Senryu: The Color Of...

Image by Enrique Meseguer from Pixabay

something unwanted

the color of blood on cloth

in the dark of night

~cie~

notes

I recently wrote about an event that happened closing in on 40 years ago that was more of a turning point than even I realized until I started writing about it. You can read the piece here.

Carpe Diem Summer Challenge: Red Sweat

Image by Isabella Quintana from Pixabay

A warning that today's prompt did not invoke in me the feeling it would in a person with a normal history when it comes to sex. I instead ended up having a physical flashback. I have not had good experiences in this area. My work addresses this, and thus I give you the opportunity to leave my work unread.

The late 1990s were extremely difficult. My mental illness would not be properly diagnosed until 2004 when I was closing in on 40 years old. Self-harm became a way of coping when I was in my early teens. When I tried to talk to anyone about what had happened to me, they only tried to push drugs on me in the case of medical "experts" and didn't listen when I told them that the drugs only made my situation worse. I have always had paradoxical responses to drugs such as benzodiazepines, and SSRI's make me manic and psychotic, although I didn't know that was what was happening at the time.

My family's response when I told them what had happened was to tell me that I got over it before and could get over it again. 

I had no support and in swooped another predator who saw his chance of getting something he wanted from a very vulnerable person. I have written horror stories from the time I was quite young, and one might think that I would compare this individual to a vampire. Incorrect. He was a ghoul.

My poem is not about impassioned lovers wrestling as one. It is about a discarded and misunderstood person wrestling with herself. It has taken me more than 20 years to finally begin to forgive her for being so broken and allowing predators to harm her repeatedly.

What happened last year

You capitalized upon

Red sweat on my arms

~Cie~

The Cheese Grates It: The Effects of Bullying Last a Lifetime

A response to a post on "The Mighty."

I'm now almost 54 years old, but the bullying that I endured all through school still affects me to this day.  I have always felt that I was hideously ugly. If I'm completely analytical about my appearance, I'm actually fairly ordinary-looking, but when one lives in a society which has a very narrow view of beauty and constant bullying is added to that, one learns to loathe one's physical appearance. I honestly don't like it when people compliment me on anything because my initial thought is that they are just trying to get something out of me.

When I was in the third grade, I was sexually assaulted by two of my female classmates. I was too ashamed to say anything.  Later, a boy in that same class pinned me up against the wall and told me that he was going to kill me with his pocket knife. I wet my pants, and when I went to the school nurse, she laughed at me and told me that I was being silly. This boy was very popular, and he was never punished.

Throughout school, the bullying that I endured often had sexual overtones. There were horrible rumors that I would have sex with any boy who wanted it. In fact, I was so naive that I thought a "bl*w j*b" was blowing in someone's ear, and I wondered why anyone found that sexy.  Boys would often grab my breasts or buttocks. The adults never did anything about it. In one math class, the teacher was sitting right there while my classmates said things like "she plays with herself" and "she'd play with her t*ts if she had any." Up until I turned 18 and realized that my breasts tended to get in the way when I was doing things, I hated my "flat chest." I actually have rather average-sized breasts, not that anyone should be bullying someone with smaller than average breasts.

I have never enjoyed sex, but once I got into high school, I allowed my boyfriend to take my virginity. He dumped me after that, and I ended up in the mental hospital over the weekend with a slew of unkind doctors and nurses looking down their noses at me. One nurse even told me that I was a freak and I would never be normal. To this day, I'm proud of my sixteen-year-old self who told her: "better a freak than a b*tch like you." I don't know how I found the strength in me, but I stood up to those jerks, and I tried to be helpful to the other patients who were in there with me. My roommate was a woman in her 50's who was so severely anorexic that all her bones were showing. She had trouble voicing her needs, so I tried to be her voice.

Remembering these things makes tears of anger come to my eyes, but they won't last long because the message that crying is weak was so deeply internalized. I have a lot of trouble crying. I didn't cry after the deaths of some of my close relatives. I didn't cry when I had to have my beloved rescue cat put to sleep on his sixth birthday due to kidney failure. It's not that it didn't matter. I've never recovered from it. There's a gaping wound in my heart that will never be filled. I get accused of being cold and uncaring because I don't cry, but I simply can't. Crying was a weakness that my bullies would exploit, so I never let them see me cry.

