“There is no such thing as a single anecdote,” Jen Percy writes within the opening sentence of Ladies Play Uselessher riveting, heartrending evaluation of what sexual assault does to girls. “What I’m speaking about is an accumulation.” She lists a number of of her personal encounters with harassment and rape tradition: the person who rubbed his crotch whereas looking at Percy and her pal; the person working a money register who requested to the touch her breasts; the person who requested to {photograph} her when she was 16, exhibiting her an album of bare girls. The purpose isn’t to interrogate the lads who supposedly did this stuff, or whether or not they occurred. (With regard to veracity, I’ve my very own accumulation of comparable anecdotes; I’m guessing most ladies do.) Extra helpful is to contemplate what Percy did in response, what so many do when confronted with sexually threatening habits: nothing.
Ladies are socialized to be nice. To be passive. To neutralize battle somewhat than spark it. They study to prioritize others’ emotions over their very own. In 1988, the feminist authorized scholar Robin West argued that these habits and behaviors assist foster intimacy and neighborhood, however that additionally they diminish girls’s safety underneath the legislation. If somebody’s intuition is to protect relationships and stability as a matter of survival, what do they do after they’re violently or sexually threatened? Not at all times one thing that could be construed as logical, or which may persuade a jury that they’ve been gravely violated. The vast majority of girls who’re sexually assaulted don’t struggle again, Percy notes. (Along with “struggle or flight” responses to hazard, advocacy teams point out that different frequent responses to rape embrace “freeze,” “flop,” and “pal,” or attempting to placate one’s attacker.) She compiles a listing of accounts from her reporting of issues girls have accomplished after they have been raped. “I made him rooster soup,” one lady tells her. “I comforted him as a result of he was crying,” one other says. Nonetheless one other: “I instructed him I couldn’t wait to do it once more.”
By Jen Percy
Ladies Play Useless started as a characteristic Percy wrote in The New York Instances Journal concerning the phenomenon of “tonic immobility,” a self-preservation mechanism that leads folks to freeze or grow to be paralyzed when underneath assault. Within the animal kingdom, mammals play lifeless so {that a} predator will lose curiosity in them; some feminine dragonflies do it to keep away from mating. Percy encounters so many ladies who describe freezing as their response to sexual assault that she pronounces it a sort of “lingua franca.” (Males freeze too, she notes; her focus is essentially however not solely on girls.) “I simply froze,” Girl Gaga mentioned in an episode of the collection The Me You Can’t Seewhereas recalling the time she was raped at 19. “I simply completely froze,” Brooke Shields mentioned of her personal rape within the documentary Fairly Child. Whereas I used to be studying Ladies Play UselessI watched a BBC documentary wherein a lady, recounting being raped by her personal boyfriend, mentioned, “The truth that I froze—it’s a sense that completely takes over your physique. You’ll be able to’t transfer.” Tonic immobility, Percy writes, is an “excessive response to a risk” that “renders victims unable to scream or transfer their limbs.” Its evolutionary profit, she notes, is that by concurrently numbing the physique, it would—within the animal world not less than—“alleviate the agony and horror of being eaten alive.”
Percy’s topic is brutal, however her writing allays a number of the affect by being nearly impossibly stunning: crisp, weak, lyrical. Her mom, a naturalist, raised her partly within the wilderness, the place hills “have been painted with belts of ochre, orange, brick-red sand.” Typically the pair slept in a trailer, “with its stale formaldehyde scent, lacquer desk, and tiny fridge that gasped as if afraid.” She has a miniaturist’s eye for element and a uncooked compassion in her evaluation. Ladies Play Useless isn’t a manifesto, or a name to motion. It’s extra like a scientist’s assortment of samples from a subject journey, organized by genus. Percy observes and bears witness. She interviews girls in jail for murdering their abusers, after describing their biographies at harrowing, hard-to-read size. She interviews self-professed intercourse and love addicts who skilled childhood abuse and whose understanding of emotional connection bought distorted. (“Abuse, neglect, or drama—it was all mistaken for intimacy,” Percy writes.)
On first studying, a few of Percy’s tales appeared unusual or incongruous, like the person she profiles who’s completely obsessive about a lady he broke up with a decade in the past. However I got here to grasp that woven into her line of inquiry are the character and significance of storytelling itself. Police investigations and felony trials demand clear narratives: They have an inclination to count on proof to be neat, habits to be logical, and tales to be linear. The questions that rape victims are inclined to face don’t enable for the sort of messiness that accompanies violation. Usually survivors themselves attempt to make sense of what has occurred by reinterpreting it. “Self-preservation doesn’t at all times appear to be what we think about it does,” Percy notes. She describes as soon as going residence with a person whereas finding out overseas in Spain, and the entire instances she mentioned no, till she lastly stopped, as a result of “I used to be drained and I didn’t wish to be impolite.” Later, she went to Paris with him. Illogical, perhaps, however commonplace all the identical, as a result of sometimes our coping mechanisms require remodeling an abuse into one thing needed, or not less than one thing not so unhealthy.
In a court docket of legislation, although, irrational reactions—reminiscent of a sustained relationship with an abuser—can fatally undermine a sufferer’s credibility. Protection attorneys, Percy writes, have a pronounced tendency “to painting the traditional habits of girls, each throughout and after their experiences, as ‘uncommon’ or ‘inconsistent.’” In the course of the trial of Harvey Weinstein, his protection attorneys put vital emphasis on the truth that two of his accusers had continued pleasant communication with him after their alleged assaults, and had even gone on to have consensual intercourse with him. “Many people could not perceive why I had hoped that making an attempt human reference to the person who was sexually abusing me, humiliating me, utilizing me, and pumping me into his world the place he at all times managed the script—was an extended exhausting type of survival,” one accuser, Jessica Mann, learn in an announcement to the court docket throughout Weinstein’s sentencing listening to, by means of response. We’re, as a tradition, deeply uncomfortable with the thought of victimhood. (Contemplate the idiom “taking part in the sufferer.”) “Claiming victimhood,” Kate Manne writes in her e book Down Lady“successfully includes inserting oneself on the middle of the story.” And girls who foreground themselves in any capability are sometimes perceived to be self-important drama queens, or narcissists.
Maybe sensing this, Percy turns victims right into a collective as a substitute. Her tales, woven collectively, grow to be one thing like a material, a totality. Messiness is the defining characteristic, in a means that turns into clarifying. Power stress damages the prefrontal cortex, she writes in a single chapter, explaining how trauma can impair the mind in order that her later accounts of girls discovered responsible for acts of self-defense appear much more profoundly unjust. Ladies Play Useless illuminates how tales can entice folks, how the impulse to rewrite a violation or rescue an abuser leads us away from the reality. However Percy additionally appears to really feel that exhibiting us the feel and shared options of human expertise could be the essential factor that may make a distinction. The legislation typically renders girls unprotected, maligned, and misunderstood. The one countermechanism, as Robin West wrote in 1988, “is to inform true tales of girls’s lives,” in such breadth and definition that the justice system lastly has to acknowledge what it’s been obscuring. Ladies Play Useless is an important continuation of this effort.
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