Sexual assault was your funniest moment???

[Spice_Weasel]

My goodness, olives, you sure have come a long way for someone who is only twenty-three!

Thanks. Yeah. It turned out to be worth it though.

I think that we are pretty much in agreement on things now and I understand where you are coming from.

I generally try to avoid talking about my history because I don’t want to give the impression I’m an overemotional fool. But I think it may have been useful in this context to point out what life experiences of mine have influenced my strong feelings on the matter. Eventually my anger will cool–I am already starting to calm down. As I prepare for my own career in the field, I will take the time to seriously investigate this… I’m still trying to decide what kind of work I want to do, after all. You have to take what I say with a grain of salt. What little I know is based on what I have acquired in six years of working really hard to get better, what I have gleaned trying to make my point in this thread, and what my husband knows from his undergraduate Psych education. (His idea of “fun reading” is something like, “Evidenced Based Psychotherapy with Children and Adolescents” – to name something I just pulled off his shelf. You think I’m militant, you should get a load of that guy.)

That “one brilliant psychiatrist” that I spoke of also focuses on the present.

The present is truly the greatest gift we have. I just had to throw that in there because I practice Zen Buddhism which is all about being in the present moment, and taking the time to just pay attention to what’s going on can make a world of difference. There’s a great therapy (a kind of CBT) called Dialectical Behavioral Therapy which actually borrows a lot of ideas from Zen. From what I understand it does have a lot of empirical support. It was the first empirically based treatment designed for sufferers of Borderline Personality Disorder.

I do think you are on the periphery of part of this matter that olivesmarch4th sort of alluded to: her virtue. Her virtue has been tarnished, and cannot be recovered.

I had to reply to this, because when I threw that comment in with the rest of my vitriol, I made it appear that had to do with my therapy argument. This idea of “a woman’s virtue” is actually something I got from a collection of feminist writings called “Bitchfest.” As I mentioned in the “controversial statements” BBQ thread, my feelings about feminism are at best ambivalent, but one particular article I read was truly eye-opening for me.

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:

"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."

All bolding mine.

I don’t know if I can properly convey how much impact this essay has had on the way I think about my life. I read this over Christmas break, and this is the first time in my entire life that I had ever encountered a challenge to the commonly accepted notion of what rape “means” to a woman. This is the first time, in six years of reading and obsessing over this issue, that I had ever heard a dissenting voice.

I’m not saying this absolutely must be true. The power of this piece is not in its certainty, but in the doubts it raises.

Nothing was stolen from you–that is a lie. Dear god… what if that’s true?

Do you realize how much possibility that would create? How much freedom? How many other alternatives that creates for the storyline of my life?

That was the jumping off point, the thing that started what motivated me to post in this thread in the first place. We can’t always assume that authority figures and experts know best–or authors of feminist articles, for that matter. But we can challenge what is commonly accepted to be true, and test it against our own experience–we can ask ourselves if the things we believe to be true are based on our own reasoned assessments–and if they are instead based on things we have been told, we then have the incredible FREEDOM to throw them out and trust our own judgments instead.

Thank you, all of you, for allowing me to share this part of myself with you.

I think what Hentor is asking is also essentially for this–not for certainty that he is right, but for doubt that what society tells us, day in and day out, about trauma, specifically sexual trauma, must necessarily be true for everyone.

And Hentor, while I’m at it, your most recent post regarding the work you do was very compassionate and very much to the point. Your clients are very lucky to have you, and my respect for you only continues to grow. Even my husband (who was reading over my shoulder) remarked, “He seems like a pretty good guy.” If you knew how high his standards were for psychologists, you’d get how impressed he is.

[Zoe]

Hentor, I thought we were discussing a hypothetical situation in which young woman who had knowingly been tea-bagged had come to you for psychological help and you had determined that her feelings were “overblown.”

That is the situation I was addressing – not specifically the one in the OP that you have switched back to.

Hentor: And look who’s talking about being the decider of feelings? Right after telling me that relatively mild outrage can’t exist?

Okay. What does “mild outrage” look like? What makes it outrage? Do you at least see the problem? Can you be mildly excessive? Mildly violent? Mildly brutal? By definition outrage is outrageous! How can it be mild? But if you still say that what you feel is mild outrage, then I must respect that that is what you feel. I really do wish you could draw a smilie for it to illustrate.

I never goddamn said I would feel “eh.” I said towards it rather than towards “string em up.”

For me, that is a distinction without a difference.

Perhaps I should have said, on a scale from 0 to 100, I feel an anger [or other Zoe approved emotional descriptor] of about 25 or 35 on this matter. Is that easier to grasp?

Am I supposed to answer that question?

