There was a time when the only good female victim was the bleeding one. The high-water mark for salacious crime reporting—the yellow journalism purveyed in the late 19th century—made sure that every crime story came with an innocent, young, white victim, hopefully in a nightgown stained red. Justice for women inevitably took the form of white male vengeance attacking whomever had sullied the lady.
This vibe has prevailed in recent decades, even when it was lightly subverted; in 1973 Ms. Magazine infamously published a photo of Gerri Santoro bleeding out after a botched illegal abortion, under the headline “Never Again.” Time and again, the stories of lily-white women generously bleeding out for justice take center stage. To be a good crime victim demands youth, innocence, tears, and a life in tatters. It pulls a woman out of one airless box—property/wife/daughter—and pops her into another: ruined angel.
It would be nice if we could transcend this ancient narrative. And lately, finally,the “good victim trope really seems to be faltering, and I am absolutely here for it. Whether it’s Stormy Daniels chortling at the former president’s penis, E. Jean Carroll refusing to designate herself a rape victim (while still suing the former president for rape), or Amanda Zurawski testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week about how her inability to access health care nearly killed her, these women are not broken, defiled, ruined, or asking men to rescue them. They are, rather, pissed off, living their lives, and defying the public imperative to open a vein in public as a testament to their loss and brokenness. They are nobody’s property and nobody’s responsibility, and it is about freaking time we took them extremely seriously.
Zurawski’s testimony is particularly compelling after months spent watching the post-Dobbs reporting on all the women who must brush right up against death in childbirth before anyone can help them. It is a chilling reminder of how very much we love stories of dying women and the men who save them. But Zurawski’s testimony—that despite the fact that her pregnancy was not viable, her Texas doctors “didn’t feel safe enough to intervene as long as her heart was beating or until I was sick enough for the ethics board at the hospital to consider my life at risk”—reworked that story. Rather than center herself as a victim, she centered the men who hurt her (including Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, who didn’t show up for her testimony) and the ways in which she and her husband saved herself. It may not be a story you read in the mainstream press, but it is why abortion won the midterms and the Wisconsin Supreme Court race and will likely keep winning elections for anyone looking to preserve reproductive rights. Nobody is going back to Justice Alito’s halcyon days of witch burnings and Madonna/whore morality tales. Abortion advocates are, again, saving themselves.
Olivia Nuzzi’s recent barnstorming profile of Stormy Daniels in New York Magazine is, similarly, one for the books, not least because of the tarot card reading that opens the piece, and the open roasting of the politics-to-reality-show pipeline that constitutes public life today. But the most arresting part of the story is the grouping of several Trump “victims”—Stormy Daniels, Kathy Griffin, Mary Trump, and E. Jean Carroll—into a category Mary Trump handily describes as having “no fucks to give.” (Disclosure: As a journalist, I’ve met all of these women in recent years.) Griffin, in a quote, goes one better, describing Daniels as “like a porno Dorothy Parker,” and then goes on to describe the fantasy as “me, Mary, E. Jean, and Daniels and probably her husband and a fluffer.” I love the descriptor, and not just because each of these women is funny, complicated, and comfortable in her skin, as well as generally quirky AF, but also because it signals that perhaps the era of the wan, ruined, long-suffering victim may be well and truly behind us.
I’ve all but given up on the pollsters and pundits who will never understand the seismic change Dobbs brought about in politics. They don’t seem to actually know any women like E. Jean Carroll or Stormy Daniels, and they clearly don’t have any idea about how to pick up the phone and reach one. If you live your whole entire life in 19th-century tabloids or 21st-century Hallmark movies, you can truly fail to understand that for most women, most of the time, sexual harassment, sexual assault, internet death threats, pay discrimination, the absence of a meaningful child and health care network, pregnancy, pregnancy loss, and pregnancy complications are daily facts of life. All those things truly complicate and confound our daily lives, and still we manage to go to our jobs, and buy our yogurt, and call our moms. We’re actually, very few of us, huddled on a velvet couch palely waiting for some legislator to rescue us, or for some ethics board to deem us sufficiently wan and pale to warrant emergency lifesaving medical care. As Zurawski testified Wednesday, she never expected the senators who favored the abortion rules that nearly killed her to show up at a hearing to hear her story. They are as wholly invisible to her as she was to them. She just wants the rest of us porno Dorothy Parkers to be forewarned.
