Community growing pains

A lot of my long-form work is sitting incomplete since I’ve been spending the past couple weeks with my boots on the ground. March on! Edmonton, the successor to the Women’s March (an American incorporated “Women’s March Canada,” because nothing says “intersectionality” like embracing your inner capitalist scum), had a town hall and I’ve been networking with various community organizers in a bid to coalition-form for the 2019 provincial election and 2020 federal election. It’s a ragtag bunch of misfits, and we’ll see how it goes.

In the mean time, my palm has been glued to my forehead in some of the most migraine-inducing nonsense I’ve ever had the displeasure of dealing with. Edmonton’s BDSM scene is going through some growing pains and it is neatly cleft in twain along an aggravating but not surprising fault line: Consent. There’s my peeps, who are principally concerned with organizing around sexual ethics, and the other peeps, who are literally complaining that our spaces have rules and standards.

Maddening. Utterly maddening that it’s 2017 and people are still trying to pretend that sexual ethics is difficult. I seriously do not have any respect for this debate anymore. We live in a culture that provides a fertile ground for honing sexual predation as a technique, why in the everloving fuck of Dog would you create a space that is especially vulnerable (lots of naked people high on adrenaline) and not police the shit out of it?

Answer? Some of them are the fucking predators. Others are just clueless. I don’t think the distinction matters to me. I’m trying to fight for an ethical BDSM space and that includes telling rape apologists they are unwelcome. But the sheer amount of resistance to a space that affirms bodily autonomy is not encouraging in a broader political landscape that increasingly targets minorities as disposable.

-Shiv

In which Miri accidentally writes my life story

Miri (Brute Reason formerly of FTB) over on The Orbit wrote a piece that has nothing to do with me directly, except that she described my abuse situation in basically 100% detail (pronoun of the abuser notwithstanding, emphasis mine):

The idea that a “real” sexual predator will inevitably prey on every single person they are involved with comes from the idea that people who harass, assault, and abuse are unable to control themselves, that they are rapid beasts who lunge at every available target. As knowledgeable folks have already pointed out many, many, many times, that’s not how the overwhelming majority of sexual violence works. At all.

I’m not inside any sexual predator’s mind, so I can’t tell you how any particular individual decides who to try to harass, assault, or abuse and who to pretend to be a good person to. But I’ve watched quite a few of these situations unfold and what they all had in common was that the accuser was young, relatively unknown in the community, queer, non-white, and/or marginalized in other ways, whereas the current and former partners stepping up to defend the accused were well-known, well-respected, often older members of the community it happened in.

What’s going on with that?

What’s going on is that people who want to hurt people pick people that they doubt will feel empowered to speak up, and who will be much less likely to be believed if they do.

…

Just like abusers aren’t uniformly awful to the people they’re abusing–if they were, it’d be much easier to leave–they aren’t uniformly awful to everyone else. They’re often charming, beloved by their friends, and professionally successful. And yes, in a polyamorous context, that can even include other partners.

Geez, Miri. I don’t know if you read my column or not, but you are rapidly becoming a very enlightening resource when it comes to understanding my own abuse–how difficult it was to speak from the back foot as a queer trans woman in the BDSM community, and how my abuser was a charismatic and charming volunteer who had a habit of making herself useful everywhere she went.

It went about as well as you’d expect. #NeedNewFriends

-Shiv

Transition Reactions p7: Feeling unsafe vs. Being unsafe

Content Notice: Abuse and violence of all stripes.

Context

I haven’t had a great year, so far. I left an abusive relationship in which I was sexually assaulted, and my vindication (snark) was to lose my chosen family because I spoke out about it. I had all the sting of family rejection–plus a generous helping of self blame. After all, I chose them. I don’t even have the excuse that they were thrust upon me by circumstance. I trusted them, and was rewarded with cold shoulders, victim-blaming, “taking no side”ism, etc. I had trusted friends tell me they believed my story and then… nothing. My abuser was still welcome at every venue we shared. “No drama” became the watchword. Shouting me down was the response any time murmurs of coming forward surfaced. That’s what my reputation became: dramatic, a ticking time bomb. Unreliable. Untrustworthy. Don’t play with her, she’ll malign you over a silly mistake (a “silly mistake” that has landed me in trauma counselling). Soon the rumours make a round trip through all the lovely cogs of rape culture and I get the freeze for “spreading rumours.”

