I have forgiven my perpetrator.
Well, sort of. We don’t hang out and gab about the old days. If I saw him in the street, I’d probably run away or throw my coffee at him or something. I don’t exactly wish him well.
For me, forgiveness doesn’t necessarily mean forgetting or letting someone back into your life. It doesn’t have to mean trying to have a relationship with the person again. Forgiveness isn’t about the other person at all, really. It doesn’t require an apology, punishment, compensation, or even justice (though those things definitely help!). All it means is that the weight of the other person’s betrayal no longer sits on your heart day after day. The fear and constriction of the experience exist in the past and no longer hold your body hostage. You can see the other as a human being with pain, just like you. The perpetrator is not a source of fear. They do not loom large in your mind. They do not have power over you.
Forgiveness is a form of freedom. Forgiveness can release our powerful sexual and existential desire from the tangle of pain from the past. It can help us remember the possibility of real, full-hearted intimacy with another human being. We can’t rush this kind of forgiveness. Before we can get there, we have to be able to fit what happened into a narrative that makes sense to us. We have to find our way back to safety. We have to mourn what we’ve lost. We have to find a little bit of compassion for ourselves, however we handled our own survival, as well as for the person who tried to destroy our lives.
It took me a long time, but I do feel some compassion for my perpetrator now. I think I understand why he did what he did. I don’t believe he intended to hurt me, which doesn’t change the fact that he did. I’m quite sure he hates women in his deep dark insides, but I doubt that hatred is conscious or chosen. What I needed to understand in order to get to that compassion is that what happened to me wasn’t a random event that took place because there’s something wrong with me. What happened to me fit into a much larger social narrative that both he and I participated in, in different ways and to different degrees. I pity him, actually. Doesn’t mean I want to see him. Still wouldn’t be that mad if he died in a fire. His existence just doesn’t really matter that much to my healing, my desire, or my ability to fully participate in my life.
Me, Too
One Sunday night, vaguely bored and too tired to do anything in particular, I opened up my Facebook feed. The phrase #metoo was splashed across my newsfeed, over and over and over and over, scrolling as far as a thumb could scroll.
The campaign was created by Tarana Burke, a black civil rights activist who first used the phrase to raise awareness around 2006, but I and many others (of course) found it through a white actress, Alyssa Milano. She popularized the phrase in the midst of allegations of sexual misconduct against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. On Twitter, Milano invited her followers to reply to her tweet with the words “me too,” quoting an unnamed friend: “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too.’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.”40
Magnitude, indeed: within a day, more than fifty thousand people had responded to that one tweet,41 and the conversation went on for weeks and weeks across various social media platforms. When I first saw Milano’s tweet, I snorted a little at the invite to every woman who has been “sexually harassed or assaulted,” because honey, that’s every woman. We haven’t all been violently attacked, but have we been catcalled? Put down at work? Lost a job or a promotion because of our baby-making vulnerability or because we wouldn’t sleep with our boss? Called a slut? Been almost raped? Had our nudes leaked? Been hit on at work? We don’t always make a big deal out of these things because they seem so normal. They are normal. They are a normal part of the human female experience. They happen all the goddamn time.
Just before I started to roll my eyes, though, at another futile attempt to make anyone care, I scrolled a little further and hit that sneaky ol’ magnitude. I already knew that all my close friends have experienced some form of assault or harassment, but here was every woman on my Facebook feed, a few men, and several trans and nonbinary people. Acquaintances, work colleagues, friends’ moms, and my second cousins once and twice removed. Literally everyone and their mother had joined the online survivor party. Some people simply wrote, “Me too.” Others added pieces of their story: “It started when I was nine.” “It was my stepfather.” “My mom and aunt said I deserved it.” “I never talk about this because most people blame me.” I remember sagging into my old red couch. I felt like my heart had deflated and landed in a pile somewhere in the vicinity of my shoes. I settled into the couch cushions and stared into space for a while. I pretty much stayed there for the next couple of days.
Shame, Silence, and Isolation
One of the things that struck me about the many responses to the Me Too movement is how much shame and silence surrounds these experiences. We all have so many stories we never tell. We’re afraid of what other people will say—and we’re right to fear that; people sometimes say really shitty stuff when we tell our stories. For some of us, including me, it feels too heavy to try to acknowledge all the things that have happened. I found myself tallying up all the times I’d been harassed, violated, manipulated, and sexually intimidated, and it was so many times I had to stop before my tallying fingers cramped up. Not all of these experiences were violent or traumatic; plenty of them are par for the course of being a human female out here on these streets. But it’s high time we give our heads a shake and acknowledge that it’s messed up that being dominated, humiliated, and fearing for our lives on the daily is something we think of as normal.
Every now and again I encounter a well-meaning man who has no idea how common sexual violation is for women. He might know one or two people who’ve been through it or seen it on the news, but he doesn’t realize that four out of five women in his life (and around two in five of the men)42 have had these experiences. Women tend to talk to each other about this stuff, but we don’t always talk to our brothers, our fathers, or our boyfriends about it. Maybe we should. Maybe we should stop protecting our men from the realities of the world we live in and let them suffer with us under the burden of our “normal.” Women are tired—not only from trudging through our own experiences, but also from holding each others’ stories and secrets, supporting each other through the pain, and protecting our families and bosses and partners from our anxiety and exhaustion. Maybe it’s high time to let a dude hold our stories once in a while.
Breaking the silence might be scary, but it’s deeply important for our personal and collective healing. The Me Too campaign is one of several that have come up over the years which attempt to reveal a very important truth: what happened to you wasn’t a one-time act of violence that occurred because there’s something wrong with you. What happened was a part of a much larger social structure in our society that we must all participate in changing. It happened because there’s something wrong with all of us.
Breaking the Silence
The Patriarchal Lie
In order to forgive my perpetrator and stop seeing him as some kind of evil monster with power over me, I had to dig deep into the musty depths of my heart to find a little compassion. I had to consider what we had in common, how we share a culture and a set of social narratives. I had to be able to think of him as a flawed human being, just like me. I had to be able to see his suffering.
I think my perpetrator is like many men in this culture: angry that patriarchy did not deliver on its promises. We may not realize it or think about it all the time, but patriarchal societies operate under the fundamental myth that men are people and women are objects. A lot of people think the word “patriarchy” means that we live in a world where men have power over women. That’s sort of true, but it’s also based on a lie: that if men hide their vulnerability effectively, make enough money at their jobs, and jump through whatever other hoops they think will prove their manliness, then they will have earned sexual access to any woman they want. In her book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love, feminist cultural critic bell hooks writes:
Lying about sexuality is an accepted part of patriarchal masculinity. Sex is where many men act out because it is the only social arena where the patriarchal promise of dominion can be easily realized. Without these perks, masses of men might have rebelled against patriarchy long ago.43
It’s a painful lie for all of us. Many men believe (consciously or not) they have to shut down their natural emotions and struggle to make money at a job they hate in order to have access to women’s bodies. Women are taught (consciously or not) that their desires don’t matter. It’s no wonder we’re so confused about sexual assault, consent, and its consequences.
