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sexual violence

Feminism

Redeeming Love: Family Love

And now, after a long hiatus, we’re digging back in to the Redeeming Love review. If you want to catch up with the review series, you can find the other entries here; there are plot summaries at the top of each post.

[content note for discussions of emotional abuse and trauma]

Plot Summary:

The Altmans move into Michael’s cabin.
Angel begins liking them, even growing to love some of the children.
She becomes convinced Miriam, the sixteen year old, is a better partner for Michael.
The Altmans’ buy a section of Michael’s land a build a cabin.
Francine reveals that Angel committed incest in order to punish her birth father.
Michael and Angel have sex again after she tells him all of that.
Then she disappears.

***

At this point in the narrative, Michael stops his physical and verbal violence. He’s not dragging her around, literally kicking and screaming, he’s not abducting her, he’s not telling her how much he’d love to kill her, and every other horrific thing we’ve seen him do up to this point. No: now, we start getting much subtler emotional abuse from him. This isn’t usually how abusers operate; usually it’s the reverse with emotional abuse escalating into physical violence (and abusers may never use physical violence at all). However, despite the order Francine has written, this is where we start seeing the abuse take its toll on Angel.

It’s interesting to me that Francine would most likely be quite horrified at the idea that she’s written a nearly textbook example of an abuser in Michael Hosea, and yet Angel still responds to him in the way a victim responds to abuse. Like here:

Watching John, Angel was reminded of all those weeks Michael had cared for her after Magowan’s beating. She remembered his tender care and consideration. He had tolerated her worst insults with quiet patience. (244)

This is about the halfway point of Redeeming Love, and up until now Angel has maintained that Michael took her somewhere she did not want to be, and was keeping her there against her will. Every attempt at escaping him was met with violence or threats of murder. She was firm in herself, firm in what she wanted, and very firm of her idea of Michael: really no different than every other man she’d known who believed they could take and control anything they wanted, including her body. She’s never been an autonomous person and Michael is just another roadblock to the independence she craves. Remember, Francine has set up this desire for autonomy as literally a temptation from Satan himself.

But now her framing of what happened when he abducted her is shifting. He didn’t force a marriage onto her while she was delirious and then drag her out to the middle of nowhere: he was tender, caring, considerate. She was actually the one with the problem.

Or here:

Tirzah. His desire for her was in that name. Angel felt a tingling warmth run down into her belly when he said it. Tirzah. (261)

Before when he called her anything that wasn’t her name, she would assert herself and correct him. Now, though? Now she’s accepting it. She’s accepting his gradual over-writing of herself and her identity. She’s adopting what he thinks she is and should be. “She didn’t even belong to herself anymore” (252), and the resistance is slowly being beaten out of her.

This couldn’t get any more textbook. Abusers need victims to identify themselves as the problem: a problem that is fixed by subverting our identities and desires in favor of what the abuser wants. Angel is slowly capitulating to Michael’s assault on the very core of who she is as a person, and learning to accept his view of their relationship: he the tender lover, she the stubborn fool.

We can also see another abusive dynamic here:

He wants children, she thought … What if he knew she couldn’t have them? Would his love for her die then? (247)

This is not an unreasonable question, although Francine expects her reader to answer the question with “of course not!” Except Angel knows what all victims know: an abuser’s love is conditional. It’s extremely common for male abusers to be extremely reactive concerning a female victim’s reproduction, too—whether they became pregnant when their abuser did not desire it, or aren’t becoming pregnant when their abuser wants them to.

The other characters also participate in normalizing everything Angel’s been subjected to, even though they don’t know Michael abducted her and married her when she was barely conscious, or that he’s taken to calling her whatever he feels like. In one scene, a younger child calls her “Mandy” (they all think her name is Amanda), and then the eldest child, Miriam, says “I think I’ll call you Miss Priss” (251). No one is allowing Angel her name or identity. Later, Miriam declares “I love you whether you like it or not” (235).

The relationship between Angel and the Altmans display the same relationship style that Francine wants to emphasize: God’s love is irresistible, unending, unyielding, relentless. The Altmans’ relentlessly “love” Angel in a not-romantic analog to Michael’s treatment of her. In the narrative, this slowly wins Angel over just like she’s slowly being absorbed by Michael’s vision for her. They give her gifts she doesn’t want and scream insults at her when she says she doesn’t want them (“idiotic child” 252), they do everything around the farm even when she begins to feel useless, and every time she says something about herself she’s contradicted by who they think she is.

Anytime she tries to assert herself, (“Angel,” she said under her breath. “My name’s Angel.”) it’s portrayed as either resentment or bitterness. Through these chapters we start to get another heavy-handed helping of Francine’s evangelical Christian view of bitterness. Miriam accuses Angel of purposely carrying around baggage with her that she could voluntarily set down, and on the next page makes it clear that the “baggage” she’s talking about is “bitterness” (254-55). Later, when she emotionally withdraws some from the group, Miriam complains to Michael that “she’s hurting herself” (271).

Angel’s reactions are all extremely typical of abuse victims. Keep in mind that Angel was raped constantly and physically abused beginning at age 8 and that experience has continued pretty much non-stop for over a decade. When she responds a way anyone with trauma would, however, it’s not portrayed as reasonable or something a compassionate person should accommodate. Instead, her behavior is universally condemned by the other characters in the book.

Angel has flashbacks and triggers, and after experiencing an episode is anxious and irritable, a nearly classic example of PTSD. Other symptoms of PTSD: avoiding crowds, wanting to keep busy, avoiding relationships, viewing the world as harsh and dangerous … Whenever Angel displays one of these, however, someone comments that she’s only hurting herself or she’s bitterly clinging to the past.

This is a pretty common view of PTSD among American evangelical Christians. Their solution is as simple as Miriam’s: just stop carrying the baggage. But when Angel tells her it’s not that easy and a lot more complicated than that, Francine makes it clear that Angel’s view is the wrong one and it’s just her sinful nature and Satan whispering in her ear that makes her think so.

***

Also relevant: the entire Altman clan thinks Michael is just so perfect and wonderful and godly and loving. Gee it’s great that most Christians don’t view abusers this way. It’s not like we put them up on pedestals or elect them President or something.

September 11, 2017 by SamanthaField

Feminism

Jaime Lannister is a rapist, and let’s not forget it

[This is an edited and slightly updated version of the post I wrote after Game of Thrones’ “Breaker of Chains” aired.]

[content note for sexual violence]

I’ve read G. R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, which are now airing as the HBO series Game of Thrones. I enjoyed them, although I caution people to engage with Martin’s world critically. He’s been hailed by a lot of people as a “feminist” writer, but I am extremely hesitant to think of him in those terms (read Sady Doyle’s piece there– it’s both hysterically funny and insightful).

Since the beginning, I have appreciated both Sansa Stark and Cersei Lannister as characters. Cersei, up until Storm of Swords, was a relatable character for me– she was forced into a difficult position by the expectations of her father, of her culture, and of her husband, but she did what she could to find happiness in the midst of an abusive marriage and constant rape. There isn’t a lot about her that I would describe as noble, or perhaps even likable– but she felt realistic to me, and I found myself grudgingly admiring her.

And then Storm of Swords happened, and Martin makes it blatantly obvious that we’re all supposed to hate her now because she’s ridiculously incompetent. She’s completely robbed of all sense because, well, the only explanation he offers for this drastic departure is lady-hormones. I don’t follow Game of Thrones as a show, but I’m a part of online nerd/geek communities, so I have a passing familiarity with what the show is like.