So, too, Carroll sat before a jury that already understands why women don’t report sexual assault the day it occurs, and told Donald Trump’s lawyer, “You can’t beat up on me for not screaming. One of the reasons [some women] don’t come forward is they are asked why they didn’t scream. Some women scream; some women don’t. It keeps women silent.” Indeed, she said, she now fully understands why women don’t report sexual abuse—because they won’t be believed (which is, paradoxically, what Trump’s lawyer kept saying: that she wasn’t believable). But this jury got to hear from a three-dimensional Carroll,who happily went into a changing room at Bergdorf’s with a guy because she was a journalist and he was a story. Her testimony was deeply hilarious and complicated and highbrow and ambitious and not at all designed for anyone’s fainting couch. “I was ashamed. I thought it was my fault,” she testified. “It was high comedy, it was funny, and then to have it turn …”
Welcome to the life of a woman.
It is worth noting here that Donald Trump’s defense in every case involving a female accuser is one-dimensional: She wanted his fame, she wanted his money, she wanted revenge. Women exist solely to steal his light, to cash in on his importance. In this Victorian telling, women are nothing until they can gouge a man.
But so many of the women presently in the world don’t actually believe that Trump is the source of their future greatness. With the exception of his wife and his daughters and some hapless attorneys, most women are smart enough to stay far away from him. To wit: What Stormy Daniels reports wanting from Donald Trump was principally to be left alone. When E. Jean Carroll’s friend Carol Martin advised her not to tell the police she’d been raped, it was because she wanted to spare her from being doubly injured by him. As Carroll put it on cross-examination: “I was afraid Donald Trump would retaliate, which is exactly what he did. He has two tables full of lawyers here today.”
Victims of persistent narcissistic misogyny, whether it emanates from Trump or Tucker Carlson or Harvey Weinstein or someone much less famous, always end up having to be “good” victims. In order to get anything like justice, they have to perfectly embody the trauma of what happened to them as the main plotline of their own life. The narratives always put their attacker, his wants and needs and actions, at the center of the story. Even when the attackers become incidental, or ancillary, or just tiresome, we have to keep behaving as though they are the beginning and the ending of the story.
But these new porno Dorothy Parkers keep making the choice to center themselves, their friendships, and their intricate lives. As Carroll testified Wednesday, “I’ve regretted this 100 times, but in the end, being able to get my day in court finally is everything to me. So I’m happy!” Like so many Trump accusers, she just wants to unstick her life from the sprawling miasma that is Donald Trump. She wants her voice back and her career back and her reputation back. Like Daniels, she just wants him to go away.
The notion that men own the law and women own their pain is so deeply ingrained in our legal system that nothing—not Anita Hill or #MeToo or decades of true crime and decades of obsessing over true crime—has fully shaken it loose. But in this post-Dobbs moment, we may finally have the potential to understand the cost of treating women as mere bodies, vessels, and victims, either perfect or ruined. Because unlike the women who bled out in random hotel rooms or died of infection, these women are surviving their mistreatment, and organizing around it. And they are finding a new way to talk about it—they are making these stories about them.
It is fitting that Trump most likely isn’t going to show up at E. Jean Carroll’s trial. It’s her story, after all. He’s just a bully she met along the way.
Today’s rain in the Catskills is very much welcome, not only because we collectively need it – our hay and corn fields and every other living thing – but because I personally need a slow day wherein my compulsivity doesn’t kick in, putting me out there (over)doing thangs when my muscles are already complaining, and rightly so.
