Useful Outrage

I am one of those people who is so skeptical of state sponsored institutions (like the police) that stories of horrific violence like that which has been perpetrated recently against a twelve year old girl in Galveston doesn’t invoke in me surprise or a need for explanation. And though as a white, cissexual, middle class woman without visible disabilities, most of my knowledge of state sponsored violence does not come from my own personal experience, stories like these feel very familiar to me, primarily because of my experience as an advocate for sexual assault survivors.

On 2L, My Cynical Self, and the Possibility of Another World

Tonight as I waiting for the bus in the cold, I read Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Yes Means Yes essay “What it Feels Like When it Finally Comes: Surviving Incest in Real Life.” Later, in my warm apartment, I took in some of the blogosphere buzz around the recent sexual violence against a University of Michigan law student. I am proud of this woman for writing publicly about her experience. I want her to know that, like so many other people, I believe one hundred percent that this was NOT HER FAULT. After reading hers and others writings, I felt a vague rumbling of remorse in myself about my initial cynical response to her story of abusive response from the police.

easy

I really appreciate Stacey May Fowler’s post from yesterday. It gives me pause, though, and a push into excavating my own truth. When I dig through each layer of my past twelve years of slut-identified existence, I can’t pretend that I am only sifting smoothly to find shiny pro-sex artifacts constructed from my own autonomous decisions about who, when, and how. My tools get bent and my work difficult when I hit upon that version of myself that actually was almost unconditionally “up for it.”

Pathologizing our Survival

These days I think a lot about Psychology as a mechanism of social control.  What would our world look like if we totally eliminated the idea of “mental illness” and instead understood psychological distress as problems of living as Thomas Szasz suggests in his book The Myth of Mental Illness? What if we approached problems of living as having grown out of conditions of oppression and abuse and not personal deficit?