The first title for this post comes from Berke Breathed’s amazing comic Bloom County, and this particular strip, seen here at Robots From The Future’s comic feed.
The second title for this post comes from this quote by author Samantha Geimer, via a Publishers Weekly interview in which she talks about the fallout of her 1977 rape by Roman Polanski, when she was only thirteen.
“Almost immediately, from the start of the case, I felt the pressure to be damaged… There was this sense of disappointment. If only he’d hurt me worse, in more obvious ways, everything would be better.”
Geimer is publishing her side of the attack and the aftermath on Sept. 17, in a book that is already making some waves for its push-back against what Geimer calls the ‘Victim Industry’.
Almost worse than being drugged and raped, she notes, were the years of being the subject of bottom-feeders in the news media and legal system who wanted to use her case for their own aggrandizement. She stayed out the spotlight, when she could have made millions off the case. That takes real strength.
Now Geimer is cautiously and carefully using her experiences to reach out to those who may be subject to the same horrible one-two punch that often greets sexual abuse victims. After they endure the act itself, they are often put ‘on trial’ by police, their community, their religious and political leaders, and even their attackers.
This is deplorable. I cannot say that enough. This. Is. Not. Right. Victims’ rights are one reason why I am agnostic, and against all fundamentalist religions. What such societies often do to the victims of their horrific policies is a blot on humanity itself. Not a religious mandate, a tool of social cohesion and continuity, or even a respected part of multiculturalism. It is evil.
But this blog post is not about that, since we’ve established that I think rape and lesser forms of sexual abuse are terrible things. Yes, I have used them as plot points in my fiction, for a damned good reason to do with character flaws and development. That is fiction, folks.
This is about the Victim Industry, and why it’s often not only a First-World solution in search of a problem, but it often damages the very people it claims to help. Personally, I think that ‘professionals’ like Nancy Grace, Gloria Allred, and Dr. Phil edge close to a truly despicable kind of reality-show emotional porn. I don’t watch them, or the cases that are their bread, butter, and malt liquor.
We have a disturbing propensity for witch-hunts of our own, here in the developed world. Often for reasons as illogical as an ancient shepherd god’s isolated credo, developed as a response to Babylonian and Roman cosmopolitan polytheism. And often, both sides of the Liberal/Conservative crowd are equally at fault.
We often elevate to virtual sainthood, whether they like it or not, the victims of terrible crimes. We worship damage. We pick and prod at emotional scars, not in real sympathy but in shameless ‘concern trolling’. Because we have created an atmosphere of automatic inclusion (often at the expense of actual merit) in our public schools, we have created several generations unable to cope with the stresses of failure and risk. There can be something terribly, seductively easy about claiming victimhood when it is not earned. Even with the societal pressures of ‘slut shaming’, there are whole social-justice industries set up to unconditionally accept and support anyone who comes to them with an apparent grievance. In the long run, this doesn’t help real victims. They still get put through the wringer – and they may never come forward at all. For every Tawana Bradley there are hundreds of women – and men – whose real ordeals never get prosecuted or even exposed.
We are not sensitive enough when there has been real damage done. We are too sensitive, too litigious, too unable to deflect and laugh at mockery directed back at us. We have no grasp of irony, and entirely too much familiarity with entitlement.
I’ve seen two classic examples of the victim industry at work recently. I’m fully aware I’m setting myself up to be flamed about them both, but what the hell. Writers write, and gadflies…gad.
The first is the recent Goodreads debacle about alleged threats of rape against an author, which turned out – apparently – to be a thin-skinned self-published author thinking that another GR member’s bookshelf titles were somehow directed personally. Not kidding. Wish I was. Blogger Rose Summers has an excellently dissected timeline of the whole incident, which sucked in even Salon.com at one point.
The second is a far longer-running trainwreck, and one that really breaks my heart.
Because I am a hermit and don’t hang around with many folks in the skeptical community, I somehow missed the toxic derailment that was ElevatorGate two years ago. Why is this more important than a Goodreads snitfest? It’s leading toward a schism that could have wider ramifications for anyone supporting a New Enlightenment, for anyone who wants the skeptical movement to strengthen itself instead of folding in the face of religious opposition.
As far as I can decipher it, the great divide falls between the pure-science crowd who do not think they should waste time on divisive social mandates, and social justice advocates who propose that the skeptical community cannot ignore such issues. What I have seen over the last year has left me a bit disgusted by both sides – to the point that I suspect they’ve driven me away from any of their gatherings.
