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rynlingThis week's episode of This American Life is about two rape cases. I haven't made it through the whole podcast yet because the first half is about gaslighting, which is probably my least favorite thing in the known universe. In the story, a young woman gets raped by a stranger who breaks into her apartment, and then she does all the right things: She calls the police, submits to the hell that is a rape kit, and then calls her friends in the neighborhood to let them know there's a rapist running around. She has, without a shadow of a doubt, been "legitimate" raped, but two of the foster mothers she grew up with don't believe her. Because she's still in shock when she tells them, she doesn't have the "right" emotional affect, and both of them manage to convince themselves that, since she had such an outgoing personality when she was a teenager, she's just making up a story to get attention. Their doubt spreads to the police, and... yeah.
Rape doesn't bother me as much as it probably should – it's unfortunately not that uncommon, and people can and do move past it – but gaslighting scares the shit out of me, especially because it never ends. Having your body violated isn't fun, of course, but having your mind and sense of self and concept of "truth" violated, not just once but repeatedly, with no recourse or escape or justification, is straight-up torture.
For whatever reason (maybe because I was "outgoing" as a young child), my parents and extended family have never believed anything I say, even when there is clear and obvious proof. This occurs at the level of basic information, like when I told them that I was moving to Philadelphia. One could argue that my life is so far outside of their realm of experience that it would make sense for them to have trouble believing me, but it's not just them. People I went to high school with who I've met again as adults are always extremely surprised that I have the credentials to do what I'm doing, almost as if they thought I had been lying for years about, I don't know, going to grad school and living abroad. Don't even get me started about the people I've dated.
The cumulative effect of being told over and over again that your perception of reality is incorrect is devastating. It doesn't help that "truth" is difficult to pin down in the first place. I'm a major advocate for the practical advantages of acknowledging epistemological relativity (and, to a certain extent, modal reality), and it's obvious to me that dismissing the complexities of any given situation by accusing the person or people not in a position of power of deliberately fabricating falsehoods only serves to silence voices that offer contradictory evidence against a normative position.
The funny thing is that, when I googled "why are women always accused of lying," thinking about how, for example, I always got blamed for shit my male cousins did when I was a kid, I got five full pages of hits with titles like "How Many Rape Reports Are False" and "Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence," which seems like a huge jump to make from the general to the terrifyingly specific.
And it doesn't end there. Women are constantly surrounded by social messages we're unattractive, that our clothes and living spaces are insufficient, that we don't deserve the salaries of our male peers, that we're bad parents, that we shouldn't be eating the things we enjoy, that our sexual fantasies are inappropriate, and that we should always work on improving ourselves because we will never be good enough. In other words, our internal perception of reality is forever under attack. And honestly? If women do lie (and fucking everyone lies, true fact) so that their lived experiences of reality can be closer to the illusions of consensus reality, can you really blame them?
I don't have any sort of conclusion to offer, save that this is why I spend most of my free time hanging out in my apartment with my dog and playing video games.
Rape doesn't bother me as much as it probably should – it's unfortunately not that uncommon, and people can and do move past it – but gaslighting scares the shit out of me, especially because it never ends. Having your body violated isn't fun, of course, but having your mind and sense of self and concept of "truth" violated, not just once but repeatedly, with no recourse or escape or justification, is straight-up torture.
For whatever reason (maybe because I was "outgoing" as a young child), my parents and extended family have never believed anything I say, even when there is clear and obvious proof. This occurs at the level of basic information, like when I told them that I was moving to Philadelphia. One could argue that my life is so far outside of their realm of experience that it would make sense for them to have trouble believing me, but it's not just them. People I went to high school with who I've met again as adults are always extremely surprised that I have the credentials to do what I'm doing, almost as if they thought I had been lying for years about, I don't know, going to grad school and living abroad. Don't even get me started about the people I've dated.
The cumulative effect of being told over and over again that your perception of reality is incorrect is devastating. It doesn't help that "truth" is difficult to pin down in the first place. I'm a major advocate for the practical advantages of acknowledging epistemological relativity (and, to a certain extent, modal reality), and it's obvious to me that dismissing the complexities of any given situation by accusing the person or people not in a position of power of deliberately fabricating falsehoods only serves to silence voices that offer contradictory evidence against a normative position.
The funny thing is that, when I googled "why are women always accused of lying," thinking about how, for example, I always got blamed for shit my male cousins did when I was a kid, I got five full pages of hits with titles like "How Many Rape Reports Are False" and "Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence," which seems like a huge jump to make from the general to the terrifyingly specific.
And it doesn't end there. Women are constantly surrounded by social messages we're unattractive, that our clothes and living spaces are insufficient, that we don't deserve the salaries of our male peers, that we're bad parents, that we shouldn't be eating the things we enjoy, that our sexual fantasies are inappropriate, and that we should always work on improving ourselves because we will never be good enough. In other words, our internal perception of reality is forever under attack. And honestly? If women do lie (and fucking everyone lies, true fact) so that their lived experiences of reality can be closer to the illusions of consensus reality, can you really blame them?
I don't have any sort of conclusion to offer, save that this is why I spend most of my free time hanging out in my apartment with my dog and playing video games.
no subject
Date: 2016-03-04 02:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-06 07:52 pm (UTC)My favorite thing about this particular episode of the podcast was how they edited the ads, though. I have long suspected that Ira Glass hates Scion, and this episode confirmed it. The two commercial breaks were cut right after the two most terrible emotional blows, so it was like, HUMANITY IS AWFUL: SCION.
no subject
Date: 2016-03-06 10:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-04 11:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-06 07:39 pm (UTC)They're totally normal in their own environment, though. I hope I'm not making any untoward assumptions here, but for you and me, someone unironically supporting Donald Trump is beyond weird, right? However, for people like my family, who live in a broader culture where the federal government is hated and feared, supporting Donald Trump is the most natural thing in the world... or at least, the version of consensus reality that governs the world they live in. The way I like to think of the rural South is that it exists in a parallel universe that overlaps closely with our own but doesn't quite match up.
no subject
Date: 2016-03-08 10:50 am (UTC)Nailed it.