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. 

My Arms are “Too Short” to Box with the Devil

My Arms are “Too Short” to Box with the Devil

Young man—
Young man—
Your arm’s too short to box with God.

Young man—
Young man—
Smooth and easy is the road
That leads to hell and destruction.
Down grade all the way,
The further you travel, the faster you go.
No need to trudge and sweat and toil,
Just slip and slide and slip and slide
Till you bang up against hell’s iron gate.

From James Weldon Johnson’s poem The Prodigal Son

Everyone has been talking about the rapper Too Short in the past few days.  It seems the genius creative minds at XXL magazine decided that he should be featured in a series of videos talking to young boys, giving advice I guess as to how to “keep it real” or whatever the popular saying of the day is.  Well, keep it real he did and Mr. Short prepared and presented a step by step guide to adolescent and pre-pubescent young Black boys on how to “go for the hole.”  He laid out archaic and violent instructions on how to seemingly find her clitoris and make her orgasm although he wasn’t clinical in any way.  Rather, he simply suggested that these young boys molest young girls, ramming their hands between their legs in search of some mythical “spot” that will be the prize.  The response to the video from Black women has been tempered but disturbed.  The overwhelming response from Black men has been, “Hey, what do you expect from Too Short?” 

Here’s what I expect from Too Short.  An apology.  I expect him, or someone with a modicum of intelligence in his close proximity, to issue an apology that explains how he understands now that his words are going to put young girls at risk for being assaulted and how he never really understood until now that he had been socialized to see women as objects and not human beings.  I expect him to show he’s sorry by working diligently to alter his perceptions and grow and evolve as a man and to make sure NO girls are assaulted because of his misguided advice.   

Here’s what I expect from XXL Magazine:  The IMMEDIATE termination of Vanessa Satten, the white women who is the Editor-in-Chief at XXL who not only thought it was a good idea to have Too Short handing out fatherly advice to young Black boys but who authorized the publication of a video that taught them how to rape young girls.  I expect XXL to be held accountable by creating videos and articles that speak to the issues of violence against women and girls and to teach boys NOT to rape, molest, assault, or denigrate women solely as objects for their pleasure. 

Here’s what I expect from Black men.  I demand your outrage.  I demand that you not just dismiss this as “boys being boys” mentality and you speak up in horror and disgust that not only Too Short and XXL magazine but Black society as a whole has allowed women’s (and girls) bodies to be violated with no little or no repercussions.  I want you to empathize, to put yourself in the shoes of the young girl pushed against the wall with an aggressive and sexually immature stronger male pushing, prodding, and poking your private parts looking for “the spot”.  I want you to hurt for your daughters, sisters, nieces, and all young girls who have ever been subjected to such treatment. 

When I was in high school, I was SKINNY and unattractive and boys didn’t like me.  I craved attention from the opposite sex and one day after school when Greg Sheffield showed me attention, my heart sang.  I thought he wanted to be my boyfriend; I was that naïve.  He lured me to a laundry room in the apartments next to the school and within minutes, he was pushing me against the machines and pulling down my pants and ramming his fingers in me as hard as he could.  I ended up on the floor with him on top of me, hurting me, and wondering what I did to deserve this.  I don’t remember if I cried or yelled or asked him to stop.  Apparently, whatever I did, I didn’t respond the way he wanted me to and he got frustrated and called me names and left me there, lying on the floor, half-dressed, sore, and confused. 

I’m a woman.  In many ways, “I’m Every Woman,” as the recently departed Whitney Houston sang.  I’m a Black woman who loves Black men despite the fact that they might not love me the way they should at times.  I’m a woman who has been the victim of sexual violence and abuse; I’m a woman who wants to heal the rift that exists between the genders, and I’m a woman who is passionate about her struggle to address Black sexuality in a way that is healing, transformative, and enlightened.  I’m also a woman sickened by the patriarchy, sexism, and misogyny that persists in the Black community to the detriment of our beautiful, young Black girls and our Black boys.  Raising boys to be sexual perpetrators not only hurts the girls upon whom they inflict their violence and aggression, it stifles the boys and prevents them from ever fully becoming, whole, complete, fully integrated human beings capable of loving, sharing, and committing to a real relationship. 

