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Title: The Broken Teapot
Author: Anonymous 
Date: Spring 2012
Language: en
Topics: accountability, community, rape, rape culture, anarchist, anarchist movement, anarchist projects, gender, violence, intersectionality, queer, love, abuse 
Source: copied from original
Notes: Art by Glia. Contact thebrokenteapot@riseup.net

Anonymous

The Broken Teapot

We all start life with our teapot intact and at some point a little

crack starts and slowly grows, or maybe one day we slip and the whole

thing just crashes to the floor. Those with intact teapots, they don’t

know what its like to try and make tea with all the water leaking out.

You can’t do it.

The play of power that is accountability and how it currently

(mal)functions in the anarchist ‘community’ has become a great fissure

in my teapot. Its a big crack because I used to be very invested in it

but it isn’t working anymore. When tea is made now, because of this

crack and, of course a few others, all that happens is that steam comes

out and people get burned.

Ever notice the way that trauma can build up in your system gradually?

You come to expect a certain amount of loss and you stop noticing how

much it affects you until one day something really small makes you cry

(you usually don’t) and then you realize how toxic you have become. Then

you really appreciate how grief accumulates. Everything feels like

mourning, even things that usually make you happy.

The idea that we could somehow help each other through the pain of

resistance, love and loss used to help me hold my shit together. Support

was the counter balance to each instance of abuse, queer bashing,

eviction, suicide, murder, and rape. If sometimes life hurt, if it hurt

in ways that threatened to drive one to madness, at least there was the

understanding and compassion of friends to get one through.

Lately, however, I have found that a funny thing has happened, at least

with the anarchists. We’ve become afraid to hold one another up in a

real honest way. The language of accountability has made support a weird

community currency, more important in appearance than deed. It has

become something which must be unquestioningly offered that functions in

rigid and essentialist ways. There is an algorithm for support now and

if you don’t engage with the algorithm in the correct manner you find

yourself out in the cold or, even worse, hunted.

Last year when I left my partner, they totally lost their shit, became

obsessed, fixated and eventually began stalking me. I received some

support from close friends and family, but the general anarchist

community, usually vocal to a fault, said nothing. Some said nothing

because they did not know the extent of the escalation and some said

nothing out of fear, a desire to avoid conflict. I hold no malice

towards any of those people. Others said nothing because I would not

begin an accountability process. It is these people, who could not have

known at the time how they were breaking me, that hurt me in ways that

are hard to express.

I did not want an accountability process and all the exposure and

tendrils that came with it. I wanted to be left alone. I would not

identify myself as a victim because I was not solely ‘a victim’. Is

anyone? In their saner moments neither was my ex solely ‘a perp’, in

fact they considered themselves to be a victim of my manipulations and

omissions. Somewhere far away from those flat unforgiving categories we

might have found some gracious out but with the language available to us

it was a mess. In order to pull support I was expected to mediate this

Kafkaesque disjuncture by branding them an abuser. I would not do that

because abuse dynamics aren’t so simple. I participated in a codependent

relationship and at the end I lied like all hell to get out.

My ex started to use their need ‘to address our issues’ as a reason to

continue to be in my life. When I would not give in to their demands,

and understanding well how power works, they threatened to start an

‘accountability process’ against me. It was a bleak affirmation of my

worst suspicions to watch them use these ‘community’ norms, so

well-intentioned in their inception, in a manner befitting a very large

stick. In the end wary, no doubt, of not winning a showdown at the

larger ‘community’ level they never made good on that threat.

I had moved out of our collective house to get away but, not

anticipating an escalation of hostilities, I made the tactical error of

moving into a place alone. They started coming over unannounced. As

their behavior became more and more erratic my fear of them grew. People

expressed concern for me but no intervention was made to them. Consent

culture precluded anyone telling my ex to leave me the fuck alone

without some rubber stamp of approval. I needed someone else to say

something totally independent of any request on my part because in ex’s

head I deserved to be punished, no reasonable discussion, amount of

screaming or pleading from me made any difference.

I left town. They found reasons to be in each subsequent city I traveled

to. At some point the categories of abuse flipped in their head. This

did not actually help much, they continued contacting me, this time in

order to be ‘accountable’ to me. I told them to fuck off and to leave me

alone. From when I left them to when they finally left me alone was

about 6 months.

After the therapist at the walk-in clinic told me if I didn’t move far

away without telling anyone, stop being a part of our shared radical

‘community’ and get a restraining order I was ‘participating in my own

stalking’ I went to the park and cried long and hard in exhaustion and

desperation. Eventually I pulled myself together and made a few phone

calls to see who might be able to help. I begged a mutual friend to

encourage my ex to leave me alone. They basically told me ‘without an

accountability process, they didn’t feel comfortable intervening’. I

wanted out of our terrible relationship not to be pressured into

continuing it in the name of ‘healing’. The tears I shed then were angry

and bitter.

This is but one vignette in a thousand of the ways these processes have

failed us. If not getting support unless you agree to the ‘correct’

process is one failure, then being unfairly damned and righteously

condemned is another. I have seen people pulled into these processes

through gray area miscommunications of consent. There have been people

falsely accused, a verbal ‘yes’ in the moment became a retroactive ‘no’

later. We have hurt and branded people through our practicing of

unquestioning belief and our sloppy use of really broad categories.

I have witnessed these processes become tribunals which continue

codependency and become about revenge. It is hard to say if this is

intentional or not but as they say, ‘the road to hell is paved with good

intentions’. These processes were born out of trauma, hope and all the

best of our desires for solidarity and healing. I know that to be true,

but it’s not working out that way. We wanted to free ourselves from

patriarchy except we just created a new kind of ‘justice’, and it is

damning us! It is making us act more and more like our enemies. Through

much soul searching, I have concluded that I was wrong to believe in,

participate in and perpetuate accountability processes. This anthology

is part of my amends.