The lie is problematic not only because men think they are owed something, but also because women are taught over and over again in many different ways that we are not powerful and don’t have any sexual agency. Men’s sexual desire is seen as potentially dangerous, and women’s sexual desire is seen as funny, embarrassing, or inconsequential, if it’s seen at all. Writer Naomi Wolf points out that many feminist campaigns have had to lean on “constructing a narrative of helpless female sexual victimization by predatory, brutal men” in order to make any progress.44 This narrative was useful for a time and is certainly true in some cases, but it “almost entirely failed to develop a companion discourse that included female sexual desire and sexual agency.”45 Wolf continues:
The trouble is that most date rapes today happen after a nuanced encounter—in which a woman wants this, but emphatically does not want that. If we are unable ever to talk about sexual agency without fearing that this makes us “fair game” for anything that follows, we will never be able to prosecute
real rapes successfully.46
We need more of an understanding of what and how complex sexual violation is and that it occurs on a wide spectrum. We have to believe and support survivors while understanding that yes, sometimes women want to have sex, but when they do, that doesn’t mean they were asking to be hurt or violated.
I thought about this trouble with nuance when I heard on the news that Asia Argento, one of the first women to accuse Harvey Weinstein of sexual misconduct, has herself been accused of sexually assaulting a seventeen-year-old man. Weinstein’s lawyer jumped to the conclusion that Argento is a hypocrite and therefore all allegations against him should be seen as suspect. When we think women are innocent victims and men are evil perpetrators, we can’t hold the possibility that what Weinstein did to Argento was wrong and what Argento did to the young man was wrong. We forget that hurt people sometimes hurt people. We get so lost in the narrative we don’t put responsibility in the right places. We can’t tolerate nuance.
When only evil monsters can assault innocent women, some men are picking up on the possibility that calling themselves feminists might protect them from persecution. Learning something about feminism has become one of the patriarchal hoops that men believe they can jump through in order to entitle them to women’s bodies. There’s a whole brand of guys out there who have learned a bit of vocabulary about feminism and then use it to try to get women into bed. My friends and I call them Ians; their namesake is an Ian who started a sexual relationship with a friend of mine while in a polyamorous relationship with his wife and a few others. His version of polyamory seemed to be less about expanding his capacity for love and more about using as many people as he possibly could for his own gains without facing any consequences. This particular Ian would come over to my friend’s house late at night, mansplain feminism to her, fuck her, then quickly shower and get the hell out of there before she could get a word in edgewise. He knew something about the theory of feminism but hadn’t really integrated the fundamental idea of the movement: the radical notion that women are people. (PS: sorry to all the good Ians out there, I’m sure you’re not all like that! #NotAllIans)
The man who assaulted me was not the big, strong jerk you might imagine when you think about a rapist. He was a skinny, awkward nerd who had picked up his version of the patriarchal lie: that “nice guys” should get a chance to finish first. He had listened to me complain about all the jerks I’d slept with, including the guy who had locked me into a dark room and intimidated me into having sex with him (it was a yes that time, but a yes born of 100 percent pure fear). After a while, he seemed to think all this listening and being a good friend-ing meant I owed him sex (and he once “playfully” pushed me into a dark room and locked the door in some sort of menacing echo of the story I’d told him only days before). Here he was, a nice guy, totally different from all those jerks. I’d given it away to so many assholes, he pointed out, why couldn’t I just give it to him? (Note to any guys reading: slut shaming is not a great way to get a woman to sleep with you.) He understood that it was unfair that big, strong, popular men got to have sex with whoever they wanted and that skinnier guys didn’t always get that prize, but, he felt, women still owed him sex, one way or another. What he did not understand was the radical notion that women are people.
These aspects of the patriarchal lie turned murderous in the mind of Elliot Rodger, an infamous twenty-two-year-old who killed six people and injured fourteen in a spree that he described in a long, disturbing YouTube video in 2014 as his War on Women. He was speaking for a group of people called “incels,” or involuntary celibates, who mostly complain about how women owe them sex in that delightful corner of the Internet called the manosphere. Rodger stated, “I will punish all females for the crime of depriving me of sex […] They have starved me of sex for my entire youth and gave that pleasure to other men.”47 Those other men, the good-looking guys who get all the sex, Rodger termed Chads, and the withholding women who fuck them were called Stacys. This angry young man clearly did not see the Stacys (let alone the Chads) as people.
In 2018, Alek Minassian drove a van into a group of people in Toronto, killing ten of them. When I heard about this on the CBC News: World at Six radio show, the host asked the reporter whether or not this was a terrorist attack. It was definitely not a terrorist attack, the reporter explained; the motive seemed to be related to Elliot Rodger. Minassian had written in a Facebook post just before the attack, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”48 So, definitely not a terrorist attack. Terrorists have to have brown skin, apparently, and speak a non-English language. Violently attacking a group of people based on an oppressive ideology with the explicit purpose of terrifying that group of people: no? Not a terrorist attack? Okay.
Some people argued that Minassian’s attack couldn’t be terrorism against women because he targeted both men and women, the Stacys, but also the Chads with the right to fuck them. Again: the implication that anyone is entitled to a woman’s body outside of individual, personal consent is an oppressive ideology that targets women. It is terrifying. It is terrorism.
In his book Love and War, Tom Digby lays out the ways in which acts like this are indeed forms of terrorism. It’s not just about bombs or machine gun fire, either: for Digby, even the everyday threat of misogynist violence is a way to keep women in their place—which is, of course, inferior to men. This inferiority is, in turn, what keeps men in place, defining themselves as the superior gender who, de facto, should have rights over the inferior sex’s body. Digby writes,
The threat of rape, which is perhaps the ultimate expression of misogyny, terrorizes virtually every woman in the United States. Few men, and not all women, are aware of the pervasive effective of the threat of rape in women’s lives.49
This misogynistic terrorism is another one of those normal things about life in a woman’s body that are so common we often forget that they are not okay. Regardless of the realistic likelihood that a specific person of any gender is about to be raped on the street (and how many times more likely it is that our date will be the one to rape us?), every woman I know thinks about it every single time she’s alone outside in the dark. Most of us have a plan for what we’ll do if and when we are eventually attacked. We have strategies for what happens if we get separated at a club or a party or if someone gets roofied. Some of us carry pepper spray or rape whistles in our purses, and many of us slide our keys between our fingers when walking alone. We talk about these strategies, plan with each other, and generally move through the world with an awareness of the possibility of violation, or even death, at any moment. Not so long ago I was watching a friend’s baby and we went for a walk, my dog’s leash in my hand and the baby strapped to my chest. Adjusting for the weight of the squiggling baby with his tiny hand wrapped around my thumb, I felt this sudden, intense vulnerability, this knowledge that I wouldn’t be able to run very fast or fight if a man suddenly decided to try to take me down. What’s the word for what I felt in that moment? Oh, right. It’s terror.
