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I have this muscle memory of distrust. My first instinct is to pull away; it's to push you away. I want to distrust you, I want you to push a little further because that's familiar because, "the devil you know is better than the devil you don't..." or however that goes. I want to learn how to do it differently. I want to teach my body another way of being. For me all of this learning, sex, abuse, power, crossed boundaries, panic attacks and anxiety, it all lives inside my body. My body reacts from its memory, from the ways it's learned to be.
So how do I do it differently? I work at a domestic violence organisation and my job is essentially to talk about relationships. My job is healing and triggering all at once. When I think back to crossed boundaries, to consent, to the moments I've been asked about what I want, how I want to be touched and how I don't want to be touched my answer is silence more often than not.
You can ask for consent, be willing to hear yes and no, you can be engaged and present but if I'm too hurt to sit with you, to sit in my body with my responses and feelings then where does that leave me? When I think about accountability I think about all the ways I've learned to go along with it, to make things easy and to not make waves. There are so many moments when it's easier to say nothing, to not have to speak up or define my edges for you. I get to hide in the blurriness. It feels less scary to say nothing and pickup the pieces inside of myself than say no and have to discover where I start and you stop. I get lost in the messy places between us and that's not love and that's not accountability. For me accountability is showing up with my whole self, it's being present and brave enough to actually be somewhere with someone instead of hiding in my own insecurities, fear and internalized shit. I want to do better than hiding. I know I can do better than sort of showing up.
As someone who mostly has sex with other folks socialized as girls communication around consent in my life and communities is different than how I was taught growing up. For me, being a homo has meant a shift in how I understand my role when it comes to sex. When I was younger I was less of an active participant in the sex I was having and more of a referee. I never said "touch me here" or "I like it like this" but instead let whatever boy I was kissing do whatever he thought was sexy and my job was to make sure it never went too far over the (my) line. I was a gatekeeper always guarding whatever felt like the most vulnerable part of myself. Generally, by the time I was willing to use my voice we were several steps ahead of where I actually wanted to be. I would wait until the scales tipped, until whatever sexy place we were going was scarier than saying "stop."
When I think about these
interactions I'm filled with all of these contradictory things. I would call some of these experiences
coercive and I struggle with the language all of the time. These are the moments when
accountability feels muddled. I believe the guys I was having sexual interactions with were
doing the best they could I believe that they wanted to have mutually pleasurable sex and
that they wished the best for me.
For me it doesn't feel like an answer to say that they were all jerks
or "evil perpetrators" that I then get to demonize. I believe that the
men I was being sexy with had some pretty shitty skills and fucked up
expectations and they didn't know how to do it better, which doesn't
mean that they shouldn't be accountable for their actions but they also
shouldn't be demonized for them either. When we make people evil it
dehumanizes everyone.
I'm
not sure how much energy it makes sense to put into this idea because
then again I'm centering on them on their experiences and not mine. But I
do want to push my communities to look at accountability models. I'm
not sure we have all of the skills to be enacting sustainable community
accountability models at this exact moment but I think we can be talking
more about sexual assault within our own radical communities and how we
extend the values of community, social justice and anti-oppression into
our conversations around consent and accountability in our sexual
interactions.
Saying that I don't want to demonize
the people who have been sexually coercive has become easier to talk about
because for the most part these interactions are far away, they're in the past
and none of these guys are in my life anymore. We were working off of this hetero
script that says that guys are the drivers, they will go as far as they can
with a girl and it's the girls job to be the breaks, always guarding against
men who will try to get as much as they can from her sexually unless we put a
stop to it. This script is a setup for everyone. It's a setup for the folks
doing masculinity because there is no space to have a full range of emotions,
to not want to have sex, or to feel anything other than sex crazed, always
looking for and wanting sex. It's a setup for women because whatever happens is
our fault. Either we don't say anything and silence is consent or we say speak up
and we are trouble makers or prudes.
I don’t want to setup a false
dichotomy that straight men are inherently coercive and queers are radical and
thus having only equitable (sexual) relationship because that’s not true, and
that idea is getting in the way of creating community accountability models. Homos
protect the fucked up things we do to each other and it's scary to talk about
because what if that proves all of the fucked up things homophobic society says
about us? What if we can’t have equable relationships? What if we are
pedophiles? What if we really can’t have healthy relationships? Not talking
about it is not keeping us safe, it’s keeping us isolated and it’s making sure
that we perpetuate the same shitty coercive dynamics that we have learned. It
means that when coercion and sexual assault happens in our queer communities we
don’t talk about it, we internalize our oppression and we stay hidden.
I
want more models for the relationships and kinds of sex I want to be
having in my life. Sometimes the queers in my life pretend that we're
more radical than coercion and abuse, that this stuff doesn't affect us,
and that it doesn't seep into our sex lives and relationships.