Since this break point I have started to try and challenge

accountability processes but even at a theoretical level, this gets

falsely categorized as ‘blaming the victim’. To question accountability

is to question the sex positive culture of consent we have all worked so

hard to create. When did these things get so tangled together? There is

a ‘can’t win for losing’ mentality to these discussion. If you don’t

believe anymore, you don’t care about violence, assault or abuse. To

question is to betray.

Instead of embracing honest conflict we hide our true feeling under so

many layers of mental gymnastics and double speak. If these algorithms

also feel wrong to you trust those feelings and say something! We are

all so afraid to speak our minds least we be judged to be on the wrong

side of the ‘fucked up’ ‘not fucked up’ dichotomy. Adjudication requires

such stark differentiation. There is always a price when you are asked

to sit in judgment, be sure you are willing to pay it. It usually comes

later in the form of futile prayers that no one will ever discover or

prosecute your own faults. Regardless of how others feel, I know the

jury is already in.

I know myself to sometimes be ‘fucked up’. Its taken a long long time

but I am finally comfortable with my contradictions and the slow

progress to be made in changing them. I want friends and lovers who are

also comfortable with those disjunctures. I do not want comrades who

either pretend such imperfections don’t exist or condemn me for them.

What we do now is back people up against an ideological brick wall in an

attempt to control them. In comparison beatings look straight forward —

even merciful. At least those end and can be healed from on a

physiological time frame. The message they provide is clear! That kind

of hate is transparent and sometimes appropriate and necessary.

Perhaps that kind of violence makes you wary, that’s good! Embrace those

small nagging feelings of doubt. Wielding power should always make one a

little disquieted. After reading and considering these essays, I hope

accountability processes will make you feel at least as uncomfortable. I

regret now that we’ve spent the last few years feeling so damn sure of

ourselves.

I offer this anthology up to you out of deep pain, not hope for

something better. I don’t have anything better. This isn’t about

offering an alternative model. If any words here are taken out of

context and somehow become a new orthodoxy we will have failed. This is

about pointing out some of the more egregious missteps we have made and

encouraging people to think and act contextually.

In parting I offer up only one concrete plea. Stop using the algorithm.

It is hurting us. The teapot may be nothing but jagged pieces, but we

don’t have to slit our wrists with them.

in love, despair, anger and contradiction. Anonymous

PS-

Please forgive any repetition herein. It seemed more important to

present pieces in long form and allow each author space to fully express

their points than to edit for redundancy.

To those who contributed it is no small act of bravery to speak so

bluntly against stacked ideological odds. This kind of discourse and

debate is well past due. Thanks for being a catalyst.

To all of my friends who didn’t shrink from conflict, understood the

contradictions and supported me anyway... you’ve helped keep me sane

during a long period of darkness. I love you.

(Spring 2012)

Safety is an Illusion

Reflections on Accountability

by Angustia Celeste

I was asked by a dear friend to write this piece about accountability

within radical communities — offer some insight in light of the years

we’ve spent fighting against rape culture. Except I don’t believe in

accountability anymore. It should be noted that my anger and

hopelessness about the current model is proportional to how invested

I’ve been in the past. Accountability feels like a bitter ex-lover to me

and I don’t have any of those... the past 10 years I really tried to

make the relationship work but you know what?

There is no such thing as accountability within radical communities

because there is no such thing as community — not when it comes to

sexual assault and abuse. Take an honest survey sometime and you will

find that we don’t agree. There is no consensus. Community in this

context is a mythical, frequently invoked and much misused term. I don’t

want to be invested in it anymore.

I think its time to abandon these false linguistic games we play and go

back to the old model. I miss the days when it was considered reasonable

to simply kick the living shit out of people and put them on the next

train out of town — at least that exchange was clear and honest. I have

spent too much time with both survivors and perpetrators drowning in a

deluge of words that didn’t lead to healing or even fucking catharsis.

I am sick of the language of accountability being used to create

mutually exclusive categories of ‘fucked up’ and ‘wronged.’ I find the

language of ‘survivor’ and ‘perp’ offensive because it does not lay bare

all the ways in which abuse is a dynamic between parties. (Though I will

use those terms here because its the common tender we have.)

Anarchists are not immune to dynamics of abuse, that much we can all

agree on but I have come to realize more and more that we cannot keep

each other safe. Teaching models of mutual working consent is a good

start — but it will never be enough: socialization of gender, monogamy —

the lies of exclusivity and the appeal of “love” as propriety are too

strong. People seek out these levels of intensity when the love affair

is new, when that obsessive intimacy feels good and then don’t know how

to negotiate soured affection.

That’s the thing about patriarchy its fucking pervasive and that’s the

thing about being an anarchist, or trying to live free, fierce and

without apology — none of it keeps you safe from violence. There is no

space we can create in a world as damaged as the one we live in which is

absent from violence. That we even think it is possible says more about

our privilege than anything else. Our only autonomy lies in how we

negotiate and use power and violence ourselves.

I really want to emphasize: there is no such thing as safe space under

patriarchy or capitalism in light of all the sexist, hetero-normative,

racist, classist (etc) domination that we live under. The more we try

and pretend safety can exist at a community level the more disappointed

and betrayed our friends, and lovers will be when they experience

violence and do not get supported. Right now we’ve been talking a good

game but the results are not adding up.

There are a lot of problems with the current model — the very different

experiences of sexual assault and relationship abuse get lumped

together. Accountability processes encourage triangulation instead of

direct communication — and because conflict is not pushed, most honest

communication is avoided. Direct confrontation is good! Avoiding it

doesn’t allow for new understandings, cathartic release or the eventual

forgiveness that person to person exchanges can lead to.