Last year, everything in that part of my internet circles exploded because of the rape scene, which a lot of people insisted diverges from the books. I find that accusation amusing because Robb Stark doesn’t even marry the same woman in the show, but this scene seems to matter to people. I wouldn’t be bothered by the scene diverging from the book, since as television it is a completely different medium, and the artists — the writers, the directors, the actors, the editors– are already telling an entirely different story than the one Martin originally penned. In many ways I think the direction they’ve taken is intriguing.

However, in this one scene they stayed true to the book.

Jaime does, in fact, rape Cersei in the sept next to Joffrey’s dead body.

She kissed him. A light kiss, the merest brush of her lips on his, but he could feel her tremble as he slid his arms around her. “I am not whole without you.”

There was no tenderness in the kiss he returned to her, only hunger. Her mouth opened for his tongue.

“No,”

she said weakly when his lips moved down her neck, “not here. The septons…”

“The Others can take the septons.” He kissed her again, kissed her silent, kissed her until she moaned. Then he knocked the candles aside and lifted her up onto the Mother’s altar, pushing up her skirts and the silken shift beneath.

She pounded on his chest with feeble fists, murmuring about the risk, the danger, about their father, about the septons, about the wrath of gods.

He never heard her.

He undid his breeches and climbed up and pushed her bare white legs apart. One hand slid up her thigh and underneath her smallclothes. When he tore them away, he saw that her moon’s blood was on her, but it made no difference.

That is rape. There is no other word for this scene. Jaime raped Cersei, full stop.

And, honestly, by this point in the books a rape scene would cause me to think yawn, well of course a woman got raped it’s Martin writing this for heaven’s sake what did I think would happen? There are various things to be said about how often people are raped in Martin’s fantasy world, but I’m not really here to critique the existence of rape in his books. It’s what he does with it, and this scene in particular, that deeply, deeply troubles me, because of what happens next:

“Hurry,” she was whispering now, “quickly, quickly, now, do it now, do me now. Jaime Jaime Jaime.” Her hands helped guide him. “Yes,” Cersei said as he thrust, “my brother, sweet brother, yes, like that, yes, I have you, you’re home now, you’re home now, you’re home.”

This, I have a problem with– because this is a rape myth. It actually gets a fucking number on the Women Against Violence’s list of “Rape Myths”– it’s #17:

“When a woman says no, she really means maybe or yes.”

It’s the idea that women secretly all want it, they just have to be persuaded. Horrifically, “with my dick” can finish that sentence without the person immediately retching at the utterly revolting idea just expressed.

In Martin’s world, hysterical shrew-bitch women like Cersei Lannister do not get to have their “no” listened to (and we get to say “no” for whatever the HELL reason we want), and strong, handsome, virile, maiden-of-Tarth-defending men like Jaime get to fuck them anyway because actually, she really does want it and I just know because . . . well, no reason– and look, see, she’s getting off on my awesome manly ravishing of her!

But, horrifyingly, this isn’t a rape scene to a disturbing number of people. Chris Ostendorf described it as “complicated consensual sex.” To a lot of people, that she’s saying no to the circumstances somehow makes it not real rape. She would have had sex with him, if it wasn’t for his hand, or where they were, or the septons, or their father somehow finding out, etc.

I have a gigantic– no, colossal— rage-inducing problem with this for the simple reason that when I told my rapist “no,” this is exactly what I sounded like. I couldn’t physically stop someone almost twice my weight, and so I did everything within my power to persuade him to stop. I told him it hurt– he did not stop. I told him “no,” he did not stop. I told him “please, not now,” he did not stop. I said “what if your parents come home?” but he did not stop. I told him I didn’t think it was right (ie, “wrath of the gods,”) and he did not stop.

Finally, I gave up and tried not to let him see me cry because I knew he would hurt me even more if he did. When he assaulted me again, and again, and again, and again, and Again, and AGAIN, I learned that it would all just be over if he got what he wanted. He would eventually leave me alone and go and play Halo if I didn’t fight him. He didn’t care about how much he hurt me, or about how often I vomited after because what forced me do to him disgusted me.

So, for all of you people who argued that Jaime didn’t rape Cersei:

FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU TO FUCKING HELL.

To George R. R. Martin, the twisted fuck who wrote this scene and is perpetuating the exact rape myth that has caused me unending agony: fuck you. To Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (who plays Jaime), who thinks because “it wasn’t just [rape]” it’s somehow justifiable: fuck you. To Sonia Saraiya who thinks there’s “wiggle room” in whether or not we think Cersei “enthusiastically consented”: fuck you. To Chris Ostendorf, who given the chance would describe my rape as “complicated consensual sex”– fuck you, too. Fuck you all.

***

I want to be crystal clear that my problem with this scene in the book (for this post, at least) isn’t that Martin has written yet another rape scene. It’s that what he’s written is a rape myth— a chauvinistic fantasy about male-centric sex that ignores or denies women the ability to consent. Cersei told Jaime no seven different ways, but then suddenly starts begging for it– literally. This is an extremely dominant myth about the difference between rape and consensual sex. In order for something to be considered “legitimate” rape, the victim has to fight tooth and nail until the bitter end. In order for it to be real rape, the victim could never– not once not ever— have consented to sex. If they consented to sex once, well, they’re only saying no for inconsequential reasons and they should just get over it, it’s not that bad.

Martin believes that this is not rape because of the rape myth he believes in– that our culture believes in. Cersei’s apparent enjoyment of her rape (and remember, this scene is written from the rapist’s point of view, not the victim’s, and most rapists think that their behavior is acceptable and normal) in the real world of modern America could be a survival mechanism for an abuse victim– and usually is. Sometimes victims freeze up. Sometimes they, like me, try to resist but then give up because it’s useless and we just want it to fucking end.

Martin does not think that Jaime raped Cersei here, because he believes that women can be manipulative whores who say no in order to be “hard to get,” but in reality really just need to be sexually assaulted into silence and then fucked into realizing what the rapist knew all along– that she actually wanted it.

This is one of the most grievous lies of rape culture– and the actors, the directors, and the writers all used it.

Keep that in mind as you enjoy the season premier tomorrow.

April 23, 2016 by SamanthaField

Feminism

"Real Marriage" review: 123-138, "Disgrace and Grace"

[content note: sexual violence and victim blaming]

This chapter was a … struggle. I’ve known it was coming for a while, but I wasn’t certain how bad it would be. It deeply concerns me because if this is how Mark and Grace Driscoll and the pastoral staff of Mars Hill has been counseling sexual abuse survivors I’m horrified, and I’m grieving for all the men and women who have been harmed by their teachings.

There was one section that I didn’t have a problem with, and was encouraged to see– the one headed “Serving and Protecting your Children” on 136-37. She recommends giving children the words they need to describe their abuse, about the difference between good and bad secrets (surprise parties vs. “this will be our little secret”), and assuring them they won’t get in trouble if they relate something that happened to them. She also makes it clear how important it is to believe your children, no matter who they tell you harmed them, and I was grateful for that.

The rest of the chapter, though, was a nightmarish trainwreck and in my opinion is totally irredeemable. Everything she says is not just wrong but actively harmful.

I also think it will be helpful for me to simply allow what she says to speak for itself. Often I get asked why I’m reviewing this book, and this chapter is a perfect example. Grace says some horrific things, but Grace is not alone. She is one evangelical Christian woman among thousands of others and “biblical” counselors who will all tell sexual abuse survivors the exact same thing, and they’ll probably say it in similar ways.