And so, while I allow for a little recovery, a few choice quotes shared below to start a day of rest, plenty of deep breaths, no noticing of what all needs a good clean hereabouts (a lot) as that can wait for another day this week, or next! A rainy day in spring is a gift, a gift allowing time for focusing on writing, writing, and more writing.
Gloria Steinem, 1970, testifying before congress re: the ERA, which we still ain’t got, daggnabbit, “The truth is that all our problems stem from the same sex-based myths. We may appear before you as white radicals or the middle-aged middle class or black soul sisters, but we are all sisters in fighting against these outdated myths. Like racial myths, they have been reflected in our laws.”
Carl Jung: “Life really does begin at forty, until then you are just doing research. And if an attractive woman is single, it’s because she’s smarter than everyone else thought.” (no comment other than LOLOLOL)
Tennessee Williams: “All the qualities of magic reside in women. This is why the fearful suppress them. This is why the wise follow them.”
Annie Ernaux: “The general belief is that one cannot go anywhere that is not familiar; people feel genuine admiration for those who aren’t afraid of going places.”
Vaclav Havel: “I am not an optimist, because I am not sure that everything ends well. Nor am I a pessimist, because I am not sure everything ends badly. Instead, I am a realist who carries hope, and hope is the belief that freedom and justice have meaning—and that liberty is worth the trouble.”
M. Scott Peck: “Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult-once we truly understand and accept it-then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”
Herman Hesse: “We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome… We are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for in our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.”
Charlotte Brontë: “I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”
Jim Ralston: “The highest meaning of the social group is to foster the development of individual potential, for the community’s own well-being depends on it. When the goal of the group ceases to be the individual, that group goes into decline. The very best citizens have also been the most evolved individuals. Groups, nations, classes, clans, and families tend toward narrowness, meanness toward other groups, nations, etc. It has always been the individual who calls the group to a larger vision, who insists on compassion and fair play. It is always the community that is ready to stone the witch.”
Sylvia Ashton-Warner: “You must be true to yourself. Strong enough to be true to yourself. Brave enough to be strong enough to be true to yourself. Wise enough to be brave enough to be strong enough to shape yourself from what you actually are.”
Agnes Hobbs: “You can close the windows and darken your room, and you can open the windows and let light in . . .It is a matter of choice. Your mind is your room. Do you darken it or do you fill it with light?”
Thich Nhat Hanh: “People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.”
T.S. Eliot: “I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: so the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
Roman Payne: The day came when she discovered sex, sensuality, and literature; she said, ‘I submit! Let my life be henceforth ruled by poetry. Let me reign as the queen of my dreams until I become nothing less than the heroine of God.’”
Sandra Cisneros: “I do want to create art beyond rage. Rage is a place to begin, but not end. I do want to devour my demons—despair, grief, shame, fear—and use them to nourish my art. Otherwise they’ll devour me.”
Have a great day, y’all. I hope you found inspiration, as I have, in the above quotes from all sorts of peeps, and thanks for visiting.
*not a horror film duckies, just normal, annual clean-up craziness for April in the Catskills.
Today I will be working outside with my branch lopper, and my chainsaw, both of which are run by battery, which batteries are charging ‘as we speak’, and omg, if you’ve never used a chainsaw, it’s so so so much fun, and I highly recommend it ~ especially if you’re in a lousy, I want to break shit mood. And, of course, safety comes first. If you’re right-handed, keep that left arm stiff while operating the saw, vicey-versy if you’re left-handed you need to keep the right arm stiff as a board, wear protective goggles, do NOT bite off more than you can chew (egos in check, always, when operating any shit that can cut your fingers and other extremities off, keeping in mind that it takes only 2 – 5 minutesto bleed out a.k.a. die, corpse up, kick the bucket if an artery is hit), wear glovies, and avoid pants that have a lot of fabric like bell-bottoms or extree doo-dads hanging off that could get caught in the chain, and long sleeved shirts are best too, also worn tight to the body as again no extree fabric to get caught up. A hat is good too – the number of branches I’ve lopped off at the proper angle to drop just so over thattaway that have instead landed thissaway and on my noggin is more than a few (ouch).