As a culture, we’re quick enough to notice that there is a pattern that some people who set off bombs identify as Muslim. That’s easy (not to mention lazy): they are “other,” so we can quickly place the enemy. A long history of white supremacy has caused us to unconsciously fear non-white people to the point that president Donald Trump justified his plans to create a border wall by calling Mexicans “rapists”50—despite the clear lack of evidence that immigrants are any more violent or criminal than anyone else in the US.51 In fact, 56 percent of the mass shootings committed since 1982 in the US were committed by white people, while only 16 percent were committed by black people and 8 percent by Latino people.52 Of 106 shootings, 102 were committed by men.53 The problem isn’t with immigrants, here. Maybe the problem is with men. Specifically, young white men.
Tom Digby suggests that these young white male terrorists are acting out against the patriarchal lie. They have been taught that in order to be “real men,” they must be warriors, capable of protecting women, providing for their families, and procreating (or, at least, performing the acts related to procreation). When this burden becomes heavy enough on a man who is not making much money or getting laid very often, these men don’t know what their place is supposed to be in society, and this masculine insecurity can become toxic. However, Digby writes:
attacking people is something every boy or young man can do. And if he attacks for the sake of a larger cause, that enhances the sense that he is acting as a warrior. Thus the barriers to entry into a career as a terrorist are really quite low.54
Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian are a part of a movement. It is a movement of misogynist terror that keeps women afraid and inferior and that ensures men are stuck for the rest of their lives striving to define themselves as warriors, superior to the women they control. The “incel” movement isn’t about sex. It’s about power.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think my perpetrator was about to take a machine gun out on a sorority or anything (pretty sure). But I felt his frustration and righteous indignation, the sense that I didn’t have the right to say no. So he showed me that I did not have that right. He took away my power and proved that nice guys could finish first. And he did. He got what he wanted and never had any consequences. His friends didn’t really believe me. He never responded to my strongly worded letter (and it was very strongly worded. Lots of big words. Highly intimidating.). He never apologized in any way. He just went on to live his life, and probably makes 26 percent more income than me, too.
I doubt, though, that he feels particularly powerful. Honestly, if he felt powerful, he probably wouldn’t have needed to show me how he was powerful. We live in an era where people keep telling men—especially white, straight, rich men—that they are powerful. They might not be healthy or happy or have genuine, intimate love with an other they see as an equal, but they should at least have a couple of people in their lives they can boss around. This narrative shifts, however, when class and race come into the picture. bell hooks points out that feminist authors with class privilege “express surprise that most men do not see themselves as powerful,” since in their white, rich families, their fathers were, pretty much, all-powerful.55 That’s not everyone’s experience: “women who have been raised in poor and working-class homes have always been acutely aware of the emotional pain of the men in their lives and of their work satisfactions,” hooks writes.56 Power can exist in a lot of different ways, and race, class, and gender are interconnecting factors.
hooks argues for the fundamental truth that what human beings crave is love and connection, being seen and heard in intimacy with other human beings. In a twist of patriarchal sleight-of-hand, we are offered domination instead. She writes:
That love and domination can coexist is one of the most powerful lies patriarchy tells us all. Most men and women continue to believe it, but in truth, love transforms domination. When men do the work of creating selves outside the patriarchal box, they create the emotional awareness needed for them to
learn to love.57
Domination is no substitute for love, and everyone wants love, no matter how straight, white, and rich they may be. Learning love is hard work. It requires seeing the ways in which we’ve participated in the lie and acknowledging how much time we lost chasing power when what we really wanted was connection. Some men take out these frustrations on women. Some are starting to see how they’ve been cheated by the patriarchal lie, how their desire for love has been traded in for the false promise of domination. Some men are fighting back against this lie by figuring out how to choose love.
Privilege is a funny thing. Its hallmark is its invisibility. It means not having to think about something other people have to expend a lot of energy worrying about. It means not noticing your race, gender, or class because it doesn’t obstruct you in any way. It’s really hard to see your own privilege. Men certainly have some power in our society, but that wavers with other factors like whether they are straight, rich, white, cisgendered, attractive, able bodied, or mentally well. Women have power in some contexts, too, specifically in the emotional realm. Women are encouraged to focus on their interpersonal relationships, which makes it easier for us to create supportive networks, talk about our feelings, and ask for help. Considering that social isolation and its attending loneliness may be worse for us than smoking fifteen cigarettes a day,58 women’s emotional privilege may contribute to our tendency to live almost seven years longer than men.59 We all have some power in some contexts, and it is our responsibility to figure out where and when so that we can use our voices to help each other out.
Forgiveness is, in a sense, about taking our power back. When someone has made us feel powerless, we have to consider the zones in our lives where we do have a voice, even if it’s not anywhere near the perpetrator’s orbit. We may not have been trained to think of social connection and compassion as particularly powerful, but they are. Being able to see ourselves and each other as whole but flawed humans with the capacity to change isn’t always easy, but it sure is hopeful.
In order for me to forgive, I needed to believe in the possibility of change. Change requires that I see myself clearly alongside all these assholes hurting other people—as someone who is also, sometimes, an asshole. I needed to be able to be angry while also taking responsibility for the ways I participate in the lies of the patriarchy and contribute to a culture that creates people like Elliot Rodger. As uncomfortable as it is to admit, Elliot Rodger is one of my people. We live in the same culture, watched the same movies, grew up with the same prime-time TV. Elliot and I (and you, as well) have been indoctrinated into patriarchal ideology—along with capitalism and white supremacy and probably a whole bunch of other stuff too—from our first moments of consciousness. We are breathing the air of this stuff. All of us. No one gets to say they aren’t affected. No one gets to say they don’t participate.
First and Second Thoughts
A lot of people think of patriarchy as something men do to women. It’s actually something we all do together in a sort of unconscious collusion. Certainly some men use their power and privilege to use, put down, or violate women, but it’s a myth that the fact of our chromosomal makeup excuses us from taking part. Women are taught to collude with our own abusers. We protect our men when they commit violence and willfully forget what they’ve done. We fail to keep our children away from the men who hurt them. We dismiss other women’s claims of wrongdoing and make fun of men who say they’ve been sexually assaulted. We blame other people for their misfortunes. Sometimes we use men sexually without considering that men’s consent matters just as much as anyone else’s. Sometimes we do this stuff because we are trying to grasp for our own little piece of power. Sometimes we do it out of fear. Mostly we do it because it’s all we’ve ever learned. It’s natural to react first with what our culture taught us. It’s pretty near impossible to stop the reflexes of our first thoughts.
What matters much more than our first thoughts, however, is our second thoughts. The problem of violence against women isn’t something individual women can solve by taking a bunch of self-defense classes and somehow making themselves less rape-able. It’s not something individual men can solve by, I don’t know, quitting being rapists (though that would probably help). Most of us aren’t explicitly sexist or racist, but we’ve all grown up swimming in sexist, racist waters. We don’t even realize how much knee-jerk assholery is floating around the edges of our subconscious minds. We have to unlearn these things actively. We have to take responsibility for our own assholery and try harder to see each other as people. That’s all it is: the whole thing. It’s seeing people—all people—as human beings with strengths and weaknesses, and, if you can stand it, the potential for change. None of this is easy. It’s something we have to practice. We’ve got to try to be kind to ourselves and each other while we figure out new ways of being in the world.
