"Girl Land:" This Is What Sexual Trauma Looks Like

Author's note: As you'll see in the comments, I was mistaken about the publicly acknowledged magnitude of whatever happened to Caitlin Flanagan as a teenager. I still think that the essence of her admonitions and fears seem to spring from a place of trauma, but do please take my analysis with several grains of salt.

Some masochistic, curious-as-a-cat-with-only-one-life-left part of me really wants to read Caitlin Flanagan's Girl Land. Now, I'm sort of broke (well, when am I not sort of broke?) so I don't really think I can shell out $30 for a hardcover I will probably want to burn after reading, so I probably won't read it, at least not until it hits paperback.

I feel like most of the coverage I've read about this book ignores a very crucial piece of information. The book has been excoriated as reactionary, and dangerously nostalgic. Flanagan herself has been called a "cranky, (prematurely) old  church lady." There's an entertaining hour with her and Irin Carmon, resident feminist of Salon, on NPR's "On Point" that's been the fodder for quite a few blogs in recent days. In particular, the bit where Flanagan goes after Carmon for not having had a boyfriend in high school is almost laughable in its ridiculousness.

Basically, the condensed version of Flanagan's ideas and thesis (if you can call it a thesis?) is that adolescent girls today are being rushed out of their girlhoods by the Internet and pornography, and parents need to protect their girls from these pernicious and worldly influences so that they don't end up having a lot of sex with men who treat them badly. There's also a lot of discussion of "princess" ideals and tropes, which Flanagan adores. There's a lot of discussion out there that Flanagan's argument amounts to: (1) men only want sex; (2) women only want to be treated like princesses; (3) sex is dirty; (4) women have to use dirty sex to get men to treat them like princesses. There's an awful lot wrong with all of that, as I'm sure most of you will recognize. It leaves out any variation among female wants. It paints a pernicious and dangerous picture of men. It precludes the idea that men and women can ever be friends. It relies on gender stereotypes that are damaging to both men and women. And it straight-up calls sex something dirty.

All pretty reactionary, throwback, damaging ideas.

But in pretty much every piece I've read about this book, the incredibly salient fact of Flanagan's rape when she was a teenager is mentioned, and then glossed over in the analysis of her ideas.

So let me be the one to say it, I guess.

This is what sexual trama looks like.

Being forced out of one's girlhood by a violent act would leave someone with a pretty negative view of sex, don't you think? And in the culture of victim-blaming and rape-apology we live in, it's not hard to see how someone would fail to heal from that. It's not at all difficult to see how all that blame could be internalized into self-loathing.

OF COURSE Flanagan wants to protect girls; she wishes, I am certain, that someone had protected her. That her recipe for protection involves giving girls no tools for dealing with men and the world and the whirlpool of emotions that is sex is no surprise. She doesn't want to deal with any of those things.

Rape is a serious and incredibly damaging act. With every word I read about this woman, and with every harsh word I read about her prescriptions, I wince a little bit inside. When Carmon admonished Flanagan on "On Point" not to make this about her, or herself, I wanted to grab my radio and shake it. This book would seem to be about Flanagan, and her intensely personal wounds that have never healed. Please, please: make this conversation about her, because that's what it needs to be. Flanagan may be a social critic, but when her criticism and prescription come from such a place as I imagine they do, it must be understood that she's not talking about the world as it is, but the world as she understands it. And while it's always true that we each of us see the world through the prism of our experiences and unique perceptions, it's also likely true that Flanagan's perspective is far more skewed than most people's.

Stop piling on this poor woman. Yes, this may be exactly the thing that misogynists and zealots and morality legislators will hold up when they try to push agendas that curtail women's freedoms. And certainly Flanagan bears responsibility for her words. But still: I can't help but be overwhelmed with compassion every time I read anything about her.

Rape is trauma. And it should surprise no one that in a culture where Ben Roethlisberger makes millions in the NFL and Dominique Strauss-Kahn goes free and women are constantly told how to dress and act so that they will not be raped that Flanagan has a nostalgic longing for a time before she ever had to think about sex or worry about danger, and that she wants to keep girls in that safe space forever.

The Gender Politics of Internet Trolling

I can be pretty obnoxiously political. As a general rule, I've kept most of it off this particular venue of expression of mine and focused here on my personal experiences of things, but really. I can be pretty obnoxiously bleeding-heart, far-left political.

