The Confession of Lot's Wife

Look out, York!

The end of a great day in York, the night crisp-cold, sharp lines cut by the full moon down every building and around every tree.  We get a late train home, full of people with the same plan.  The Butler and I find seats across the aisle and facing each other.  Not a long trip home, so we don’t care.

I sit at a table next to a young woman reading.  Across from her, a muscular young man checks his camera.  When he asks her to tell him which of his photos are crap, an American accent comes out of his mouth. 

I’m not fond of American accents that don’t come from former Confederate states.  Nothing political in that sentiment; my Civil War ancestor got disowned by the family because he fought for the North.  It's just what fits in my ear better, accents from the south of the country.

So, on the train, Annoyance #1, this Yankee sitting across from me, going over his holiday snaps.  Then comes Annoyance #2, their conversation.  Specifically, the way he intrudes on the woman’s reading with a near childish request for assurance that his photos are great, the woman’s dignified enthusiasm for his work, like a fond mother for a child.  This guy is hard work.  I have sympathy for the woman.

Annoyance #3 is what tips things off.  After repeatedly telling the woman that she should say if a photo is lousy – and it takes her a while to get there – she says she prefers one shot of a location over another shot of the same location.  That gives him permission to say how angry she looks in the next photo, but then she always gets angry with him when he tries to take pictures and how could he take good pictures when she’s nagging at him, and picking fights?  In fact, now that he thinks about it, all of these photos are of arguments. 

Annoyance #3 isn’t so much annoyance as that o-shit feeling in the pit of the stomach.  In my former life as a trauma therapist, I met lots of people in relationships where conversations like this always led to a box canyon called, It’s Your Fault I Hit You. 

The woman must have that o-shit feeling, too, because her comments on his photos now parrot his own, and if he changes his mind, she changes her mind, too.  There’s no enthusiasm in her voice.  She quite artistically monitors his level of emotion and adjusts hers to save herself.

So the photos gone through, she turns back to her reading.  He sits for about 3 seconds, then asks if she’s done her homework.  She closes her book and looks at the table.  He asks if she understood him.  She nods, continues to look at the table.  He makes her repeat the question to him so that he knows she did in fact, understand.  He then keeps asking questions about her homework and does she understand why she should do her homework and does she understand why he asks if she has done her homework.  By this time, it’s clear that the homework is her ESL course, which surprises the hell out of me.  The woman has an accent, but there’s nothing in her spoken English that leads me to believe she isn’t fluent.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, the woman stops looking at this man and looks out the window where it’s so dark, she can’t see anything but her own face.  What her expression says, I can’t see.  Maybe she doesn’t trust it to anyone but herself.  I stare at the Butler across the aisle who cannot hear this smiling man at my table speaking in a very low voice like he’s a normal human being, telling this woman that he’s putting her through all this in public because he’s her husband and he loves her and I’m still staring at the Butler to keep from leaning over and telling her that this guy’s an asshole or that she should run fast and far or come with us to safety.  I don’t say any of this because the worst thing I can do for her is say anything.  Speaking up for her would be another reason for him to hit her later.

‘I’m your god,’ he says to her.

The o-shit feeling ratchets up several degrees.  My little pea brain goes into overdrive trying to think of something I can do for this woman, some way to help her without making it worse.  But it’s a short train journey, my expertise has always been at cleaning up the mess, not stopping the mess.  I’m not smart enough to come up with something that'll do more than ease my conscience while at the same time, not anger this woman’s god.

Our stop comes.  The Butler and I get up to go, but there’s a bottleneck at the exit.  And there’s me, Lot’s wife, turning back to stare at that guy, everything I feel right there on my face.  I know it’s there because our eyes meet and his face reacts to mine.  The people in front of me move.  I turn around and walk off the train, no pillar of salt, just a conduit of social condemnation that this man can take home with him and take out on his wife.

My Long Overdue Rant

This has been one of those weeks plagued by a breakout at the idiot asylum.  Stuart Hall gets 15 months for sexual offences spanning 18 years.  Charles Saatchi accepts a caution for assaulting Nigella Lawson, not because he was being anything more than playful with her, but to make all the aggro go away.  Tom Martin wants to explore whether there’s a correlation between gold digging and why women are less funny than men.  And who can forget John Waters’ psychotic planet where Irish women tyrannise their menfolk and don’t really appreciate the inherent bliss which is pregnancy?  A bliss disconnected from the manner of conception or the viability of the foetus. 

After 30 years as a trauma therapist, I am jaded.  Even my husband’s horror at these news items didn’t get through to me.  People are intrinsically stupid and I’m going back to my writing.  Then I read Jinan Younis’ posting, What Happened When I Started a Feminist Society at School. 

http://fb.me/2eCSL48E5 

What a brave woman.  After an incident of sexual harassment by strangers, she forms an organisation to help herself and her classmates meet the anachronistic challenge of misogyny.  Obviously this brings a backlash of abusive and threatening comments from male peers, because that’s what happens when women speak out.  Jinan’s school does what society always does to women – stops them from expressing that something’s wrong.  Out of concern for their safety, of course.  Yes, that makes a lot of sense.  Let’s not upset the dear misogynists lest they become naughty.

