Eight Anti-Rape Affirmations of Female Power
Eight Anti-Rape Affirmations of Female Power
After Andrea Dworkin’s eight components of male power in Pornography: Men Possessing
Women (1991)
I. I am the self—
◦ I/me: Rose Jeanou.
◦ My rapist is that shadowy, unnamed figure. He is but a signifier of universal male
violence. He is the object, no more consequential to me, the creative and talented
I, than this plastic fork or the first video that pops up for me on Pornhub—Aunt
Judy’s XXX Your Busty Stepmom Lila Lovely Gives You Dating Advice (POV).
The first eight results are incest, teen, lesbian, and some combinations thereof. We
have lived to see a future that compels a dyke to perform black magic to resurrect
radical feminist theorist Andrea Dworkin (I only abstain because I believe she
deserves to rest).
◦ It is true that I am a woman, but I fuck about as much like a man as someone with
a female body could be expected to fuck. I wear men’s clothing and have a men’s
haircut. Nevertheless, I was born female and most of the world sees me as a
lesbian woman.
◦ My favorite term for myself is lesbian or butch.
◦ She/her is fine.
II. I am physically and mentally strong.
◦ I’ve been a dyke for four years. I’ve never been happier. I just get butcher and
butcher. The longer I stay lesbian the more male I get, the happier I get. No,
really.
◦ Women and queers tend to develop eating disorders that leave us frailer than our
manorexic macro-counting, creatine-swilling counterparts. Not I. I’ve been
training at the rock gym and eating lots of red meat and reading Dworkin and
Despentes. When I get on T I’m gonna be formidable. Testosterone is cheaper and
more easily accessible to bio-females than it’s ever been. I’ve seen people far less
androgynous than I waltz out of the telehealth clinic with injectables.
◦ Straight women are far worse off than lesbians. Straight women bare the brunt of
domestic violence, reproductive warfare, and yes, rape from bio-males. I want my
appearance to say—I don’t get raped anymore.
◦ The next person who tries to rape me dies. He will almost invariably be a man,
and I am sure to relish that when the moment comes.
◦ My femme is over six feet tall and built like an NFL linebacker with Bipolar I and
a brass knuckle.
III. I have a strong capacity to endure terror, and an even stronger capacity to terrorize.
• Men will never like or respect me. I’m just not that type of broad.
• Dworkin says masculinity is fundamentally about violence, in particular, male
violence against women (the female/fem class, borrowing from Cassandra Luca).
Bioessentialist male-supremacist notions that males are stronger than females are
generally real—most females, shorter and weaker, are easily dominated by males.
Transgender women are also usually weaker than cis men due to genetic changes
of HRT. Like all types of women, I have been dominated by males/men. I have
even rollen over like the proverbial log and taken it. I have even claimed I liked it.
• Masculinity is violence against the woman incarnate. The opposite of violence is
submission—passivity. I am all activity. I am not becoming a man. I am becoming
a violent lesbian.
• Rapist-killing is a process that must occur over and over again in my art. I will
never stop mining this experience for content. If I did, it would be disingenuous,
because it would ignore the very real forces in the world that have shaped me, that
I cannot help myself from perceiving.
• I am still mad about what happened to me during childhood. I am mad at what
happened to all children, all women, all females/fems. I sat in the classroom. The
teacher was calling me Rosebud, he was calling us buttercups, he was calling us
his flowers. We could not control if our sports coaches took pictures of us in our
Spandex, could not control if we saw them projected on the board. Our sports
coaches watched us get anemic and worse at running. Our teachers watched us cut
ourselves, and the guidance counselors they sent us to? You don’t want to know
what happened in there. We were all activity, but we were never allowed to get
big enough to be really scary. Even as babies we were fed one percent milk to stay
weak.
• IV. I have the power to name. I name through writing.
• “As with fire when it belonged to the gods, the power of naming appears magical:
he gives the name, the name endures; she gives the name, the name is lost. But
this magic is illusion. The male power of naming is upheld by force, pure and
simple. On its own without force to back it, measured against reality, it is not
power; it is process, a more humble thing” —Dworkin, Pornography, pg. 70, in
“Power.”
• I’ve written about various rapes before. Why, look at my story “Real Love.” I put
myself in the perspective of one of my rapists and imagined raping an inanimate
sex doll. I don’t need to tell the real-life story about him. I don’t need to add how
he had a five and a half inch dick, and it would be overkill to say something
snarky like, the only dick smaller I’ve ever seen his than the my smallest stone-
safe dildo. And no one would buy that after that rape I scream-cried to
“Wonderwall,” which was playing on Emerson college radio as I drove backwards
through the castes of Newton, Massachusetts. I don’t feel the need to expound on
the story of my trigger of pointy-toed shiny black loafers and how my square toed
Vagabond Elsa loafers cured my trauma in some overwrought castration
metaphor. The part of me that was nineteen, twenty-one, and anorexic, is dead.
