tricks

i've been a very infrequent blogger lately, and honestly it's an act of will to write now. but i am reminding myself of something wise i once heard David Sterry (author of "Chicken: Self Portrait of a Young Man for Rent") say. David talked about how writing about trauma dramatically boosts the immune system, and how much physical healing happens, how much stronger we get, when we release the shock-trauma in words. i've heard, and know, that same idea a lot of different ways--- you gotta get it out, express it, so it won't chew up your insides.

a little earlier tonight, i was re-reading some of my own poems, free-writes, tirades from 2001-2004, and i came across this piece i wrote called "oppression is a terrible reason for death". it was one of the most emotionally intense writing processes i ever experienced, i practically dehydrated crying my way through it. in it, i tried to articulate how freaking bewildering and inconceivable it is to wrap one's brain around the fact that people are completely destroyed by so many violent dynamics and institutions that you can't even list them all. and i expressed my continued longing for the return of my grandmothers, and remembered some of the stories other survivors have told me about their loved ones who've been murdered or in one way or another, taken from the world. this all seems really basic to any even slightly politically educated person, but i also think we're all so completely saturated and submerged in capitalism and patriarchy and white supremacy and the whole fucking mess, that we just become too small to really hold the knowledge a lot of the time, or at least to hold it and still have room for anything else but shock and grief and powerlessness. even having nearly died a bunch of times, and having had my life constrained so many ways by violence and torture, i think i've still got the kind of bewilderment that a lot of young children have about death. i dreamed a few years ago that i was lying next to my great-grandmother who was dead, and suddenly she started to come to life again, and to put her arms around me, and my joy and need and like... ecstatic satisfaction, was so intense that i just never wanted to move in time, at all. when i woke up, it was kind of like falling from someplace high up. i ached, i felt broken, all over.

she died, suffering, so pointlessly and viciously, because when i was 10 my family institutionalized her and left her to be deprived and drugged and emotionally starved in a nursing home, and eventually she lost her mind, along with her vision and ability to walk (they took away her cane), and then finally her life. i would see her, and she would take my hand, but she didn't know anymore who it was that she was calling 'precious darling'. it meant something that she seemed to know, sort of, sometimes, that someone who cared about her was taking her hand. but she was so lost, and i had no way as a girl, to help her find her way back to me.

i'm wanting the kind of security/clarity-of-being that i only had as a child when i was with my great-grandmother, while she was still able to look at me and know me, before they locked her away. the reason i'm especially missing that, besides that i always do, is that i'm thinking hard about tricks (i.e. johns, people who molest/rape/abuse/use/exploit people in systems of prostitution). thinking about tricks is not easy. it's kind of like trying to comprehend death. or at least the deadness of a human spirit.

i was once listening to this woman, who was a prostitution survivor, talk about what it was like to heal, become an activist and a mother to a young son, and then to try to face how it is that we live in a world in which you can buy a child for sex.
that's definitely a core question --- how is it allowed to happen? how do states and communities create it, tolerate it, sustain it? but i think right now i'm more focused on the existence of the perpetrators --- how is it that tricks can exist. sexual exploitation is so extremely, relentlessly ordinary. people practice it with humor, in company with friends, while laughing. it's sold anywhere, everywhere. there are so few questions about the experiences and spirits and minds and needs of us --- the ones who are used, we're so completely erased as anything other than the fuckable object. and while the tricks take up space, so much space, while they consume television and movies and public events, while they walk down the streets confidently and seem to possess the ground they stand on, while they laugh and have sex without thinking about it and own things, our worlds are so small. our violated bodies rebel at the touch of absolutely anyone, while we're simultaneously desperate for comfort, we can't bear to take anything in --- food or water or even air, and at the same time we hunger, thirst, gasp with need, we're too vigilant to rest, and too exhausted to protect ourselves enough, we recoil from the triggers which are embedded in every twitching bit of popular culture, while we grasp for points of reconnection with the world. nothing works well enough.

i know the tricks aren't really fine. i know a human being can't treat another being as merely destructible, and remain whole. i even get that it's that broken-ness, the gaps in themselves, that in part, motivates the need to get inside someone else, to take from someone else as if you can just use the body of another being as glue to keep yourself from breaking. in a weird way, they're desperate too, i believe.

i once heard Chris Stark (co-editor of "Not for Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography") speak to a group of students, about her experiences as a child in systems of prostitution, including stripping. i talked a few months later with one of the men in the audience, and he told me, looking shaken, that hearing her had really changed him, changed the way he lived, that he was drawing farther and farther away from his male friends, that he couldn't just go out with them, knowing they would go to a strip club, but that he couldn't seem to tell them why. it was amazing to see him struggle and change, and reinforced my intense gratitude towards Chris, for existing, and speaking out. it also was so intense to see his inability to speak to them, to be able to own to them that he could not accept or embrace these basic things that are supposed to make males men, and to connect them to one another. it was basic, and human, and what any decent person should do, to take in the information that Chris gave him and the other students, and to at least stop contributing directly to sexual violence. so i don't mean to throw a parade for him for just daring to be slightly ethical. but i also didn't envy his world just then. it's frightening to recognize that the world one lives in, where sexual exploitation is just a joke, just an orgasm, is in fact a freaking hellhole in which real beings are being consumed and destroyed, by your buddies. he left his trick world, enough to figure out something about the one where people like me live. and seeing him facing, with some horror and shock, the world of sexually exploited and tortured children, it brought home to me what a weight, we the survivors carry, in knowing this truth, and trying to somehow reach people who have at least initially, so much comfort to lose by listening to what we know.

i'm not about some kind of 'it's my personal mission to heal the pain of all the monsters' agenda. i want it to stop, whether it means they change or die or get scared into quitting, or lose their access to vulnerable bodies. i'd like it if they healed, but i don't think they all will or can. so long as they stop, or we find a way to stop them.
but i think part of reclaiming my right to be anywhere but underneath the cultural noise of sexual objectification --- to be where people laugh without a backlash of terrible grief, walk down streets without feeling exposed and endangered, touch the environment without getting burned --- involves breaking down the conceptual separation between us and them, at least halfway. otherwise we, the survivors, are always out on the edges trying not to fall off. i'm a living, somewhat complete/whole, if severely broken being, and they are also in some sense, living, and very incomplete and also broken, and we have all been created and produced by oppressions that go generations deep. we exist simultaneously in one extremely damaged, highly medicated and distracting, horribly hierarchical, not (as yet) thoroughly hopeless and destroyed world, which we can choose to fight for and to heal with/in. we can take up enough space, even change things, to the extent that we can write, struggle, feel, and bite our way through our hurt enough to make ourselves known (and hopefully to break down some of their denial, and rapacious entitlement). this brings me full circle for now.

shrayberin