I am doing April clean-up outside; it’s the spring month when it’s not too hot for me to be doing tree work that is hard, exhausting, and deeply rewarding as well as long overdue on a property that’s been in my family for over a century, but which has been in my hands – after six decades as a rental – for just four years. Once the house where lived, in my grandparent’s day, the hired hands for the family farm, the inside needed so much work, 98% done, I didn’t get a lot accomplished outside until last year, but now my full attention has turned to the property surrounding the house. I do what I can (not a whole lot, TBH, but some) with dead or struggling saplings, and with the removal of dead branches, and the numerous stinky whatever bush/trees no one seems to know the name of; these suckers flower but are the main head bashing criminals, growing up like a twisted rope of a mess that challenges me to my stubborn core, and yes, they stink when cut. They are mainly on the edges of the property, along stone walls I have begun to restore, proliferating during an age of neglect in what once was a corn or hay field depending on the year.
Everything hurts. Including my eyelashes.
A slight exaggeration. But, chainsawing saplings, and dragging them along with dead or live tree branches – even just the medium and small ones – is a lot and, it really is so much fun, it makes me smile just typing it out. I write this instead of finishing a piece on gender and sexuality because that subject is so broad, so deep, and so in need of concentration, I worry I’m too exhausted to do it justice even in this short form. I practically can’t move, and ~ I’m heading back out there shortly once the batteries are all charged up, because despite the fact that a dear friend of mine is horrified/thrilled I use a chainsaw at all, I know like I know like I know that, girl, it’s fun. And, if I do an hour or two or three a day, every April day, it’ll get done. Vroom, vroom!!
My dad is home and now instead of wanting to live, period, he wants to live “on his terms”, which statement I took to mean (since he removed his oxygen the moment after my sister, the nurse, left his house) that he wants to live unencumbered and free of both oxygen and a need to give up smoking. Whatever. I am exhausted and feeling blue because this is the beginning of what could be the end of the release and relief I felt after my mom’s death: release from being the decision-maker and caregiver who filled out paperwork and went to the status meetings with the staff at the nursing home, relief because care-giving my parents was, as of her death in ’07, an already eight-year-long process.
The hardest part is negotiating boundaries. What will my father allow me to do for him and to require of him, if he expects me to do so much, as in get him to the doctors and the specialists and make sure his oxygen equipment is kept clean, although it was my nurse sister who called to give me those instructions, thank you very much. Every three days some part has to be thoroughly cleaned – don’t ask me which one – I was at work and quite frankly I wasn’t in the mood to take instructions from afar regarding my dad’s care from someone who has, for years now, had minimal contact with my parents. Don’t. Get. Me. Started. I love my dad and this will all be worked out I am sure but if he chooses to begin smoking again, I may just lose it. I won’t take care of someone who won’t do that one thing for himself. I know it’s not a small thing, but rather a g.d. addiction, but Jesus H. Christ come on. I have three siblings he can call for help and there are services he can make use of, services for people like himself who are functional but need some extra looking after. I am much too tired to be making decisions and even thinking about all of this, yet I am unable to think of much else. Tonight, I will take a long hot bath, watch Project Runway (ah, escapist TV, how I love ya!) and contemplate how best to do nothing at all except love my self. I did my work-out this a.m. which I skipped yesterday due to running around to get pop back home. Oh oh oh – it’s a gorgeous sunny day and all I can think of is how much I long to be asleep in my wee bed. Only 11 more hours of awake to go……
February 9, 2010 A Drama Queen
