Today is the anniversary of the death of my best friend. She
was killed in her home. Through a combination of shoddy police work, cronyism, sexism, and plain old racism,
the police have never made an arrest in the case and don’t plan to. Dead black woman in Hayward. Who cares?
A hastily thrown together funeral. complete with false
sentiment, grandstanding relatives, and painfully confused children portrayed
my friend as a tragic and troubled
figure rather than a victim of abject misogyny. The preachers at best were ineffective, at worst:
offensive. At one point, one of
them requested we stand and give my friend a “round of applause for a life
lived well.” Another likened her
to a conch shell. Far from a
proper and fitting goodbye that would help quiet the demons inside me, my rage
grew as I sat listening to people who did not know her tell me who she
was. I was grateful her mother was
not in attendance. Having somehow
foreseen the circus that was to ensue, she left the funeral home early. I was not invited to my friend’s
internment. No one was.
My greatest sadness is that I knew she was an abused woman
and I didn’t push her hard enough to leave her situation. Murder. Suicide.
Accident. One was bound to
happen.
This year has left me frustrated, wanting to remember my
friend in a way that truly shows the fire and light and passion of who she was,
and hoping for justice for her death.
I am not much for religion these days, but I found myself silently reciting
the mourner’s kaddish, a practice of habit over worship, for some comfort
around all of it. Still, it wasn’t
enough. Having my attempts to
start a scholarship program in her name thwarted by her husband, I struggled this
year to regain the fire to do something to remind the world that she was
someone important; that her life and death will – and should – never be
forgotten.
Congressman Akin gave me that fire. It is in my friend’s memory, and in the
memory of all women everywhere who have lived with or died from abuse that I
share my story.
Some years ago, I was raped. By a boyfriend.
It happened not when I was a teenager, but when I had enough education
and fire in my own belly – at
least in theory – to be able to stop it.
And yet I was powerless to do so. I begged my boyfriend to stop. With tears streaming and enduring a
searing pain I know from other women who have been raped to be common, I
pleaded for him to let me up. I tried
to punch him, but he gripped my hands to the bed. I screamed, and it only seemed to excite him. When he was
done, he rolled over and said, “Now that
was good, and I know you liked it
because the bed is soaking wet.”
He didn’t notice the blood.
He didn’t realize the wetness was urine. I gathered my things, though I could barely walk, and I left,
leaving my dignity in the urine and blood on his bed.
When I finally got the courage to tell a friend what happened
and to ask whether I should go to the police, she said, “I honestly don’t know
what to tell you. I was raped by a
boyfriend once. When I reported
it, the police vilified me and never even went to talk to him.” So instead of trying to regain my power and stand up for
myself, I decided to get a therapist, work it out, and move on.
It’s true he was my boyfriend at the time. It’s even true that I was willfully in
his home that night. But make no
mistake: I was forcibly raped, and while I was fortunate enough not to get
pregnant from the most horrific experience of my life, my terror in thinking that
I might made me vomit on my way to the car. As it happened, my birth control pills worked. Some women are not so lucky.
In the ensuing years, I’ve learned my experience is all too
common, and worse, we have all – tacitly or directly – been encouraged to
deep-six the horrible truth of rape and abuse we’ve endured in exchange for
making it in a man’s world. I’m standing up now.
What Mr. Akin did was awaken in me the realization that I
have been silent about this for too long, have ignored the repeated and ongoing
misogynists in churches and synagogues and mosques, in Congress and in the
media—some of them women—who are methodically turning women back into chattel.
I have let people like Jaycee Dugard be infantilized,
despite her amazing courage; and allowed people like Sandra Fluke be demonized
for standing up, while I hid in the shadows and quietly shook my fist. I have stood by as friends were the
victims of domestic abuse of all flavors because they didn’t feel they’d be
believed or were afraid of what people would think of them. Of them.
I didn’t have the
fortitude to be their voice. And
in my silence, I have allowed women to die.
In honor of my friend, I will not be silent any longer. I
will not let anyone die on my watch because I was silent. Our bodies are not negotiable. This isn’t about free speech or
religion; no one gets to “regulate” violence and hate against women.
The political grandstanding on the backs of women
constitutes unchecked violence of the most brutal nature against women. It is men forcing their will, physically
or legally, upon those who, by virtue of our biology, are more easily preyed
upon. This aggression must be
stopped.
I was raped. I was raped. I will never support anyone who
doesn’t advocate absolute protection for any woman who has ever been violated.
I will never acknowledge anyone who doesn’t give unqualified support to the
victims of violence against women. I will call out for the misogynists they are
anyone—male or female, democrat or republican—who suggests, even for a second,
that what I’ve endured, what we’ve endured at the hands of rapists, is anything
less than pure evil.
We must as men and women who stand for humanity and peace
come together united against anyone who
tries to hide behind a shield of religious freedom, teachings of the
bible, or arcane and narrow legal definitions of any kind to support any
interpretation of violence against women as somehow justified. We must denounce completely and totally
without reservation every horrid religious leader, every unchecked politician,
every person who believes that women should not have complete and total control
of their bodies at all times.
Acquiescence is killing us.
I will not be silent any more. I do this not for myself, because I am strong enough to fight
my battles now. I do this to protect
the many who are not strong, and in memory of the one whom I did not save.
