Letters to the Editor
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Tina S.
You've been really generous with your commentary on this thread, and I wanted to say Thanks. Thanks. It's a weird world. Not altogether happy, not altogether miserable. My world, anyway. At the moment. I really believe that most of us are working with good intentions and fond hopes. In our hearts we all want what is good and true and beautiful. I don't know what is true for most people, how they feel about men, how they feel about women. I don't know how studies and polls relate to how people actually lead there lives, any more than I know about they way what is in their hearts and their minds informs their actions, their relationships. The way they think and feel about other motorists while navigating through traffic. There are so many seeming contradictions, so many disconnects, with people and their inner states, their beliefs. And then, our knowledge, our beliefs, come to us through such subjective channels. We tend to believe and understand, to interpret and organize our impressions, in ways that support what is already in place for us. I think it is a reflex for Self Preservation.
I really believe that the man who kidnapped and raped me, over thirty years ago, wanted something beautiful and true. As beautiful and true as he could imagine. He was playing house, at some level, and I was a sort of doll. I won't pretend that the selection of people with whom I have been intimate over the years is a random or representative sample of humanity. It isn't that many people, and the selection process is far from neutral. There have been very few among them, three? four? who, when they speak about their lives, and the challenges that they face, do not have stories about sexual violence. I mean "sexual violence" in a tightly constructed way, involving bodies, power disparities, and coerced acts of physical intimacy, leading to lasting trauma. There are very few of those stories in which I would say of the perpetrator, "Yes, he/she wanted to inflict the harm that was inflicted." There are a couple, but overwhelmingly, the impression is that the perpetrator was acting out a sort of fantasy, in which everything was OK, or better than OK, when everything was good and true and beautiful. I think people may be most firmly wedded to this hope when they are fucking children, whether their own, or someone else's, but that's probably hard to back up with statistical analyses. Anyway, the breach between what the heart longs for, and what the person lugging the heart around is able to achieve, is where much of life occurs. It is a sink-hole, filled, though un-filllable, with human misery and confusion.
Of course, that is not the sum of life. One of the things I've appreciated in your remarks, Tina, is the absence of bitterness. If I read that incorrectly, I apologize, but my impression is that, mostly, you are angry about these things that people do, and some particular things that it seems mostly men do, and angry about the illusions and prevarication with which people protect their acts and themselves.
For me, the actual truth and beauty in life comes through cultivating compassion. (Sure, it sounds trite. Mock away.) But, and I cannot say this too strongly, compassion cannot depend on white-washing, on minimizing or denying the effects of our actions, or those of others. Yes, the man who kidnapped and raped me was on a quest for truth and beauty. It is unlikely, I think, that he is still alive, and if he is, it is unlikely that, telling the story of our encounter, he would use the words,"kidnap and "rape." But he might, and I would be happy for him if he did. There have been many consequences for me, arising from that event. I have no desire to expand, or amplify those consequences, but it would be equally dishonest to minimize them. That being said, to actually quantify such things is impossible. Sorry, I'm digressing. I just wanted to say that I felt like you had a project going, with your comments, and that I appreciated the project and how you were going about it. Thanks again,