Yes. I am a drama queen, especially when tired and stressed, both of which I have been of late. Last night I slept well and long and as a result life looks much better this morning. I have had my long walk, started a fire in the wood stove and set-up a time for lunch with a good friend I have not seen in several months; all of which are life affirming actions. And, I have taken innumerable deep breaths in the process. I was also better able to sleep because I had a talk last night with my father about some of the issues I have with my being his primary caregiver, the one who does for him because I want to, but also because I can, and because it’s the right thing to do and I just want you to know, daddy, that sometimes doing the right thing SUCKS. And he acknowledged me and all that I’ve been doing and have done this morning (admittedly in his very understated way but still…), an acknowledgement that went a long way toward making it a lot better. And yesterday afternoon I wrote. I worked on a creative writing project I have had on my desk for about a year – a project I have neglected far too often. I had dropped it in the midst of the crisis, and as I had not sat down to write for two whole days it was eating at me, adding to my sense of anger at my poor old pop, who is certainly not responsible for my lack of discipline when it comes to my writing. Hard to write when I’m a wreck, and all I really want to do is watch mind-numbing TV, but it can be done. Another deep breath. I equate writing, especially on the bigger projects, with diving in, immersing myself in another, imagined world. It takes some time and space and a lot of commitment to go there. And writing is lonely. Suck it up, drama queen, and get down to it. I shall, once I am done here, promise. My dad keeps taking his O2 off and has a follow-up appointment with his doc next week. We’ll see how his blood oxygen levels are. Maybe, drama queen, he won’t need it for ever and ever, especially if he can stay away from cigarettes. Anyway, I am not responsible for his choices, but as I reminded him last eve I do tend to get most of the picking up of the pieces when both he and I pay for the bad ones he makes. Still and all, it’s all good. I slept. I dreamt I was in love with The Office actor Jon Krasinski and we were planning a fun day and night to celebrate his birthday. Hilarious. I also told my dad that I love him. Always a good thing to know and say, drama queen.
I am one of those young women who, at the age of sixteen, began to feel that virginity was a burden that needed to be shed. I was tired of reading about sex in all those great paperbacks of the seventies while simultaneously diddling around with my boyfriend while he diddled with me. When were we going to DO IT?
Honestly, I think I was pretty happy with all that deep kissing and sweet caressing. It did go on for hours, after all, and I never remember feeling all that deprived. But all that changed pretty quickly after my boyfriend left mid-winter to do a three-month service project, and I was left alone with that pulsing libido.
But leave me he did, however well-intended we were on reuniting in the late spring, and meanwhile, a new fella slipped onstage. Literally. He was my co-star on the big stage of our high school musical, my Dolly Levi’s Horace Vandergelder. How terribly convenient. A real Broadway cliché.
This guy knew I had a serious boyfriend of nearly two years, but he moved in anyway. And he was cool – ran with a group of seniors (I was a junior) that smoked a lot of pot and had deep philosophical discussions that I could barely grab onto. There was Andy and his girlfriend Shelly, and Leslie, who had the longest hair I’d ever seen and was the daughter of the assistant headmaster (this was a New Jersey private school, after all), and a handful of other hippie intellectuals, mostly males. They were definitely the freaks and not the geeks (which the school had plenty of). Lots of talk about the band “Little Feat” and weird movies that I’d never watched. And after a month plus of absence, my boyfriend still hadn’t written to me. At all. I was pissed and horny. So, when this guy started to pursue me in earnest, I figured, why not? And he was cute, with his long hair that was cut to his shoulders with precision.
We’d lie on the couch making out, and I remember him whispering in my ear, “We really should sleep together.” His words didn’t so much excite me as challenge me: could I? Should I? Would I? And I knew what he meant by “sleep”! At least that didn’t confuse me.
He let this question worm its way through my head for a few weeks, repeating it maybe twice. Meanwhile, the idea was forming. Why not? Why the heck not? (I was and still am a pretty good Presbyterian.)
So, I thought about it. For a little while, though not too long. The opportunity soon presented itself. My seducer actually lived within walking distance to the school, and this was long before things like security guards and other forces that keep students within the walls of school if they don’t want to be there, so all I had to do was skip (!) over to his house during my study hall. How long would it take, for real? It was time! I was done with this virginity thing! LET’S DO THIS!