We have set up a model where all parties are encouraged to simply

negotiate how they never have to see each other again or share space.

Some impossible demands/promises are meted out and in the name of

confidentiality lines are drawn in the sand on the basis of

generalities. Deal with your shit but you can’t talk about the specifics

of what went down and you can’t talk to each other. The current model

actually creates more silence — only a specialized few are offered

information about what happened but everyone is still expected to pass

judgment. There is little transparency in these processes.

In an understandable attempt to not trigger or cause more pain we talk

ourselves in increasingly abstracted circles while a moment or dynamic

between two people gets crystallized and doesn’t change or progress.

“Perps” become the sum total of their worst moments. “Survivors” craft

an identity around experiences of violence that frequently keeps them

stuck in that emotional moment. The careful nonviolent communication of

accountability doesn’t lead to healing. I’ve seen these processes divide

a lot of scenes but I haven’t seen them help people get support, retake

power or feel safe again.

Rape breaks you — the loss of bodily control, how those feeling of

impotence revisit you, how it robs you of any illusion of safety or

sanity. We need models that help people take power back and we need to

call the retribution, control, and banishing of the current model for

what it is — revenge. Revenge is OK but lets not pretend its not about

power! If shaming and retaliatory violence is what we have to work with

then lets be real about it. Let��s chose those tools if we can honestly

say that is what we want to do. In the midst of this war we need to get

better at being in conflict.

Rape has always been used as this tool of control — proffered up as a

threat of what would happen if I, in my queerness and gendered

ambiguity, continued to live, work, dress, travel, love or resist the

way that I chose to. Those warnings held no water for me — in my heart I

knew it was only a matter of time — no matter what kind of life I chose

to live because my socially prescribed gender put me at constant risk

for violation. I was raped at work and it took me a while to really name

that assault as rape. After it happened mostly what I felt, once the

pain, rage and anger subsided was relief. Relief that it had finally

happened. I had been waiting my whole life for it to happen, had had a

few close calls and finally I knew what it felt like and I knew I could

get through it.

I needed that bad trick. I needed a concrete reason for the hunted

feelings that stemmed from my friend’s rape, murder and mutilation a few

years back. I needed to have someone hurt me and realize I had both the

desire to kill them and the personal control to keep myself from doing

it. I needed to reach out for support and be disappointed. Because

that’s how it goes down — ask the survivors you know most people don’t

come out of it feeling supported. We’ve raised expectations but the real

life experience is still shit.

I was traveling abroad when it happened. The only person I told called

the police against my wishes. They searched the “crime” scene without my

consent and took DNA evidence because I didn’t dispose of it. Knowing I

had allowed myself in a moment of vulnerability to be pressured and

coerced into participating in the police process against my political

will made me feel even worse than being violated had. I left town

shortly thereafter so I didn’t have to continue to be pressured by my

‘friend’ into cooperating with the police any more than I already had.

The only way I felt any semi-balance of control during that period was

by taking retribution against my rapist into my own hands.

I realized that I also could wield threats, anger and implied violence

as a weapon. After my first experience of ‘support’ I chose to do that

alone. I could think of no one in that moment to ask for help but it was

OK because I realized I could do it myself. In most other places I think

I could have asked some of my friends to help me. The culture of

nonviolence does not totally permeate all of the communities I exist in.

The lack of affinity I felt was a result of being transient to that city

but I don’t think my experience of being offered mediation instead of

confrontation is particularly unique.

In the case of sexual assault I think retaliatory violence is

appropriate, and I don’t think there needs to be any kind of consensus

about it. Pushing models that promise to mediate instead of allow

confrontation is isolating and alienating. I didn’t want mediation

through legal channels or any other. I wanted revenge. I wanted to make

him feel as out of control, scared and vulnerable as he had made me

feel. There is no safety really after a sexual assault, but there can be

consequences.

We can’t provide survivors safe space — safe space, in a general sense,

outside of close friendships, some family and the occasional affinity

just doesn’t exist. Our current models of accountability suffer from an

over-abundance of hope. Fuck the false promises of safe space — we will

never get everyone on the same page about this. Let’s cop to how hard

healing is and how delusional any expectation for a radical change of

behavior is in the case of assault. We need to differentiate between

physical assault and emotional abuse — throwing them together under the

general rubric interpersonal violence doesn’t help.

Cyclical patterns of abuse don’t just disappear. This shit is really

really deep — many abusers were abused and many abused become abusers.

The past few years I have watched with horror as the language of

accountability became an easy front for a new generation of emotional

manipulators. It’s been used to perfect a new kind of predatory maverick

— the one schooled in the language of sensitivity — using the illusion

of accountability as community currency.

So where does real safety come from? How can we measure it? Safety comes

from trust, and trust is personal. It can’t be mediated or rubber

stamped at a community level. My ‘safe’ lover might be your secret

abuser and my caustic codependent ex might be your healthy, tried and

true confidant. Rape culture is not easily undone, but it is contextual.

People in relation to each other create healthy or unhealthy exchanges.

There is no absolute for ‘fucked up’, ‘healed’ or ‘safe’ — it changes

with time, life circumstance, and each new love affair. It is with

feelings of unease that I have observed the slippery slope of

‘emotional’ abuse become a common reason to initiate an accountability

process...

Here is the problem with using this model for emotional abuse: its an

unhealthy dynamic between two people. So who gets to call it? Who gets

to wield that power in the community? (And lets all be honest that there

is power in calling someone to an accountability process.) People in

unhealthy relationships need a way to get out of them without it getting

turned into a community judgment against whomever was unlucky enough to

not realize a bad dynamic or call it abuse first. These processes

frequently exacerbate mutually unhealthy power plays between hurt

parties. People are encouraged to pick sides and yet no direct conflict

brings these kinds of entanglements to any kind of resolve.