The time to address the misogyny and sexism in hip-hop is about ten to twenty years too late.  Black men are so used to seeing women as things to acquire, not people with feelings that it doesn’t even bother them when things like this Too Short debacle occur.  They are accustomed to being socialized to think that their manhood is in their penis.  If we don’t take drastic measures to address this problem we are doomed as a subsection of society.  We cannot continue to have men believing that their manhood is measured in the number of women they bang and that women exist to satisfy their lusts.  I’m tired of fighting with Black men to show them that women ascribing to stereotypes of Black men being big-dicked sexual savages is not only detrimental to the women they violate, lie to, cheat on, and use, but to them and to our community as a whole.  It’s an exhausting fight to get men to see that they need to evolve past the notion that sex validates them.  I can’t fight anymore with men who don’t care that women are objectified and oppressed by a culture that doesn’t care if we are used up and spit out as long as they get a nut.  My arms are too short to box with the demon of sexism and misogyny that tells little boys that it’s okay to use little girls on laundry room floors and step over them like a piece of lint that can be swept away like insignificant trash. 

Copyright 2012 Scottie Lowe

The Culture of Rape

The abuse of women’s bodies, our spirits, is so accepted, so ingrained in our society that rape isn’t even seen as anything abnormal.  Black women’s bodies especially are seen as objects to be used and abused by men.  We’re supposed to take it, like it even.  If we as a culture, society, and community don’t do something to stop this NOW it will be the end of us. 

Fate is a mother fucker.  I get into an argument on Facebook today, on someone else’s page mind you, and someone else, an “innocent bystander” as it were, starts fanning the flames, trying to provoke the disagreement.  The instigator sends me a friend request.  I accept, not thinking anything about it more than he’s someone who likes what I have to say.  He sends me a private message, asking me if I used to live in the apartments in downtown Atlanta.  In that first few seconds, I couldn’t imagine how he would know me like that.  I didn’t really think anything about it, but I didn’t panic or anything, I just responded, “How do you know me?”  He responded by saying, “You probably don’t remember me.  We met in the summer of ‘99.  You took me to your apartment. Wow, small world. LMBAO.” 

My home is sacred to me.  I’m very cautious of the people I invite into my home.  When he said, “You took me to your apartment,” I think I knew who it was before I even went to his profile.  At this point, time is moving in slow motion.  Going to his page, pulling up his pictures, opening the albums that show his face . . . everything is taking light years.  Sure enough, it was the face of the man who raped me, whose name I hadn’t previously known.  Jason Mass is his name as it turns out.  I confront him.  I say that I do in fact remember him, that you are the man who raped me. 

He wasn’t even a man at the time, he was 19 or 20.  I was in my early thirties. I was not attracted to him in the least even though I shouldn’t even have to mention that fact.  We met at Atlanta’s Underground Mall outside the Haagen Dazs store.  I saw him there a few times.  I’m guessing he was a student at Georgia State.  He could have just been hanging out there, I don’t know.  I didn’t really inquire too much, he was far too young for me and I was not at all interested in him.  I was nice to him; we might have even had lunch in the food court once.  I’m not sure. 

One day, he asked me to come to my apartment.  I told him no.  He kept asking, saying he just wanted to hang out with me.  I told him that we could hang out in the club room of my apartment building but that we couldn’t go to my apartment.  We watched TV for a while and I told him that I was not interested in him, he was far too young for me.  He wasn’t my type at all.  He said that didn’t matter, he just wanted to hang out with me, he wanted to see what sort of music I listened to, he said he thought he could learn from me.  He wouldn’t take no for an answer and I really thought I had made myself clear that I wasn’t interested in him. 