So we did. He knew I was a virgin, and he used a condom. He wasn’t unkind, but it was mostly underwhelming, as I believe it is for a lot of young women basically brought up on the idea that sex was going to be the most sky-rocketing, mind-blowing, transformative thing you could do in this lifetime. Meh. Of course, it was my first time, so I imagined I had a lot of road ahead, and who knows what I might learn along the way, right? So, bottom line: did it, done, and moving on! I now had my teenage “lover” and I was interested in where all this might lead. More sex? Better sex? Maybe even, love??
This was not a boy who “gave love to get sex,” but I was probably a girl who believed I could give sex to get love.” It just didn’t actually work out like that.
After that fateful afternoon, we carried on, only we didn’t have any more sex. I didn’t know why, and I was too awkward to know how to ask. What happened? We still hung out together, mostly with his friends, but sometimes just the two of us (I think?). Nothing had really changed, but something was off, something was different. Did I do something? Did he not like me anymore? Maybe my greatest fear: Was I that bad “a lay”??
I remember his bedroom was in the basement, and one day about a month or so after my “deflowering,” I was down there looking around. I was alone for the moment, and I don’t remember where he was, but I had a moment when I looked over at this large wall calendar he had hung on the back of his door. I noticed he had made some notes on the calendar, some markers of specific dates, so I thought to check out the date we had “done it.” And there it was! Marked on his calendar with my initials. Ah, how sweet! And next to my initials was a symbol: it was a small circle with a perfect X/Y axis through the middle. Basically, the same thing you see when you look through a scope to set aim on your target. A crosshair. Well, I had a pretty good idea what THAT meant, didn’t I?
Then I zoomed out of that particular date and swept my eyes over the days, weeks, and months both before and after that occasion. And I saw that symbol again, only this time there were different initials. I knew pretty quickly who they stood for: it was Shelly, and it was Leslie. And it was more than once, way more than once, for both of them.
But wait a minute! Shelly had a boyfriend! Andrew! And Leslie was just a friend, not his girlfriend! What the fuck (now I’m getting upset) is going on? Did I really need it spelled out to me? Shelly was actually a friend of mine by now, or so I thought. So I called her (not him, of course) and asked if we could meet so we could talk.
To her credit, she didn’t even try to lie. Yes, they were sleeping together. It was just for fun, it didn’t mean anything, and Andrew didn’t know or care, I can’t remember which. And Leslie was just a “free spirit” and they did it when they were bored. It was all very “The Group” or “Peyton Place” – all very enlightened and free and no hang-ups, ya know? No baggage, no expectations, just plain old fun between the sheets. I didn’t need to be upset about it, after all.
But of course I was. I was devastated. But not just because he had been sleeping with other girls. The part that hurt me the most was that he’d slept with them multiple times, but only done it with me that one time. I took this as an obvious indicator of my bed-worthiness. Clearly, I was subpar, not only not as cool as the other cool girls, but also – clearly – not as sexy. It was a rejection that cut deep.
It took me a while to finally confront him with what I knew. He wasn’t very apologetic. It was one of those “I’m sorry you are upset” kind of things. Like “it’s no big deal.” But I couldn’t get over it. What was I supposed to think? And what about the crosshairs? But we stopped seeing each other, pretty much by mutual agreement, I guess.
Later that summer, we actually went on a school trip together, something we’d planned earlier in the spring, but by the time the trip actually happened, he wasn’t speaking to me anymore. In fact, he avoided me completely the entire time. It was the most miserable two weeks in Europe you could imagine. I remember I just ate bags of candy and stared out the window of the tour bus, wondering what in the world it all meant. I’m still not sure I know.
But I think about those crosshairs. Maybe it was just a mark, not really significant beyond its use as a code for intercourse, but still – I did feel like I had been a target. That he had decided to bed me, and even though I thought I made that decision free and clear, did I really? And how did this experience inform me of what sex meant, or intimacy, or – even – love? Or was I just an idiot?