Before we get to that, though, I want to highlight something that I think is revealing:

Was Mark really safe to talk to about it, or would his response cause more pain (123)?

What will happen to our church and our life if they know about my abuse (128)?

The first time I told Handsome about my rape and abuse, it never once occurred to me to wonder if he was a “safe” person. There was not a single second that I was worried if his reaction would hurt me. I was nervous about telling him, but not because I thought he would possibly think of me differently. And this breaks my heart for Grace because her gut knew that Mark’s reaction wasn’t going to be the right one (“Sometimes his responses caused fear all over again” 132); she makes casual references all through this chapter about how Mark had to learn and adapt in order to respond “appropriately,” and she talks about that as if it’s normal.

That is not normal. That is disturbing.

Also, the fact that she was worried about what the congregation at Mars Hill might think tells me that they had not been building a church that was safe for survivors. If a church hears “your pastor’s wife was in an abusive relationship” and reacts with judgment and condemnation, you have not been responsible leaders. Unfortunately, this is a failing endemic to evangelical churches everywhere.

Anyway, I want to spend the rest of the post showing how evangelicals use Christian-ese in order to victim blame survivors.

We wondered if it was really possible to trust each other again … (126) [implying that she had done something by being abused/telling him she’d been abused to be untrustworthy]

I had lived a double life, a pastor’s daughter and wife filled with deception and fear. (127)

That meant asking the Holy Spirit to restore any memories that needed to be brought into the light so I could be cleansed … and it meant Jesus’ righteousness alone had to replace all my old identity of abused, neglected, dirty, and worthless [sic]. (127)

We quickly realized there were large numbers of abuse victims attending our church … Mutual, honest accountability had always felt too vulnerable but it was part of the process I needed to prayerfully participate in. (128) [“accountability” is a term used among Christians that is intrinsically linked to sinfulness; men who struggle with porn have “accountability partners,” many small groups have “accountability times” where they confess sin to each other.]

I finally wanted to put my own sin and shame to death, through Jesus’ death on the cross. (128)

God gave me a few trustworthy women to encourage and exhort me and love me, despite knowing the truth about me. (129)

I never thought [healing] was possible, but that is what repentance and redemption feel like. (129)

To cope with the pain, I initially pretended to be a “good girl,” … without true repentance. (130)

It was an identity crisis [referring to different common coping mechanisms experienced by many survivors] because I wasn’t rooted in Christ. (131)

But we each need a new identity so that we don’t feel condemned by our sin. (132)

I sobbed off and on for hours over the pain of abuse and the conviction of my own sin. (133)

I could give many other examples, but the others need more surrounding context and I’m trying to keep the length of this manageable.

Survivors of abuse– any form of abuse– have not sinned. I don’t know how to stress that any more emphatically. The only person responsible for sin is the one doing the abusing, not the victim. Trusting someone not to hurt you? Not a sin. Expecting someone to be a decent human being? Not a sin. Hoping that your abuser is capable of change and growth? Not a sin.

There is a common argument among evangelicals, especially “biblical counselors,” that it is important to claim “responsibility for your choices”; very often they frame this in terms of “autonomy,” appropriating feminist vocabulary in order to cloak what they actually mean. In reality, what they’re doing is a logical fallacy: post hoc ergo propter hoc, more commonly known as “false cause.” Grace argues that because she chose to date her abuser and chose to have sex with him willingly, she is partly at fault for what happened. If she had not chosen to date him, or chosen to have sex with him, the abuse would not have happened.

And, in a ridiculously literal way, that’s true. However, just because the abuse happened after she started dating him does not mean that she was abused because she dated him. It happened because he was an abuser.

In my opinion, there are few “counseling” ideas more poisonous. I spent so many years trying to do this, trying to be “responsible by recognizing what I had done wrong,” not allowing myself to have a “victim mentality,” and all it did was cause agony.

There’s a secondary problem going on in this chapter, most clearly seen in this:

My judgment was clouded once I had sex with someone outside a marriage relationship. The abuse made me feel dirty and defiled, and the lie that I had no value became even more believable. (136)

This is what purity culture does to sexual abuse survivors. I don’t want to say that without purity culture no victim would ever feel “dirty” or “defiled” after being abused. Abuse is intrinsically a deep spiritual, emotional and physical violation and it will cause pain and suffering, regardless of whether or not purity culture exists. However, Grace feels that because she’d consented to sex that her abuse was inescapable (“I was filled with my own guilt from fornicating and told myself if I married him it would cover my sin somehow” 124), and she felt that way because purity culture teaches women that sex– even rape– makes women dirty and defiled.

And she’s clueless that the “lie that I had no value” comes from purity culture, the exact same lie she’s promoting all the way through this chapter.

November 10, 2014 by SamanthaField

Feminism

can video games turn us into misogynists?

For most of my life I didn’t consider myself a “gamer,” mostly because I had an incredibly narrow understanding of what a gamer could be. I was usually more interested in books and film than I was in video games, so I didn’t think I was “allowed” to describe myself as a gamer. Over time I changed my mind.

That happened in graduate school, and the first time I self-identified as a gamer a bunch of boys tried to laugh me out of the room. Mockery, derision, dismissal … I was an English major, a book nerd– and they were being extremely honest when they said that I was “too pretty.”

For weeks I tried to establish my cred– that I’d grown up with the TurboGrafx-16, the Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, N64, Gamecube, Playstation 2, and Wii. That I’d played Doom and Warcraft. I can still cycle through all the different responses you’d get by clicking on an orc grunt and the StarCraft Terran medic (“where does it hurt?” still makes me giggle). I still cry when I think about Kerrigan (and I played through that mission so many times before I figured out that it was rigged). My family hosted Unreal: Tournament LAN parties. I can hum the theme songs from Sonic the Hedgehog. Diddy Kong Racing and Star Wars Episode I: Racer are still my all-time favorite games, and I downloaded an N64 simulator just to play them. That guy who proposed to his girlfriend at a Con by cosplaying Link and Zelda and then saying “It’s dangerous to go alone, take this” while offering her a ring makes me sob like a baby.

In high school I played EverQuest, Anarchy Online, Star Wars Galaxies— I even played Lord of the Rings Online from beta and all the way through grad school. I love all of the Fable and Assasin’s Creed games and I’ve played through Portal a half-dozen times. Currently, I’m saving up money to get Bioshock Infinite.

It was extremely frustrating to have all of that dismissed like it didn’t matter. I was a girl, and that’s all they could see, so they did everything they could to ignore me. Had I played every single Halo? No, only 3? Not a real gamer. Had I ever played Call of Duty? No? Not a real gamer. It was endless. I eventually realized I didn’t have to prove myself to them and I walked away, but it still irks me at times that those dumbasses were so smug and arrogant and they still think that I couldn’t possibly be a gamer because I was a girl.

So, yeah: video games and sexism? In every single encounter I’ve had with “gamers,” they go hand-in-hand.

Which is why I’ve been paying some attention to #GamerGate. Anita Sarkeesian is one of my all-time favorite people and YouTubers, so she’s how I found out about it, and I’ve been keeping up with it since about early September. If you’re not familiar with it, this post is a good synopsis. I also really loved this video, which covers the base assumptions of #GamerGate.