Pretending that I'm more "down" than you, that I'm more radical and
liberated reinforces the same stuff I'm trying to unlearn. It makes us
feel like we are not enough. I'm tired of us all feeling like we're not
ok. What would it look like to believe that we could do it another way,
that we could do it a million other ways? What would our sexual
interactions look like if we believed that we were ok, if we were
allowed to be our whole selves, if we saw ourselves as whole? What would
it look like to be able to sit with our fears and to engage in a
process of accountability with each other? What if we were able to show
up in a centered, solid, whole, and graceful way? What would
accountability look like? What would we need to even imagine this?
The
scariest thing I can think to say to someone that I'm having sex with
is that I don't want to have sex. What does my accountability process
look like around this? What does consent look like when I'm not even
sure I could tell you no? I don't think this is the most loving way I
can show up. When our scripts shifts and I'm the one touching you, I'm
initiating sex and I'm no longer the brakes but actively engaged then
what does consent look like? All of a sudden my responsibility shifts.
I've trained myself to go with the flow and now I have a more equitable
role in asking how you like to be touched, how you don't want to be
touched, what's too light and what's not hard enough and not just once
but all the time, it's a constant process of engagement. When I look at
this power shift it's a re-envisioning of the sex I had when I was
younger. I can feel the complexity and layers to the ways that we learn
how to treat each other. You can have someone's best intentions in mind
and that doesn't mean that you won't fuck up. That's the scariest thing,
sometimes when it comes to crossing people boundaries it doesn't matter
where your heart is. That is to say that we can be trying our best and
still cross each other boundaries.
That's
not to say that intention isn't important. Intention sometimes makes
the difference in my healing process but mostly my experience has been
that I can't really know what's happening for other folks. We have a lot
invested in people that perpetrate sexual assault as evil villains and
people that are surviving sexual assault as perfect angels. This
narrative hurts us all because it's not about good or evil but about
power. Often we get power without asking for it and giving power away
can feel counter intuitive because it's something we're not taught to do
and have almost no models for. Mostly people who have power and
privilege don't necessarily feel like they do. So if coercion is
generally about power and most people that have power don't feel like
they do then where does that leave us when we're trying to negotiate
sex; when we're talking about consent, how to say yes and how to say no?
How do we know when we have the power, how do we figure out how to
shift power dynamics and what do we do when we use our power
(intentionally or not) in fucked up ways? How do we hear and respond
when someone says they're not feeling heard or that they feel like their
lines have been crossed? How do we honor what an amazing thing it is
that someone is even able to say that at all?
Accountability
is a process and part of that process is screwing up. That's so scary
and so real because when the stakes are this high screwing up doesn't
really feel like an option. But what if instead we see accountability as
a process we get to engage with when we fuck up, that fucking up is
going to happen and instead of denial and hiding, instead of saying that
we didn't know any better (whether that's true or not) we apologize,
figure out what was going on for us, what places inside of us our
actions are centered in and then figure out what we're going to do about
it. Because screwing up is a part of the deal but that doesn't mean we
get to fuck up in the same way over and over again. We engage so we
don't keep fucking up in the exact same ways. I want to fuck up in
totally new ways.
In
order to do this we have to be coming from a place where we assume that
people are trying their hardest and where people really are trying
they're hardest. Because the reality is that people do really shitty
things to each other all of the time and frankly I don't know how to
make sense of that. As a survivor of abuse, as a domestic violence
advocate, as a friend and a person in community with other people I've
seen and heard some of the really shitty awful things that people do to
each other. Folks call us all of the time with really heavy hard stories
and those are true and real and everyone makes sense of their
experiences and finds healing in ways that are real for them. I feel
like I can't say it too much, healing is a process.
Accountability
is not taking all of the responsibility and apologizing forever. We all
know the script; someone screws up and when they're called on it their
response is, "It's all my fault, how could I do this, I am a terrible
person, how could you even like me?" In this script the person who
didn't necessarily mess up ends up comforting the person who is trying
to be accountable. It's a way of looking like we're being accountability
without actually having to apologize and look at our actions. Sometimes
this seems almost like accountability but really it's a mask that keeps
us from sitting with ourselves and getting real about what's going on
with us. I choose to believe that the people in my life are doing the
best they can. That doesn't mean that they get to treat me badly or do
shitty things. Holding this complexity has often been very painful for
me, jumping from unearned trust in people who keep crossing my
boundaries and not respecting me to martyrdom, so that someone fucks up I
keep throwing myself into the fire saying, "they're doing the best they
can". I believe there can be a place in between, a place where I can be
real with myself and present for the constant engagement it takes to be
good to the people in my life and demand respect and kindness.