Her words may live on, but they’re kind of pitiful, feminine. Womanly, as it were.
Top 10 ways male writing instructors describe my prose: histrionic, angsty,
emotional, “good for YA.”
• Although I have written about rape, I have never named a real-life rapist of mine.
It is one of my great shames as a feminist.
• I have lived through what I consider the immaculate climax to a life-defining
Bipolar I manic episode but which psychiatrists have technically termed a
“psychotic break.” During this time, I was completely overwhelmed by a few
distinct memories, most of which had to do with sexual assault starting with a
significant moment at the age of thirteen involving an authority figure who
provided some kind of therapeutic counseling service for children within a certain
public middle school. I was overwhelmed with the idea that these assaults, as well
as treatment of lesbians/ism from family and friends, were directly linked to me
hiding the fact that I was lesbian. On both counts, I was certainly right to be upset,
but the pain has subsided over time. It was replaced by anger.
• They say there are cultures that have no misogyny. They say misogyny is almost
over in the United States. Is any girl born in America, the world, in the past
hundred or five thousand years, who was not aware of misogyny before she could
say her own name? Let alone name misogyny? Her own name and misogyny
being two things a man named. Is any girl born in the United States today who
does not have a man in her head?
V. I own myself.
◦ By 2030, “You will own nothing, and you will be happy,” the World Economic
Forum tells us. Founder and Chairman of the WEC Board of Trustees Klaus
Schwab will be thrilled to know I already own very little: my clothes, my books,
the groceries in my fridge, my furniture, and my bike (gifted from my mother) are
all I claim to my name.
◦ “If you called your dad, he could stop it all,” Pulp sang to the rich girl. “You can
rely on your old man’s money,” Hall and Oates reminds theirs. Rich women are
mocked, but crucially, they are not free. The woman is but an emblem of wealth,
of course it comes at a price of submitting to one’s father, but the woman is not a
human to the singer, she is an emblem. Notice that it is never a rich mother figure
in these scenarios.
◦ If songs about poor women reveal a bit of misogyny, songs about poor women are
far worse. The misogyny in every genre of music that has lyrics and is vocally
performed by men is astounding. It’s too bad that, like most women, I am a broke
wage-laborer.
◦ Women and queers often work in underpaid fields, such as teaching, nursing,
elder care, and homemaking. Nevertheless, we have ultimate bodily autonomy.
◦ I own my body. I am a human being.
VI. I sell my speech, not my silence.
• It’s extremely embarrassing to write about a rape that happened to you. This is. true
particularly (not to compare traumas) when one’s rape occurred in a highly stigmatized
way. For instance, take childhood sexual assault, or abuse occurring within a sanctioned “good” institution such as the school or the healthcare system. Mine was something like that. Incidentally, rapes also occur a lot within families, so to blow that up would to be to blow up the very foundation of what holds one’s social life in a nuclear-family based society together.
• To tell the truth, I do not know if the rapes really happened to me or not. It is some kind of Severance, Truman Show, Fight Club bullshit, but no part of me can square the two realities. If someone pressed me in court if I had just hallucinated it all, I would say, “Probably.” But I’m not in court yet.
• Processing in the brain can happen extremely slowly. Andrea Dworkin writes about the “agony” of becoming aware of patriarchal violence in Right Wing Woman, explaining the mechanism of how women come to serve patriarchy. The alternative, she points out, is to be treated objectively worse. It was utter agony to become aware that I was a victim, past and present.
• I don’t feel like a victim anymore, but I don’t mind acknowledging that I once was.
• I will reveal the names of one person who raped me for the cost of one month of rent plus (about $1100). One name per month of rent. Each of them has stolen at least a month of my life in psychic damages—it seems only fair.
VII. I have sex.
◦ I can think of few words besides “Lesbian” that are owned by women.
◦ I have sex with the radical lesbian feminist goal of ultimate bodily autonomy in mind. Just kidding, it’s the female orgasm.
◦ I have sex with femmes (well, just one from now on, we hope).
◦ I am always in control.
◦ I am stone.
VIII. I have sex with women, as a man.
• For at least 0.25 cents/word (a very fair market price, and see point VI), I will
write you as much as you’d like on the topic.