There’s already posts and articles and forum threads and twitter conversations aplenty covering what’s wrong with this “movement for journalist integrity” (coughbullshitcough), but there’s one argument I’ve seen pop up quite a bit, and I want to address it: video games cannot make players be misogynists.

This is not an argument unique to #GamerGate– I’ve already heard it a number times, usually in response to the Feminist Frequency Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games series. The argument usually follows this pattern:

Research shows that violent video games don’t increase aggression among players (which some research does support; but then, some research says no, it can make people more aggressive and hostile).
Ergo, video games can’t make people be sexist, either.

I’m not a psychologist or a sociologist, but in a way that argument makes a certain sort of sense to me. I don’t think that video games can make a non-violent person go on a shooting spree at their high school. I’ve grown up around incredibly violent and graphic games, and I’ve enjoyed camping with a sniper rifle while picking other players off, delighting in “FIRST BLOOD” and “HEADSHOT” being shouted out of my speakers during an Unreal: Tournament deathmatch– but I have never once wanted to pick up a gun and shoot anyone, or even become a sniper. I’m not a violent person, and playing violent video games didn’t change that. That is also true for most of the people I know.

However, saying that video games can’t make people violent so they can’t make people sexist, either is a false equivalency for the simple reason that everyone is already sexist.

Video games that uncritically (key term) show sexism, misogyny, violence against women, rape, sexual assault, sexist slurs, domestic violence, casual sexism, sexist tropes/costumes all contribute to our cultural assumptions about gender and women. There isn’t a culture of “regular” people walking around cities robbing, looting, defacing, and killing indiscriminately like what the player does in the Grand Theft Auto series– however, there is a consistent problem of violence against sex workers, a problem that GTA engages in by allowing players to murder sex workers in order to retrieve their money.

Sexist video games capitalize on the already existing oppressions in society. The sexist tropes that appear in video games don’t show up in these narratives completely out of thin air– they are present in games because they are present in our culture, and every single time we encounter one of these tropes or patterns it can reinforce the patriarchal narratives our minds have been steeping in since birth.

Gamers aren’t being forced to become misogynists against their will by playing these games– these games are simply relying on shallow depictions of women, on clichéd storylines and tired plots, and a player who absorbs the gendered messages of these games without analyzing them is having his or her beliefs confirmed, not invented.

#GamerGate is such a perfect illustration of this, too. Without even realizing it, these gamers who are so worried about “journalistic integrity” have only even gone after women, none of whom were journalists. You’d think that if they cared about journalistic integrity they would have en masse attacked the journalist that Zoe Quinn supposedly dated in order to get positive reviews (which don’t exist, by the way), but they didn’t. This “movement” hasn’t turned any Gater into a misogynist– they all just already were.

Photo by Mack Male

October 22, 2014 by SamanthaField

Feminism

"Real Marriage" review: 3-18, "New Marriage, Same Spouse"

[content note: sexual violence, emotional abuse]

I’m doing something different with Real Marriage than how I reviewed Fascinating Womanhood and Captivating; with the last two books, I’ve read the entire thing before I started and then did one chapter at a time, trying to keep the message of the whole book in mind. After reading the first few chapters of this book, I realized I couldn’t handle that– not spiritually, not emotionally, not psychologically. So, for this review, what you’ll be reading from me will lean in the direction of gut reaction and instinct, since I don’t know where Mark and Grace are taking this.

The first chapter is Mark and Grace telling their story, starting from before they met each other, through dating, engagement, and what seems to be the bulk of their marriage. This chapter is mostly written from Mark’s perspective, as he wrote 46 paragraphs and Grace wrote 11. What I found the most disturbing, however, is what Grace says about her side of the story. It is … well, it reminded me of this:

Most of Mark’s paragraphs are him patting himself on the back for living such a good, moral life even though he was surrounded by “brazen prostitutes” and “manipulative women”– he even left his own fraternity, guys, because of the drinking! Wow, isn’t he just great? But Grace’s sections are full of self-flagellation; her teenage and young adult years are summed up by her as “living a lie,” and the few things she says about her marriage are full of “oh, how much I sinned against my husband! I did not feel that I was worthy of his love!”

And this is where I get incredibly fuzzy on the details, as both Mark and Grace are deliberately vague: apparently during the early days of their dating relationship, Grace “sexually sinned” with another man. There is no distinct timeline given, and I’m left wondering things like if they’d both verbally committed to a monogamous relationship at the time, or if their perspective on dating relationships now is coloring their dating relationship then, and what the “sexual sin” was; but what has me the most concerned is that they mention several times that Grace was sexually assaulted, and her assault caused some significant trauma for her. I can’t tell whether or not this “sexual sin” was actually being assaulted, especially because of things like this:

I felt God had conned me by telling me to marry Grace, and allowed Grace to rule over me since she was controlling our sex life. (10)

When I discovered her sin against me and that she had punished me with resulting years of sexual and emotional denial . . . (13)

Then, after more than a decade of marriage, a root issue was finally revealed. Grace’s problem was that she was an assault victim who had never told me or anyone else of the physical, spiritual, emotional, and sexual abuse she had suffered … In forgiving and walking with Grace . . . (16)

And if you have unconfessed sin and/or a past of sexual sin, including pornography, fornication, sexual abuse, bitterness, and the like, we pray this book leads to the healing of your soul and your marriage. (18)

There’s a pattern through this entire chapter, and it is victim blaming. Both acknowledge that Grace was sexually abused, and that this abuse affected their sex life. She experienced pain and discomfort during intercourse, and Mark describes her as “checked out”– this is known as disassociation, and is common with sexual violence survivors.

However, all of that is framed as Grace’s fault. She “punished” him because she was traumatized– her needs as a sexual violence survivor was her “ruling over him.” He had to “forgive her.” In the last paragraph of the chapter, being sexually abused is listed as a form of “unconfessed sexual sin.” So, even if the “sexual sin” that they’re talking about back when they were dating was consensual, it’s clear that even if she’d been assaulted, Mark’s reaction would have been exactly the same: it’s a sin, her trauma and pain was her “punishing him,” and he needed to forgive her for her “sexual past” of being sexually abused.

What is just as horrifying to me is how Mark and Grace describe at least the first decade of their marriage: Mark says his actions were “overbearing and boorish, so angry and harsh, that I had not been the kind of husband who she could trust and confide in with the most painful and shameful parts of her past.” He said he used his words to “tear her down,” that he “condemned” her, and he links this with Grace “shutting down.” Grace describes it– in the scant few paragraphs where she’s allowed a voice– as him being “angry” and “harsh.” She describes her own reaction as “distant” and that she reacted to his diatribes and “harsh words” with silence.

I do not know Mark and Grace personally. I have never met them, and I did not observe them during this time. However, what they’ve spent fifteen pages describing sounds an awful lot like Mark being an emotional and verbal abuser. Apparently finding out that Grace had been sexually abused caused Mark to do some heavy re-thinking, but that just breaks my heart even more.

My partner and I had been dating for a couple months when we initiated any sort of physical romance, and it took me a long time to finally open up to him about what I’d been through. Before that, all he knew was that my last boyfriend had been a “jerk.” He didn’t push me, he didn’t question me. He waited for me to talk about it when I was ready, and was willing for that to be never. However, he didn’t need to know that I’d been raped in order for him to pay attention to my boundaries and to not just respect but love my physical needs.