Using accountability models developed all those years ago to deal with

serial rapists in the radical scene has not been much to help in getting

people out of the sand pit of damaging and codependent relationships.

Emotional abuse is a fucking vague and hard to define term. It means

different things to every person.

If someone hurts you and you want to hurt them back — then do it but

don’t pretend its about mutual healing. Call power exchange for what it

is. Its OK to want power back and its OK to take it but never do

anything to someone else that you couldn’t stomach having someone do to

you if the tables were turned.

Those inclined to use physical brutality to gain power need to be taught

a lesson in a language they will understand. The language of physical

violence. Those mired in unhealthy relationships need help examining a

mutual dynamic and getting out of it — not assigning blame. No one can

decide who deserves compassion and who doesn’t except the people

directly involved.

There is no way to destroy rape culture through non-violent

communication because there is no way to destroy rape culture without

destroying society. In the meantime let’s stop expecting the best or the

worst from people.

I am sick of accountability and its lack of transparency. I am sick of

triangulating. I am sick of hiding power exchange. I am sick of hope. I

have been raped. I have been an unfair manipulator of power in some of

my intimate relationships. I have had sexual exchanges that were a

learning curve for better consent. I have the potential in me to be both

survivor and perp — abused and abuser — as we all do.

These essentialist categories don’t serve us. People rape — very few

people are rapists in every sexual exchange. People abuse one another —

this abuse is often mutual and cyclical — cycles are hard but not

impossible to amend. These behaviors change contextually. Therefore

there is no such thing as safe space.

I want us to be honest about being at war — with ourselves, with our

lovers and with our “radical” community because we are at war with the

world at large and those tendrils of domination exist within us and they

affect so much of what we touch, who we love and those we hurt.

But we are not only the pain we cause others or the violence inflicted

upon us.

We need more direct communication and when that doesn’t help we need

direct engagement in all its horrible messy glory. As long as we make

ourselves vulnerable to others we will never be safe in the total sense

of the word.

There is only affinity and trust kept. There is only trust broken and

confrontation. The war isn’t going to end anytime soon Let’s be better

at being in conflict.

Love You Too Much

by Alex Gorrion [1]

The gnostic priests of Capital, who wish to see in everything only their

imperfect, evil God, can nail down the torrential force of romantic love

within their flat cosmology by referring it to the nuclear family, which

exists only to reproduce labor power, and thus will disappoint the

desires that justify it; or they can claim, and not without evidence,

that love has been commoditized, and the consumption of a commodity

extinguishes its value and produces, again, disappointment. But they are

as inadequate as their nemeses, the priests of the Market, who assure

that every ill will be worked out by an Invisible Hand. Capitalism’s

effect on the emotions is nearly always dulling. The anticlimax of

Christmas, that most condensed gifting and extinguishing of commodities,

does not lead to bloodbaths, but to boredom. The violence born of love

does not climax in the formation of the family, as it would if its cause

were the inability of a labor-power factory to satisfy human emotion,

but accompanies it every step of the way. To understand the wrath that

hides behind the mask of that most tender sentiment, we need to seek out

older, more jealous gods.

Perhaps it is the way pop music conditions our expectations that kept me

from realizing, at first, that Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie”

(featuring Rihanna) is not a macho glorification of domestic violence

but rather one of the few honest love songs to ever top the charts.

It’s an easy song to hate or to fear, because it protagonizes someone

who beats his partner, and climaxes with the following lines:

<verse> Next time I’m pissed I’ll aim my fist At the dry wall Next time

There will be no next time I apologize Even though I know it’s lies I’m

tired of the games I just want her back I know I’m a liar If she ever

tries to fucking leave again I’mma tie her to the bed And set the house

on fire </verse>

Rihanna, singing the chorus, responds periodically with:

The song follows a moral compass that unequivocably signals domestic

violence as wrong. But it also presents such violence as an inevitable

tragedy, which the beater as much as the person beaten reproduces. The

song itself explains their love as an irrational, overpowering

addiction.

<verse> I can’t tell you what it really is I can only tell you what it

feels like And right now there’s a steel knife In my windpipe I can’t

breathe But I still fight While I can fight As long as the wrong feels

right It’s like I’m in flight High off a love Drunk from the hate It’s

like I’m huffing paint And I love it the more that I suffer I suffocate

And right before I’m about to drown She resuscitates me She fucking

hates me And I love it Wait Where you going I’m leaving you No you ain’t

Come back We’re running right back Here we go again It’s so insane

</verse>

I can’t remember if it was the comparison to addiction or the line “I

love you too much” that forced me to recognize this song had more

validity than my fears wanted me to admit. It’s a commonplace that songs

on the radio pine “I can’t live without you,” “I never want to leave

your side,” and other statements of absolute codependency that decorate

the elaborate myth of romantic love, in which two people complete each

other in a static and unending congruity. How many of these songs are

honest enough to mention the abuse that logically accompanies this kind

of love?

It was the look in his eyes as he beat her. As though his dearest

illusion had shattered, and he had snapped with it. She wasn’t his, she

never had been, and she never would be. Up until now, she had chosen to

accompany him, and after today, clearly, she would not. “Whatever

happened to ‘Until death do us part’?” he muttered confusedly, on one of

the few occasions he ever talked about it with me. He didn’t understand

the kind of love that changed, the kind that was contingent on choice.

I continued to love them both, not with the proprietary love of a

husband or a mother, but with the love of a child who wants everyone to

be okay. By loving them I learned a number of things. I learned that she

was strong, that we may not get to choose if we get beaten, but we can

choose whether we become victims, or whether we walk out. She never

hated him, either, but unlike Rihanna’s character in the Eminem song,

her sympathy was not a weakness, not a resignation to being abused. I

also learned from her that abuser and survivor are flexible categories,

that one is very likely to become the other, and therefore neither of

these can define someone. Someone who has been hurt very often wants to

hurt others, or to turn them into protective appendages. The patriarchy

I grew up in never taught me that my gender entitled me to abuse without

being abused. What I was taught is that you gotta pay your dues.

