This month Aunt Acid advises a reader whose boyfriend is down about his unemployment, and another who is wondering how to tell her husband about a past sexual assault.
Hello, friendlets! Last year we shared the Words of Hope project with yourselves, which sends holiday cards to survivors of prison rape as part of Just Detention International.
"For so many survivors, this simple gesture, even from a stranger, is a profound reminder that they are not alone or forgotten."
Malena Magnolia was sitting at a table with her best friend, Harley, waiting to pick up a pizza to go, when a stranger approached them. “This dude is talking to us and saying all this vulgar stuff,” Malena recalls. The two did their best to ignore him, but he was persistent, trying to provoke a response. Harley remembers watching her best friend. She could sense Malena’s frustration boiling. Finally, Malena turned and looked…
In my third year of law school, I began to remember things I had spent most of my life forgetting. My attention fractured into a thousand glass splinters, each one cutting. I was assailed with strange images. With the images came disconnection, as if I was watching what was in front of me on a screen. Then, incongruously, a pervasive sense of threat, the shadows of my apartment stalking me.
I might tell you that I speak German, but I won’t say that I’m fluent. I can read a newspaper article and hold a conversation on your day, the weather, your opinion on Angela Merkel. But a bureaucratic form or a passage from Schiller will stymie me. I moved to Berlin having only taken German 101 and 102, and so I can also never tell you when I’m using a modal verb or the Präteritum,…
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.
You never know what you'll find poking through the loose sheet music in an antiques store. Take this, for example: a souvenir from the days when Ivy League schools were good at football, orchestra leaders were a cultural force, and other things were not so different at all. Ladies! Gather ’round the parlor piano and tune your ukuleles to B-flat, because I’m about to teach you the new song all the college boys will…
My son was a planned surprise, which means I wanted him but didn’t think he could ever happen. What was even more unexpected were the feelings that arose around my ability to care for him. It took years for me to figure out that a lot of my struggles as a new mother were directly related to my history as a sexual assault survivor.
One of the unanticipated difficulties was breastfeeding.
The first night of my freshman year of college, a group of fraternity guys locked me in an apartment and threatened to gang rape me. In retrospect, I realize one of the reasons I was chosen is exactly because I was a freshman. Most students had to wait two years to graduate from a dorm to a coveted spot in the two-bedroom apartments we called “the courts.” When jealous students asked me how I maneuvered…
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…
He took me into his bedroom, which was painted red. Other than the bed, the room was empty, just red. I could do things to you, he said. But maybe he didn’t say anything at all. Maybe I wanted it. He told me that he found the red color relaxing. He was depressed a lot, he said. He hadn’t seemed depressed to me. We began the familiar procedures: removing clothes, touching, imagining. I couldn’t quite…
Hayley Krischer's previous work for The Toast can be found here.
I traveled across country just before cell phones were widely available. My cousin in Baltimore had a cell phone, so my father instructed me to drive there from my house in New Jersey on the first leg of the trip to get it. The phone was the size of my current laptop and was wrapped in a leather bag.
Stacey May Fowles' previous work for The Toast can be found here. This is her first piece for The Butter.
*
Women’s stories, the reality of our lives too often appears to have no value to the reading public, who it seems don’t want to read such boring, painful stuff. Really? We can dismiss the reality of women’s lives so easily? Unless there is a major
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
