i think one thing that gets missed in discussions of like. âokay depiction of abuse/problematic dynamicsâ where the person is on the side of âit's fine to depict problematic things as long as the victim is clearly traumatized/not enjoying itâ is that a part of the way in which abuse functions is by changing what intuitively feels good or bad to a person, that is to say, why people stay in abusive relationships is bc your brain can be wired, as a result of sustained trauma, to only feel comfortable or at-home in such situations, and to not recognise that anything is wrong in the first place. that is how conditioning and grooming work, it's how people stay in awful situations for years... and how do you depict that? an abusive relationship is still a relationship, real victims have loved and continue to love those who perpetrate intimate violence against them. you can, from a distance, see and say that the love is wrong and should not exist. but when you're narrating a story from close quarters, you can't effectively differentiate without context, an author depicting as romantic a manifestly abusive relationship and a victim and perpetrator whose inherent sense of themselves, of right and wrong, of boundaries, and acceptable forms of intimacy, has been warped through abuse.
Lolita is a book that appears to be about seduction but is really about rape. The Incest Diary presents itself as the inverse, a book apparently about rape but really about seduction. But this conceit betrays the further truth â call it the secret under the secret under the secret â that sometimes rape and seduction, coercion and desire, are not opposed at all. This is why the question of whether or not a child âwants itâ is irrelevant to the morality of pedophilia (something both pedophiles and many reviewers of The Incest Diary overlook): not because children donât want it â or do want it â but because âwanting itâ is itself something so easily formed by adult violence. And not just the declaration of the wanting â what is a childâs âletâs fuckâ but a simulacrum of consent? â but the wanting itself. When a victim of sexual abuse says she wanted it, she is telling us about the sort of person the abuse required her to be. The author says that it is only âas ifâ her sexual obsession is being raped by the man who created her. Here she is hanging back, knowingly, from the bleaker truth: It is not merely âas ifâ she is sexually obsessed with the man who gave her half her genetic material, fed and clothed her, made her into a thing that would desire him forever. She is sexually obsessed with him. How, indeed, could it be otherwise? Describing her father letting her out of the closet in which he had locked her, she asks, âHow could I not love the man who set me free?â
Silent Treatment: The troubling response to a memoir of incest