I have major mental illnesses (type 2 bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder which manifests as hoarding objects, not animals.) Any coping skills I have with these diseases have been developed on my own. "Mental health professionals" have only tried to medicate me into normalcy even though I do not respond well to psych meds. They make me manic and psychotic. Family members offer wisdom like "just stop being like that," "just stop thinking like that," "just stop looking for attention," and "just act normal."

I have been completely unsuccessful in life, and, if it weren't for my son, the honest truth is that I would have been long gone. My life has been a series of loss and disappointments. With the psych conditions I have, it would have been an uphill battle anyway, but with the self-loathing I learned from being bullied all through school, the battle became impossible.  

When my diabetes worsened, I became unable to work the difficult jobs and long hours that I had always prided myself on being able to work. I am now living in poverty. If it weren't for my son, I'd be homeless. I do not have hope for things getting better.

Bullying destroys lives, but all I ever heard is that it was my fault that I was bullied, and if I would just "act normal" and "ignore it," I wouldn't "bring it on" myself.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

30 Days of De-Objectification: Worthless

30 Days of De-Objectification:

Worthless

Trigger Warning:

Discussion of sexual assault 

Mention of self-harm 

I am going to reveal something very personal.

Twenty going on twenty-one years ago, in the early morning hours of November 1, 1997, I was sexually assaulted by my ex-boyfriend.

I was in my early thirties, but I was very naïve. Even though I broke up with the guy because he had a very callous sense of humor and everything physical that happened with him had been coercive, I thought it was the right thing to do to remain friends with him. After all, I had broken up with him. So, I thought that we would start our new friendship with my taking him to a work friend’s Halloween party.

Not only was I very naïve, I also had untreated type 2 bipolar disorder, which would not be correctly diagnosed for another six years.

I took my son, who was seven years old at the time, with me because my co-worker had kids around his age.

I proceeded to get extremely drunk.

One of my other co-workers was flirting with me.

My ex-boyfriend became extremely angry.

To avoid having him start a fight, I took him out of there. I also did something which makes me flinch to remember to this day. I took my son with me over to my ex-husband’s parents’ house. I drove drunk with my child in the car. I didn’t know who I could call.

After dropping my son off with his grandparents, I went back to my apartment with my ex-boyfriend, so he could get his car. I went to bed fully clothed. I woke up undressed with him on top of me. I begged him to stop, but he didn’t. When he was done, he said “well, now we’re back together again.”

For the next year, I had panic attacks every twenty minutes for about five hours from the time I woke up. I didn’t want to go back to sleep because I knew it would start all over again when I woke up. Eventually, I would become too exhausted to stay awake, and the cycle repeated, every day, for the next 365 days.

I was falling apart. Nobody thought what I’d been through was “that bad,” because this bastard didn’t grab me and throw me on the ground or beat me up.

I felt like garbage. I felt worthless.

I was very vulnerable, and about six months after the event, I went to another co-worker’s party, where I became involved with one of the most predatory men I’d ever met. This creep expressed sympathy for what had happened, but he really just wanted sex. He took advantage of the fact that I was extremely vulnerable and my self-esteem was completely in the toilet. He would be affectionate towards me and then threaten to withdraw his “love” if I didn’t do what he demanded, which included watching a lot of pornography. He got a sick thrill out of my disgust over the bestiality videos he enjoyed watching. He eventually took up with another girlfriend and flaunted her in my face. He told me I was his “only girl,” but said he needed “a cheap piece of ass” too.

I ended up at his door one night with bloody wrists. I still have the scars.

Neither of these men saw me as human. I was a thing, an object. I was garbage.

Twenty years later, I still feel like I’ve been thrown in a sewer whenever I talk about it.

It is never right to look at another person and see an object rather than a human being.

It doesn’t make it better if you’re a girl objectifying a man.

There are some who will say “well, look what these guys did to you! We should turn the tables and have our revenge!”

I don’t believe that will make anything better.

I believe that objectification is never right.