I wanted to play softball, I really did. I wanted to join my local skeptical movement, go to skeptical community conventions like TAM (The Amazing Meeting), and meet some of the people I hear every week on skeptical podcasts. It’s not like I am the enemy. After all, I dared to put a sympathetic, agnostic empire in a racy science fiction erotica novel. But now I think I’ll remain a hermit.
I can see value in both arguments.
Initially proposed by blogger Jen McCreight, the Atheism+ movement bills itself thus: “Atheism+ is a safe space for people to discuss how religion affects everyone and to apply skepticism and critical thinking to everything, including social issues like sexism, racism, GLBT issues, politics, poverty, and crime.”
Noble enough. There have been many kinds of discrimination in the skeptical/atheism front, and I’m glad to see the issue addressed.
Except that I still remember reading Orwell in school. I know what follows after “All animals are created equal…” Because power corrupts, and the meek and downtrodden can so easily follow the backlash into discrimination of their own. Movements fracture into hostile camps, arguing over the most trivial of minutiae. The proper text order of the letters LGBTQIA, anyone? In Russia right now, any combination of those letters can provoke beatings, corrective rapes, and unofficial death sentences.
I’ve heard this music before. It’s the same thing that pushed me away from the university-based art community in Arizona, as students were advised to make certain that their majors contained strong ‘socially relevant’ projects and statements, to justify their proper place as contributing members of society. I called bullshit then: sometimes a potter wants to just make a pot, not an overwhelming political statement.
I’m not going to call the original ‘Creepy Proposal in an Elevator’ ** incident false. I wasn’t there. I’m not going to call women’s rape allegations against prominent male skeptics false. I wasn’t there, though so many parts of these allegations ring a bit odd to me.* Whatever. The stories have been discussed at length, on the side of Atheism+ and against.
What does bother me is the reflexive, automatic assumption of guilt toward anyone who does not immediately step in line with all tenets of Atheism+.
When well-meaning posters have spoken out against assumed-guilty-until-proven-otherwise, they are lumped in with all the real misogynists, white-male-privilege proponents, and rapists.
When well-known skeptics have joined Atheism+ groups as no-name outsiders, intending social experiments to prove these groups are truly welcoming and rational, the opposite seems to occur: the experimenters are outed as sockpuppets, attacked for somehow supporting the enemy, and summarily banned.
When a female attendee wore a T-Shirt to one Amazing Meeting that said ‘I feel safe and welcome at TAM’, it somehow became conflated with an anti-feminist manifesto. It was largely a misunderstanding as awkward as the Goodreads trouble, but it got a lot of mileage.
I’m an equalist, or I try to be. The only things I’m really against are stupidity and brutality. The atheist movement is not my whole life, though it is a major interest of mine. Like any other club, I do not have to join any form of this one. And I won’t, until I see how the community evolves out of this conflict.
* One of the especially troubling things about one of these cases is the victim’s allegation that she was non-confrontational and did not want to seem ‘rude’, so she allowed her wine glass to be topped off repeatedly by her alleged rapist. She then claims she was put into a position where she could not give consent.
Okay, that is a terrible thing to happen. Drunk people cannot give real consent, no matter how handsy they are. It’s up to the non-drinkers around them to put them away safely and let them sleep it off. Anyone who takes advantage of a sloppy drunk is not only a criminal, but an asshole.
I don’t drink in public, even around friends I trust. It’s not fair to them or me, because they are not my babysitters or protectors. I can nurse a glass of ginger ale and have a great – and sober – time. I’m crazy enough not to need booze or drugs.
** I have my own Creepy Elevator story from a couple of decades ago. At a large regional science fiction convention, well into the evening, I was in a hotel elevator when a slightly drunk fellow con-goer stumbled into the elevator. He tried to chat me up, which I calmly ignored. Then he unzipped his fly and hauled out his junk. I looked at his dick, looked him in the eye, shook my head, and said, “Dude, that’s not as sexy as you think it is. Put it away and stop bothering me.” He looked embarrassed, tucked himself away, and shuffled out at the next floor. At no point did I show fear or shock. I did not turn my back to him, and I kept in strong eye contact the whole time. I stood with my hand in my purse, so he could not be certain precisely what I might be packing – but something of that got through to him. I was fully capable of violently defending myself, so I did not need to appear to be overly defensive. Nor was I terribly traumatized by the experience.
Would I walk alone in certain areas, at certain times? Nope. Would I always consider avoidance and escape before violent reaction? As often as possible. I am only as much a victim as I allow myself to be. If I acknowledge, as nearly every human being must, that there are times and places where I could be victimized, then I owe it to myself to not be incapacitated in enemy territory.