Our Abuse

I had a disturbing conversation with a young lady recently.  She was distraught over the fact that she caught her boyfriend of three years cheating on her with a transsexual.  Sounds like something from Jerry Springer, right?  Turns out she was depressed, quit her job, gave up her apartment, and was going to move back to her hometown to be with her family.  While it seems that her entire identity was wrapped up in this man, and she was having homicidal thoughts because he had the nerve to change his password to prevent her from snooping in his e-mail account any longer, I found out that she and her boyfriend of three years had never had sex.  Interesting, you may say?  But wait, it gets curiouser and curiouser.  Not only had she and her boyfriend of three years never had sex, he was her Dom, meaning their interaction was based on him beating and controlling her and her being “sexually” submissive to him.  Strange you say?  But wait, there's more. 

When I inquired why they had never had sex in three years of their relationship, she said it was because she had been a lesbian all her life and she didn't know how relationships with men worked.  Like any reasonably sane person would do, I sort of asked her if she thought her life and her choices were just a tad bit out of control.  She told me without a doubt that she was just fine.  It was obvious to me without even asking that she had been the victim of abuse when she was a child, so much so that her choices as an adult were extremely dysfunctional.  Without needing validation of my suspicions, I asked her if she had ever gotten any counseling for the sexual abuse she had been subjected to as a child.  She told me of being raped at 10 years old and how she had gotten counseling once or twice back then but she didn't need it any more because she was fine now, that she didn't have any problems at all.  When I made the decision that I couldn't help her and I politely ended the conversation with her, she became incensed that I was doing something to her and I somehow became the enemy and she verbally attacked me.

Black women are so used to abuse, so accustomed to it, so conditioned to swallowing our pain that we don’t even understand how damaged we are from it.  We pass down our abuse to our children and justify it because we think abuse is normal.  I had a conversation with a young lady once who told me her mother let her get raped by her uncles and her mother’s boyfriend.  Her reaction, as an adult, was to defend her mother’s actions and blame herself.  She was suffering from extreme depression and all she could do was blame herself for seducing these men when she was nothing more than a child. 

It seems inconceivable in this day and age when you can turn on the TV and see Dr. Phil and a host of other shows that discuss mental health that a grown woman would not be able to grasp the concept that being raped at 10 years old had some sort of negative effect on her life.  She doesn’t grasp the concept because we as a community can’t even face our own demons.  We rape, abuse, and molest our girl children and tell them that it is natural and normal.  We socialize our sons to use women for sex, we tell them that women are nothing more than objects to be screwed and thrown away like garbage in search of the next woman who looks better.  We validate our pain by holding on to some ridiculous Christian notion that it’s noble to suffer and that when we die we won’t have any more pain.  We sexually abuse our children and sweep it under the rug while pretending that it’s no big deal at all. 

Well, I'm not going to be quiet about it.  I'm going to keep bringing it up until we can discuss our molestation, rape, and abuse without shame.  I'm going to keep working with the abused to help them heal and I'm going to be all up in the faces of the abusers in order to stop this pain.  I'm going to fight for the man that was raped as a boy and who is so afraid of feeling powerless and emasculated again that he forms strings of empty and abusive relationships with women in an effort to suppress the pain.  I'm going to fight for the woman that thinks that she has to dress sexy every day because the only attention she gets is from men that want to fuck her when she shows off her body, a little bit of knowledge she learned at an early age from older men that tried to steal her innocence.  I'm going to fight for the spirit of the young girl that was raped at 10 years old that has no touch with reality and thinks that pain is normal.  You can stand in silence if you want but I will scream and fight and I will not let it go.