In “The Collapsible Woman: Cultural Response to Rape and Sexual Abuse,” Venessa Vaselka writes a very daring challenge to the commonly-held assumption that rape is the worst thing that can happen to a woman–and she investigates the cultural circumstances that have created these assumptions. She said it much more eloquently than I could ever do, so here are some excerpts:
Quote:
"The collapsible woman–one model of mental health for an unaccountable number of individuals. She is fragile, humorless, and diluted, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the sickly Victorian “angel of the house.” …Every major media piece on the subject of rape or sexual abuse presents us with the same vision of the collapsible woman. We see the same fight for sanity and purity and the same picture of life after the cathartic process of renewal. This can be seen as a support for violated women, or as a victim culture – but neither stance offers us much worth striving for. There has to be something better than the toaster prize of being called a survivor, an alternative to the role of this forever scarred, pain-haunted neurotic.
This deification offers nothing but a religion in which the pinnacle of holiness is the ability to break down at any moment, over anything, and call it a return to sanity. I’m not questioning real emotions: nightmares, tears, pain; they are the inviolable rights of every human. How though, from this, have we come to portray the ideal “recovering” woman as someone who can’t go to the grocery store without having her “issues” “triggered”? Sure, there are days, sometimes months, in the life of anybody who has been violated when the need to protect oneself from the callousness of the outside world is an absolute. We need, however, to hold up more than a skinless existence as an endpoint.
As a culture, we tell girls from the cradle that rape is the worst thing that can ever happen to them. We say it will destroy their lives and they will lose their sense of purity. We tell those who were sexually abused that it is natural to feel dirty. We do this because it’s true, and we’re trying to prepare them so they don’t feel alone when it happens. But aren’t we also setting them up to feel destroyed, to feel dirty and impure? How much are we training ourselves to crumble? The convenient words like “survivor” and “victim” don’t really change the messages we’re given. While there is no positive side to rape or abuse that could be emphasized, we need to tell another, fuller truth. We should say, “This may wreck your life for a while,” or “Sometimes you’ll feel dirty.” But we don’t, and we are left with the impression that there is no healthy response other than breakdown. It’s as if we see moving beyond trauma as denying its impact.
The real problem is not that we treat rape as sex, but that we treat it as theft. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary describes rape as forced sex and also plunder – “robbing or despoiling” to be exact. You weren’t just violated, we tell a raped woman. You were pillaged. Something of intrinsic value was stolen from you. …we tell a woman clearly and loudly that if she was sexually violated, she has been robbed, and that the objects stolen were her purity and innocence. With the best of motives, we still say to her, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
The truth is, if you were raped or abused, nothing was stolen from you. The lowlife who did it threw his soul in the trash, but yours is intact. As long as we cling to the concept of rape or abuse as theft, we are ultimately led back to the belief that a woman’s worth and her sense of self lie in her sexual purity, and we can speak of her condition only in terms of ownership and loss. To imply that deep within every woman is something essential that can be seen or touched, a vessel containing the real her that can be stolen by someone else, is the absolute objectification of women.
…Idealizing a state of breakdown, however, rather than the strength it takes to get past one, traps women into believing that moving beyond the trauma is heresy. We need to be able to turn to each other and say, “Be a macha” and know that that means, “I’ll cry with you, hold your hand, and give you time. But I won’t watch you lie down.” Until we can whisper the truth–nothing was stolen from you, that was a lie–and honor women for both their compassion and their guts, we won’t stop unraveling. We will always be the collapsible woman."