Posts tagged “rape”

  1. In mid-October I memorize my sexual assault. Over breakfast each morning I marshal memories into order, flipping through flashcards in my mind. This is what came first, then this came after. There were these words, then those hands, then that smile. I make a game of it and play it all day: for each cigarette I smoke I have to practice my story, but each time I go through it I get to smoke again.

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  2. I lied almost every day during the years I worked for a rape crisis program. I burnt my marriage to the ground. I made enemies of sheriffs and bureaucrats and a few good women. I had my heart broken by my first true love: feminist service work. I hope I helped a few victims along the way because they taught me a lot. I burnt out, and then I got out, but just barely. Burnout…

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  3. It's not murder if the murderee is sleeping. It's not malpractice if the patient's anesthetized. It's not theft if no one's home. It's not battery if you're hitting someone who is both female but also pregnant. It's not a bank robbery if you're a cowboy and you're in the Old West and you point a gun at the teller and ask him to hand over "All the money" and you leave the bank with many bagfuls…

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  4. July 2014

    The first thing I have to do is find out X.’s full name. I know his first and last name, but I want to have his middle name. Being able to say all three names has power. Like when I get mad at my kids and say all three names, they know they’re in deep shit.

    I don’t even know how to spell X.’s first name properly—it’s

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  5. Setting: A conference room in a Brooklyn hospital. There is a circle of chairs, but only two have women sitting in them, making introductions. One woman is 31, fat, with an Alternative Lifestyle Haircut, and biracial: Margaret E.I. The other woman is 18, thin, white with bobbed brown hair, and wears a remarkably preserved vintage dress. Also...she seems to be  flickering in and

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  6. My father molested me. He wasn’t the worst molester in the world, or even a particularly dedicated one (his other interests - choir, hiking, his compost heap – got in the way), but he did it and two years ago I told the police. I learned a lot that year. For example, did you know that a sex offender isn’t necessarily charged according to the most current Sexual Offences Act? They’re charged according to the…

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  7. It’s February 2014. Thanks to a number of survivor-activists, the media has thrust the issue of sexual assault on college campuses into the mainstream. The Department of Education has received federal complaints against, investigated, and/or is in the process of investigating numerous American colleges and universities, including Yale, UNC, USC, Occidental, Dartmouth, UConn, Emerson, Amherst, Carnegie Mellon, Hanover College, and Penn State over…

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  8. On a Saturday afternoon last summer I went to a theatre performance with a male friend of mine. After the show, we wandered to a bar down the street, where I proceeded to drink more than a few cocktails. My friend, who does not drink himself, had to explain to me what happened after I had paid the bill. When I awoke the next morning, I didn’t remember how we got home, didn’t remember hailing,…

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  9. The story of how my family acquired Old World recipes for Ashkenazi cuisine is a rape story – but it takes a bit of digging to figure that out. They don’t talk about it. The ones who are left alive to tell it, anyway, the old ones. And we, the young ones, learned long ago to stop asking. The pursing and hardening of lips that were wide open with laughter only moments before, the sudden…

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  10. Spoiler alerts galore.

    I follow Lucy Hale on Instagram. For those that don’t know who she is/don’t obsessively read US Weekly, Lucy is the actress who plays Aria Montgomery on Pretty Little Liars. The other day she posted a picture of herself and Ian Harding, the actor who plays Ezra Fitz, Aria’s high school English teacher and her rapist.

    I had a strong reaction to seeing their smiling faces, one of total disgust.

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