Abuse and Rape.

So, many friends of mine posted This in facebook. (don't watch it, it's horrible. I almost barfed.)

I commented on a friend's page that that this was very stressful to watch, and a friend of a friend chimed in and said "These things need to be shown. People need to see what is going on and be aware of abuse I shared it on LJ too." Then my friend also told me to repost it. "yes it was hard to watch.... so share it..."

I am not comfortable reposting such on my Fb. And I'm not going to.

For a number of reasons.

One: I have kids, friends and family, friended. They don't need to see that.

and, Two, a biggie: I think a video of a man slapping a woman around while she cries and begs him to stop is a VAST and sort of insulting over simplification of domestic abuse. I think most of us can agree that slapping a person around without their consent is abuse, it is wrong, it should not be tolerated. (And, yet, sadly, there are people whose spouses slap them around and they don't leave, they don't call police, and sometimes if neighbors, friends, kids, or other family call the police, they refuse to press charges, they defend the actions of their abuser, and so on and so forth. Because of the day to day grinding away of their sense of worth by all the verbal and nonviolent ways in which they were abused before that fist ever made contact with flesh, so that by the time the hit came, it was almost a relief and they were sure they deserved it) AWARENESS is not the issue. We are all AWARE that hitting people is bad, mmkay? Fucking duh.

Here's the thing...I am not a stupid person. I even have some pieces of paper from various institutions of higher learning that say so. I know that hitting people is wrong. At some point during the dating phase of my last relationship, I said "you hit me once, and I'm gone," He knew that. And he never hit me. He hit the wall, the furniture, the seat of the car NEAR me, but he never hit ME. he slammed doors. He yelled. he drove erratically with me in the passenger seat when I made him mad. (If I accidentally bumped into him or stepped on his toe, he would deliberately bump me hard enough to hurt, or step on me hard enough to hurt in response. But that wasn't hitting, right? So not abuse, right?) He gave me the silent treatment. He treated my family and friends like crap and talked shit about them so that I gave up spending much time with any of them because it wasn't worth it to me to hear what a loser so and so was or what a bullshitter so and so was. He left garbage all over our house, he didn't clean up after himself. He was briefly unemployed and used that as an excuse to make me start paying for all our household bills (when he became employed again, he didn't pick any of them back up again, though he was making twice what I made at the time. I was going broke and into debt trying to keep the house afloat, while he bought himself cars, toys and gadgets and ran up giant bar tabs every night). I injured myself badly and he didn't take me to the hospital,or the grocery store, or work. I had to do all of those things by myself, on crutches.

If he had hit me ONCE in anger, I would have known "this is abuse, and I am gone"...but he never hit me. So it took YEARS AND YEARS for me to figure out, hey, no shit, I'm being abused.

In my humble opinion, there are a LOT of abusive relationships that are more like what I experienced with my ex, and a LOT that are perpetrated by women against men. So, imho, graphic images of some guy beating the shit out of some woman is an extreme over simplification of abuse, and it doesn't touch on the day to day grinding away of your self esteem by a partner who is always unrelentingly angry, sullen, sarcastic, nasty, uncommunicative, slovenly, rude, unhelpful, uncaring, alcoholic, rolls their eyes when you share an opinion or ask them to do anything, etc.

While we're at it, I should mention it took me some years to figure out that him coming home drunk from the bar and having sex with me while I was asleep was rape, too. Because, duh, it didn't fit the stereotypes of a man beating and shoving a woman around and ripping her clothing and all of that. It didn't hurt me or scare me, at worst it just inconvenienced and annoyed me and/or "just" left me feeling like a convenient hole that he could relieve himself into... so even though it hurt my feelings and made me feel worthless and ugly for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on at the time, I didn't think it counted as rape. After all, we lived together. We shared a bed. I had consented to having sex with him and initiated having sex with him many times in the past. So it was easier to just let him do his thing and get off so I could go back to sleep and get a little bit more rest before I had to get up for work, rather than keep pushing him away.

I am not dumb. But people who push representations of abuse as men violently hitting women and rape as a vicious attack by strangers are helping to make folks like me feel pretty dumb when they do finally realize that what happened to them was also abuse and rape. And not just dumb, but...hey, I got no bruises, my vagina wasn't bleeding after the 3 minutes of drunk poking, what on earth do I have to complain about, really, right? It hardly counts because there was not that horrible meat-pounding sound of fist hitting flesh and woman crying and saying no again and again and again.

there was just me, feeling worse and worse about myself, feeling hoplesss and depressed and "killing time until time kills me" but there's nothing wrong with my relationship....because there's no hitting. There's no bruised flesh. There's no bleeding. Just the constant daily treatment of someone I loved, who said he loved me, not caring what I say, think, want, or feel. Using me to pay the bills, clean and cook and masturbate into. Not abuse, not rape. Yeah, I was stupid. (And I'd be you money that there are people out there who will hear or read what I went through and say "nope, that's not rape, or abuse,she's just a whiny little bitch"...because that's what I thought, for a long, long time.)