I believe that it’s particularly awful to exploit and objectify vulnerable populations.

I took care of old and sick people for a lot of years.

I feel protective towards people in that population.

People who have lost their health and their ability to continue their careers should be honored, not objectified.

One of the residents at the retirement community I used to work at started hallucinating. One night she called me to her apartment in hysterics. She said that there were men who had come out of her closet and beat her. She said that these men told her that they were going to have sex with her. She said: “you’d think they could leave a seventy-five-year-old woman alone, wouldn’t you?”

These men in their sixties, seventies, and beyond don’t want to be objectified by teenage girls.

They have enough problems.

Don’t treat people like things to do with as you see fit.

Don’t deny others their worth.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

I Let My Husband Rape Me, and Here’s Why...

I Let My Husband Rape Me, and Here’s Why...

Trigger warning for sexual assault, psychological and religious abuse.

This article also contains some important points about welfare, how hard it is to get welfare, and why the idea of "welfare queens" is such a shitty one.

I was working part-time at a grocery store and about 75% of my income went to childcare just so I could go to work. I was on the waiting list for child care assistance for over a year. I had gotten three foreclosure notices. The utilities had been cut off God knows how many times. My car was breaking down. The kids were getting sick constantly. I got little sympathy because mothers are just biologically supposed to be able to handle that stuff. I was using cloth diapers and wipes because I couldn’t afford to buy them. My food stamps were cut significantly when I started working, so the running joke was that I was still breastfeeding my kids because I couldn’t afford to buy groceries. It wasn’t without some merit.

Read more at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/removingthefigleaf/2016/08/i-let-my-husband-rape-me/#9XClrybKWbjaEuIw.99

The Cheese Grates It: College, Family Dysfunction, Patriarchal Attitudes, and Sexual Assault

This post is a response to Gail Dines' excellent essay about the patriarchy's fear of women's empowerment and the rise of pornography and suppression of courses such as women's studies in response to that fear.

http://www.feministcurrent.com/2017/10/04/hugh-hefner-represents-neoliberalisms-win/

The fear of truly liberated and empowered women does indeed terrorize those who are caught up in patriarchal beliefs. When I was bound for college in the early 1980's, I was signing up for courses, and one of the courses I signed up for was women's studies. My parents threw a huge fit and demanded that I withdraw from the course. They said that if people heard that I was taking "courses like that" they'd think I was "a dyke" and that I'd be ostracized and have no friends. I said that if someone thought that I was a lesbian simply because of a class I was taking, or that they would refuse to be friends with someone who was a lesbian, that was not someone I wanted to be friends with. They then stated that they would refuse to pay for college if I took this course. Because I didn't have the financial means or the knowledge to pay for college myself, I backed down. I lasted one semester. I was sexually assaulted early on in the semester, and I knew that because I was drunk at the time my concerns would be dismissed, so I never reported it. When I tried to tell my father what had happened, he asked why I had put myself in a position where I would be vulnerable to such an assault. I had a nervous breakdown and ended up getting married too young to the one person who treated me with any compassion. There is some positive outcome to this tale. I am still friends with my ex-husband. We divorced in 1994 but were able to repair our friendship. We had a son together who is now 27, and we are a family. Sadly but understandably, my son cannot stand my mother.

My father passed away near the end of 2010. In spite of his awful reaction to my assault, I hope that no-one will say it's good that he's dead or good that he suffered for many years before dying. He was a good man who had some stupid beliefs and I did love him in spite of these unfortunate ideas.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

That Thing That Happened Nearly 20 Years Ago

Image purchased from 123rf.com

That Thing That Happened Nearly 20 Years Ago

Trigger warning for talk about sexual assault and self harm.

*************************************

It was the night of October 31 into the morning of November 1 1997.

I made the mistake of taking my ex boyfriend to a halloween party that a co worker was having because I wanted to be open minded and show him that we could "still be friends." He got angry with me when another co-worker and I flirted with each other. I took him out of there so he wouldn't start trouble. I made a lot of stupid decisions that were the product of improperly treated bipolar disorder, including driving while really drunk.