Art for a Better Second Thought
Forgiving Ourselves
For many of us, forgiving our perpetrators isn’t so hard—it’s forgiving ourselves that’s the real issue. Getting beyond the identity of helpless victim without turning to self-blame is incredibly challenging. Trauma isn’t always traumatizing because of explicit violence. Sometimes it’s traumatizing because it shows us in a light that makes us hate ourselves: weak, stupid, vulnerable, miserable, powerless, and so on. Finding compassion for someone else is okay, but when we need it for ourselves, it might as well be buried at the bottom of the ocean.
As we talked about in the last chapter, anger and rage are vital pieces of the healing puzzle because they help us figure out how to protect and care for ourselves. Being honest with ourselves about our anger, hurt, and betrayal is a non-negotiable first phase of the forgiveness process. We need to learn what our needs and boundaries are and find a way to stand up for them. When we first start dealing with and acknowledging our pain, however, that anger can rage like a wildfire and threaten to burn all the houses down. Rage doesn’t always land in the right place. Blame can land on the people who didn’t get hurt, the people who didn’t help us enough after the violence happened, or people the perpetrator looks like. Sometimes we forgive our perpetrators far too quickly and our rage and pain get redirected onto the wrong people—or straight back onto our own selves.
Having compassion for someone doesn’t mean blindly forgiving them or suppressing all your feelings about how they let you down. It just means seeing them as a flawed human being doing the best they can with the resources they have available. We have to work at turning this compassion toward ourselves. Whatever we did, however we survived, we have to remember that there are reasons why things went down the way they did. If we could have made better choices in the moment or in the aftermath we would have. It wasn’t our fault we were hurt. It wasn’t our fault if we didn’t know how to deal with it after the fact. Maybe we’ve made some mistakes, but that’s a natural function of having choices. There are no right or wrong choices, just actions that have consequences, not all of which are predictable. It sucks that we live in a world where our stumbles can make our lives explode, but there are always more choices coming down the line in some form or another as long as we’re still alive to fuck things up. As Gil Scott-Heron sings in his song “I’m New Here,” recorded at age sixty-one after a period of struggle with drug use: “No matter how far wrong you’ve gone, you can always turn around.”60
When we use our anger mindfully, it can help us set up appropriate boundaries and figure out how to meet most of our own needs. Then we can figure out where the anger actually needs to be directed. When someone is mean to me, my first reaction is often to apologize for being a horrible person who caused their cruelty through some far-reaching tendril of my own stupidity. It can take me a day or two to clue in that someone crossed my boundaries and that I actually need to stand up for myself. That anger is still useful, even when it comes after a delay. It still helps me find my boundaries even if I dropped them for a minute there.
Compassion and forgiveness are only advisable once we’ve created some sense of safety within ourselves and our relationships. This is important, because compassion requires softening the walls around the self, an easing of our hard-won boundaries. It can only happen after the anger has had its time, and that’s not to be rushed. We can’t think ourselves past anger—we have to let ourselves feel it in our bodies for a while before compassion and forgiveness become possible. Compassion requires a willingness to see a perpetrator as someone you have something in common with, as one of your people. This is incredibly confronting, and it doesn’t have to happen at any specific time (or ever). But again, forgiveness isn’t about the other person. It doesn’t matter if the other person has apologized, paid you a million dollars, self-flagellated in pain and remorse, or if he spends his days not thinking about you in cream-colored cafes reading stories written by straight white men all day. Justice isn’t the same as forgiveness. Forgiveness is about finding your own power and trusting it enough that you can let go of your attachment to the other person and what they did to you.
Inviting Empathy
It’s easy to want to head straight to the soothing tones of forgiveness where what’s past is past. But if we jump to this part too quickly, we might miss the part where we find and stand up for our boundaries. Opening our boundaries to compassion is incredibly dangerous until we know how to keep ourselves safe.
Skipping over anger also does a disservice to love. Jumping straight from hurt to the all-encompassing wholeness of the universe is false forgiveness, a form of blind compassion. In his book Spiritual Bypassing, Robert Augustus Masters warns of the dangers of avoiding the difficult work of connecting with our unhealed wounds and trying to fix everything with a too-eager compassion. He writes:
When we are driven by blind compassion, we cut everyone far too much slack, making excuses for others’ behavior and making nice in situations that require a forceful “no,” an unmistakable voicing of displeasure, or a firm setting and maintaining of boundaries. These things can, and often should, be done out of love, but blind compassion keeps love too meek, sentenced to wearing a kind face.61
Love means a lot of things, but it definitely doesn’t mean never saying no. Love doesn’t forgive all, but it can sometimes help us heal—as long as we let it be fierce from time to time. Love must not be sentenced to wearing a kind face.
For me, forgiveness can mean holding someone responsible for their actions while also acknowledging their humanness. People rarely intend to do us wrong. People often act out because they themselves are hurting. That helps us feel for them, but it doesn’t make bad behavior okay. Sometimes we need to figure out how to hold our empathy, compassion, and even love for someone who has hurt us alongside the truth that they did us wrong and might very well hurt us again. This is hard work.
Let’s be honest—we don’t like hard work. We like things to be simple. Our subconscious minds are sweet little children who like to think that people are either good or evil, monsters or rescuers, safe or dangerous. Sadly for the naive babies of our minds, life isn’t like that. People can be good and do something bad. People can promise us that we’ll always be safe and not have the slightest idea of what they are promising. People can be so sorry for what they’ve done and do it again anyway. People can be really well-intentioned parents and make an absolute psychological mess of their unsuspecting children. When we let that freaky little “and” into the room, we can come to a much more mature and complex understanding about what’s happening.
I believe my perpetrator was hurting and that what he did was wrong. I believe he hated me and had no idea that he hated me. He wanted me to be his girlfriend and he treated me like a vending machine after he had put a dollar in and then kicked it when the bag of Twizzlers was not immediately forthcoming. All those things are true at once, which means that if he wanted to do the difficult work of looking at his own subconscious belief systems, he could probably change them. He could probably find a way to see women as people, to love them as flawed human beings just like him. I have to believe that’s possible. The belief that people can change and do better is the only way to survive the merry-go-round of assholery that is life.
Monsterizing
When sexual violence happens, especially male-on-female violence, our knee-jerk reaction is to side with the perpetrator. We’ve been conditioned by decades of popular movies to see men as heroes and women as objects that push the men’s plot along. Only 49 percent of Oscar-winning films for Best Picture pass the Bechdel test—a simple measure that started out as a joke in a 1985 comic strip by Alison Bechdel. The test requires that a film have 1) two (named) female characters on screen at the same time 2) talking to each other 3) about something other than a man. The Bechdel test’s official database houses 7,760 films to date, and the percentage of films that pass this simple test sits at an underwhelming 57.8 percent.62 We tend to take the male perpetrator’s side partly because we are so used to looking at things from a man’s perspective. We only consider women’s inner lives and perspectives as an afterthought—even if we’re women ourselves.