My 17^th year, the place where Jinan Younis is now, was done a long time ago, but her article reminds me that it’s just now happening for hundreds of thousands of young women and men.  And so this week, I’m setting aside my writing to share a few things that I’ve learned.  This is not empirical data.  These are anecdotal events from my years as a trauma therapist, that I pass along to those of you who, like my husband, still respond with horror.

First let me say that I am not an activist.  I don’t have the temperament.  Nor does my son.  When he transitioned, he said he wanted to live his life, not spend the rest of it trying to change society.  I told him about my mother, a professional woman with seven children who one day in the 1970s wore a pants suit to church where she was the choir director.  After Mass, several women in the congregation thanked her for breaking the dress code.  My mother said that she’d put on the pants suit without thought to the wider ramifications.  She was living her life, not making a statement.  The point being, I told my son, they’re the same thing.  For me, living my life meant being a writer and trauma therapist.  Which means I've gotten close and personal with victims of domestic and sexual abuse.

Domestic abuse.  This week, people have said more times than I wanted to hear that Nigella Lawson’s experience somehow outs the problem of domestic abuse.  The jaded part of me wonders how society hasn’t noticed before.  In many places such as Glasgow, there are whole courts dedicated to domestic abuse.  There’s not a Murder Court or a Petty Larceny Court, but there is a Domestic Abuse Court.  How marginal can domestic abuse possibly be when we need courts dedicated to it?

Domestic abuse is a complicated thing.  Abusers don’t smack a woman they meet in a bar and so she goes home with him to live a life of physical violence.  It starts very subtly and progresses in an insidious way, like a slow acting disease.  Most of my clients are remarkable women.  The organisers.  The heads of departments.  The gregarious barkeep who tossed drunks out on their ears.  The women first on the dance floor and last off.  The artistic.  The alluring.  The intelligent.  The compassionate.  Great mothers and educators.  The heart of the family.  The object worth attaining and possessing.  Someone so accomplished, as a matter of fact, it’s satisfying to destroy her.

That, in my experience, is the face of the domestic abuse victim.  Women who can survive decades of extreme physical and emotional violence, usually with the aid of some powerful drugs and no external supports, who, given 2 short years of therapy, are often able to resume their lives. 

Unfortunately, funding sources typically expect domestic abuse victims to get past 20 years of terror in 12 short weeks.  We acknowledge that PTSD in soldiers takes longer to address.  We have the research to show the correlation of symptomatology between domestic abuse and victims of war.  We also know that the psychological effects of abusive trauma increases exponentially to the level of intimacy with the abuser.  But hey, someone damaged in the ‘defence’ of our country deserves more support than the women trying to raise the next generation.

And now sexual abuse.  I once worked in a homeless shelter for women with an admission criteria of either a history of abuse or of substance misuse.  In the time I worked there, only one woman didn’t have an addiction but all of the women had a history of abuse.  The majority of them also had a history of childhood sexual abuse.  This can be the future for a sexually abused child.  Her life sucks.  Her whole life.  Not just the incident of sexual intrusion, but her whole, entire life gone in some pervert’s ejaculation.

That was a discrete population of homeless women, so perhaps extreme, you say.  Remember what I wrote above.  The psychological effects of abusive trauma increases exponentially to the level of intimacy with the abuser.  In other words, it hurts more if you know the person.  Most sexual abuse of children is perpetrated by someone the victim knows or respects.  It’s how the predator works.  There is a bond of trust, so the child does what she’s told to do.  The predator has tentacles in the child’s life, can use knowledge about the child to control her or, in the case of celebrity paedophiles, their societal power to subdue her resistance.  Society colludes, hushes the child in the same way Jinan Younis and her classmates have been hushed.

How is that child ever expected to form a healthy relationship?  Sexual abuse objectifies her.  There it goes, self esteem, out the window.  You are nothing but an object.  A sexual object.  You give your body and you get love.  Or intimacy.  Or just physical warmth because let’s face it, without self esteem, what else do you think you're worth receiving?

Not only is the ability to have a normal and intimate relationship, sexual or platonic, permanently impaired by childhood sexual abuse, but often these victims are pathologised by the very institutions meant to treat them.  I have had countless clients with sexual abuse histories, both childhood and adult rape, who could not have their medical issues taken seriously if their sexual abuse history were known.  Headache?  Because of the rape.  Abdominal pain?  Because of the rape.  Antiphylactic reaction?  Because of the rape.

We didn’t listen to them then.  We don’t listen to them now.  We medicate them into silence.

So.  Stuart Hall’s eighteen years of sexual predatory behaviour equates to a 15 month sentence, only half of which will be served.  The poor old fart.  The fathers of Hall’s victims are horrified.  The brothers and uncles and husbands are horrified.  Men are horrified.  Women are horrified.  Why are there not laws to reflect this horror? 

I don’t know.  My poor pea brain can’t wrap itself around the fact that Nick Griffen can utter sexist and sexual things about Nigella Lawson and still have a job as MEP.  But there’s undoubtedly a correlation between people like Nick Griffen being allowed to speak and the silencing of women like Jinan Younis.  And we need to address it, rather worry about inciting the bastards.