A Very Personal Problem

As a kid, I was asking my mom questions about formal and informal you in her native language of German. To my shock, she replied "No. If I'm going to insult someone, I'm going to get very personal." [1]

That was shocking in part because she was endlessly kind and generous to people. So that was jarring as it was out of step with my perception of my mother and it stuck with me because of that dissonance. [2]

Human sexuality is generally very personal, so people wanting to hurt you will frequently make it sexual in some fashion, even if it's just to call you fat and ugly which is calling you sexually unattractive, and never mind that it's kind of meaningless because in a healthy culture and a healthy relationship, attraction doesn't boil down to weight or looks.

Anyone choosing partners entirely or primarily based on looks isn't really having an intimate relationship. They are treating people like sex objects and choosing what plugs into something in their brain in the most shallow, immediate fashion.

That's how you choose a sex worker for the night, not a life partner to marry and have children with. If that's a big factor in the people you date and your love life is all kinds of drama, well, there's your problem.

So sexual trauma is very personal and private and then planet Earth doesn't seem to know how to effectively help individuals effectively recover.

Because it's supposed to be a very private aspect of your life, when some awful person hurts you, to a large degree individuals are left trying to figure out how to get lovers and close friends to help them and these are typically going to be people who have no professional training in coping with something like that.

The old sitcom TV show All in the Family was actually very groundbreaking and political in some sense. It has a main character, Edith who is a middle aged housewife and at some point she's raped by a superficially polite visitor to her house who very politely informs her she's about to be raped without violent assault.

It made it clear that contrary to the stereotypes, physical violence isn't necessarily a part of the equation, it's probably someone you know socially and it's not about how she looks or dresses.

Probably a follow-up episode touches on the fact that Archie doesn't know how to cope with this and he doesn't want her to feel like she's just a sex object to him and is afraid to touch her at all. I think his daughter suggests this probably is making Edith feel rejected and dirty rather than reassured.

And it was an incredible thing for a popular TV show that was nominally a sitcom to address and I'm impressed that it happened at all and more impressed at some of the points they tried to make.

But it's a thimbleful of what is needed and this problem space has the following challenges, among other things:

1. Talking too much about it publicly isn't really a societal solution. You don't move on and make a nice world by harping on this stuff endlessly. That's like that saying "Going to war to preserve the peace is like fucking to preserve virginity."

2. It's extremely difficult to address something so private publicly at all. Making a public resource of any kind has many complicated moving parts and it's inherently hard to write anything useful for a general audience in the Internet age where your potential audience is vastly more diverse than ever before. Add in the sensitive nature of this subject and it's nigh impossible.

3. But expecting every individual who has ever been traumatized to reinvent the wheel from scratch "because it's a private matter" means current societal expectation is "People just don't ever really recover from things like rape or incest. You are ruined for life once one asshole hurts you in this way."

I've tried for a lot of years to bring solutions, not complaints and I was respected on Hacker News, an overwhelmingly male forum, for posting as openly female and bringing a healthier perspective to such discussions. I was very clear that went as well as it did because it was a small minority of my comments and I mostly talked about other things and didn't just harp on such topics as some kind of personal obsession.

This didn't prevent some people from accusing me of being screwed up, neurotic, incapable of moving on, not really recovered etc. It also served as a bottleneck significantly limiting how much I could do about a huge problem plaguing society.

I've also been met with enormous hostility from people who think I can't possibly really know what I'm talking about and who seem to think that my current lack of baggage and failure to be someone bitter and angry and wearing it on my sleeve means I can't possibly have ever had real challenges -- you know, like they have.

I've also had so-called "friends" impose upon my time, energy and expertise for better solutions than high-priced paid professionals were able to provide and then disappear from my life once I fixed all their problems and act like they don't owe me anything "because we were friends" and "you did it because you cared about me." 

It adds up to people both insisting I don't really have any professional credentials that merit charging big bucks and also it's fine to treat me as slave labor, not pay me, not provide me anything like customer testimony helping me turn it into earned income and feel fine about SHAFTING me for making a huge positive difference in their lives.

At one time, I defacto had an unpaid consultancy helping parents of extremely difficult children whom all the high-priced professionals couldn't help and people were sharing my email address and referring parents to me and I had no means to turn this into a paid consultancy.

Sexual assault is extremely personal and there is a very long history of people needing help with recovery who see their relationship to me as therefore extremely personal and who insist I obviously LOVE them that I'm capable of helping them -- and then when I complain I can't pay my bills, not their fucking problem, bitch. Get a real job.

I'm extremely ambivalent about trying to create this resource at all. Past experience suggests it may do some good things for other people and will most likely get me bit in the butt for being helpful and I don't believe that's actually a way to create a healthy society. What it actually does is perpetuates a world where people feel ENTITLED to VICTIMIZE someone "NICE" in the name of healing from someone victimizing them.

AKA "Someone else hurt me first! So YOU -- MY VICTIM -- need to UNDERSTAND!"

I sincerely believe if you feel fine about taking advantage of someone like that and obviously shafting them, you aren't actually recovered and you still are part of the problem, not part of the solution where everyone agrees that people who are hurting have a RIGHT to take what they want from someone for personal gain and do nothing in return FOR that person -- exactly like the person who assaulted you did to you.

You are agreeing with and promoting the abusive values of the person you probably nominally hate while living your life as an ode to their warped, abusive values.

That right there is the essential underlying "DNA" of Rape Culture which you are replicating virally with your Fuck you, got mine! defacto behavior.

Footnotes

[1] A longer version of that conversation about German language and culture is available on Adult Learners Handbook.

[2] My mom died in October 2024. I've spent decades trying to avoid gushing too much online about how wonderful she was in order to protect her from being taken advantage of by people reading that, tracking her down and having ridiculous expectations of a total stranger.

But I've also spent decades mostly not talking too much online about her shortcomings and some of the friction I had with her, especially in my teens when we had screaming fights.

She was a huge conflict avoider and so am I. The fights we had in my teens were out of character for her typical behavior and I have never known what drove that.

In recent years, I've begun to wonder if she saw too much of herself in me and desperately wanted to make sure I didn't make the same mistakes as her. 

My mom was such a big conflict avoider, I had to learn "There are some things worth fighting for." She grew up in Germany during World War II and just had a tremendous capacity for utterly ignoring petty BS from people until they went too far, at which point you were dead to her and she never spoke to you again.