Everyone should watch this video. Dan Savage has started a new project, prompted by the suicide of a bullied gay teenager, Billy Lucas, in Indiana. So they’re trying to get the word out: It gets better. Don’t despair. And they’re collecting other people’s stories, too.
This particular project is specifically about giving gay kids the strength to carry on, but it’s not just gays who are made miserable by schools and religion and other agents of the enforcement of artificial norms. I suspect that the readership of Pharyngula, all you geeks and nerds and oddballs, is enriched for people who were outliers in their youth…and still are, but most of us have reconciled ourselves to our status. It gets better for all of us.
Another good essay to read is The disease called “Perfection”. We all face ridiculous expectations from our culture, and we all face these pressures to conform with the boring mundanes with their distressingly unrealistic and uninteresting ideals. I didn’t have the stigma of being gay, but I was the homely, unathletic, four-eyed weirdo no girl would look at twice…and I can say that it got better for me, and it can also get better for everyone.
By the way, Dan Savage also talks about the unenlightened oppression of a Catholic upbringing. If that’s your burden, rest assured that that can get better, too—you can become an ex-Catholic, and while the world may still be tinted in shades of sin and guilt for a long time to come, you’ll get better.
Hang in there.
our dead selves
I speak from experience. I was much worse off from going to the police. It was terribly humiliating and I didn’t get any support or help, and was made to recount events over and over again for multiple strangers, even though I had written down my account for them already. The numbers I gave you aren’t fake- what kind of sadist would tell women that they should put up with everything entailed in that? Its up to them ultimately (duh), but the way that society works now makes it impossible for a trial to revolve around anything except a victim’s character. It is a second assault on the dignity of a woman, she has to prove she didn’t enjoy it. There are circumstances where it will almost never make a difference, like if you were drinking or if you husband did it or if you were a prostitute. It wastes the time and emotions of people to put up with this broken thing all the time.
What I don’t like is people saying that there are consequences for violence, when one type of really sexist violence has almost no consequences for perps. The lie of “just tell the truth and it will be okay” hurts a LOT. I am being realistic, busting the myth that the law gives a crap about any of this.
My mindset isn’t the thing that is wrong, its the misogynist society I live in and the rules I have to deal with.