Plum crazy!

I was twenty-three years old, fleeing a relationship that had crushed me. I didn’t call myself a survivor, not at first. I knew the relationship was bad—everyone knew it was bad. I hadn’t slept through the night once since we moved in together. There were always sleepless nights—drinking, a fight, a crisis, sex. I knew we couldn’t coexist in that same big-small city where all the queers knew each other and there were no social places where I wouldn’t have to see him. He had stalked me, and no matter what I tried, I couldn’t stop him from coming into the coffee shop where I worked and pretending that he didn’t know me. Every place I reached out to for help didn’t know how to help me. Not knowing what else to do, I left the state.

Fortunately, as I was leaving, I was offered my dream job working as the youth advocate at one of the few LGBTQ-specific domestic violence programs in the United States. As community-based domestic violence advocates, we weren’t therapists, we weren’t social workers, we were peer survivors supporting people experiencing violence in their own self-determination and safety. As queer and trans survivors of domestic and sexual violence, we knew the crushing nature of this violence. As survivors, we understood what it was to have your sense of self slowly chipped away. And we knew precisely what it was like to wake up one day, years into an abusive relationship, twisted into knots and unaware of how the violence started or how to get out.

In 2005, when I started my anti-violence advocacy, there were almost no domestic violence programs directly supporting young people. Young people might receive support from a program but only as the children of adult survivors. Young people weren’t the center of the support—they were there because of the harm a parent had experienced.

Young people deserve to be supported beyond what they may witness between adults in their households. Child sexual abuse is an epidemic. Over half of women and almost one in three men have experienced sexual violence during their lifetimes, while more than four in five female rape survivors report that they were first raped before age twenty-five and almost half were first raped as a minor (that is, before the age of eighteen).

Where adults would reach out and “cold call” our advocacy line, youth rarely did. In my ten years as a youth advocate, I could count on my fingers the number of people under the age of eighteen who called our advocacy line without a prior connection with a youth advocate. We went to them. We started talking to young people about their friends, families, and relationships, and they talked to us about violence.

One day, years into being a youth advocate, the principal of Capitol Lake High School (CLHS; the name has been changed to protect the anonymity of the people involved), an alternative school in my community, called to let us know that one of their students had been sexually assaulted, and, as a school, they wanted to help but didn’t know how. A couple of hours later, I was at the school. The principal introduced me to Amanda and her classmate Maria.

Amanda, who was sixteen, had been sexually assaulted by a teenage girl she had been dating. Amanda was shy and wanted to move slowly into this new relationship. The girl she was dating hadn’t listened. Amanda said no, the girlfriend pushed things, ignored Amanda’s requests to stop, and sexually assaulted Amanda. After the assault, the girl ended the relationship. Amanda was confused, overwhelmed, and unsure what to do. She told her best friend, Maria, what happened, and together they reached out to a trusted adult at the school.

The friendship of teenage girls can be so powerful. When I was a teenager, my friends were my entire world. There were four of us in total, and we were loyal and committed friends. Sexual violence was the constant reality of our teenage lives. I remember almost nothing from middle school except the tightening of my entire body when, in the lunchroom, in front of everyone, another middle schooler, a boy, reached over and grabbed my butt. I froze, my heart beating in my chest and a ringing in my ears. All I could hear was the laughing of this boy and his friends. He had violated my body. In front of everyone. No one said or did a thing. I told no one.

There was the constant safety planning with a friend whose creepy stepfather we always tried to avoid. He had a special room in the basement where he painted areola and pubic hair onto Barbies and hung naked lady calendars on the walls. He insisted we watch Death Race 2000, a 1970s dystopian movie with a road race to the death, in the spirit of the Hunger Games books. The film featured nude women, sex, violence, misogyny. The stepfather insisted on sitting there and watching it all with us. We were thirteen.

Years later, during our senior year in high school, this same friend told us that she had been changing clothes in the shared bathroom of her home one day and discovered a video camera hidden under some towels. It was recording her while she changed. She told her mother, and handed over the video camera. Her mother watched the tape, told our friend she would take care of it, and they never spoke about it again. Our friend knew in her gut that something was wrong. She did the only other thing she knew to do—she talked to her trusted friends. So, we safety planned, although we did not know this term at the time. We made plans for her to be at one of our houses as much as possible, or for one or more of us to go home with her after school. We reorganized our lives to help her stay safe.