And what I learned from him is that his story was also important. He was

not evil, but hurt. What happened in that cold family he never talked

about? He was clearly scarred. Now I was too. I was sure that I would be

much better than him. I wasn’t entirely correct. The story that’s never

spoken is sure to be repeated. Hate it, fear it, ban it from the radio.

It’s going to come back around.

A single-minded critique of capitalism cannot possibly explain the

vehemence of love, and must neglect love’s central role in perpetuating

the harm we do to ourselves. Love is something more than desire and its

misplaced satisfaction in commodity form. But the traditional

understanding of patriarchy, as a hierarchical system with men

dominating women, is also inadequate, because love is also something

different than hierarchy. Love does not end in the domination of the

other but in the mutual destruction of self and other. Its most

uncensored expression is the murder-suicide.

N was starting to lose it. S became the object of his obsessions. They

had been comrades and lovers. Once it got undeniably unhealthy, she

ended it. But he couldn’t walk away. He became unhinged, but she refused

to call the police, because she cared about him, and hated the state.

The rest of us couldn’t provide the support they both needed, neither

the friendship that would have given him the strength to heal, nor the

accompaniment that would have saved her. I lived in a different town:

that was my excuse.

One night he killed her, walked up the hill to watch her house burn

down, opened his wrists, and spilled his guts out on the ground in front

of him.

I understood those who hated him for it. But I couldn’t find it in

myself. He already hated himself enough, and that was the part that

finally triumphed.

In our society, love is the perfect mask for self-hatred. I don’t

believe that self-hatred is a product of capitalism, but an inevitable

companion to the anguish of living. However, work, politics,

colonialism, deforestation, and the patriarchal family give us many more

reasons to hate ourselves. And they deprive us of means to heal

ourselves. Strength is collective property. No one is alone. The

illusion of individuality, where it succeeds, leaves us constantly

bleeding. All the nodes on our body that connected us with the world —

my hand that gripped yours, my lips that kissed his, my feet that held

up the earth, my lungs that traded secrets with the leaves in the trees,

my belly that was a furnace transmuting one living thing into another —

become open wounds.

By promising us one intimate relation with another being, they in fact

take away all those other relations, and they produce a silence that

exiles us into one another, often destroying the affection of the couple

by demanding the world of it. When the opium must also be food and water

and shelter, the user destroys, ultimately, her love affair with the

opium as well.

Patriarchy doesn’t reproduce itself as a hierarchy, but as a network.

What will be most hard to accept, and most easily dismissed as a

dangerously sexist idea, is that it is a fully participatory enterprise.

The tendency of some feminists today to reject the fact of participatory

patriarchy only shows how deeply they have internalized a capitalist and

statist worldview. Believing that we all have agency does not mean we

believe in the American dream, that anyone can pull themselves up by

their bootstraps and that any misfortune that someone suffers is

ultimately their fault. S was one of the strongest people I knew. She

died first and foremost because N gave her no choice in the matter, and

secondly because we, her friends, could not give her the support she

needed to defend herself and we could not give N the critical support he

needed to heal. S’s agency resides in how she chose to deal with the

situation, decisions that were brave and principled, even though

everything ended so horribly. It shouldn’t have to be said: we live in a

shit world and things often end, no matter what we do, in the worst

possible way. This doesn’t change our agency in these situations.

Perhaps ninety-nine times, we may try to avoid tragedy and fail. The

difference is, if we refuse to be victims, the way S was a fighter and

not a victim, the hundredth time things might just turn out better.

The point is, within circles dedicated to fighting patriarchy- i.e. most

anarchist and feminist circles- we need to get over our politically

correct fear of blaming victims. If we are consistent in our political

views then we do not believe in blame, nor do we feel affinity with

victims.[2] We must focus on agency and on the potential for underdogs

and disempowered people to change their situations. I feel it is

essential to stress: it’s the only way out of this mess.

Some patriarchal societies have practically imprisoned women. Others,

such as ours, offer mobility. What contradicts the theory of a

hierarchical patriarchy is that whether or not a society offers this

mobility, most people still don’t walk out. Regardless of whether a

woman would get stoned for leaving her husband, or whether she’d be able

to get a job and an apartment, the abusive relationships don’t end.

Because they are not predicated on enforcement. The content of the

gender roles differ wildly from one patriarchy to the next, and although

a duality and some kind of privileging of the male half are features

common to all of them, the means of enforcement, and even the

availability of centralized coercion to enforce these roles, are

inconsistent. The universal feature that could guarantee the

reproduction of these roles with or without enforcement is their

complementality.

Patriarchy would either have aborted capitalism or been abolished by it

long ago if its functioning required that any power or autonomy remain

in the hands of its male half. Capitalism can brook no independence. No

radical feminist can deny this. Yet a misunderstanding of privilege has

done everyone a disservice, by painting women as too weak to break out

of this system if they actually wanted to, and men as the monsters who

keep the whole thing going. Privilege means, among other things, that

male perspectives and experiences are the default, but this could only

be possible within an oppressive system if it were impossible for men to

live within their own prescribed experiences. In other words, male

perspectives are the default, but they do not belong to or serve the

interests of those categorized as male.

And this is exactly how it works. As an oppressive network system that

supplements structurally enforced hierarchies (such as capitalism and

the State), patriarchy functions like an addiction, by fostering

dependency, casting incomplete parts to seek completion in an impossible

way, and in so doing to articulate a web of mutual theft or destruction

of value. It is, if you will, a scarcity machine, in which people keep

the treadmills running by stealing from those closest to them to fill

their own holes, like four people in a bed with a blanket big enough for

two. Love is this machine’s dynamo. Its violence arises when people

can’t live without exactly what is destroying them, when one thinks he

is completing another and actually he is filling up his hole by

eviscerating the other.

