anyone who reads the newspaper should know what it is. Anyone who has ever had a daughter, a mother, a wife, a girlfriend should know it. And what about his silence... what does that signify?

I am guessing he is baffled, but there is a 3% chance that he understands, that he is a survivor also, that he is unwilling to risk an act of language here in this sunny garden, with all these art lovers holding their plastic cups of wine and their plates of camembert.

The question remains: Was it art? Where is the phallus now? Was it pulverized in an act of ritualized rage, and if so, was it a solo performance, or witnessed? Is it sitting on the mantle of a frat house, trophy of a daring prank, rite of passage to manhood? Is it stuffed in a dumpster? Tossed in a river?

Personally, I think that the statue, sans penis, should be exhibited. I don't believe that will happen, because that is too suggestive of the really censored art: women's anger, women's agency.

This morning I was reading a fascinating article about the effects of pornography addiction on the brain. Gotta warn you, the guy swings into some pretty right-wingnut, anti-feminist conclusions toward the end... illustrating some serious synaptic damage in his own brain when it comes to connecting up with women's history...

BUT... let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Dude's been a neuro-surgeon for fourteen years.

Well... actually, before I get to the brain chemistry discussion, maybe it's important to talk about whether or not we should do coalition with anti-pornography or anti-prostitution activists who are in it for reasons of religious fundamentalism. That's a good question. I remember in 1986, when Reagon commissioned the Meese Report on pornography, this issue was really "up" for feminists.

During the Vietnam War we had some pretty strange bedfellows... so to speak. There were the Jehovah's Witnesses. They were conscientious objectors because they took literally the injunction to "love thy neighbor." Most of us anti-war activists embraced a wide range of liberation politics, including Women's Liberation. Obviously, this was not on the Jehovah Witness agenda. But they were part of the anti-war movement. They resisted the draft. Sometimes they got off, and sometimes they went to prison.

For me, anyone who is in the fight against child sexual abuse and who is telling the truth and researching pornography addiction is useful as an ally. It's important for me to be very specific in the "Venn diagram" of our overlapping and non-overlapping agendas. Usually these folks are virulently homophobic and anti-feminist.

Okay... that said, can we get back to the brain?

A lot of research has been done on addiction. It does affect the brain, and the brain changes occur whether or not the addiction is to a foreign substances like alcohol or cocaine, or to food or gambling.

Three things occur:
1) Cortical hypofrontality
2) Downgrading of the mesolimbic dopaminergic systems
3) Production of oxytocin and vasopressin associated with use of pornography

 Let's take them one at a time:

Cortical hypofrontality:
The frontal lobes of an addict shrink, or atrophy as a result of addiction. This damage can mimic the results of frontal lobe damage from head trauma. What are these results? According to Dr. Hilton:  "First, these patients are impulsive, in that they thoughtlessly engage in activities with little regard to the consequences. Second, they are compulsive; they become fixated or focused on certain objects or behaviors, and have to have them, no matter what. Third, they become emotionally labile, and have sudden and unpredictable mood swings. Fourth, they exhibit impaired judgment."

In other words, not good.

Downgrading of the mesolimbic dopaminergic systems:
Dopamine is a drug, related to adrenalin, that is produced in the brain. It's the drug that makes us move. It's a motivator. It's a crucial neurotransmitter in the reward/pleasure system of the brain. What happens in the brain of an addict is that this system becomes overused. The dopamine cells begin to atrophy. The dopamine receptors on the pleasure cells downgrade also. Craving sets in. The addict has to "up the dosage" of the addictive substance in order to achieve the same pleasure or "high." This is why the pornography addict gravitates toward more and more shockingly violent and bizarre imagery, including child pornography. And, of course 85% of men arrested for child porngraphy have histories of sexually abusing children.

Production of oxytocin and vasopressin associated with use of pornography:
Okay, now this is weird. The addict "falls in love" with the images of pornography. Remember, we are a species of ape whose evolutionary circuitry never took into account the possibility of visual sexual cues completely divorced from the presence of a potential partner. The erotic arousal from viewing the pornographic images triggers the "bonding" brain chemicals of oxytocin and vasopressin. The addict's relationship to the pornography is, biochemically, that of a person to a lover. Which is why so many partners of addicts experience the addiction as a form of sexual and emotional infidelity. Because that is exactly what it is.

At this point, our right-wingnut neurosurgeon veers into apocalyptic prophesy of global annihilation due to falling birthrates from "porn impotence" (which is a real thing) which he attributes to the sexual revolution of the 1960's. In fact, falling birthrates in the West are a direct result of public accessibility of birth control, and specifically the empowerment of women in terms of controlling pregnancy. He's not that specific, but I suspect that his panic may have something to do with racial concerns... you know, fewer of "us" and more of "them."

But... back to the science...  It does not matter to the brain that the drugs are exogenous or endogenous... an outside job or an inside job. The effect, in terms of neurophysiology and addiction, is the same. By far, my concerns and focus are on the women and children who are used in pornography... but it is important to incorporate all the harms... and, sadly, the percentage of women addicted to pornography continues to rise with the increasing ease of access from the Internet.

And so ends Day Two of my 5-Day Blog-off with Deb Randall! Please let me know how I'm doing!