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.