I told her from the beginning that I didn’t think monogamy was healthy

in a romantic relationship, at least for me. She considered this an

unhealthy, selfish attitude. Consequently, she was always right, or at

least excused, when she looked through my address book, read my old love

letters, searched the files on my computer, screamed at me, in order to

discover my infidelities. And when she broke the rules she herself had

laid down, it was only an error caused by the stress of loving a selfish

bastard. Our own imperfections are always easy to understand.

How long it took me to discover that healthy love is only possible when

we take responsibility for our own emotions — expropriate them from

these networks of codependency, as it were. And in fact I can be most

grateful to the lovers who treated me like shit, for teaching me this.

They took good care of themselves. Beyond that: “If we meet, it’s

marvelous. If not, that’s alright.” I could either choose to take care

of myself, and not demand anything of others but what they gave as a

gift, or I could choose to be a victim. I chose the former, and our love

existed where we coincided. When we stopped coinciding, we went our

separate ways, each stronger and wiser.

We love in order to destroy ourselves, and build ourselves back up

again, a heartbroken friend tells me in a moment of hope.

Once the affair is over, we’re free, until the end of our days, to think

about the person we loved, to care about them, to wish them well, to

wonder what part of ourselves must be broken that it turned out this

way, to malign the nature of our love that it became a weapon against

our lover; where it should have completed, it only hurt and controlled,

and we will never be able to make it right, nor reconcile the sincerity

of the concern we feel for that person with the damage we caused in the

intensity of our passion. Perhaps the best way to go on loving them is

to love the next person better.

Both the idea of romantic love and many of the radical responses to its

inevitable abuses are implicitly predicated on the idea of human

fragility.

Love runs perpetually from a fear of loneliness, but only by embracing

this loneliness and — not conquering it; it will never be conquered —

make our peace with it, can we love not as a parasite but as one

creating a joyous project among companions. Accountability, meanwhile,

often unknowingly fosters moral and judicial frameworks of blame. In

this paradigm, pointing out that patriarchy is participatory will be

interpreted not as the first step towards a strategy of liberation, but

as blaming the victim.

This defensiveness is perfectly understandable, given how judicial

processes impose themselves on us, and in these processes the person

with less social privilege usually takes the blame for whatever disorder

has interrupted the illusion of social peace.

But if what we are setting up is not a courthouse but a commune, a

conspiracy among friends, the embodiment of our dreams, we have to

permit ourselves to talk about things that could never be said in a

society in which “everything you say will be used against you.”

One of these unmentionables is that sometimes we choose to be abused.

Sometimes it feels good. Sometimes we “like the way it hurts.”

As we move from a world of imposed desires and addictive relationships

to one in which relationships express our paradoxical agency and

independence as subjects of the world and interlaced hubs in a network

of mutual aid, play can be as important a tool as destruction.

Patriarchy is a game that solidified and forgot its own rules. Queer

theory and some of the libertarian psychologists who preceded it have

taught us that suppressing what troubles us only perpetuates it. By

playing with power dynamics, playing with pain, even playing with

torture, we make them our own, and we can make them harmless to us.

We are not so fragile that by having our partner tie us up and having

her whip us or choke us with a dildo we lose something to her, we become

dominated.

A consensual scenario is a world apart from an abusive relationship, but

the hidden connection between the two, and the one thing that would

allow us to move from the latter to the former, is that in both

situations we have agency, whether we recognize it or not, and that our

own desires may well be contradictory and frightening.

Compare the Eminem song to “Kiss with a Fist” by Florence and the

Machine. Though the singer croons that “A kiss with a fist is better

than none,” and, just like Eminem, promises to set her lover’s bed on

fire, only a dogmatic second-waver could claim “Kiss With a Fist” is a

fucked up song that apologizes for abuse or victimization.

The Eminem song frightens us because it protagonizes the batterer, and

to a lesser extent also the survivor who chooses to remain. It refers to

emotions all of us have felt, and thus forces us either to reject it as

incorrect, or to acknowledge our own capacity to abuse or to choose to

be abused, without judgment.

By suspending judgment, or at least mixing it with sympathy, the song

creates the possibility of learning from a seemingly incurable

situation. Judgment makes learning impossible. The judge is the greatest

fool in the statist pantheon, because one cannot learn from those one

condemns.

The picture painted in “Love the Way You Lie” reveals the violence of

love not as a hierarchy but as a cycle. Perhaps what is needed to change

this cycle is the recognition that abuse is a function of dependency and

nowadays dependency is perfectly normal, but it is also an expression of

our individual agency; what we need is no less than to be exceptional.

Questioning Rape

by Anonymous

Coming To Terms

How do you begin to say, “I think we’ve been going about this all

wrong?” How do you get out of a dead-end without going in reverse?

It seems like in the last fifteen years, rape has gone from being an

issue that was only talked about by feminists and downplayed in other

radical communities, to one of the most commonly addressed forms of

oppression. Part of this change might be owed to the hard work of

feminist and queer activists, another part to the spread of anarchism,

with its heavy emphasis on both class and gender politics, and another

part to the antiglobalization movement, which brought together many

previously separated single issues.

Despite all the changes in fifteen years, its just as common to hear the

sentiment that rape is still tacitly permitted in radical communities or

that the issues of gender and patriarchy are minimized, even though in

most activist or anarchist conferences and distros I know about, rape

culture and patriarchy have been among the most talked about topics, and

it wasn’t just talk. In the communities I have been a part of there have

been cases of accused rapists or abusers being kicked out and survivors

being supported, along with plenty of feminist activities, events, and

actions.

