I had a lot of feelings about Kavanaugh being confirmed and what’s been happening to women and how we’re letting little girls down. It’s a cocktail of anger, frustration and pain so I wrote a poem.
If you feel inclined, please share it!
Sending love and strength to anyone who needs it x
A male colleague was making fun of the #metoo movement a few days ago, and many more (I’m one of 5 women in a department of 200 men) joined in. So I raised my voice and said I was glad women were speaking up about sexual harassment and assault and that I hoped that everyone who perpetuated this toxic behavior got taken down.
“Yeah but it’s a trend now, lots of them are just saying it for their 15 minutes of fame.” He then continued to say that he didn’t know anyone who had been harassed or any man who had done it.
I asked him if he had a daughter. He did. I asked him how old she was. She was was 17. I told him I’d bet my rent money that his daughter had experienced sexual harassment.
“That’s impossible.”
“Did you ask her?”
“No.”
“Well then, do it.”
The next day, he came in the office with five bouquets of flowers for all the women in our department, including me. He publicly apologized for making fun of sexual harassment and for making our lives harder by doing so. He said that he simply hadn’t known how widespread it was. Apparently, his daughter deals with it very regularly. She hadn’t told him because of the way he spoke about assault cases that were on the news. She thought he’d think less of her if she’d mention it. It was her idea that he should make a public announcement. He said he felt like a bad father.
I said: “You were. Same goes for everyone who laughed with you. Be better, now you know better. And educate other men that still think the same way you did yesterday. And next time someone tells you about an experience they have, don’t automatically assume that because you haven’t seen it, it’s not true. That kind of willful ignorance is why we still deal with this shit.”
He also offered to pay my rent as that was part of the bet, but I told him I’d rather have him put effort in being a person his daughter and wife could be proud of.
In conversation the other day my mom stopped and asked my dad about what percentage of women he thought had experienced sexual harassment. He said about 20-30% maybe. My mom told him that both of us had been harassed multiple times at work (same goes for both of her sisters) and that she had actually been assaulted by a groper on a public bus. I have never seen anyone’s face go slack so quickly before as he realized that literally every woman in his family had experienced this. And while I’m glad he believed us and has changed his view on that subject I still can’t shake the frustration, the anger, that it required being sat down and spoonfed these incidents that we didn’t particularly wanted to relive. This is something that women have been saying for years, but men just never listen. Not even when they’re forced to sit in mandatory harassment in the workplace training seminars.
His whole weird theory about penis envy and children being sexually attracted to their parents and secret desires and all that shit actually came straight out of an attempt to ally himself with wealthy and influential rapists and was a direct form of victim blaming.
He had started the research looking into “hysteria” which at the time was really usually referring to women’s symptoms of PTSD. It turned out that the reason so many woman had these symptoms is because so many of them had experienced sexual violence– especially CSA and incest at the hands of their fathers.
At first he was making real progress, and it was through working with these women that he discovered that talk therapy could be used to treat trauma. The symptoms of PTSD were lessened when women were able to safely speak about their experiences out loud and be believed.
But it wasn’t the women who paid for the therapy. It was their fathers, husbands, the same men who were perpetuating the violence in the first place. And Freud didn’t want to validate his patients (the women) if it meant making his clients (the men) unhappy.
So he came up with a new idea. These symptoms weren’t from trauma. The memories weren’t real. These women were just sexual beings as children and had penis envy and it made them lust for their fathers and fantasize about the rape that they had reported to him. That’s where the shittiest parts of Freud’s theories emerged.
Another part of it besides just the monetary aspect, though, was that there was a feminist movement on the fringes starting up at the time and by publishing work about women’s CSA he would be aligning himself with it and therefore losing support, respect, funding, prestige from his male peers and from the psychological community at large. He literally made that gross victim blaming shit up to keep his own reputation with these fucks and to make sure he still got publication and fame.
By coming up with fake theory about little girls fantasizing about incest he not only fucked over generations of women, the feminist movement that was arising, and the entire psychology field for years to come, but he also completely swept away any progress made in understanding trauma and so we didn’t have any clue why men coming back from war had “hysteria” like women during WWI.
And our research on PTSD and trauma is still lacking to this day, especially because of the stigma that maybe traumatized people deserved it or wanted it or imagined it. People don’t want to believe it’s real. Perpetrators of traumatic violence want everyone to forget about it, not acknowledge it, or trivialize it.
And they have Freud’s cultural legacy to help them.
Can you provide academic citations for this? This is really neat.
If you want some more, just google, “Sigmund Freud Seduction Theory Problematic.” There’s lots of academic and non-academic discussion on the topic, but TLDR Sigmund Freud is basically disregarded in almost all aspects of psychology by anyone who actually cares about their patients, so fuck that guy for holding psychology back.
Words cannot express how much I hate Freud. His theories have been entirely disproven by current psychological research, but using him to interpret literary texts is still a widely accepted technique in the field of literary study today.
English departments across the country will not bat an eye at tenured professors bringing Freud into lectures and citing him in scholarly articles and books. Doing a “Freudian reading” of a literary character or theme is regarded as a valid means of understanding and drawing meaning from works by authors as diverse as William Shakespeare, James Joyce, and C.S. Lewis. And it is based entirely on this guy’s unbelievably sexist, flat-out fraudulent, and thoroughly disproven research. It’s insane.
Just so everyone on my dash is aware that Freud’s theories are pseudoscience.
Hi all! So, I’m gearing up to start writing a fic I’ve been researching for two or three months now (things have gotten intense!) and I’m wondering if anyone with some knowledge of US/California law/how court cases work on a basic level would be interested in helping out answering some specific questions for me or pointing me in the right direction!
The fic is Kara x Cat x Alex, featuring demisexual Kara Danvers and asexual Alex Danvers, and is basically going to be a realistic exploration of trauma and kink in the superhero genre. Or as realistic as I can get it via a LOT of research (seriously, you should see my google search history these days).
The court case I’m trying to figure out involves the DEO/Supergirl suing Maxwell Lord for human alien trafficking, rape and sexual assault, and involves fun legal questions like how to get aliens considered persons under US law. (This is just for your info; most of my questions are pretty basic legal things!)
Reblogging just in case it’ll help anyone else see this! I am looking for super basic (US) legal advice from anyone with that kind of experience–just things I can’t quite figure out how to google. Fic info above is just in case anyone is interested. DM me if you know things about the law and wanna chat!
Hi all! So, I’m gearing up to start writing a fic I’ve been researching for two or three months now (things have gotten intense!) and I’m wondering if anyone with some knowledge of US/California law/how court cases work on a basic level would be interested in helping out answering some specific questions for me or pointing me in the right direction!
The fic is Kara x Cat x Alex, featuring demisexual Kara Danvers and asexual Alex Danvers, and is basically going to be a realistic exploration of trauma and kink in the superhero genre. Or as realistic as I can get it via a LOT of research (seriously, you should see my google search history these days).
The court case I’m trying to figure out involves the DEO/Supergirl suing Maxwell Lord for human alien trafficking, rape and sexual assault, and involves fun legal questions like how to get aliens considered persons under US law. (This is just for your info; most of my questions are pretty basic legal things!)
Question of Smoke 