I decided for once today not to take my coffee and food To Go. I brought my laptop with the implicit purpose of writing this weeks blog post.
A friend of mine owns my favorite coffee place and it has an apartment upstairs and is a block from the Bay and the ocean. It reminds me of my family's business. Without all the personal stress.
Before I left my house I was having more anxiety than usual. I had a massive panic attack from when I left work Saturday until this morning. I still have the brain fog and embarrassment that accompanies them but I think it's over now. I kept thinking it was over yesterday and it was not.
I spend a lot of time after panic attacks obsessing over if anyone other than Kyle or my mom has heard me. I suppress them successfully around everyone I don't feel safe around now. Which is almost everyone else. I let them out when I was with the police. Hoping that my symptoms would make perfect sense as a response to what I am claiming my life has been like.
I can't remember what I wanted to start this about. I think it's about a lot of things. It started with a post on my Facebook about lesbian erasure. I lost my Facebook for 7 days a week ago for posting something positive about lesbians that used the word dyke. I then used the word dike in a negative way on my mirror Facebook page Jack Lane where I present as a male with no ban. Then retyped the post that got me banned verbatim on a page where I claim to have been born a male and say horrifically misogynist things that I have heard grown men to say about women to women, that flood my mind all the time. The things women think when they put their keys between their fingers in a parking lot at night. Things the "good men" they know have said. Our fathers, brothers, best friends, lovers. Still no Facebook ban for saying horrific shit about women, as long as I do it as Jack Lane and not Jackie Lane.
My cousin is coming home from college in August. I am not talking to anyone lately. No one makes an effort to talk to me unless they are in a crisis. I am okay with that. I want people to reach out to me when they are in pain. But I don't have anyone I consider a close friend at this point except for my husband. Everyone else seems to have a rape wall built around them since I realized what happened to me was wrong. Since I realized and opened up about the fact that what I did was wrong
I have had multiple people accuse me of not accepting responsibility for what has happened in my life. I in fact accept whole responsibility. As I expect other people to do. Most adults are just semi evolved poorly educated full sized children. We have a culture that makes reading seem uncool and learning only for a chosen elite.
This post is about women like me. The handmaid's. The ones who see full well that we are participating in grooming and enabling the abuse of other women and keeping them also entwined in domestic violence culture.
My husband asked me what it was, what made me trust and want to be around my abusive ex friend. I was entirely isolated living with my future mother-in-law at the time. I missed my family but I also thought if I never talked to anyone ever again then I would never have to tell anyone in my family what really happened to me. Even if I committed suicide to me it was better than my parents or cousins or aunts and uncles, grandmothers who were still alive, having to live with the fact that my behavior has always made perfect sense if I was being emotionally abused by my father and then physically and emotionally abused by my step "brother". Men and women who have suffered child abuse would often rather die then talk about the things that have happened to us. We think that owning the things that have happened to us and admitting they were wrong is humiliating. We are brainwashed to believe it makes us weak as opposed to the fact that is makes the people who took advantage of power they had over another person weak.
His mom, his mom who I accused of being a pedo enabler. When I met her, she hugged me and acted like I was part of their family. Now looking back it seems like really poor desperate boundaries for a grown woman, then I just missed my mom and my own family and a more fucked up family didn't seem bothered by the little bit of fucked up I was. They were entirely unfazed and now I know it was for good reason. There are definitely levels of abuse. It's a common phrase of emotionally abusive parents to say, "oh cause you had such a bad life?" When adult children try and discuss the painful memories of our childhoods. It's dismissive.
The worse realization, the hardest thing to deal with while processing all of this new feminist literature and knowledge I've taken in, has been coming to terms with the ways in which I helped groom and abuse women. Just like his wife gave me presents and invited me to things and into the family in the beginning, I gave a flower, and other gifts to new women around us. How do we create a culture that doesn't groom women into abuse before we are even adult enough to know what that word really means?
Why does every woman I know assume they're saving anal sex for their husband. That if they do it, it will be while married. Why is that a thing?
Why do I hear women every day say, "he's always on the computer. Who knows what he's doing on there." There's a lot of internet gambling going on, which makes no sense to me, pushing fake buttons to earn fake money that quantifies nothing really because nothing has been accomplished to earn it. It didn't contribute anything to society. It's a waste of time to keep you locked into the screens and not in the streets.
But mainly it's internet porn. I don't need to argue with anyone about this. Because I've read all the statistics. I don't need to argue with anyone that we need feminism more than ever because I've seen the data on how much work we do for society vs. how much of the money we take home or are in possession of. I've seen the data on how much porn there is. I've seen the data on how many people are watching violent porn. You can not say it doesn't have an effect.