All the same, every year I meet more people who have stories of

communities torn apart by accusations of rape or abuse, both by the

shock and trauma of the original harm, and then by the way people have

responded and positioned themselves. One option is to blame a passive

majority that toe the line, giving lip service to the new politically

correct doctrine, without living up to their ideals. In some cases I

think that is exactly what happened. But even when there is full

community support, it still often goes wrong.

After years of thinking about this problem, learning about other

people’s experiences, and witnessing accountability processes from the

margins and from the center, I strongly believe that the model we have

for understanding and responding to rape is deeply flawed. For a long

time I have heard criticisms of this model, but on the one hand I never

found a detailed explanation of these criticisms and on the other I was

trained to assume that anyone criticizing the model was an apologist for

rape, going on the defensive because their own patriarchal attitudes

were being called out. After personally meeting a number of critical

people who were themselves longtime feminists and survivors, I started

to seriously question my assumptions.

Since then, I have come to the conclusion that the way we understand and

deal with rape is all wrong and it often causes more harm than good. But

many of the features of the current model were sensible responses to the

Left that didn’t give a damn about rape and patriarchy. Maybe the

biggest fault of the model, and the activists who developed it, is that

even though they rejected the more obvious patriarchal attitudes of the

traditional Left, they unconsciously included a mentality of puritanism

and law and order that patriarchal society trains us in. I don’t want to

go back to a complicit silence on these issues. For that reason, I want

to balance every criticism I make of the current model with suggestion

for a better way to understand and deal with rape.

My Experience

When I was in a mutually abusive relationship, one in which both of us

were doing things we should not have done, without being directly aware

of it, that resulted in causing serious psychological harm to the other

person, I learned some interesting things about the label of “survivor.”

It represents a power that is at odds with the process of healing. If I

was called out for abuse, I became a morally contemptible person. But if

I were also a survivor, I suddenly deserved sympathy and support. None

of this depended on the facts of the situation, on how we actually hurt

each other. In fact, no one else knew of the details, and even the two

of us could not agree on them. The only thing that mattered was to make

an accusation. And as the activist model quickly taught us, it was not

enough to say, “You hurt me.” We had to name a specific crime. “Abuse.”

“Assault.” “Rape.” A name from a very specific list of names that enjoy

a special power. Not unlike a criminal code.

I did not want to create an excuse for how I hurt someone I loved. I

wanted to understand how I was able to hurt that person without being

aware of it at the time. But I had to turn my pain and anger with the

other person into accusations according to a specific language, or I

would become a pariah and undergo a much greater harm than the

self-destruction of this one relationship. The fact that I come from an

abusive family could also win me additional points. Everyone, even those

who do not admit it, know that within this system having suffered abuse

in your past grants you a sort of legitimacy, even an excuse for harming

someone else. But I don’t want an excuse. I want to get better, and I

want to live without perpetuating patriarchy. I sure as hell don’t want

to talk about painful stories from my past with people who are not

unconditionally sympathetic towards me, as the only way to win their

sympathy and become a human in their eyes.

As for the other person, I don’t know what was going on in their head,

but I do know that they were able to deny ever harming me, violating my

consent, violating my autonomy, and lying to me, by making the

accusation of abuse. The label of “survivor” protected them from

accountability. It also enabled them to make demands of me, all of which

I met, even though some of those demands were harmful to me and other

people. Because I had not chosen to make my accusation publicly, I had

much less power to protect myself in this situation.

And as for the so-called community, those who were good friends

supported me. Some of them questioned me and made sure I was going

through a process of self-criticism. Those who were not friends or who

held grudges against me tried to exclude me, including one person who

had previously been called out for abuse. In other word, the accusation

of abuse was used as an opportunity for power plays within our so-called

community.

For all its claims about giving importance to feelings, the activist

model is coded with total apathy. The only way to get the ball of

community accountability rolling is to accuse someone of committing a

specific crime.

The role of our most trusted friends in questioning our responses, our

impulses, and even our own experiences is invaluable. This form of

questioning is in fact one of the most precious things that friendship

offers. No one is infallible and we can only learn and grow by being

questioned. A good friend is one who can question your behavior in a

difficult time without ever withdrawing their support for you. The idea

that “the survivor is always right” creates individualistic expectations

for the healing process. A survivor as much as a perpetrator needs to be

in charge of their own healing process, but those who support them

cannot be muted and expected to help them fulfill their every wish. This

is a obvious in the case of someone who has harmed someone else it

should also be clear in the case of someone who has been harmed We need

each other to heal. But the others in a healing process cannot be muted

bodies. They must be communicative and critical bodies.

Perp/Survivor

The term “perpetrator” should set off alarm bells right away. The

current model uses not only the vocabulary but also the grammar of the

criminal justice system, which is a patriarchal institution through and

through. This makes perfect sense: law and order is one of the most

deeply rooted elements of the American psyche, and more immediately,

many feminist activists have one foot in radical communities and another

foot in NGOs. The lack of a critique of these NGOs only makes it more

certain that they will train us in institutional modes of thinking.

The current method is not only repulsive for its puritanism and its

similarity to the Christian notions of the elect and the damned; it is

also a contradiction of queer, feminist, and anarchist understandings of

patriarchy. If everyone or most people are capable of causing harm,

being abusive, or even of raping someone (according to the activist

definition which can include not recognizing lack of consent, unlike the

traditional definition which focuses on violent rape), then it makes no

sense to morally stigmatize those people as though they were especially

bad or dangerous. The point we are trying to make is not that the

relatively few people who are called out for abuse or even for rape are

especially evil, but that the entire culture supports such power

dynamics, to the extent that these forms of harm are common. By taking a

self-righteous, “tough on crime” stance, everyone else can make

themselves seem like the good guys. But there can’t be good guys without

bad guys. This is the same patriarchal narrative of villain, victim, and

savior, though in the latter role, instead of the boyfriend or police

officer, we now have the community.