This plays out in real life. After a group of students raped and humiliated a young woman in Steubenville, Ohio, two sixteen-year-old football players were convicted of raping a minor in juvenile court. CNN’s Poppy Harlow stated that it was “incredibly difficult, even for an outsider like me, to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart.”63 Many other reporters, male and female alike, jumped to sympathize with the boys, apparently somehow forgetting that a young woman had been raped, filmed, and peed on while unconscious on the front lawn. These reporters aren’t bad people. They just went with their first reaction. It takes a little work to see things from the survivor’s perspective. As silly as it may seem, we need more popular, accessible Hollywood movies that tell different kinds of stories from a woman’s perspective (not to mention all the other perspectives we’re missing, including those of people of color, people with different sexual orientations and gender expressions, differently abled people, non-neurotypical people, and so on). We need more practice seeing a range of different kinds of people as people.
Of course, when we can get past our tendency to side with the perpetrator, we tend to then go to the absolute opposite extreme. Now, we all agree the perpetrator is an evil monster. We pile all of our social anxieties about rape and violence onto this one person. We fire him, jail him, socially isolate him, sometimes even kill him, if we can get him on death row. This is monsterizing: making a human being who did something bad into an evil monster who must be destroyed. Remember how good it felt to see the man-hunting shark in Jaws get blown to bits by a couple of well-meaning Americans? As Slavoj Zizek points out in his film The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, Jaws was a great place to put our nebulous anxieties about immigrants, natural disasters, and the Soviet Union at the time.64 When there’s evil in the world, we need a monster we can blow to bits so we can feel like we have some control over an unpredictable world. This is completely reasonable and natural, but it’s also not helpful. Not for us, and not for the sharks: sharks are actually pretty cool about not killing people, but partly thanks to Jaws, people are not that cool about not killing sharks, and now the animals are largely endangered.
Monsterizing in sexual assault cases gives us the illusion that taking revenge on this one person and getting rid of him will somehow solve the problem of violence against women in our society. When we do this, we miss the point that violence against women is a social and cultural problem, that it’s embedded in our everyday lives. As Tom Digby points out:
To focus revenge or punishment on individuals can distract from a broader, crucial, specifically philosophical project: identifying, describing, explaining, and critiquing the cultural programming that systematically produces the perpetrators of misogynistic terrorism.65
These assaults and attacks aren’t rare. They happen all the time. It feels so good to find, accuse, and punish someone for them that we feel our work is done. It allows us to stop feeling uncomfortable and skip the part where we have to consider how big and far-reaching the problem actually is. We can skirt that sneaky ol’ magnitude.
That doesn’t mean perpetrators shouldn’t have to face consequences for their crimes. They should. The problem is that when we focus on pointing out and punishing these people, we think that absolves us from looking for the pattern and actually changing things.
Paul Gilmartin is a survivor of childhood covert incest who was interviewed on the podcast I, Survivor. He acknowledges the damage his mother caused him and the damage he caused to the women he mistreated in his own life. He shows a fantastic ability to hold empathy and responsibility at the same time, and he insists that while we must have consequences for our actions we must also try to see each other as human beings and have empathy for the reasons we sometimes hurt other people. “If these were forest fires breaking out,” he points out, “we wouldn’t just say, ‘Oh, fire is such a piece of shit!’ We would look, we’d go into the woods and go, ‘Okay, what is causing this?’ ” That doesn’t mean people wouldn’t have consequences—Gilmartin adds, “We wouldn’t say, ‘Welcome into our home for Christmas, Arsonist!’ ”—but we’d take the time to consider why the fires were starting and how to prevent them in general, rather than simply punishing a single person who caused one. We must remember that, as Gilmartin phrases it, “Compassion and consequences are not mutually exclusive.”66
Perpetrators should face consequences, and sometimes they should be big ones. No doubt some people intend harm and should be stopped and possibly imprisoned. But so many assaults are much smaller than that. They are mini power plays that might not even leave a visible mark but can devastate the survivor’s life anyway. They are strange, confusing experiences where one person thinks everything is going great while the other is thinking about escaping out the bathroom window. The consequences of these actions are devastating, but excommunicating a perpetrator from his community, imprisoning him (or killing him) may not feel like appropriate punishment for the crime—even to the victim.
Our tendency to turn people into monsters is part of the reason these experiences are so cloaked in shame and silence. It perpetuates the myth that rape is always a violent bloody affair committed by an unhinged asshole. We have different legal definitions for the various ways you can kill someone: causing death by accident is called manslaughter, and when it is intended and premeditated it’s called first-degree murder. These are different crimes that have different legal consequences, but at the end of the day, someone is still dead. We’ve thought so carefully within our legal system about what it means to cause death and how much intention matters, but we haven’t put nearly as much serious attention into understanding sexual assault. Whether there was intent, malice, premeditation, brutal force, and so on matters, but at the end of it, someone was still sexually assaulted. However the punishment is meted out, the survivor is still stuck with it for life.
Sometimes we talk about how rape isn’t sex because sex is about love and connection and rape is about power. This is a useful narrative in some ways, but, for some of us, an experience of nonconsensual sex was both nonconsensual as well as sex. It looked a lot like something we might want to consent to from time to time. We may have even had a sexual response during a sexual experience that we were coerced or manipulated into, and it’s confusing to try to think of that as not-sex. It’s a lot harder to explain to the authorities that someone raped you when it took you awhile to realize that it was rape. You might not even think of it as rape because even though you said no, you went along with it because that seemed like the safest option. Many of us end up with sexual difficulties after a rape, which means we were wounded in a sexual place. We need a better vocabulary to understand the difference between painful, physically forced rape and the less physically obvious mentally or emotionally coerced rape. They are different experiences and have different healing journeys, but as Naomi Wolf points out in her book Vagina: A New Biography:
Rape tends to be understood and even prosecuted—if there is no weapon involved, and no additional physical assault, no visible bruising and no blood—as if it is “just” forced sex, rather than a highly violent act resulting in potentially lasting damage. But this new science shows that “mere” fear and “mere” violation, when imposed on a victim through a “nonviolent” sex assault, even a date rape, can imprint and harm the female brain and body in measurable, long-lasting ways.67
Most women don’t report their rapes because, around 85–90 percent of the time, the perpetrator is a friend, a former partner, or a schoolmate. Half the time it happens on a date.68 We might be angry and want revenge, but we don’t want to be responsible for destroying someone’s life. Maybe that’s because we can see their humanity even when they can’t see ours. Maybe it’s because we know we’ll be more likely to be blamed and shamed for putting someone away rather than actually getting any sense of justice or support from the community. Maybe it’s because we blame ourselves. Or maybe it’s because we need a different set of consequences than what’s currently on offer.
