Like getting chewed
Amanda Hess at Slate on Elizabeth Smart three years ago:
When Smart spoke at a Johns Hopkins University panel last week, she explained one of the factors deterring her from escaping her attacker: She felt so worthless after being raped that she felt unfit to return to her society, which had communicated some hard and fast rules about premarital sexual contact.
“I remember in school one time, I had a teacher who was talking about abstinence,” Smart told the panel. “And she said, ‘Imagine you’re a stick of gum. When you engage in sex, that’s like getting chewed. And if you do that lots of times, you’re going to become an old piece of gum, and who is going to want you after that?’ Well, that’s terrible. No one should ever say that. But for me, I thought, ‘I’m that chewed-up piece of gum.’ Nobody re-chews a piece of gum. You throw it away. And that’s how easy it is to feel you no longer have worth. Your life no longer has value.”
Why escape if people are going to think you’re just a dirty used rag?
As Jessica Valenti points out, the chewing gum analogy is a typical tactic employed by abstinence-only advocates to try to scare teenagers away from having sex. And while stunts like those are often delivered to coed groups, the messaging falls harder on girls: If one person is the gum, the other person chews.
Girls are the receptacle; the receptacle is what gets dirty. Girls are basically toilets. Boys get cleaner by having sex, and girls get dirtier.
As Smart’s story shows, administering broad sexual shaming to children can have disastrous effects for victims of assault. The same goes for all of the other “tips” that put the onus on the victim to prevent rape. When we instruct teenagers to dress modestly, abstain from alcohol, never go out alone, and certainly never engage in sex, we’re not actually helping them prevent rape—but we are telling them that when they are victimized, they are partially to blame. Sex educators can’t equip children to escape horrific crimes like the ones committed against Elizabeth Smart. But they can help build a society that refuses to compound the psychological effects of those crimes by shaming victims before the abductor even breaks in.
Let’s do that.
That poor woman. It is heartening that she is able to stand tall and speak out. I can’t imagine that I, personally, would have been strong enough to overcome that trauma.
There was a story on NPR yesterday, an interview with an author who was on a book tour for a book that she had written about how adults should talk about the topic of sex with their kids. She brought up an interesting point about the different ways that sex ed is taught to boys versus girls: boys are told about the mechanics and how it all works, whereas girls are admonished about unintended pregnancies in addition to the basic biology. The author noted that for girls, it’s a matter of teaching them to suppress what they feel, and to lay a basic groundwork of shame. She contrasted this with how Dutch parents talk to their kids: “for them, it’s a balance of joy and responsibility, taught to both boys as well as girls, from an early age, and reinforced regularly”. Apparently as a result, Dutch teens have much more positive outlooks on sex, in general.
How horrible. It’s also reminds me of something I read regarding the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda. As most of you know, or can probably guess, large numbers of Tutsi women who were not immediately killed were violently raped and assaulted in an effort to wipe out the Tursi population. The thinking apparently was that, in Rwandan culture, husbands would not accept wives or children who had been sexually sullied by rape, so those women were made worthless. I recall there were also wide scale attempts to infect the women with HIV, as a more horrible form of murder which would kill them later and inflict maximum suffering.
Funny how the basic thinking of abstinence only sex-ed seems to have in common the same thinking of a racial genocide.
Unrelated, I was very fortunate in having parents who felt that a solid sex education start young and must include information on the mechanics, understanding consent, and the importance of pleasure for both parties. As I grew up, I learned how anomalous my parents were for Australian society, especially 20 years ago. It seems a shame that the information and support my parents gave me can’t be the model for all children.
Elsa, this reminds me of Haim Nachman Bialik’s poem about the pogroms in Kishinev (1903). Bialik was on a committee of the Zionist Congress that did an investigation after-the-fact into the circumstances of the attack and how the Jews responded. He wrote 2 poems inspired by the events. One was an emotional outcry – how does God (if he exists – the doubts are Bialik’s) allow such terrible things to happen, a demand for heavenly justice. The other was a sharp criticism of the Jewish community. There’s a part where men hide in the outhouses while their wives are being raped, and later go to the rabbi to ask if their wives are still ‘kosher’ enough for them to remain married.
@ ^
Holy fuck. That makes me think of those bits in the bible that say that if your daughter’s been raped, the best way to capitalize on the spoilage of your goods is to marry her off to the rapist.
yeah – it’s awesome. A woman is violated, her mind and body raped by an assailant, and the net response of so many in our society (explicitly or implicitly) is that SHE is the one who should be ostracized because she is ruined. Like spilled milk, she will never be “clean” again, and all because just about every human civilization says women’s value lies entirely in her virginity. So depressing.
Anat – I’m going to have to look up those poems.
A variation on the ‘chewed gum’ analogy that I’ve heard many girls who received abstinence-only sex-ed relate is the clean cup of water, where they pass the glass around and have people spit in it, then ask if anyone wants to drink from it, and the girl who has had sex is compared to that glass.
Makes the ‘receptacle’ role of women in sex even more apparent, of course–after all, the spitters are not affected in any way.