He was so incredibly careful and gentle about making sure I was ok with anything we were doing. When I mentioned one day how much I loved his way with me– that he was respectful and loving– he looked at me like he didn’t know what I was talking about. For him, it was of course he would respect what I wanted, what I needed. Of course he wouldn’t cross my boundaries. Of course he thought of my enjoyment, my fun, my laughter and pleasure as paramount. This is normal, he told me, and it took me a very long time before I believed him.

American culture accepts violence against women as normal. Of course a penis will tear a vagina the first time they have penetrative sex. Of course men are sex-fueled robots. Of course women should expect reactions and behavior like Mark Driscoll’s. He had every right to feel bitter and tormented and angry because he’d had the bad luck to marry a traumatized sexual violence survivor who displays some symptoms of PTSD and couldn’t be his own personal porn star in bed.

That Mark Driscoll needed to know that his wife is a survivor in order to respect her needs during sex tells me everything I need to know about him.

Update 9/16/14 12:57a: for readers who have engaged in the comment section, please read my new comment here. My deepest apologies for letting that go on so long. I should never have let it begin.

September 15, 2014 by SamanthaField

Feminism

they took it down

That’s what I felt like last night around 11 pm. Then I started crying.

First, I want to thank all of you for joining me in asking Leadership Journal to #TakeDownThatPost. Seeing so many of us rally on twitter, and on facebook, and reading the e-mails you were sending … it was extraordinary.

I also wanted to say this, in case they ever have the chance to read it.

To his wife: you are an incredible woman. What you did when you left him was amazing, and courageous, and I – a stranger you’ve never met—am proud of you. You did the absolutely right thing in what must have been one of the darkest times of your life.

To his victim: I wish there was a way to express how much my heart broke for you. My horror if my rapist had the opportunity to manipulate and deceive Christian leaders all over the country would be inexpressible. Hopefully you didn’t know that he’d been given a platform, but if you did, I hope you know that everything we did to get that post removed, we did for you. You are a child of God, and we love you.

~~~~~~~~~

It took the Leadership Journal five days to remove the post, and there were some significant bumps along the way, but they did, ultimately do the right thing and removed it. And not only did they take it down—the absolute best I was hoping for—they apologized. And it wasn’t a non-apology of “we’re sorry you all were stupid enough to be offended.” It was a real, legitimate apology.

I read it, and I laughed, and rejoiced. We did it. They listened. It was . . . incredible. This week had been so hard because I fully expected them to continue ignoring us, to delete our comments, to silence our criticism, to block us and ridicule us. Since when would a Christian media outlet recognize that they’d screwed up so epically? I was cynical, and my cynicism made me angry because I desperately wished that I didn’t have a reason for it. I hated that an entire editorial team had been taken in by a manipulative abuser, and that they had allowed a rapist into a pulpit to spread his lies.

And then I cried, because oh how I wish I weren’t so surprised that they’d done the right thing. It is a sorrowful thing to know that it is so extraordinarily rare for a Christian organization to admit to wrong doing.

So, thank you, Leadership Journal and Christianity Today for not taking the road that so many Christian leaders before you have taken.

But what now?

They were right in one thing: Christian leaders desperately need to be educated about child sexual abuse, clergy abuse, rape, and sexual ethics. To me, it is the most glaring and hideous fault in the modern American church, that they are negligently ignorant about this issue and the lives that are at stake.

I would like to see the Leadership Journal replace that hideous screed with posts—not just one, but many, and again and again and again in the years to come—from the perspective of victims and those who work with abuse survivors of all kinds. The American evangelical church knows nothing about abuse—not physical abuse, not domestic violence, not spiritual abuse, not sexual abuse—and that needs to change. Now.

They need to go to pastors like Jeff Crippen, who have been working with abuse survivors for decades. They need to ask the leaders at GRACE to do an entire series about how to identify abuse and how to properly respond to victims, especially children.

They also need to think about bringing more diversity into their editorial staff. All of them are men. I can’t help but believe that if they had a woman on the editorial staff, this atrocity would never have happened. Women are the targets of sexual violence in a way that men simply aren’t, and because of that we are going to be much more aware of what sexual violence is and the ramifications that it has on victims.

During this week, it was women who were leading, women who were telling our stories, women who were starting and participating in the hashtags #TakeDownThatPost and #HowOldWereYou. Men were there—good, amazing men—but the overwhelming majority of the voices calling on Leadership Journal were women.

We are half the church, after all.

So—you did the right thing, Leadership editors. You apologized. You took it down.

Don’t let it end with that.

June 14, 2014 by SamanthaField

Feminism

Moni's Story: How PCC Re-Victimizes Students

As I was interviewing people and researching their stories for my article on PCC, I had to make a tough decision about the stories that I would include. I didn’t have space for everyone, and I needed to be able to tell the stories clearly, but succinctly. There is not a whole lot of time for nuance in 1,200 words. A lot of people assumed that I chose the stories I did because they were “sensational,” which they are, but I actually chose them because their stories were simple, easy to explain, and easily understood by those who aren’t familiar with how predators operate and how they groom their victims.

However, I believe that the vast majority of victimized PCC students don’t have such cut-and-dried stories. So far, most of them have been far more complicated—however, they are also far more typical of what happens on the campus of Pensacola Christian and in the broader culture.

Monica Varela, “Moni,” has a typical story.

She is from Taiwan, the child of missionary parents, and started her freshman year, her very first semester, at PCC this January. As I’ve been talking with her, I’ve gotten to know a very gentle and incredibly sweet young woman, but she’s also incredibly brave—she decided to attend college in a foreign country, reached out to me, and is sharing her actual name. I am fiercely proud of her for being willing to do this.

After she arrived on campus, she quickly became friends with a young man who had also started in January. Her first impression of him was that he was a little awkward, but when he initiated a friendship with her, she thought that she should give him a chance. At first, everything seemed to be going well. He was incredibly sweet and generous—he gave her his favorite hoodie, and showered her with attention and compliments.

As their friendship progressed, he began “opening up” to her, telling her that he had never been able to open up to any other girl before, that he trusted her and valued her. She was helping him. He told her about some horrible things he’d experienced and said that her friendship with him was allowing him to trust people again, to realize that maybe people weren’t so bad.

If you have ever been in an abusive relationship, you will recognize this stage. It is one of the very first things that some predators do to groom their victims—they make their victim feel needed. They do everything they can to make sure their victim has bonded with them emotionally; the goal is to ensure that their victim feels compelled to stay in a relationship with them once they begin the abuse. You’ll hear this sometimes from domestic violence victims: they’ll excuse their abuser’s actions as part of them being “troubled,” and they see it as their responsibility to remain in a relationship with them in order to “fix them.”

The abuse in Moni’s relationship, like in most abusive relationships, began very slowly. One of the first steps he took was to isolate her from her support structure—she had family on campus, and had made other friends. He began asking her to go to dinner “just the two of them” because he wanted to spend time with her. When she would protest and say that she wanted to spend time with other people, he would ask her to accommodate his “social awkwardness.” He didn’t like big groups, he didn’t feel comfortable. Being the sweet person that she is, Moni capitulated to what he was saying he needed. Over time, she began seeing her friends and family less and less.

Another thing that predators do is test boundaries, or to outright violate them and see how you react. He began doing this to Moni, asking her to send him pictures. At first it was all incredibly innocent—he wanted a picture of her wearing the hoodie he’d given her, for example. This made her uncomfortable, but he would insist and eventually convince her that there wasn’t anything wrong with his request and she shouldn’t freak out, it wasn’t a big deal.

That is called gaslighting, and it is a very common abusive tactic. Predators employ gaslighitng in order to make sure that the victim doesn’t trust their own instincts or to respect their own boundaries—abusers convince victims that they cannot trust themselves or their perceptions.

(I explain more about how abusers can operate here and here.)