I never wanted to watch porn. I remember my mom and step dad fighting about it too much for the thought of it to have been a turn on to me mentally. I can name the 3 times I intentionally watched porn other than the pop up advertisements which were just traumatic stills of women that all computers had when we first got the internet, that are burned into the retinas of all the teenage girls I knew.
The first time I was alone in my room. It was the month I tried to kill myself because I was withdrawing from anti-depressants. I would have tried anything to make me want to live again. All my friends looked at porn. My boyfriends watched porn. My friends talked about it constantly. I looked at a few free things. It didn't serve any purpose towards masturbation really, I had never had a problem with that on my own. It's only effect was to make me feel gross and have more objectifying thoughts about women in general. But I never even experimented with it again.
I had a porn addicted boyfriend the following year and his obsession with women as sex objects cemented for me that I would never watch porn by choice. He had me watch moments of the Paris Hilton DVD that was so infamous when I was in High School but I was too prudish to have seen. All my peers had seen 2 girls 1 cup and I hadn't even seen the most mundane porn out there. I didn't watch it with him but I know he was always watching it without me, or whenever he had a moment alone. He is the only boyfriend who has coerced me into taking naked photos that he could keep and I was happy to find out years later that his computer crashed entirely because of his addiction and I hope those photos are long gone but they might not be. For all I know they are on revenge porn sites somewhere. Someone like me would never find out since I never look at porn.
The second time I intentionally watched porn was at the bachelorette party for Tess. Earlier that day I went and had my vertical labret pierced. To replace the one I had previously needed to remove, because to this day it's still promoting the rotting of my gums in the front of my bottom teeth. I had slept with Greg 3 times, I can't be sure exactly what happened because I was blacked out all the times. Each time I had drank at least 3 Long Island Iced Teas that I know of. Not to mention shots or other drinks people gave me. I got the piercing through my lip to remind me not to say anything or break down the day of the wedding. Pain. A painful reminder not to tell the truth. Plus it made me look tough. It made me not want to talk to anyone ever again. I started using the internet to talk to people a lot more.
The 3rd time, some time after my husband and I moved back next door to my parents. I still hadn't told anyone what I was recovering from. I had read all my old journals, and figured out why I have my panic disorder. Or at least that I had been abused by my brother. There were all these family videos of my siblings and cousins at my old house in the house we moved into. My abusive "best friend" Greg lived only blocks away now. He found out about my brother threatening to kill my mom and that he abused me. I felt pressure from him and Stan Bummer about my relationship to my husband not being sexual enough. Mainly my husband never abused me and never made me react porn scenes, which will get you called Vanilla by people who promote Bondage and Domination, Sadism and Masochism.
My abuser and other men constantly act like my husband is not a REAL MAN because he never wants to hurt me. He never wants to grab me when I don't want to be grabbed. He never wants me to be afraid of him. He FINALLY believes after years of trying to explain it that all females are inherently afraid of males. They are stronger. They are the perpetrators of violence. And until we live in a society where that is never the case we will remain afraid of all men even though we hope and pray to god it is #notallmen.
Will we ever live in a society where to be a grown man means to be a protector? Will we ever live in a society where only those who are children and haven't been taught properly how to be a human enact their rage upon others? Will we ever stop belittling men with the phrase "boys will be boys" and allow them to show their true colors? Allow them to show that they can be the bones of our society that we need them to be.
Feminism ain't about women. That's not who it is for. It's about a shift in consciousness that will bring an end to war. So listen all you fathers. Listen up you sons. Tell me which side are you on now? Which side are you on?
Right now we allow the unregulated internet to teach our children. We allow massive amounts of violence to happen to women and children so that men can retain their freedom to abuse. Why is it Any man's right to watch the filmed prostitution and violent degradation of women? How have they manipulated language so much through double speak that we don't even question it? Why do we think that people who enjoy to the point of sexual completion the violence enacted on women deserve to have us respect their opinion on anything?
Porn hurts.
Porn hurts the women in it.
Porn hurts the women who are in relationships with the men who watch it.
I am not even convinced it really makes men feel as good as they say. I think it might be rather humiliating to find you ejaculated to women with cum, food, or even worse feces smeared all over them. It might make you want to commit suicide.
It definitely creates a barrier between you and your real lover if you hide from them what you get off to. It definitely causes erectile dysfunction because it programs people to want graphic visual stimulation instead of physical.
Many people have sex or cum in the dark. Because sex is about feeling and being. Porn is about watching someone be humiliated because they were filmed while they had sex.
Until Next Time....
Jackie Fucking Lane
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