My ex followed me into my apartment. I believed he was gone. I went to bed with all my clothes on. I woke up with my clothes off and him on top of me. I don't know if I actually told him to stop or if that only happened in my head. I remember saying it several times, but I don't know if I ever used my vocal cords. When he was done, he said "well, now we're back together." Interestingly, he never called me again. He must have known that what he did was wrong or at least that I didn't want it.

I did not cry prettily. I didn't cry at all. I was in shock. I was in shock for several days. Then the panic attacks hit, and they kept hitting. I had several panic attacks within every hour I was awake, up until about the fifth hour, then they started to subside.I didn't want to go to sleep again, not ever, but I eventually fell asleep again from sheer exhaustion. This went on for a year. Then, finally, the panic attacks went away. They just went away.

I learned during this time that Xanax knocks me unconscious and then makes me suicidal when I wake up.

I learned that prozac works differently than most SSRI's do in my case. It makes me flat rather than manic, which is what most SSRI's do. I cut my arms to see if I still had any feeling in me. It didn't stop the panic attacks though.

The doctors wanted to medicate me so I wouldn't think about it. Everyone else just wanted me to shut up about it, to sweep it under the rug. I was told "you got over this before, you'll get over it again." (I had been sexually assaulted previously at 18 during my one failed semester at the University of Colorado).

I never told the police, because I was sure that since I'd been drinking I'd be blamed for what happened.

As I told a friend recently, I can go out of the house, no problem, including at night. I can work. I don't think about this incident all the time. And yet, it never leaves me. I sleep with a bunch of pillows surrounding me on a twin bed because subconsciously I feel safer in a small space.

Part of me still feels like what happened is my fault. If I hadn't taken my ex boyfriend to the party, if I hadn't gotten so drunk, if I hadn't flirted with my co-worker, it wouldn't have happened. And then maybe the sick relationship with the predator who took advantage of my vulnerable state, told me I was "the one" and then flaunted other women in front of me and forced me to do things like kiss his feet and watch bestiality porn under the threat that he would withdraw his "love" wouldn't have happened either.

All I know is that being sexually assaulted fucks a person up. How could it not?

Rape isn't funny, not ever. And it is never the victim's fault. It doesn't matter how drunk the victim was or what the victim was wearing. The one at fault is the rapist. End of story.

The act itself probably took 5-10 minutes all told.

Twenty years later, it still feels like a fist gripping my heart when I remember and I feel sick inside and like there is a layer of filth on me that will never, ever wash off. I feel like other people can see it. Even though I don't think about it all the time, it is beneath my skin every moment of every hour of every day for the rest of this life.

~Cie~

The Cheese Grates It: The Fallacy of the Friendzone

If she keeps adding bricks to the wall, maybe you need to get a clue

The Cheese Grates It:

The Fallacy of the Friendzone

TRIGGER WARNING:

Discussion of sexual assault

This is a response to a post on David Futrelle's marvelous blog, "We Hunted the Mammoth." Pretty much every day, David dives into the bilge that is the thoughts of MRA's, MGTOWs and "pickup artists" and somehow manages to come up smelling like a rose while he exposes their manure for what it is. I can't recommend "We Hunted the Mammoth" enough!

Anyway, here is my story of life as a Friendzoning Bitch.

I've had guys who got angry with me for "friendzoning" them. One of them was my ex boyfriend, who was an ex because of all the emotional abuse he heaped on me but I was still young and naive enough at the time that I thought it would be "the kind thing" to remain friends with him. I took him to a Halloween party given by one of my co-workers. I and one of my other co-workers started flirting with each other, and my ex boyfriend made a scene. I took him back to my apartment because his car was parked there. I thought he had left and I went to bed with all my clothes on. I woke up with my clothes off and him on top of me. I screamed (or more accurately, slurred) at him to stop. I was far too drunk to actually fight. Yes, I know I shouldn't have been driving in that condition. When he was done, he said "well, now we're back together." I had back to back panic attacks during every waking hour for a year after this happened.