~~~~~~~~~~

As Moni’s relationship continued, the abuse progressed and he began using threats. He carefully never threatened Moni, but he started saying things like “I’ve never wanted to punch someone [referring to a female friend] so much” or “I could totally beat up your brother.”

Moni’s reaction to these threats was the reaction that most people would have: he could not possibly be serious. He must be making a very bad joke, she thought, and she blamed it on his “awkwardness.” She responded with “that isn’t funny” or “please don’t say things like that.”

Personally, I believe that abusers might use ridiculous threats like this in order to further isolate their victims. At one point during my abusive relationship, my ex threatened to hire a hitman to assassinate my two closest friends. It just sounds so crazy—who exactly are we going to tell? I didn’t really take him seriously, but it did make me horribly afraid. I knew he was capable of violence, and I had no idea how far he’d actually go. Moni began feeling and thinking very similar things—what was this young man actually capable of? Who would he hurt?

He continued his threats, continued gaslighting her, and began coercing her into sexting with him. When I asked her to describe those interactions, it all felt so familiar to me. In the early days of my abusive relationship, John* had pressured me into sexting and, eventually, phone sex. It’s difficult to explain how that process works if you have never experienced it, but the constant needling, the never-ending drone of “please please please please please” eventually wears you down to the point where you give in. When you’re simultaneously being gaslighted and drowned in flattery and “affection” and “baby I need you so badly,” things can get incredibly confusing, especially for a young woman who has nothing to compare it to. Especially for young women who belong to a culture that puts what men need at the top of our priorities.

During this period, he sexually assaulted her twice—while they were on campus.

After all of this, Moni still had the courage to stand up to him: she told him that she did not believe him, did not trust him, and that she did not like their relationship. She says that he “blew up” and broke up with her. She was relieved, and thought “finally, he’ll leave me alone now.”

That is when he began stalking her.

He followed her all over campus, even when she was in a group. Her friends noticed, and commented about the way he was looking at them—he made them feel unsafe and was giving them “evil looks.” A cousin asked her about what had happened, and when she heard everything Moni had been through, told her to take it to her floorleaders (which is exactly what PCC tells students to do).

The second her floorleaders heard what was happening, they were appropriately concerned and immediately sent her to Student Life the next day.

~~~~~~~~~~

Moni went to Student Life feeling hopeful. This was her first semester at PCC, so she innocently believed what Student Life said—they claimed to care about students, and they had publicly assured the campus that they take things like what Moni was going through very seriously. It’s even in their handbook, the Pathway, that they respond to “harassment” (which supposedly includes stalking and sexual assault) very seriously.

However, the several women that she spoke to in the Student Life office did not take her seriously. They told her that because the threats he had made were verbal and not written that there was nothing they could do, and their only “solution” to his stalking was to tell her to “remain in groups and very public places,” confident that he would eventually give up and leave her alone, and that she was “letting herself be too controlled by fear.”

In an attempt to explain what this man was capable of, she told them about how he had sexually assaulted her twice, and about how he had been coercing and pressuring her sexually.

That’s when they finally became interested. They switched from being dismissive to being hostile and demanding—they repeatedly asked her variations of “do you know what your sin is?”. After several hours of interrogating her, they concluded that she “had been too willing” and she was sent in front of another “council” and told to “defend herself.”

She explained everything that had happened, and the council decided to expel her for “sexual misconduct.”

In her own words, this is how Moni described her encounter with Student Life:

They treated me like I was a dirty, sexually disturbed person … how they mentally and physically exhausted me that day and then made me defend myself without really knowing how is the most horrible memory I have. I looked into their faces and saw no sympathy and Christian love. Only disdain and judgment as I sat there trembling.

Did the women, when interrogating me, try to comfort me as I cried? No: instead they were trying to elicit a confession of my sins, and a repentance for what they thought was my “seduction.”

This is called re-victimization, and many sexual violence victims report that their encounters with authority figures after their assault is more traumatic than the assault itself. That is what Student Life did to Moni—they listened to a story about verbal abuse, physical threats, stalking, and sexual assault, and instead of reacting with empathy and compassion, they began attacking her.

Instead of helping her, they expelled her.

~~~~~~~~~

That is what Pensacola Christian College does. I’ve heard dozens of stories from other victims in the past few months, and most fit this pattern. The administration, Student Life, and their “counselors” do not understand sexual violence, trauma, or abuse, and so they almost invariably re-traumatize victims.

This must change.

author’s note: I was able to independently corroborate this story with several PCC students and staff, all of whom have asked to keep their identities private for fear of reprisal from the college.

*edit: ordinarily I keep my comment section fairly open. For posts like this one, however, I moderate more closely. Because of the content, it is vital that the comment section remain a safe place for me, Moni, and other survivors. Also, if you believe that whether or not Moni has reported her assault to the police is at all relevant, you have missed the point of this article.

May 24, 2014 by SamanthaField

Feminism

Dear Savoury, from a Christian feminist

[photography by Verdance]

