I no longer watch nature programs. I can't stomach the violence. Ever since I witnessed the mating of the elephant seals on the California Coast I have been disgusted by the violence. When elephant seals mate the women bellow and the babies are sometimes crushed as the males pursue the females. I stood on the cliff watching and listening to the shrieks and the sound like a bathtub draining and hurled parts of my girlhood and childhood over the cliff. I have seen how violence can intersect sex without feeling the full assault, then I moved on. That man and boy were not so far evolved from the elephant seals. For me it was therapeutic. But my way is not every woman's way and I stand in respect and awe of the various ways women survive and transcend the horrors of the world around them. Dorothy Allison tells stories to move beyond the violent rape and incest she endured as a child. She says:
...all of [the stories] have to be told in order to not tell the one the world wants, the story of us broken, the story of us never laughing out loud, never learning to enjoy sex, never being able to love or trust love again, the story in which all that survives is flesh.Allison cuts to the very heart of our culture's perception of perceiving victims of abuse as victims and then survivors. In our culture we speak of abuse identifying the people by the abuser's affect on them. We might talk about Allison and expect her to be to be strong or speak of women in war torn countries and feel pity. When we do this we are perpetuating the violence. In a large part we are limiting the identity of the women who experience violence through the lens of their past.
As we do this we forget the very egocentric vantage point we are looking from. We do not see how the violence intersects all part of it's victims and at the same time is more the shame of the perpetuator. WE become blind to the inequities of violence. As we celebrate the successes of people moving past violence it is as if we are discarding those women who did not rise above. As if we are cutting the problem down so that it can be easily definable. Just as when we look at people we try to box them up into tiny pieces of identifiable bits that we can easily consume. When it comes to domestic violence we are guilty of the same things. We want to be able to swallow the problem and go to bed able to sleep at night. We want the problem to be solve-able so we cut it up into tiny pieces and make a cookie cutter solution. So much so that most women who have endured violence are left behind. In her essay "Mapping the Margins" Kimberle Crenshaw discusses these inequities with several examples of how class and resources define the ability to escape violence. She discusses how our system undermines women of color and women who do not speak english. For these women the intersection of color and gender are crossed and lead to entrapment. The main point for these women is that:
...women of color are situated within at least two subordinated groups that frequently pursue conflicting political agendas.It becomes clear as she talks about how these women end up being doubly victimized that we need a wider lens in order to examine the violence issue. That a one size fits all approach is not effective. And that every woman has a different path and a unique way of overcoming violence.