Less than a year later, my very screwed up self got into a really bad relationship with a guy who would do things like order me to kiss his feet and make me watch bestiality porn, threatening to pull his "love" away from me if I didn't do what he asked. He ended up picking up some girl who worked at the video store where he got a lot of his porn (this was 1998) and then being angry with me for being upset that he was fooling around when he told me I was "the one." I finally mustered the emotional wherewithal to break free of him, but not before I cut my wrists and showed up at his window begging him to let me in. The cuts were superficial, but I still have scars from them.

Following the breakup, a guy whom I considered a friend ended up emotionally browbeating me because I didn't want to go out with him. I told him I'd just gotten out of a really bad relationship and didn't want to get into another relationship at that point, if at all. He said "well, thanks for destroying my ego." He claimed that the only reason I didn't want to date him was because he was fat. Well, not being thin myself, that would be pretty hypocritical. Besides, on a physical level, I've been attracted to guys from Joey Ramone to John Goodman and every size in between. My reasons for not wanting to date this guy amounted to: I'd just gotten out of a really bad relationship, and I had a lot of problems. I didn't know it at the time and wouldn't find out for another twelve years, but I had untreated type 2 bipolar disorder. Also, he was kind of emotionally immature, and I already had an eight year old child, plus my ex husband who has Aspberger's who was living with me as a roommate because he was between jobs. I didn't need to add a 35 year old overgrown kid to the mix. Also, he said that thing which should always be a red flag: "I'm not like those other guys."

This "nice guy" behavior ruined what had seemed to be a good friendship up to that point.

TL:DR If someone is "friendzoning" you, it may not be about you. But if you keep pressuring her, you're going to lose her friendship. If you actually value said friendship, cut it out. If, on the other hand, you are a "nice guy," do her a favor and leave her alone, because you really don't care about anything but her vagina anyway.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

The Cheese Grates It: When Victims Feel the Need to Confess

Stock image purchased from 123rf.com

This post is a response to Evan Rachel Wood's revelation regarding being a survivor of sexual assault.

https://twitter.com/evanrachelwood/status/803354562337865728/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

It's sad that women feel the need to confess that we've been sexually assaulted, as if we're the ones who did something wrong. My most recent sexual assault happened nearly 20 years ago. I don't fear being home alone. I don't fear falling asleep. However, I am not and never will be the same. I was 32 years old when it happened. I will be 52 in February of 2017. To the day I die, I will never forget it. It was an acquaintance rape (ex boyfriend.) I never went to the police. I had been drinking, and I knew they'd ask why I let him into my apartment. I let him in because I didn't expect him to rape me.

We'd been at a Halloween party "as friends" and he got angry with me for flirting with a co-worker. So he wouldn't cause more trouble, I took him back to my apartment even though I was way too drunk to drive. I let him in. I thought he'd left. I went to bed fully clothed. I woke up with my clothes off and him on top of me. I told him to stop. I was too drunk to fight. When he was done, he said "now we're back together again." I had panic attack after panic attack from the time I woke up until about 5 hours into the day. I was terrified to go to sleep because I knew once I did I'd just wake up to the same thing again. This went on for a year. My family told me "well, you got over this once before, you'll get over it again." I was a mess. I was dying inside. The only reason I didn't commit suicide was because of my son. I know now that some of the poor decisions I made at that period in my life were due to untreated bipolar disorder. Regardless of the reason, nobody deserves to have done to them what was done to me. When I'm alone, I still prefer to sleep in a confined space, i.e. a twin bed or a couch. I think that subconsciously I feel safer there.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

Mike Pence: Misogynist Asshat Number Two on the Ticket

Responding to this article:

Straight from the horse's ass--er--mouth:

"What if women would go out and get raped on purpose just so they could get off work?"

As someone who was sexually assaulted twice in adulthood, at eighteen and at 32, let me just say, fuck you, you utterly despicable piece of shit.

Even though I no longer have panic attacks remembering what happened to me early in the morning on November 1 1997, my heart still starts pounding. 

I had panic attacks on and off throughout the day from the time I woke up until the time I finally became too exhausted to stay awake any more. i didn't want to go to sleep because I knew when I woke up it would start all over again. I went through this for literally a year. An entire year of panic attacks about every 20 minutes.

Fuck you and anyone else who thinks anyone would willingly go through that shit. Seriously.