This post, titled “Dear Feminists,” showed up in my Facebook newsfeed today, and curious, I read it, since it was from someone I respect. I’ve thought a lot about what she had to say this afternoon and almost decided to leave a comment on her blog, but my response would be a little unwieldy, so I decided to respond to her this way.

~~~~~~~~~~

Dear Savoury,

You start your post by describing a feminist woman you saw on television whose story called for your sympathy after you found out what had happened to her– that her husband had abandoned her, betrayed her. That’s why your description of her as “hard-bitten” stood out to me, because it doesn’t align with the compassion you seem to be trying to express, and I’m wondering if you, perhaps, saw a “hard-bitten woman” because she identified as a feminist, and it’s a little hard to get around how our culture paints feminists as bitter hags.

You then propose this definition for feminism: “Feminism really at its core means, ‘I can defend myself.'”

I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt here; you’re young, and from what I’ve gathered of your family, I’m going to make a guess that you haven’t read books like bell hook’s Feminism is for Everybody or Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth or Caitlin Moran’s How to be a Woman or Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism; which, speaking of, if you have the time or the inclination, please read those books, or books like it. If fiction is more your speed, The Color Purple and Room with a View are also excellent.

However, this definition and the paragraphs that follow it indicate that you’re at least aware of how dangerous the world is for women, and because of the personal experiences I’ve had I can understand how you arrived at this definition.

What you go on to do, though, shows that you are– quite innocently– unaware of what feminism is, what feminism means, and why people decide to become feminists– and that men can be feminists, too.

I want to be honest with you, Savoury. One of the reasons why I am a feminist is that I’m an abuse and rape victim. When I finally started the excruciating process of finding healing, one of the things that helped was my feminist community. They supported me, loved me, and believed me when no one else would. It was a feminist who didn’t call me a liar when I told her I was raped. It was a feminist who counseled me for the first time. And now, as a feminist, I want to work to bring the kingdom of God to earth, to help bring an end to violence against all those who are oppressed, not just women. I am a feminist partly because I look around and see people suffering, hurting, bleeding, dying, and I want make it stop.

You said that you feel that, too.

However, I am not a feminist so I can punish the people who hurt me.

That is not what feminism is. That is not what feminists want. We are not out for revenge. We do not want to take an “eye for an eye,” and we’re not in it to perpetuate the violence against us. We want the world to be a less violent place, not just for oppressed people to become as equally violent as our history’s oppressors.

I am not a feminist because I don’t know any good men. I am married to the most wonderful man I’ve ever met, and my life has been filled with good, healthy, beautiful friendships with men. It would be impossible for me to name all the good men I’ve known. I’m not a feminist because I believe that all men are “bad”– in fact, I’m a feminist because of the exact opposite, because I believe in men.

I’m sure there is a feminist, somewhere, who paints all men as bad. I’m sure they exist, but they are so rare that I’ve never encountered one, and I’ve spent the past few years reading every feminist I could get my hands on, and building relationships in a wildly diverse feminist community. There are extremely radical and militant feminists like Andrea Dworkin who were accused of “painting all men as bad” primarily for the supposed argument she makes in Intercourse, an argument she denies trying to make.

Lastly, you tell feminists like me that we have a “Defender” and a “Protector”– essentially, you seem to be making the argument that I don’t need to be a feminist, because I have God.

I think that’s a beautiful thought, but I don’t think it aligns well with what believers are instructed to do by Jesus. To me, and to most of the other Christian feminists in my community, feminism is one of the ways that we “love our neighbor as ourselves.” Christians are not to sit around, doing nothing, trusting that “God will take care of it,” but to work with him in building the Kingdom on earth. I see feminism as my sacred God-given duty, my calling. Feminism is how I show love, how I am a beacon of light in a world filled with suffering and pain.

Also, God promised us many things, but he did not promise to protect us. My life is living proof of that; I trusted God to hold to a promise he had never made, and I was abused, assaulted, and raped. I could blame God for not protecting me, for not defending me– and honestly, sometimes, I do. But that’s not being honest about who God is and what he’s said that he’ll do for us. He says that we can trust who he is, that we can trust in his love for us, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to protect us.

In the end, Savoury, it is obvious that you meant well, and you seem to be a loving, caring, kind, and compassionate person. I appreciated the tone of your entire post, and how tender you were. That I disagree with you is not a reflection on who you are, or what you were trying to do. You are young, and intelligent, and I hope you’ll take what I’ve said here to heart.

Peace,

Samantha

May 15, 2014 by SamanthaField

Feminism

Cersei Lannister, rape culture, and a lot of me flipping the bird in general

[content note for sexual violence]

I’ve read G. R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire up through Feast of Crows, and I’m currently reading Dance of Dragons, albeit slowly. The books are a struggle for me to read, as an abuse and rape survivor. I do enjoy them, although I caution people to engage with Martin’s world critically. He’s been hailed by a lot of people as a “feminist” writer, but I am extremely hesitant to think of him in those terms (read Sady Doyle’s piece there– it’s both hysterically funny and insightful).

Since the beginning, I have appreciated both Sansa Stark and Cersei Lannister as characters. Cersei, up until Storm of Swords, was a relatable character for me– she was forced into a difficult position by the expectations of her father, of her culture, and of her husband, but she did what she could to find happiness in the midst of an abusive marriage and constant rape. There isn’t a lot about her that I would describe as noble, but she felt realistic to me, and I found myself grudgingly admiring her.

And then Storm of Swords happened, and Martin makes it blatantly obvious that we’re all supposed to hate her now because she’s ridiculously incompetent. She’s completely robbed of all sense because, well, the only explanation he offers for this drastic departure is lady-hormones. I don’t follow Game of Thrones as a show, but I’m a part of online nerd/geek communities, so I have a passing familiarity with what the show is like.

Last year, everything in that part of my internet circles exploded because of the rape scene, which a lot of people insisted diverges from the books. I find that accusation amusing because Robb Stark doesn’t even marry the same woman in the show, but this scene seems to matter to people. I wouldn’t be bothered by the scene diverging from the book, as television it is a completely different medium, and the artists — the writers, the directors, the actors, the editors– are already telling an entirely different story than the one Martin originally penned. In many ways I think the direction they’ve taken is intriguing.

However, in this one scene they stayed true to the book.

Jaime does, in fact, rape Cersei in the sept next to Joffrey’s dead body.

She kissed him. A light kiss, the merest brush of her lips on his, but he could feel her tremble as he slid his arms around her. “I am not whole without you.”

There was no tenderness in the kiss he returned to her, only hunger. Her mouth opened for his tongue.

“No,”

she said weakly when his lips moved down her neck, “not here. The septons…”

She pounded on his chest with feeble fists, murmuring about the risk, the danger, about their father, about the septons, about the wrath of gods.

He never heard her.

That is rape. There is no other word for this scene. Jaime raped Cersei, full stop.

And, honestly, by this point in the books a rape scene would cause me to think yawn, well of course a woman got raped it’s Martin writing this for heaven’s sake what did I think would happen? There are various things to be said about how often people are raped in Martin’s fantasy world, but I’m not really here to critique the existence of rape in his books. It’s what he does with it, and this scene in particular, that deeply, deeply troubles me, because of what happens next:

This, I have a problem with– because this is a rape myth. It actually gets a fucking number on the Women Against Violence’s list of “Rape Myths”– it’s #17: “When a woman says no, she really means maybe or yes.” It’s the idea that women secretly all want it, they just have to be persuaded. Horrifically, “with my dick” can finish that sentence without the person immediately retching at the utterly revolting idea just expressed.

I have a gigantic, rage-inducing problem with this for the simple reason that when I told my rapist “no,” this is exactly what I sounded like. I couldn’t physically stop someone almost twice my weight, and so I did everything within my power to persuade him to stop. I told him it hurt– he did not stop. I told him “no,” he did not stop. I told him “please, not now,” he did not stop. I said “what if your parents come home?” but he did not stop. I told him I didn’t think it was right (ie, “wrath of the gods,”) and he did not stop.

Finally, I gave up and tried not to let him see me cry because I knew he would hurt me even more if he did. When he assaulted me again, and again, and again, and again, and Again, and AGAIN, I learned that it would all just be over if he got what he wanted. He would leave me alone and go and play Halo if I just played along, no matter how much he hurt me, no matter how often I vomited after because what he made me do to him disgusted me.

So, for all of you people who are arguing that Jaime didn’t rape Cersei:

FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU TO FUCKING HELL.

***

My problem with this scene in the book (for this post, at least) isn’t that Martin has written yet another rape scene. It’s that what he’s written is a rape myth— a chauvinistic fantasy about male-centric sex that ignores or denies women the ability to consent. Cersei told Jaime no seven different ways, but then suddenly starts begging for it– literally. This is an extremely dominant myth about the difference between rape and consensual sex. In order for something to be considered “legitimate” rape, the victim has to fight tooth and nail until the bitter end. In order for it to be real rape, the victim could never– not once not ever— have consented to sex. If they consented to sex once, well, they’re only saying now for inconsequential reasons and they should just get over it, it’s not that bad.

This is one of the most grievous lies of rape culture– and the actors, the directors, and the writers all used it.

Keep that in mind as you enjoy the season premier tonight.

April 29, 2014 by SamanthaField

Feminism

Christian women: feminism IS your friend, actually

[this is what the patriarchy will look like, when we’re through with it]

I usually do whatever I can to avoid reading anything Matt Walsh says, because reasons. He’s the blog version of Rush Limbaugh and an un-educated John Piper rolled into one Godzilla-sized disaster. Seeing someone in any of my social media feeds link to him has been enough to cause this reaction:

And that person usually ends up blocked or hidden. However, he’s been showing up more and more often in my Facebook feed, and from people that I respect and value my relationship with them. So, here goes.

If you want to read Matt Walsh’s article, “Christian women: feminism is not your friend,” here’s a Do Not Link version.