I think a lot about what happened with comedian Aziz Ansari in 2018. In the midst of the flurry of allegations in Hollywood against sexual predators, a woman spoke out about her bad date with the then-newly famous comedian and TV star. To make a long and super uncomfortable story short, she consented to go out with Ansari and went back to his place, and he then pressured her aggressively into some really awkward sexual activity that she did not consent to—including, at one point, a couple of fingers going into her mouth in what I guess you might think was sexy, you know, if you’d never had sex before.69 When the story went live, Ansari put out a bewildered statement saying that he had thought everything had been consensual and half-apologized for something he was pretty sure he hadn’t done.70 Up until then, Ansari was a champion of women and often dealt with issues of race, class, and gender in his work. His award-winning TV show, Master of None, was cancelled. If he had any deals for upcoming comedy specials on Netflix, they were cancelled, too. I’m sure no one ever picked up his part-comedy, part-sociology book, Modern Romance, for a light read in public ever again. At least, not until his comeback—which he has begun not a year after the whole thing went down.
This story is, in many ways, the crux of our problem. We totally get that women are sometimes raped and violated. Totally. We get it, it’s really bad, rapists are bad, we’d never be rapists, let’s kill all the rapists and then all our problems will be solved; all righteous citizens get yer pitchforks out. Right? Sadly, it is not that simple. What happened to the young woman Aziz Ansari went on that date with has happened to so many of us (I’ve had that date, like, four times, and I’m pretty sure you have, too). We may or may not have experienced it as traumatic, but it might have made us want to hide in our basements forever and never date again. Bad dates should be funny stories we can tell our friends later. They should never be situations where things are happening to our bodies that we didn’t consent to. A bad date shouldn’t mean fearing for our lives or bodily integrity. The difficult thing to swallow here is that Aziz’s date was telling the truth about her experience of violence while Aziz was probably also genuinely confused about what happened and never intended to force his date into anything. A man might see Aziz’s downfall and think to himself, “Have I ever done something like that?” The truth is, yes, you possibly have, bro.
Aziz’s sudden rise to fame probably brought a lot more dates into his life all of a sudden. Short, non-white men don’t often get a swipe right on dating apps (for a whole other set of problematic social and cultural reasons), so his popularity in the dating world might have been somewhat new and overwhelming. I don’t mean to imply that people who get fewer swipes for artificial reasons like race are necessarily going to be any worse at consent than someone with a ton of experience; if anything, non-white men may have had more opportunities to think critically about sex and dating because they don’t tend to fit the white-oriented standards of beauty in our culture. But fame comes with a lot of attention and a degree of power that may have skewed Aziz’s sense of entitlement and awareness of his own behavior. Maybe, like so many men of his generation, Aziz saw someone in a porn stick their fingers down someone’s throat once and thought that’s what women wanted. The heady mix of sudden fame and power plus a bit of awkwardness created a situation that was received as violence by his date, who, by the way, knew his fame meant he had more power than she did. He had probably swallowed the patriarchal lie with the rest of us and figured that now he was famous, every woman would obviously reward him with total access to their bodies. Probably quite a few were doing so at the time. He may have been coming from a place of ignorance and innocence, but, for his date, it was violence. Both can be true at the same time.
So what do you do when the limits of your knowledge and abilities cause you to commit violence against someone you never intended to harm? Take a year off and then book a comeback tour? This is an important question. I don’t think Aziz Ansari should be imprisoned, but I also think we need to believe his date and collectively acknowledge the hurt and pain she experienced as a result of his actions. I want a better solution for these everyday violations. I want a way for men to concretely unlearn the entitlement they have picked up from generations of films about men where women barely talk to each other in the background. I want kids of all genders to learn what consent is in school and how to spot it before things go off the rails. I want us all to feel that our “no” matters. I want us to stop assuming that if we excommunicate every person who has ever been violent toward a woman that we will solve the problem of violence against women. I want us all to look honestly at the ways we participate in the toxicity of patriarchy and stop doing it, goddammit.
Dr. Adi Jaffe is a mental health professional who wrote a book called The Abstinence Myth. Jaffe argues that abstinence as the only treatment for addiction may actually be preventing a lot of people from getting help. When success is measured solely by the intimidating goal of consecutive days of sobriety, there is a huge amount of shame in relapse. Jaffe acknowledges that an addictive behavior might be someone’s only coping mechanism and that asking them to quit before they can get any other kind of help could end up being counterproductive. For many people, he says in an interview, “using, in whatever way they are doing it, is the only thing that’s making their day survivable,” and telling them they can’t get any help until they quit is like telling someone with two broken legs, “Okay, I have physical therapy for you, it’s right at the other end of the building—you just can’t take your crutches or your wheelchair.”71 Helping people improve their stress management and relationship skills rather than focusing on abstinence might support them enough for them to be able to let go of an addictive behavior. If we could take the shame away a little bit, Jaffe believes, and let people bumble through a recovery process in a less intimidating way, more people might get help and actually get better. I think this principle applies to our collective problem with consent. It is unreasonable to expect us to know what consent is and treat each other with respect when we’ve never seen it in our own lives, let alone in porn or in Hollywood movies. We’re not born with that kind of skill. We’re terrified to even consider the possibility that we perpetrated a nonconsensual act or said something racist or perpetuated some stereotype, and denial and defensiveness aren’t super helpful for positive change. If we could acknowledge that we’ve had bad training without spiraling into shame, we could learn new things about each other and how our bodies and minds work. We could avoid the shame spiral when we mess up along the learning journey. We could listen to each other and communicate about what we want and don’t want. We could get better at seeing each other as people. We’d definitely be having better sex.
So let’s admit, collectively, that we have a problem here. We were born mainlining toxic masculinity and we need to figure out together how to break the pattern. Feeling shame about our mistakes or the ways we’ve participated in the whole situation prevents us from actually looking at ourselves and being willing to try it a different way. Let’s set aside the shame and start doing the uncomfortable work of figuring out what it might mean to have loving, connected sexual experiences that aren’t about power. We can’t try new things if we’re too terrified of fucking it up. No one taught us how to do this!
So yes, Aziz Ansari must take responsibility for his actions. He is someone who, before this story came out, was a self-described feminist who worked out some of his own questions and confusions on his show, in his book, and in his comedy routines. He has an opportunity now to let people watch him learn what it might look like to do better, to take responsibility without the debilitating effects of shame. Unfortunately, as I write this, the news from his comeback tour is dismal: his comedy seems to have turned away from his focus on social justice and is now centered more on making fun of people who are too politically correct. Even Orbey notes in the New Yorker that
The amused but progressive spirit that once informed Ansari’s commentary on current events seems to have crusted into suspicion about wokeness and its excesses. Without ever mentioning the #MeToo movement—or his own experience as one of its most disputed casualties—Ansari decries the destructive performativity of Internet activism and the fickle, ever-changing standards of political correctness.72
I wanted Aziz to spend his time off in counseling (with a feminist therapist), looking honestly at himself and his actions and learning something he could share in his comedy acts and TV shows. I wanted him to take the opportunity to teach a generation of men who are terrified and confused about what sex is how to go through the process of learning this stuff. I wanted him to use his fame as a power for good. It would have taken some courage, to be sure, and undoubtedly he would have made himself more vulnerable to the fire of wokeness and its excesses, but we could have learned something from seeing the process of atoning for his mistakes and blind spots and committing to do better. Now that is a Netflix special I would watch. Be better, Aziz Ansari. Help the rest of us.