I'm fucking shaking. Part rage, part PTSD.

And y'all wonder why I'm laying it on the line like this. Simply because I don't want there to be even the remote possibility that someone who thinks like this could be in charge of the damn country.

If you think I'm spin-doctoring this shit, read the article. That despicable sentence, along with several others along the same lines, came right out of his mouth.

Trump runs too hot--this bastard is cold as ice.

~Cie~

On Porn: The Blinders are Off

Image copyright 123rf.com

TRIGGER WARNING:

SEXUAL ASSAULT

PORNOGRAPHY

SELF-INJURY

The short version is a response to a post on Alternet about the summer's most popular porn.

Reading this turned me off rather than on. 

Porn is utterly unrealistic, and yet it's what people have come to expect sex is like. It harms rather than helps relationships. Yet we as a society glorify it.

A lot of people think of porn as just people being filmed having sex. You've got your guy-girl porn, your girl-girl porn, your guy-guy porn, and your group sex. If it's consenting adults, no big deal, right?

If it were just consenting adults having sex, it would be no big deal and would, in fact, be kind of boring. If you're not the one having sex, sex looks kind of silly.

Once on the Howard Stern show, Howard asked one of my favorite people, Angus Young, how much porn he watched. Angus replied: "I don't get off on watching butts bouncing up and down, especially not hairy man butts."

Angus may not be aware of just how much more disturbing than butts bouncing up and down porn can be. Hopefully he never finds out. I use his statement to illustrate that for the uninitiated, "butts bouncing up and down" tends to be what they think porn is. Thus, they can't understand the argument that porn is harmful, and view those making said argument as pearl-clutching fuddy-duddies.

For many years I had myself convinced that porn was okay and that I was being closed-minded in my knee-jerk reaction that it really wasn't okay and was exploitative of women. 

I also had a complicated relationship with porn, because my own past abuses led me to be simultaneously aroused and disgusted by humiliating fantasies. Part of me believed that I deserved to be hurt and humiliated. While I would never have sought it out in real life, I would spend entire days sometimes watching scenarios in which one person was the target of sexualized demeaning acts.

Back in 1997, I was involved with a very bad guy. He was looking for a victim, and he found a perfect one in the thirty-two year old me, with her untreated mental illness and terrible self esteem.

I had a history of two full-on sexual assaults, and most of my sexual experiences had been coercive. I was molested when I was very young. I was everything a guy like this abusive misogynist could want.

It started out with regular porn, and then he started bringing in worse stuff. At first it was scat, then it moved to bestiality. When I got upset, he laughed at me and threatened to withdraw his "love" from me if I left. 

If you're saying that anyone with any sense would have left, you're partly right. My sense was telling me that I needed to get away from him. My butchered self-esteem told me that I was throwing away "love." I was so desperate to have someone care for me that I put up with this abuse.

My boyfriend started flaunting his other conquests in front of me, and when I got upset he told me that men were incapable of being monogamous, and I needed to understand that. He made me kiss his feet.

At one point I showed up at his house at two in the morning with my wrists slashed, after having wandered about the neighborhood cutting myself repeatedly.

I finally mustered the courage to leave him for my son's sake rather than my own. I didn't care about myself. I thought I was garbage. I was still obsessed with him. It took months for me to fully realize what an absolute piece of crap he was and that nobody deserved to be subjected to his monstrous behavior.

It would be another seventeen years before I could break free of the cycle of psychologically abusing myself by watching demeaning pornography.

I'm going to keep this post in the material realm. One of these days I'll talk about how Gem helped me break free of my porn obsession.

Follow-up:

I should not be surprised that I had someone Mansplain to me that my argument was "completely invalid" because his experience with porn had been the opposite of what I described. Porn is totes realistic, you guys.

As we know, nothing will change a woman's mind quicker than Mansplaining. The poor dumb bitches don't know their own minds, after all.

Well, you've convinced me. Porn is wonderful and makes the world a beautiful place. It does not create unrealistic expectations about what sex is like, and it is never violent, demeaning or ugly. I will now return to my invalid existence, gleeful in the knowledge that at least I can always have porn.

~Cie~