~~~~~~~~~~

Before we get started, there’s something that Walsh is doing in this post that seems to be a consistent pattern with him: he re-defines words to whatever he wants them to mean in order to make his “argument.” In this post, “feminist” is re-defined to mean– an only mean– a woman who thinks there’s nothing wrong with murdering babies and “equal” means sameness, both of which are preposterous definitions.

Everyday I hear from people who tell me they are ‘pro-life feminist’ or ‘Christian feminist.’ Yet millions of modern feminists would respond that such a thing is not possible. Feminism, they say, exists largely to combat the patriarchal evils of pro-life Christianity. They claim that calling yourself a pro-life feminist is like calling yourself a carnivorous vegan, or an environmentalist Humvee enthusiast. The concepts are contradictory, they argue, and I agree — though I’d say the term ‘pro-life feminist’ could be more aptly compared to ‘abolitionist slave trader’ or ‘free market communist.’

Ok, first off, since there’s apparently “millions of modern feminists” who would argue this, I’m surprised he was unable to find a quote of anyone actually saying this– especially when I know they’re out there. I think it’s a completely accurate statement to say that Matt Walsh is lazy. In the posts I’ve seen, I’ve never seen him link to research, studies, even people who agree with him. He just spews bullshit for 2,945 words and then eventually runs out of steam.

But more importantly: yes, there are feminists who are primarily focused on maintaining reproductive rights; however, that is not the sum total of feminism, and, in fact, a lot of feminists critique these “single-issue” feminists for a variety of reasons. Intersectional feminists have a problem with reproductive rights being a “woman’s issue” when trans men and intersex persons need to have access to abortion and hormonal contraception, too. A lot of other feminists feel that trying to make it seem like feminism is singularly focused on reproductive rights to the exclusion of anything else is damaging.

In fact, in all of the feminist literature I’ve read, it’s actually unusual for them to spend time talking about reproductive rights; which Walsh would know if he’d bother to read any, which he openly admits that he hasn’t. The only two significant organizations I know of that seem preoccupied with reproductive rights is NARAL and Emily’s List. NOW does what they can to protect those rights, but it’s far from their only platform.

It is also completely possible to be a feminist and to be pro-life– and to be a Christian feminist and to be pro-choice, like me. I’m a Christian, and I feel that is consistent with being pro-choice as a civil issue. Being a Christian is not synonymous with being pro-life. In fact, many Christians (50-60%) are politically pro-choice while having ethical and moral reservations. Feminism is an extremely large tent, and people only have time to maintain their own education and activism in certain areas. For me, I focus on sex education for teenagers and raising awareness about abuse and rape– others focus on violence against women in an international context, like sex trafficking. These are a tiny sliver of what feminists can talk about and fight for.

Also, most of Walsh’s argument in this post centers on the idea that feminism is the only thing responsible for the “slaughter of countless innocent babies,” since it was primarily the feminist movement that got it legalized in America. The problem with this argument is that the number of pregnancies that were terminated before and after Roe vs. Wade is exactly the same. Legalizing abortion didn’t increase the number of abortions– it just made them safer.

And, feminists are constantly working to lower the abortion rate, because the feminist goal is for abortion to be extremely rare. How do we make it rare? By pursuing paid parental leave– for both mothers and fathers. By subsidizing daycare. By making contraception available to all the people who need it. These things could dramatically reduce the abortion rate to something like what it is in other developed nations, where the rate is half of what it is in America. There have been studies conducted in Michigan and St. Louis– when these things become available to the people most likely to consider an abortion, the abortion rate drops immediately and drastically.

Who opposes these things? Oh, right. Conservatives. Like Walsh. People aren’t having abortions because it’s legal– they’ll have them whether or not it’s legal. They are having them because the world we live in is hard.

What truth did feminism reveal at all, actually?

That women are equal to men in human dignity and intrinsic value? No, feminism did not reveal this. Christianity revealed it. Christ revealed it. Christian thinkers throughout the ages have affirmed it and taught it; notably Thomas Aquinas, who said that women are meant to rule alongside men. That was 800 years ago, or 600 years before the term ‘feminist’ existed.

Ok, yes and no. As a Christian feminist, I believe that Christ exalted women at pretty much every opportunity and treated them as equals– or even as his superior, on one occasion. I believe that his followers did the same– Paul frequently praises women in leadership positions, and he describes at least one woman as a leader over him. So yes, there are roots of feminism in the Christian tradition.

However.

There is also a long, horrific history of flagrant misogyny in the Church. There are archbishops removing a woman’s name from Scripture. Clement said “every woman should be filled with shame by the thought that she is a woman.” Tertullian described women as “being built over a sewer.” St. Augustine asserted that women were not created in the image of God and that we have “no use” (except, he grudgingly acknowledges, possibly pregnancy). Even Thomas Aquinas, who Walsh quoted here, said that women are “defective and misbegotten.” John Wesley told women to be “content with insignificance” and Martin Luther… well, he said a bunch of shit, because by even Christian-theologian-patriarch standards, Luther was a misogynistic son of a bitch.

This is why the church needs feminism– because the last two thousand years of church teachings have been riddled by misogyny and sexism. Many of St. Augustine’s writings form the basis for long-held Christian orthodoxy, and he declared that half of the people on this earth do not bear the imago dei. Martin Luther, whose teachings formed the basis for Protestantism and evangelicalism, said that it’s better for women to die in childbirth than to live a long life. Christian feminism seeks to overcome these failings in our theological systems, to breathe fresh life into these doctrines so that they more truly represent what Christ did and taught.

Similarly, equal legal protections are good, and feminism, at one point many years ago, helped ensure those legal protections. Times have changes, and feminism no longer serves that purpose.

Yes, technically, women have the right to vote, own property, and divorce their abusive husbands now– so yes, feminism is no longer pursuing those goals. However, sexism still exists, as does the reality that 1 in 4 little girls will be sexually abused, that 1 in 5 women will be sexually assaulted, that 1 in 7 married women will be raped by their husbands.

Walsh doesn’t even mention this. He accuses feminists of painting some horrible picture of reality that doesn’t exist– that feminists are literally making shit up in order to convince women that they’re oppressed with some horrible, fake, woe-is-me sob story. Except, most women– with the exception of women like Mary Pride, Mary Kassian, Phyllis Schlafly, and Elisabeth Elliot, who somehow ignore this– experience oppression every single damn day of their lives. We are catcalled and harassed virtually everywhere we go. I had a male friend look me in the face and say that it just makes sense for a man to dismiss a woman’s arguments because we’re “too hormonal.” Women, for a variety of factors, earn less than men, with Hispanic and black women being horribly affected by the wage gap.

Feminism is necessary because of these things. Feminism doesn’t just exist to protect reproductive rights. It exists to fight for the marginalized and oppressed, no matter what shape that person might take.

We’re not fighting to be “the same” as men, as Walsh argues when he accuses feminists of being gnostic (which, wow, does that ever expose his complete ignorance on this subject). We’re still fighting because men like Walsh can write an entire post about how “feminism is not your friend,” never even once mention the rampant violence against women, and hardly anyone will even notice.

April 24, 2014 by SamanthaField

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