The Complications of Consent
Consent is kind of a new idea in our culture. We are slowly unlearning the idea of owning or being entitled to each other’s bodies in romantic relationships, and we’re starting to figure out what it means to ask whether or not someone wants a certain kind of touch and how they might feel about what we are doing. All our romance narratives are focused on this wild, untamed passion that grabs/pins down/takes rather than asks/checks in/respects. Sexual desire is something we often think of as nonverbal, animalistic, and out of our control, but when we just take what we want without concern for the consequences, before we know it, we’ve assaulted someone. It’s not okay.
One solution we’ve found to this problem is using our words. Yes, asking permission is helpful, but it’s complicated, too. More than one of my male-identified friends who date women have told me the same story—they practice what they learned in their consent workshops and ask their date permission before they do anything. And does she tear up with gratitude that someone is finally asking her how she feels? Nope, she gets frustrated and says, “stop talking, and just kiss me!” Now that, my friends, is confusing.
This is partly a problem of our cultural narratives that tell us that men always want sex and that it’s a woman’s job to either say yes or no. For a lot of women, having a choice at all is kind of a new thing, and it’s incredibly, painfully difficult to say no. We’ve been conditioned to say yes to men even when we mean no. When consent workshops focus only on men and teach those men that their job is to ask and a woman’s job is to agree or dissent, we’re perpetuating the myth that sex is a man’s choice and a woman has to deal with it; it simply adds a clause where a woman is allowed to say no sometimes—which is something she may not feel completely equipped to do. There isn’t any space for her desire in this narrative. Consent that boils down to him asking, her responding, is still gendered, power-based, and not very playful. It implies that all initiative belongs to men, just as it always has, and that women are not in a position to participate in choosing what happens next. Besides, men aren’t the only ones who need to learn about consent. Women and other genders not only need to learn how to feel their desire and own their “no” but also how to respect other people’s sexual boundaries and desires. Being sexually assaulted a lot doesn’t automatically teach us how to treat others with sexual respect.
Taught in the right way, consent workshops can be incredibly effective, especially when they are given to mixed genders. Consent classes for mixed genders that have been going on in Nairobi, Kenya, for the last decade have reduced the incidence of rape in that region by 51 percent.73 Boys do probably need some extra help unlearning the cultural pressure to chase girls and get as many conquests under their belts as they can, but as we figure out what’s most effective in these workshops, we have to be teaching all genders to participate in consent together and to communicate effectively about it, not simply reducing it down to a formula where he asks and she either says yes or no. It’s much more than that.
It doesn’t help, either, that a lot of us have a nonconsensual romance narrative very deeply embedded in our skins and feel that sexual passion is a non-verbal, dominance-oriented “taking.” Some women expect that and are confused when it doesn’t happen (especially if they’ve never been to a workshop about it). You can’t just tell someone to unlearn everything they thought they knew about desire and romance in one conversation. Besides, there should still be room for passionate abandon when we’re not analytically thinking through every step of our sexual experience.
Verbal consent is probably the gold standard for what we have currently come up with in terms of consent, but this model has its limitations. In the thick of things, someone may not be sure how they feel. They might want to do some things but not other things. They might be into it in the moment and then realize the next day they were only trying to get back at their ex and be full of regret. They might really want to have sex with you, but for some other reason (like, say, a monogamous relationship with someone else or a recent breakup) they resist, which can lead to mixed signals. There may be cultural differences between two people that affect how we read body language, tone of voice, silence, or verbal cues. Someone might, for any reason in the world (like having you stick your fingers down their throat), change their mind in the middle of everything. Not to mention that women often unconsciously fear the consequences of saying no to a man. As the old adage goes, men are afraid women will laugh at them, and women are afraid men will kill them. There are a lot of hidden power dynamics in our world, many of which aren’t even available to our conscious minds. Men have historically had power over women, so even if everything else is equal between a heterosexual couple—same age, same income, same status at work, same physical strength—there’s still a power dynamic there. Asking and saying yes or no out loud is a lot more complicated than it might seem.
A further complication with verbal consent is what happens in our brains when we are sexually aroused. If things are going well in a sexual encounter, our rational, analytical brains quiet down, allowing us to be fully present with sensation in our bodies so we can surrender to pleasure and orgasm. It’s well documented that women (at least) have a harder time orgasming when they are in an analytical state of mind; surrender is a prerequisite for letting go into pleasure. Notoriously, being turned on can make us want to do things we wouldn’t do in a more sober, rational state. It’s a fun place to get to, but it’s also vulnerable: behavioral economists Dan Ariely and George Loewenstein studied a group of male college students to find out what effect sexual arousal had on their decision-making skills, and, predictably, it significantly changed them.74 Under a state of sexual arousal, the subjects were much more willing to make reckless decisions, including agreeing to unsafe sex practices. That means we might be much more willing to say yes to something when we’re aroused than when we’re not, so even if you get verbal confirmation in the heat of the moment, there’s no guarantee someone might not regret it in the morning. Desire has its dangers, so we must take seriously each other’s physical and emotional fragility as best as we can. At the same time, we must take that surrender seriously, too, and not interrupt it every three seconds to bring our verbal, analytical minds back online.
For me, that kind of surrender can only happen when I know that my consent matters and I can trust the partner I’m with. When it does, it’s like my words are at the bottom of a well, and it’s a bit of a struggle to pull them up to the surface. I can nod or make sounds, but it’s kind of a challenge to string a sentence together. For me, consent conversations need to happen before sexual contact begins, and then we can get into a nonverbal groove together. Even then, however, it’s still useful to use our words from time to time: something might come up that requires a verbal check-in, and it’s always okay to pause, come up for air, talk it out, and then dive back into nonverbal playland.
I’m still sorting out my own understanding of consent, but I know that I need to feel safe enough with someone to know that they will be responsive to my reactions, which include tensing up, holding my breath, or verbally saying, “wait,” “stop,” “slow down,” or “no.” I’m listening for the same sort of reactions from my partner and want to make sure they are staying present with me throughout the experience. Consent happens in the nonsexual realm, too: does my partner respect my space and my decisions? Do we decide together when we want to hang out and what we want to do? Is there respect in this relationship in general? I don’t think asking permission before every single touch within a sexual experience is the most effective (or most fun) strategy, but I do want some degree of verbal confirmation before anything gets started. I find it quite romantic when someone asks for a first kiss because it indicates respect and it means the other person cares how I feel. I think respect is romantic. But the deeper I go with someone in a sexual encounter, the less able I feel to verbally gauge my consent levels. I need to know I can stop and go back into my analytical mind if I need to, but I want to trust enough not to have to.
I’ve started to think of consent not as a blanket “permission granted” status, but as a space that two people co-create together. We learn about each other’s body language, preferences, and verbal and nonverbal cues over time. There is work involved in learning someone’s sexual language. That’s one of the reasons sex tends to get better when you get to know someone—the first time with a new partner is almost never the best time. Simply relying on a verbal “yes” and then plowing ahead no matter what else happens isn’t a complete form of consent.
