Author’s Sidebar: Women Raped By Women
I know there’s a lot of new readers on the site who came to MU after I moved it from Livejournal, so they won’t have encountered the Author’s Sidebar before. These are ordinarily little asides where I take a break from the story to elaborate or comment on some point raised within it, discuss my motivation or inspiration, etc. Well, that was the idea. Sometimes it was just me getting frustrated with answering the same questions over and over again and blowing my top. Not proud of that, nor of not realizing how a FAQ would solve that. Anyway, that’s what a Sidebar is. I plan on copying over the better ones… for instance, the one about demons vs. vampires… and I have plans for others, such as where the business with surnames and honorifics came from, but this one… this one in particular is going to be little bit different…
Well, I had intended to finish Chapter 56 when I got home, and then get a good start on or finish Chapter 57 for Friday. This block of chapters detailing Mackenzie’s Saturday are meant to be a fairly light-hearted interlude in her life, though, and… my heart is not light.
Months ago, when I started Tales of MU on Livejournal, I was gratified to receive responses from women who said they identified with Mackenzie and had been in similar situations with people much like Puddy, either in terms of the sexual depredation, the physical abuse, or both. I wasn’t glad that they had been in such a situation, of course, but I was gratified that my story had accomplished one of its goals in showing them that they weren’t alone, showing somebody in the long, painful process of working through the emotions that necessarily arise out of such an event.
On the other hand, some others said they couldn’t keep reading, because they’d been through something similar… and that’s valid. I understand it perfectly. I really do.
It’s not always easy for me to write this stuff, so I can’t imagine it’s always easy to read it.
Still others (men and women) wrote me to say I’d opened their eyes, that they more or less had never considered the possibilities of rape and abuse among lesbians, or had found it implausible, until they saw my depiction. That made me feel good.
Understand… I’m not claiming to be on a mission here. This is, at its roots, a fantasy pastiche story which will encompass anything that it wants to encompass as it follows our fictional heroine through her college career. But, as long as it was including themes of abuse, I wanted the story to do some good.
Now, one reason I find this all so gratifying is that when I first started chatting on the internet… back about, maybe, 1993… in the gay/lesbian chatrooms in which I found myself (in more than one sense of the phrase), there was a commonly espoused belief that women didn’t rape, that women couldn’t rape, that lesbians in particular COULD not be rapists, because lesbian sex was about equality.
Pretty words, but even when I was thirteen, they sounded fishy to me. I thought better of it, before I had cause to know better. But, I was just thirteen, and new to such things, so I mostly held my tongue.
It’s been a long time since I’ve heard such a claim seriously made, except by the most radically separatist lesbians (the ones who still advocate, only half-joking, that men be killed at birth so they don’t grow up to rape)… at one point, I expressed on the Livejournal comments what a pleasant surprise it was that nobody had coughed up that chestnut yet.
Well, apparently the chestnut lives, because tonight, somebody did. They apparently think the abuse themes have been written (by a male writer) for reasons of cheap tittilation.
Let me start by saying that I hope there is no doubt in anybody else’s mind that I do NOT write the abuse scenes in Tales of MU to titillate. If that was my intention, then I would have to be a very poor writer, for they are not tittilating. I write them to convey, in no uncertain terms, how awful it feels to be so violated, and the convoluted mental twists and turns that can occur in the mind of the abused. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has actually been titillated by them.
That’s all a digression, though. I’m not writing this article to explain or defend my work. I generally try not to explain my work and leave it open (sometimes wide open) to reader interpretation.
When I interrupt the story to say “Lesbian rape is real. Lesbian abuse is real.”, I want everybody to understand that I’m not doing it in some desperate attempt to justify the validity or realism of my work. I’m doing it because it’s important that people realize that it is so.
Any victim of rape and abuse may find themselves fighting an uphill battle to get the attention they need… the support… the mental health assistance… the legal protection… the simple recognition that they are a human being who has been hurt in ways that no human being should ever be hurt.
If the victim lives in a society which does not recognize his or her class of victimization as valid… or even possible… that struggle is made all the more difficult.
The overwhelming majority of resources for rape victims are geared towards helping the female victims of men. Even those which are not explicitly dedicated to such often lack the training, the literature, and even the inclination to help other classes of victims. Men raped by men have a harder time finding help and understanding, for instance… but… and I say this meaning no disparagement towards men who have been so abused… at least society has more or less collectively accepted that such a thing is possible.
If somebody truly believes that it’s impossible for a woman to rape another woman, I don’t know what I can say to prove to them that it can happen.
Sadly, I don’t have to look too hard to prove that it has happened and is happening:
- An article from
- An article from Planet Out detailing the chilling reality of rape among the lesbian community and lesbian dating scene.
- A fact sheet about woman-woman rape from the Santa Fe Rape Crisis & Trauma Treatment Center.
- A page from the Northwest Network of Bi, Trans, Lesbian, and Gay Surivors of Abuse .
- A simple Google search for the words “lesbian”, “rape”, and “support” turns up plenty of resources for finding support groups dealing with these issues.
Happily, that’s a lot more than you could find online (or anywhere else) back in 1993.
I post these links not to prove a point in some juvenile “I’m right, you’re wrong” sense. Frankly, I’ve thought about posting links to resources for survivors of sexual and domestic abuse (of whatever gender combination) since the story started to pick up those themes, but I didn’t want to seem like I was claiming expert status or elevating myself and my stories to some kind of “spokesperson” or “advocate” status… I’m certainly not putting Tales of MU forward as a resource for abuse survivors!
Because really, folks, at the end of the day, they are just stories about one girl’s life… and I don’t plan to keep Mackenzie mired in one issue any more than a real life is.
But, faced with certain knowledge that the myth of “no lesbian rape” still exists… I can’t help but confront it.
And, now that I’ve got this off my chest, I’m going to write Chapter 56… it will go up tonight.