Oh look! The woman in your office is back:

If she feels she is scarred for life and thinks she should kill herself, would you then allow me to consider that, in the back of my mind, as dramatically overblown? How about if she thinks she will always be at risk to be attacked and should never leave the house again? Would it be wrong to flag that one as overblown?

If you notice, I stayed solely with the subject of FEELINGS – not thoughts! The examples you have given are actually all matters of thinking.

She make think that she is scarred for life and that she should kill herself because she is so sad and filled with despair and humiliation. You will help change her erroneous thinking. Her feelings are all real. It’s not her feelings that are overblown, it’s her reactions to those feelings with thoughts of suicide.
(I would be inclined to make certain that she is in a safe place, if at all possible.) And I would certainly work with her so that she did not suffer unnecessarily from the trauma she has been through. (Hey, you are talking to a woman who WAS agoraphobic for years!)

I have no doubt that you are a good therapist. I’ve seen good stuff come out of your head here for years now! When I imagine you, I actually think of someone that I used to confide in frequently and liked a lot.

There is not going to be a continuing snit between us. It’s just not going to happen.

I don’t think we are all that far apart except for our nitpicking and for our reaction to the crime itself. I suggested 6 months in jail. My husband suggested a month.
What do you think, Hentor?

What about the rest of you?

[Zoe]

olivesmarch4th, that is one fine piece of writing! Actually, I think that most feminists would agree. It very empowering in more ways that just on the subject of rape. So much depends on what we tell ourselves.

I think I will make a copy of that!

[Spice_Weasel]

If you notice, I stayed solely with the subject of FEELINGS – not thoughts! The examples you have given are actually all matters of thinking.

For what it’s worth, he is a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist. I’m no expert but I think the general gist of CBT is that your cognitive beliefs together with your behaviors are actually what create your emotions in the first place. I’m guessing his argument would be that the more he and his client worked on her unhealthy cognitions, the better she would feel. Asking him to address her feelings as something separate from her thinking would be meaningless in a therapeutic context. I think?

What about the rest of you?

Okay, I’ll finally actually address the OP, if you insist.

I don’t know the law very well, though I think someone did mention in Michigan (where I live) this would be considered criminal sexual conduct. I do feel that given the nature of cultural attitudes toward genitalia, it would be pretty difficult to see this as anything other than sexual. The fact is another few millimeters into her mouth and this would have probably met the legal definition of rape. I’m not comfortable with letting it go as merely a despicable act–I think it was both despicable and misogynistic with the intent to subjugate her sexually.

Though Hentor is correct – given that she doesn’t even know about the incident, it is difficult to quantify any emotional damage done to her–I support Jodi and eleanor’s assessment that just by nature of acting, the perpetrators were doing harm to society as a whole. This deserves punishment.

Being in college myself, I have encountered a lot of guys with a mentality that would produce this kind of behavior–or worse–in the right circumstances, so I am confident in assuming this had to do with misogyny and his objectification of the victim. However, I also notice that these kind of men do these behaviors without having any idea that they are misogynistic. It’s kind of like with racists–most racists don’t think they’re really racist. I believe the same to be true with misogynists – which means the guy who did this might really not have any clue how completely inappropriate his behavior was.

I think he should be charged with something that has a connotation of sexual violence. That way he’ll have a black mark on his record but many more years in the real world to learn how to treat others with respect. I’d say three to six months in jail would be sufficient.

[Dead_Badger]

Not wading in on page 8 of a thread like this one, but I just wanted to welcome olivesmarch4th. Really interesting to read your posts; I hope you’ll be sticking around.

Incidentally, if abuse of the scientific method angers or amazes you, or both, you might find the Bad Science blog interesting. It’s the website of a weekly column in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, written by one Dr Ben Goldacre with the aim of taking potshots at crappy science and crappy science reporting. It’s a bit UK-centric, but is always interesting, frequently hilarious and not a little scary. It’s not often you see discussions of the statistics of predicting very rare events in a mass-market paper. He tends to focus more on the medical than the psychological since that’s his background, but crap science everywhere shares the same symptoms.

I think this is the third time I’ve plugged this site now. I’m not on retainer, honest; it’s just ace.

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

@Zoe

For me, that is a distinction without a difference.

It seems a common response here. If I don’t feel 100, I must feel 0. At least you’ve had the guts to acknowledge your all or nothing thinking.

Oh look! The woman in your office is back:

I don’t know where you’ve gotten the fantasy that all this discussion has been about me working with this person. I’ve actually been trying to work with you and your ilk. But yes, when you suggest that I would erroneously charge her with a dramatically overblown response, I gave you two examples that I didn’t think you could refute as dramatically overblown. I note that you failed to comment on whether or not they met your understanding of dramatically overblown.

