Child Abuse Part 1

When I started writing about my experiences with childhood sexual assault, I focused a lot on how terrible I felt. But for some reason I just woke up from a long nap wanting to get into the details. I've been reading/listening to audible a lot about the classes in Amerika. I've been learning about Caste systems. I've been swallowing knowledge whole. The Artist's Way would call me out for my avoidance of producing my own art.  

I wrote about abuses I faced in life and felt that was the last thing I ever had to say. I became protective of my new story. Wanting to control precisely how other people view what I have going on now. But there is still judgement. And there always be. I miss putting it all out there in writing so I feel understood by my friends and whomever my readers are. I always feel it is special that anyone ever reads what I have to say. I always forget what it feels like. But my last post before this brought tears to someone's eyes. 

That is powerful. 

I listen to a lot of comedians in podcasts and audiobooks. In another life I was a comedian. If I don't explode onto the scene like Hannah Gadsby someday out of extreme social frustration. 

I promised myself I'd stop being afraid. 

That I would channel teenage Jackie Lane again. The personna that protected me through the worst of keeping my secrets from the people I love. I don't need to protect secrets but I miss her strength.

God it feels good to not have secrets. 

That is the one thing I wish I could give to everyone in the world. 

I am shameless. 

I feel no shame somehow anymore.

After a lifetime of walking around bearing a cross the size of the World Trade Center Monument. 

All this reading and listening to other incredible authors and artists* has had a common serendipitous theme. 

Nothing changes without action. 

I always thought being abused by my "brother" was a gift. Because anytime I've ever told anyone they responded with, "oh he's your step-brother, so you're not actually related" as if being related to someone is why it sucks when they manipulate and abuse you. 

I have no biological siblings. But that common female response tells me that far More women have been abused and assaulted by their biological brothers than we talk about as a society. Older cousins and uncles, sometimes fathers and grandfathers, of both male and female children influence their early exposure to porn culture. It has gone from leaving Girls Gone Wild in with the regular DVDs back in the day Or accidentally turning on the Playboy or Cinemax Channel as a kid just scanning for some cartoons or a good TV movie; to being shown hardcore while you are looking through Twitter or Instagram. With Tik Tok and SnapChat we adults all know it has gotten worse and that we are in denial about the problem of sexualized children. 

But in typical fashion teenagers and young people always show us the way. They are protesting every injustice imaginable. They want us to have PPE and go to work, to respect gay people, to respect trans people,  to respect sex workers, to confront the corrupt government, to stop allowing white supremecist cops to execute citizens who have committed no crime.

If my story tells me anything. It is that because of the harmful adult world children can be groomed to hurt one another. Right now gangs of children are killing one another in the street and we can watch the livestreams and video footage from the comfort of our own home. Teenage children are raping one another because adults have presented an internet full of the filmed rape and degradation of millions of young people their age. 

I always like to think my CSA wasn't that bad. Which it wasn't. But I also know that Every Single Victim Says That. It doesn't matter that you were not penetrated when you were groped and controlled and manipulated to be mentally broken. Left with a constant feeling of humiliation and shame. Just because on some level your feminist upbringing Did protect you. That you know you used force to stop some things. That you know you were groomed by culture to think this is normal but because of who your mother was... You never did. Even when you were the most brianwashed a little voice inside you screamed from deep within the echo of your belly that there was another way. 

But childhood sexual trauma is going to have to be like all the other problems we are facing as an adult global culture right now. I would say as a country but Amerika is just the tip of the iceberg right now in sexism and male violence. The internet has promoted and exposed things about humanity that have long needed changing. 

Women and children will be protected finally. 

We will have world peace. 

Not without action.

Not without difficult conversations adults do not want to have with themselves about the role they have played promoting violent patriarchy because of internalized misogyny. Men also have deeply internalized misogyny. Men have to deal with being accused of being lesser men when they refuse to participate in porn culture any longer. Every man is raised surrounded by it and can only choose in adulthood to change. When men choose to respect women the men in their life want to know why. What happened to them? What woman has been influencing them? That is how you know. 

Love, 

Jackie Fucking Lane

*Shout out to my authors/artists: Alex Haley, Malcolm X, Rachel Dratch, Sheila Jeffries, Nancy Tuana, Gail Dine, Cordelia Fine, Andrea Dworkin, Whitney Cummings, Amy Pohler, Ronan Farrow, Julia Camron, Adam Cohen, Danny Haiphong, Glen Ford, Caroline Criado Perez, Isabel Wilkerson, Michelle Alexander, Tina Fey, Bailey Poland, Joe Rogan, Anna Farris) [I highly recommend you look all of these people up, see what they say, read a thing-a-ling]