We knew we needed help. We talked through the various adults we could ask and landed on a teacher whom all of us liked. When I think back to the decision now, I’m curious about our choice. He wasn’t the most empathetic or emotionally intelligent teacher. He was a bit gruff and frank, but he was also funny. I think we picked him because he was the only adult we knew who openly broke the rules. He would loudly proclaim that he was veering off the approved curriculum. He was my only teacher who tried to teach practical things he thought we might need but would likely not be taught. He taught me financial literacy, including how to open up a bank account and balance a checkbook (this was the ’90s, when people still balanced their checkbooks). One day in class he told us to close our textbooks and marched us out to the parking lot. “Who has a car here?” he yelled. A classmate raised her hand, and he taught us how to change a tire and check the oil. I still think about this teacher every time I have to change a tire.

One day after school a couple of us hung back and told him what had happened. He was clearly freaked out. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I do remember how it made me feel. I knew immediately that he had nothing to offer. I could feel how desperately he wanted the conversation to be over. We told him—and nothing happened. We told—and there was no help. No calls were made, no resource was offered, no strategies were discussed. We had only each other for safety.”]

by Louise Glück

“The connections between anger and tone management are so predictable that I have come to understand them as anger/knowledge management tactics,” explains Bailey. “In fact, anger’s epistemic strength can be measured in direct proportion to the amount of energy used to contain it. But, anger-silencing practices are not just about quieting uncomfortable tones as a parent hushes a child at a movie. There is power in the hush. The hush reasserts dominance: it restores the audience’s own epistemic and psychological comfort.”

Celebrities who spoke openly about their harassment and assault have wealth, visibility, and resources that most women do not. Nonetheless, the emotions and conflicts that they displayed in their public appearances and statements, particularly around their use of anger, were remarkably familiar to women broadly.

A few weeks after the Weinstein revelations, actress Uma Thurman, another of the producer’s victims, was asked what his decades of abuse meant about her industry. “I don’t have a tidy sound bite for you,” she said through gritted teeth, “because I’ve learned—I am not a child—and I have learned that when I’ve spoken in anger, I usually regret the way I express myself. So I’ve been waiting to feel less angry. And when I’m ready, I’ll say what I have to say.” Thurman not only tone policed herself, she talked about tone policing herself.

Her anger was reined in, and, as she explained later, she was trying not to cry. This is a good illustration of the awareness we all have of how easily and quickly our fury, if expressed, can be twisted against us. Thurman’s posture, her face, her voice all thrummed on screen, belying the composure of her words. The actress’s sense of her own position reflected the precariousness of women, even powerful women, when they have this anger. And Thurman is not only a celebrity but also an actress who is recognized specifically for her representation of powerful, angry, vengeful women in films such as Kill Bill.

Two months after Thurman spoke, in another pitch-perfect example of what Bailey describes in her work, Salma Hayek also shared her experiences with Weinstein. She’d never publicly come forward, she explained, because “I didn’t consider my voice important, nor did I think it would make a difference. . . . Women are talking today, because in this new era, we finally can.” She describes Weinstein’s “Machiavellian rage” and “attack of fury” and his “terrifying words.” However, even in describing several humiliating episodes, she didn’t once mention her own anger.

Actress Rose McGowan was a central figure in Weinstein’s downfall. McGowan, whose unorthodox childhood included growing up in a cult, regularly brandished her fury and aggression in public appearances, appearances that seemed to fill other people with discomfort. Vanity Fair described her as the “white-hot voice of rage.” Her public engagements in the wake of the revelations were complicated by her unwillingness to de-escalate hostile exchanges and, instead, respond aggressively to critiques and challenges.

I asked Judd, whose career, she soon revealed, had been blackballed by Weinstein, how she thought about her anger over the years of silence. “By the time I was talking about Harvey and being heard, in 2016 and 2018, I had long ago coped with the anger,” she explained. “Learning how to express carried, suppressed anger is definitely a process. It festers and becomes toxic rage and fury. It requires so much adrenaline and dumps cortisol into our systems.” Her response has been to use her body to fend off the possible ravages of rage. “Running, movement, drawing . . . cathartic arts,” she said, “helped to physiologically transform roiling anger into strength, energy, and motivation.” This body competence made it possible for her to talk about her childhood sexual abuse, dysfunctional family dynamics, and workplace sexual harassment with determination and control.”]