Finally, I told him that we could go to my apartment to check out my music.  I didn’t own a TV at the time so I had a super duper extensive music collection.  I honestly believed he saw me as a mentor or semi-mother figure.  There was nothing remotely sexual or romantic between us and I thought he was a harmless kid.  We went to my apartment and he was impressed by the Black art, all the books; I wasn’t a kid and I wasn’t ghetto so he probably hadn’t been exposed to very many homes that were like mine.  I showed him my balcony and that’s when things started to go terribly wrong.  We came back inside and he started to try to kiss me, grab me, hold me.  I started pushing him away.  He took out his dick.  I remember it so clearly, like a movie in my head.  It was almost like he was in a trance.  He was stroking it, telling me, “I love my big dick, I’m in love with my big dick.  I have such a big dick, don’t I?” It was like he was hypnotized by his own penis.    I told him to get out, I was trying to make it to the front door and he pulled me to the floor and we fought.  We fought and fought and fought.  We fought until I couldn’t fight any more.  I cried out, I said no, stop, NO.  We fought until I had no more strength in my body.  I lay there, in tears, while he raped me, unable to fight any more. 

So, here I am, on Facebook, and I’ve just accepted a friend request from the man who raped me.  I’ve written about him before, years ago, in my efforts to reclaim my own personal power.  I didn’t know his name but I would identify him whenever I spoke of the instance when men have violated me.  I confront him, in my haze of confusion, anger, and disbelief.  I say, “You raped me.”

He responds by saying, “Rape?  Don’t say that.  It didn’t go down like that.  We didn’t even get a chance to finish because you said stop.” 

Finish?  Finish?  Perhaps he wanted a second or third time to rape me but I most certainly had finished.  I informed him that we had fought, that I didn’t want him, that I said no, and he had raped me.  At that point, he gets an attitude with me, like I’ve offended him, saying, “Are u fuckin' kiddin' me?!  om fuckin' g!!!”  At this point, I’m scrambling to block him before I explode in anger and outrage. 

This wasn’t my first time to meet up with him.  The first time was as FunkJazzKafe, one of Atlanta’s premiere music events, a few years later.  We were both going in the backstage door in a dark, not heavily traffic parking lot.  He said something to the effect of, “You probably don’t remember me but . . .”  I turned around and looked at him and I knew him immediately.  I think I said, “You’re the guy who raped me,” but I’m not sure.  I got so scared I just turned around and ran away, shaking and crying and terrified.  The second time, I had my hands full of groceries and I was coming home and he was coming out of my neighbor’s apartment two doors down.  It was all I could do to open the door and get inside and I was terrified.  He took my sense of safety.  He took my sense of peace in the world.  He took something from me that was no his to take.  He stole a piece of my soul.  He’s walking around, not a care in the world, no remorse, no guilt, seemingly no consciousness at all that he RAPED me.  I think I knew that if I ever did have a chance to meet him again, he would deny it but I didn’t think he would send me a friend request, like I was going to be happy to talk about old times.  There’s something delusional about a person who doesn’t even realize the hurt that they’ve caused. 

I can’t describe to a man the fear that consumes you when you come face to face with your rapist and you know he could do it again.  Most men will never know that sensation.  He felt justified in violating my body.  He felt he had a right to take it without my permission.  We fought.  Not a tussle, not slap and grab, but I’m yelling NO and pushing and kicking and trying to punch and bite and do anything I can to get away and somehow, in his head, he thought that was foreplay.  He somehow interpreted that as perfectly acceptable to force himself inside me as long as it felt good to him. 

This god damn obsession society has with dick size, specifically black men’s dick size, is breeding rapists.  Objectifying women and this willingness to see us as things to be used by men, for men’s pleasure is manufacturing rapists.  Mothers raising their sons not to take responsibility for their actions is creating a nation of rapists.  Fathers teaching their sons to measure their manhood by the number of women they fuck is Rape 101.  This shit has to stop.  IT HAS TO STOP.  I don’t want another black girl to endure what I did.  I don’t want another black woman to know the sort of fear I felt.  There is a culture of rape that let him think that without any foreplay, romance, no attraction whatsoever, that he had the go ahead to force himself on me and that I would like it. 

I’m going to speak truth to power.  I’m going to continue to address the pathologies of this diseased and sick society that treats women like things to be used and thrown away.  Don’t feel sorry for me and tell me how you wish you could take the pain away.  Do something.  Confront men when they talk about women like things.  Confront the men you know are rapists, make them admit what they did.  Don’t waste your empathy on me, I’m going to be okay.