Mostly this comes through on Twitter, where it was the protests against Governor Scott Walker and his union-busting that made me truly appreciate the medium. I was looking at a picture of the court order re-opening our state Capitol an hour and twenty minutes before it hit any local news site. (And yeah, I timed it.) I have made some really wonderful friends while tweeting about politics. And had some fascinating discussions.

So when I tell you that I've never been trolled, not seriously, you should understand that I do go through pretty long jags of political commentary. It's not that I've never been trolled because I stay away from that sort of thing. But, back in March when I starting getting the first inklings, I definitely did circle my wagons and clam up for a few days. And that's a strategy that's worked very well for me ever since. I am obnoxiously political for (at maximum) five days, and then I go back to tweeting about my love life or clothes or food or something safely domestic for a period of time that is at least three days longer than however long I spent tweeting exclusively about politics and current events.

This has had the interesting (and hilarious) effect of getting me on some really interesting public lists. Like "Almost Worth Following." I laughed pretty hard at that one. There was another one that was simply titled Liberal/Retard/Spam/Troll, which I thought was an interesting grouping of things to be. I didn't laugh so much at that as I did wince.

But my strategy of just never going for too long without backing off and becoming nonthreateningly girly again seemed to work. Aside from the most glancing, easy to identify, and non-personal trolling that exists, I've never had to deal with vitriol from strangers.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine (one of those wonderful Twitter pals I met through politics and #wiunion) dropped a comment along the lines of "Remember when I didn't have my real name here and people thought I was a guy? That was fun."

And it made me think: I'm pretty obviously female, even on a gender-neutral platform like Twitter. My handle is "TheGirlOne" for crying out loud, and for a long while I had a picture of my actual face up there as an avatar, and I'm clearly female. What if the reason I never get trolled is less to do with my careful curated strategy, and more to do with my gender? A woman in politics isn't "worth" trolling?

I don't think that's seriously the case; I think it might be some combination of gender roles and my strategy, but after having read this piece, and this one, and this one, I am pretty convinced that my being a woman hasn't been the driving force in not being trolled, either on Twitter or here. Because there are, apparently, a lot of men out there, and a lot of people out there in general, that are willing to aim a lot of pent-up rage at women on the Internet.

And I think that the quote at the end of the Time article is intensely relevant to anyone that's about to tell me that it's *just* the Internet:

"This is 2011. It’s not “just” the Internet. It’s our culture. At this moment in time, you can work, socialize, date, learn, communicate and debate online. There is no longer a divide. What is happening online is happening in real life. This type of abuse reflects real-life attitudes, real-life misogyny and it’s prolific. It’s about time we started discussing it."

The Internet is, for better or worse, a part of the way we live these days. It is our culture. It's no longer a subculture, or an underground culture, or any other negating adjective you want to throw on it. The Internet is pop culture. We inhabit these spaces as surely as we do our bedrooms, apartments, cubicles, cars. And what happens here is real.

I've been lucky. Startling, beautifully, terrifyingly lucky. I have blogged about gender relations, and gender bending, and patriarchal political pundits, and my own sexual history. I have been, at times, uncomfortably personal. I have been, always, lucky that all of you that read this or have stumbled upon it have been kind and supportive.

I worked for a political office in Milwaukee for a year when I was in college. When the then-governor of our state, Jim Doyle, vetoed concealed carry legislation, a lot of people were understandably upset. Several of them called into the Mayor's office to express their disapproval. (Don't ask me why people upset with the governor were calling the mayor of a city. I don't know. People are dumb.)

One of the interns answering phones during that period was a lovely young woman, a friend of mine, and she took a call in which the man on the other end of the phone told her, after she tried to explain to him that the Mayor had no control over what the governor did and it wasn't under our purview, that he "hoped she got raped on her way home tonight, so [she'd] understand that carrying a gun is a good thing."

I cried when it was directed at her, and I certainly looked over my shoulder the entire walk from City Hall to my busstop, the whole bus ride home, the whole walk from that busstop to my apartment.

I have been (for me, anyway) remarkably open here, and I have been lucky. And I have been consistently supported in that. I hope that never changes. But I would be lying if I didn't tell you that putting this piece out there is taking slightly more courage than I probably have.

We should all be more compassionate. Telling that to a mysogynistic, scared little man in his basement spewing hate at all the women he can find on the Internet is probably a bit like spitting in the storm's eye, but I'll do it anyway. We should all be more compassionate. We should all be working to understand the ways in which we're all vulnerable and scared, and we should all be working to change those conditions. Life doesn't have to be nasty, poor, solitary, brutish, and short. We can be better than that. So, let's be better than that.