Trying to grapple with that and the fallout of leaving an abusive relationship, including the PTSD?

Yeah. 2016–worst year of my life. And it’s not even over.

During all that I lost gainful employment, just as the economy started to really tank. What was painful about that was that it was a work place where I could be openly trans. I swore off the private sector after routinely being told to endure abuses from my coworkers. My boss basically said it was on me to go back in the closet if I wanted the workplace harassment to stop. Government employers actually did something about it, when it happened. And non-profit? I’ve never had a problem with a bigoted coworker. After all you don’t get far working for crisis resources by being an insensitive asshole. Emotional intelligence is a prerequisite.

[Read more…]

Confronted by the word

At pretty much the exact same time I accepted a probationary offer from FtB to write on New Frontier, my relationship at the time took a drastic nosedive. What had previously been a subtle form of chipping away at my self esteem (which I would later learn is known as “grooming”) abruptly exploded. Shouting matches, belittling, cornering, threats, gaslighting, compulsive lying–daily. Near fucking daily. It all culminated in a scene at one of the local BDSM clubs where she… well.

I suppose I always knew what happened. I’ve used the words before. “She hurt me,” “she violated me,” etc. It’s one thing for you to recognise what it is from the other side of the fog installed by gaslighting. It’s one thing to try and recognise the fog for what it was–a survival tactic used by a serial abuser to keep her victims dizzy and unwilling to fight back.

It’s another can of worms to have someone else look you in the eye and say, “girl, she raped you.”

My counselor doesn’t quite understand BDSM. There was no sexual contact that occurred that night, so arguably the legal applications of sexual assault are ambiguous at best (regular assault might be more plausible?). But that’s not the point. My abuser will never be charged. At least not for what she did to me. The legalities aren’t important. What is important is fully capturing the following:

  1. She removed my ability to consent;
  2. She proceeded not knowing or caring whether I consented;
  3. She blamed me for being upset

I didn’t–couldn’t–consent, and she proceeded anyway. I knew this. So why is it so different to have someone else say it? Have I been so inundated by skepticism from the community that having someone believe me feels so alien?

-Shiv

Signal boosting: Consider the Tea Cosy nails relationship abuse

=AtG=

Aoife covers relationship abuse over on her blag at The Orbit and abso-fucking-lutley nails it:

You don’t want to. You don’t want this to be happening. You don’t want to believe that Bob- who you respect and like- could have done the things they’ve been accused of. Similarly, Alex has never shown signs of being manipulative or a liar before. You feel like you’ve been dragged into this circus against your will. So you decide to withhold judgement.

What effect does this have?

It strengthens Bob’s standing, and weakens Alex’s.

How does it do this?

Before Alex accused Bob, things were pretty great for everyone but them. Even if Bob was doing something abusive, it didn’t affect anyone but Alex. Everyone (except Alex), without knowing it, believed that Bob wasn’t abusing anyone. That’s the status quo.

When you claim the middle ground, what you’re really claiming is the status quo. You want things to be like they were before. Like it or not, the person who changed everything was Alex. Alex is the one who asked everyone to look at things differently. Alex demanded that we acknowledge that there’s an abuser in our midst.

And your middle ground? It’s not backed up by evidence. If Alex was as likely to be lying as telling the truth, it would make sense to withhold judgement. However, when it comes to rape or abuse accusations? While we don’t have exact numbers, it’s very likely that rates of false accusation lie somewhere somewhere between2% and 8%– although there’s a good argument to be madethateven those numbers are high. Even assuming them to be true, however, this leaves a 92-98% chance that Alex is telling the truth. Only somewhere between one Alex in twelve, or one Alex in fifty is making it up- at most.

Please go read. Her analysis is astute. I’m not happy to say I’ve lived her hypothetical example, but it feels good to know that some people get it, y’know?

-Shiv