If you notice, I stayed solely with the subject of FEELINGS – not thoughts! The examples you have given are actually all matters of thinking.

olivesmarch4th is correct about the links between thoughts, feelings (and I must add behaviors), all of which influence one another. But I must point out that it was no accident that I said she “feels” scarred for life. If you don’t understand the possibility of this as a feeling, you are simply out of your depths here, Zoe. And feelings can be very much overblown, no matter how honestly they are felt. You seem to be getting hung up on whether feelings are valid, in the sense of honestly and fully believed by a person, and valid, in the sense of appropriate and accurate responses to circumstances.

A person with a fear of bridges fully and honestly experiences that fear. But that fear is not an accurate and appropriate response to the level of danger presented by a bridge, right? Isn’t it proportionally greater than is warranted?

I don’t think we are all that far apart except for our nitpicking and for our reaction to the crime itself. I suggested 6 months in jail. My husband suggested a month.
What do you think, Hentor?

I’ve already agreed with eleanorigby on the matter. Some time in community service seems pretty appropriate to me. Probation, a record. Those seem on par with the level of harm. I don’t think jail time is warranted, but if it is applied, I would definitely agree more with your husband than you.

Dead Badger, thanks for the link. I can’t wait to check out more of his stuff, particularly the homeopathy stuff. I’m sure you must be familiar with the book already, but I really enjoyed “Voodoo Science” by Robert L. Park. I didn’t know the scope of the folly behind homeopathy until I read that book. He covers a good deal of other topics as well.

[Spice_Weasel]

Not wading in on page 8 of a thread like this one

Ahh… Right away I see you are a reasonable and intelligent person.

[/QUOTE]
, but I just wanted to welcome olivesmarch4th. Really interesting to read your posts; I hope you’ll be sticking around.
[/QUOTE]

Thank you. I definitely plan to stay. I really appreciate your kind words and the general hospitality of this marvelous board.

Incidentally, if abuse of the scientific method angers or amazes you, or both, you might find the Bad Science blog interesting.

Thanks for the recommendation! It looks fascinating.

[Frylock]

Has anyone told ArchitectCore about this thread yet?

-FrL-

[Spice_Weasel]

And feelings can be very much overblown, no matter how honestly they are felt.

I do have to agree here. Feelings can be deceitful, irrational, evil little bastards. They are generally not to be trusted–especially in the context of a psychological disorder. People seem to believe that feelings just pop up all by themselves as a result of shit that happens to them… but they fail to notice what happens in between Event A and Feeling C: Thought B. Albert Ellis kind of pioneered this concept with his ABC (Action Belief Consequence) method. My understanding of Buddhism works a similar way. We don’t suffer because things happen to us, we suffer because of our beliefs and thoughts and opinions about that thing happening. (please note there is a distinction here between pain, which is inevitable, and suffering, which is not.) This is not a radical idea by any means–people have been noticing it for thousands of years.

I believe the whole notion of “validating” feelings comes from a well-meaning attempt to compensate for a history of apathy and ridicule toward people who suffer in general… but perhaps it’s gone to the other extreme. Now every feeling must be validated, no matter how ludicrous and irrational it is.*** We’ve become a society that worships feelings, which are some of the most untrustworthy, ever-changing, unreliable things in existence.

***No I am not referring to anyone’s feelings in specific here.

[Spice_Weasel]

Sorry for the double-post, but I’m worried I might not have been clear in the last one regarding “validating feelings.” I think we’re culturalized to believe that the most compassionate response to a person’s feeling is to say, “It makes sense that you would feel that way” so that the person in question doesn’t feel like a total freak for his or her emotional responses to a given Event. But how far ought we to take that? If someone has experienced a trauma, at what point do we say, “I care about you, but I refuse to validate your feeling (which is really a THOUGHT) that you deserve to die. It’s not rational because it presupposes that you did something wrong, and as what happened is clearly not your fault, there’s no reason for you to punish yourself for it.” Sometimes, especially with trauma survivors, there is an inability to think clearly and rationally. I’m not advocating we go back to the stone age and universally tell people to “suck it up,” but I am suggesting we question this automatic response that every feeling/thought-based-on-emotion must be validated.

How much better off would I have been if instead of hearing, “It’s natural to feel guilty for what happened to you,” I’d heard, “People who have experienced this often have the irrational belief that what happened was their fault.” That way I would have both not felt like a freak AND realized the pure insanity of my emotions at the same time. Nobody ever said, “It’s natural… AND irrational to feel his way,” therefore I felt it was perfectly natural… and rational… to go on torturing myself. Irrational might be a loaded word to some, but it is essentially the truth when it comes to emotions… emotions, in their purest, most physical sense, are beyond reason. I think I would have been much better off with some straight talk about the facts of the situation instead of people bowing down and worshiping every feeling I had as the sacred Truth.