And let's start by all being as civil to everyone as you've all been to me.

Fear and Life, Courage and Compassion

Dear Every Human Being Everywhere (But Particularly Human Beings That Reside In and Around Milwaukee, Wisconsin),

I understand that it's natural to be scared of scary things. Fear is a completely normal response to things that are scary. Uncertainty. Violence. The possibility of death or dismemberment. Fear is biology's way of keeping us out of harm's way.

But we don't always give in to fear, do we? People do brave things all the time. People face down other people threatening them. People jump off of bridges and out of airplanes. People go to war.

We are more than capable of over-riding our natural fearfulness.

So let's all do that, ok? Let's let go of being afraid, and add a very small smidgeon of basic compassion, and let's stop talking about carrying guns and possibly shooting other people in crowded public spaces. Let's stop calling other human beings "animals."

There's a great deal of racial tension in my beloved city. This I know. It is known. I've known since I was just a wee tot, often the only white girl in my classes at a public school. So yes, let's all stop pretending that it's not there. It is. And it can be ugly. It is human nature to be hostile to that which is different from you. That cuts across pretty much every demographic line we in the modern age can come up with. Race, age, gender, income, education level, whatever: if whoever you're looking at is different from you in some way, your initial reaction will be one of fearfulness and hostility.

Don't bother arguing with me about that. It's true.

Now the good news! We can tame those impulses. All of us. We have the capacity to conquer our fear and see that different, weird "other" as another human being. All it takes is a little courage and a little compassion. People perform this emotional alchemy EVERY DAY because, hey, guess what? NO ONE IN THE WHOLE WORLD IS EXACTLY THE SAME AS YOU.

Of course, the more percieved danger there is, the harder it is to practice the courage necessary to overcome the first impulse toward hostility. The more percieved strangeness there is, the more difficult it is to realize that the person you are looking at is, in fact, a person.

So when incidents like the one after the fireworks last month in Riverwest, or the one last night at State Fair, occur, they are generally seized upon by cowardly people as an excuse not to excercise that courage that is required of anyone that's going to function in society.

Similarly, the perpetrators of these actions have declared themselves too cowardly and without compassion to bother viewing the people they hurt as people like themselves.

But hey. EVERYONE. THIS IS IMPORTANT.

We're all human beings.

I know that we all have vastly different ways of looking at the world. I know that our experiences of the world and how it works and what we've learned from it are really, really disparate.

But we're all people. We can agree on that, right? So let's start by cutting out the nasty name-calling and the use of words like "animals" and "swine" when we're discussing this? We really should be discussing it, because there is a lot of racial and class-based tension in this city, but we need to discuss it constructively. And that's just not helpful. It's really not.

And hey, people beating other people up? Those are people you're hurting. They hurt and cry and bleed like you. They have problems, too. Making them hurt and cry and bleed is not going to solve your problems. It's not going to make the schools in Milwaukee better and it's not going to make your [parental unit] care about you. It's not going to get you a job. I PROMISE. So you might want to think of another route to accomplishing some of those goals.

Hell, you might want to set a few goals. Really. You can do that. I have absolute faith in your ability to look at your life and set yourself some goals. Why do I have that faith? Because I know you're human beings. You know it, too. So act like it.

Likewise, one-liners about how concealed-carry will solve all our problems is not helpful. Guns don't solve problems. They kill people.

I'm going to say that again, a little slower.

Guns don't solve problems. They kill people.

The subtext here is that killing people doesn't solve problems. Which is absolutely, positively 100% true. Killing people is a cowards way out. Killing people sweeps a problem under a rug, or sticks it into a hole in the ground. A really big, deep, dark hole. But that's not a solution, it's a burial. It doesn't do anything to address the fundamental things that allowed a problem to grow in the first place, and so there's always the chance that some other person or set of people will come along and have the same set of issues and then there will be no template for resolving them other than putting someone in the ground, and that's not a solution because it might happen again.

To solve a problem, you need to make it go away forever, not just for a little while.

So this is for EVERYONE: Shooting people isn't a solution. Beating people up isn't a solution. And fear is not a solution.

Being afraid is a natural response. I get that. Being afraid of the "other" out there is what we're hardwired to do. But we are none of us animals, and we can all of us exercise a little courage. And a smidgeon of compassion.

Going through life afraid and alone is no way to live. For anyone.

With sincere hopes,
Ryan