Sex is fundamentally unstructured adult play, and there needs to be space to explore, to try things, and for some things to not work perfectly. There need to be some rules in place but not too many. I need to be able to laugh with a partner when there is awkwardness and know that they will stop if I indicate that I need them to. I don’t expect my partner to read my mind, and I certainly wouldn’t want someone to think I can read theirs. I do, however, want them to be paying attention, both to their own pleasure but also to how I am responding to what they do. We are exploring each other together, playfully, and by the same rules—like, for example: anyone can call for a time-out at any time for any reason, and there’s no pressure for any particular thing to happen in any specific way. The problem with Aziz Ansari and his date may have been very simple: Aziz was so focused on his own experience and his own goals for the evening that he wasn’t paying any attention to what the human being in front of him was feeling, experiencing, and expressing with her words and body language. Staying present and caring about the person in front of you goes a long way toward keepin’ it consensual.
Reading Consent Cues
The Possibility of Restorative Love
We are living in a time when our anger is moving us forward. It’s helping us notice victimization, create a vocabulary for what that means, and empower survivors. We may not be ready yet as a culture to think about what it might mean for a perpetrator to heal. Forgiving a single act of violence is one thing, but as I’m trying to point out here, sexual violence against women isn’t a collection of unrelated unfortunate acts. It is a systemic issue. There is a time, of course, when the focus must be on the healing of survivors. That takes priority. But we won’t be able to truly move on as a society and genuinely stop the cycle of violence until the perpetrators heal, too.
Seeing a perpetrator apologize, pay a fine, lose custody of his children, get fired, or be escorted out of the courtroom to jail can be useful for a survivor. Appropriate consequences can bolster healing. Unfortunately, of course, that’s not usually what happens. In her book Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman points out,
Genuine contrition in a perpetrator is a rare miracle. Fortunately, the survivor does not need to wait for it. Her healing depends on the discovery of restorative love in her own life; it does not require that this love is extended
to the perpetrator.75
My perpetrator has never apologized, and it doesn’t matter. I can forgive him, feel compassion for him, hope he finds a way to do better, and still never want to see him again. As survivor Paul Gilmartin has pointed out, “You don’t have to have somebody in your life to have love or compassion for them. Sometimes that’s the only way you can have love and compassion for them.”76 Destroying my perpetrator’s life might help him clue in that he has some work to do on himself, but it wouldn’t necessarily protect other women from him. It wouldn’t necessarily help me move on. I’d rather he do the work of thinking about what went wrong and try to do better.
In 2018, Eliana Dockterman wrote an article in Time Magazine on sex offender therapy. She points out that “Most people find it difficult to reconcile the hope that rehabilitation is possible with the impulse to push these men to the periphery of society forever. Punitive measures alone, however, have not been found to meaningfully increase community safety.”77 Punishment, isolation, and excommunication are meant, at least in part, to protect others from getting hurt. Unfortunately, punishment doesn’t really do that; 70 percent of incarcerated individuals go on to reoffend within five years of their release, and there’s some evidence to suggest punishment and imprisonment may contribute to a cycle of illegal activity.78 Therapy, on the other hand, might help.
The social workers in Dockterman’s story work hard to listen to the sex offenders that come to them and to see them as people, but also to help them take responsibility for their actions at the same time. The offenders often rationalize their behavior. They don’t relate to the famous men who abuse their power, thinking that their situation is different, that perhaps their victims actually wanted their attentions, or that their desires were more important than anyone else’s. With time and effort in therapy, they start to see why they did what they did and understand that it was wrong. One man, who was caught repeatedly masturbating beside women in movie theaters, “believes that he exposed himself in the hopes of making a human connection, however irrational that may sound. […] ‘It took me a long time to figure out that women don’t want to see that. They find it disgusting,’ he said.”79
It’s difficult to try to see these men as human beings instead of as monsters, especially if we’ve been hurt by people like them. Some certainly may be sociopaths devoid of empathy, but a lot of them are flawed human beings choosing the absolute worst ways to try to make sense of the loneliness and powerlessness of life. Learning life skills in therapy might help these human beings live their pain without hurting other people along the way.
We need to focus on our own healing, of course. Survivors need support, too, all kinds of it, more than we are getting. We need to focus on the power of restorative love in our own lives. But finding a little piece of compassion for our perpetrators (and certainly for ourselves) is key to finding forgiveness. Forgiveness can release us from the past so we can remember the possibilities of love and intimacy.
We don’t need to love our perpetrators to forgive them. We don’t need to talk to them or see them trying to be better. We don’t need to stop holding them accountable for what they did. We forgive them when they stop being evil monsters with control over us, when they shrink back into regular old human beings who are hurting in their own ways. We can forgive them when we can forgive ourselves, when we can start seeing ourselves as worthy of love, no matter what we’ve done or what’s happened to us in the past.
My friends are tough. They’ve been abused, sometimes by their own family members. They’ve been stalked, chased, raped, humiliated, oppressed, and manipulated. They’ve gotten depressed living with boyfriends who subtly put them down for years until they finally got out and found their joy again. We congratulate ourselves and each other on our hardness, our resilience, our ability to survive the terrors of love, sex, and living in a world that hates women. As much as I admire us all for being the badass bitches we’ve had to become, it shouldn’t have to be this way. We shouldn’t have to prepare ourselves like soldiers to survive the field of love. We should be able to be soft sometimes, tender, and vulnerable. We should be able to hang out with the wrong guy for a minute without our lives exploding. We should be able to see the rose-colored glasses that come with a new crush as a fun accessory, not a life-threatening liability. Every time I fall in love (or even lust), I have to do it alongside the terror of abuse, manipulation, or outright rape. I do it in spite of the parts of me that fear certain annihilation. I do it because I’m full of courage (or stupidity). And I wish I didn’t have to be so brave. This is not the world I want to live in. I want the right to love without fear.
Each one of us that heals enough to reclaim some tiny sliver of compassion in our own lives contributes to the possibility of a better world. When the time comes to set aside thoughts of revenge long enough to focus on restorative love, we begin to take control of our own healing. My badass bitches are not only impressive because of what they’ve survived, but because of how they’ve chosen love, even when their own pain wanted them to choose something else. One created a monthly women’s group for connecting with a spiritual intention. Another runs dance classes for little kids and teaches them how to ask for consent when they want a hug. Another flew across the country to be a witness for a woman in the process of pressing charges against her abusive ex. Some of the men I know are gathering in groups to do their own learning and think critically about what it means to be a man in this world. Some of us create these mini-cultures of love simply by having open and honest conversations with each other. We do it by joking around, by having fun with each other, by making mistakes, and by being confused and seeing different perspectives. We do it when we nakedly engage in the excruciating task of intimacy with another human being. This type of healing doesn’t have to be big and dramatic. It is a daily practice of self-love and compassion for other human beings. The work of restorative love helps us forgive. Forgiving sets us free.