We Will Not Go Quietly - Centre Against Sexual Assault

As I read Jamie’s post, I felt a hot, uncomfortable dread creep over me, that
prickly feeling under your skin that you sometimes feel when you’re ashamed
of something you’ve done. I sat for a moment and thought about what Jamie
had written. And then I opened up my browser and wrote her an email.
I used to be one of those people who made you cry today.
When I was a sophomore, I took a women’s studies class, and
when it came time to discuss alcohol and consent in precept, I
didn’t get it. I said things about being drunk and being responsible
and being raped that I now deeply, deeply regret. I hurt the
feelings of two girls in the room - that I know of - who had been
raped while drunk. Things got heated and we all went and met
with the professor teaching the class and it was really ugly. Now,
four or ive years later, I get it. Like, really, really get it, enough
to write about it for Feministing. I think about those girls in
my class every time I write about this stuf, because I have to
remember how much pain I caused them just by espousing stupid,
poorly thought out and entirely mainstream ideas, and I have to
remember what I used to think and how I used to justify it to
myself. I guess all I’m saying is, you probably converted a person
or two today. And if you didn’t today, you will next time or the
time after that.
When Kate and Mel asked me to contribute to We Will Not Go Quietly, and
told me that it was a resource for survivors, I wasn’t entirely sure what of use
I could say. I am not a survivor. I am lucky to be one of the three out of four
young American women who has not been the victim of rape or attempted
rape. Every day, I am grateful for that. Every day, I live with the possibility, and
the fear, that I will one day join the other twenty-ive percent. But as it stands,
I do not know how it feels to be sexually assaulted.
What I do know is that I have sat where Jamie sat and felt the frustration
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that she felt. But I have also sat across the table and inlicted that pain on
other people. I’m not proud of the things I said in that class as a second-year
student. I’m appalled when I remember the tears in the eyes of my classmate,
a woman who, she told me later, was a survivor of a brutal rape. I wish I could
take back what I said in that classroom – and even though I can’t, every time
I write a blog post about victim-blaming and rape apologism now, I feel like I’m
atoning, in some small way, for the fact that I said them.
I’m atoning because at some point, I saw the error of my ways. I saw how
wrong I had been in believing those ideas I espoused back then. And ever
since then, I’ve been on the other side of the table, Jamie’s side. I can’t
remember exactly what it was that made me see reason. But it did happen,
eventually.
My point, then, is this: conversations like the one Jamie describes are
incredibly dificult to have. They can be triggering and traumatic and
sometimes they can make you cry with frustration and disbelief that people
just don’t get it. But they can also convert people. They can make those
people question beliefs they’ve never really thought to question before. They
can bring them around to see what you see, what Jamie sees, and what her
classmates could not yet see: rapists cause rape. The only way to prevent
rape is for rapists to stop raping people. Perhaps it won’t be your words that
change someone’s mind, but that doesn’t mean that their mind won’t one day
be changed.
As dificult as these conversations are, we have to keep having them.
We have to believe that when it comes to mainstream ideas about who’s
to blame for sexual assault, minds can be changed. We have to ight that
good ight, even when it’s exhausting and enraging and frustrating beyond
description. And sometimes, we have to leave the room to cry.
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