The term “survivor,” on the other hand, continues to recreate the

victimization of the standard term, “victim,” that it was designed to

replace. One reason for calling someone a “survivor” is to focus on

their process of overcoming the rape, even though it defines them

perpetually in relation to it. The other reason is to spread awareness

of how many thousands of people, predominately women, queer, and trans

people, are injured or killed every year by patriarchal violence. This

is an important point to make. However, given the way that rape has been

redefined in activist circles, and the extension of the term “survivor”

to people who suffer any form of abuse, the vast majority of things that

constitute rape or abuse do not have the slightest possibility of ending

someone’s life. This term blurs very different forms of violence.

Judging Harm

Hopefully, the reader is thinking that an action does not need to be

potentially lethal to constitute a very real form of harm. I absolutely

agree. But if that’s the case, why do we need to make it sound like it

does in order to take it seriously? Why connect all forms of harm to

life-threatening harm instead of communicating that all forms of harm

are serious?

As for these crimes, their definitions have changed considerably, but

they still remain categories of criminality that must meet the

requirements of a certain definition to justify a certain punishment.

The activist model has been most radical by removing the figure of the

judge and allowing the person harmed to judge for themselves. However,

the judge role has not been abolished, simply transferred to the

survivor, and secondarily to the people who manage the accountability

process. The act of judging still takes place, because we are still

dealing with punishment for a crime, even if it is never called that.

The patriarchal definition of rape has been abandoned in favor of a new

understanding that defines rape as sex without consent, with whole

workshops and pamphlets dedicated to the question of consent. Consent

must be affirmative rather than the absence of a negative, it is

canceled by intoxication, intimidation, or persistence, it should be

verbal and explicit between people who don’t know each other as well,

and it can be withdrawn at any time. The experience of a survivor can

never be questioned, or to put it another way an accusation of rape is

always true. A similar formulation that sums up this definition is,

“assault is when I feel assaulted.”

Distinguishing Rape and Abuse

I don’t want to distinguish rape from other forms of harm without

talking about how to address all instances of harm appropriately. One

solution that does not require us to judge which form of harm is more

important, but also does not pretend they are all the same, would have

two parts. The first part is to finally acknowledge the importance of

feelings, by taking action when someone says “I have been hurt,” and not

waiting until someone makes an accusation of a specific crime, such as

abuse or rape. Because we are responding to the fact of harm and not the

violation of an unwritten law, we do not need to look for someone to

blame. The important thing is that someone is hurting, and they need

support. Only if they discover that they cannot get better unless they

go through some form of mediation with the other person or unless they

gain space and distance from them, does that other person need to be

brought into it. The other person does not need to be stigmatized, and

the power plays involved in the labels of perpetrator and survivor are

avoided.

The second part changes the emphasis from defining violations of consent

to focusing on how to prevent them from happening again. Every act of

harm can be looked at with the following question in mind: “What would

have been necessary to prevent this from happening.” This question needs

to be asked by the person who was harmed, by their social circle, and if

possible by the person who caused the harm.

The social circle is most likely to be able to answer this question when

the harm relates to long-term relationships or shared social spaces.

They might realize that if they had been more attentive or better

prepared they would have seen the signs of an abusive relationship,

expressed their concern, and offered help. Or they might realize that,

in a concert hall they commonly use, there are a number of things they

can all do to make it clear that groping and harassing is not

acceptable. But in some situations they can only offer help after the

fact. They cannot be in every bedroom or on every dark street to prevent

forms of gender violence or intimate violence that happen there.

In the case of the person who caused the harm, the biggest factor is

whether they are emotionally present to ask themselves this question. If

they can ask, “what could I have done to not have hurt this person,”

they have taken the most important step to identifying their own

patriarchal conditioning, and to healing from unresolved past trauma if

that’s an issue. If they are emotionally present to the harm they have

caused, they deserve support. Those closest to the person they hurt may

rightfully be angry and not want anything to do with them, but there

should be other people wiling to play this role. The person they have

hurt deserves distance, if they want it, but except in extreme cases it

does no good to stigmatize or expel them in a permanent way.

If they can ask themselves this question honestly, and especially if

their peers can question them in this process, they may discover that

they have done nothing wrong, or that they could not have known their

actions would have been harmful. Sometimes, relationships simply hurt,

and it is not necessary to find someone to blame, though this is often

the tendency, justified or not. The fact that some relationships are

extremely hurtful but also totally innocent is another reason why it is

dangerous to lump all forms of harm together, presupposing them all to

be the result of an act of abuse for which someone is responsible.

If their friends are both critical and sympathetic, they are most likely

to be able to recognize when they did something wrong, and together with

their friends, they are the ones in the best position to know how to

change their behavior so they don’t cause similar harm in the future. If

their friends have good contact with the person who was hurt (or that

person’s friends), they are more likely to take the situation seriously

and not let the person who caused the harm off the hook with a band-aid

solution.

This new definition is a response to the patriarchal definition, which

excuses the most common forms of rape (rape by acquaintances, rape of

someone unable to give consent, rape in which someone does not clearly

say “no”). It is a response to a patriarchal culture that was always

making excuses for rape or blaming the victim.

The old definition and the old culture are abhorrent. But the new

definition and the practice around it do not work. We need to change

these without going back to the patriarchal norm. In fact, we haven’t

fully left the patriarchal norm behind us. Saying “assault is when I

feel assaulted” is only a new way to determine when the crime of assault

has been committed, keeping the focus on the transgression of the

assaulter, then we still have the mentality of the criminal justice

system, but without the concept of justice or balance.

At the other extreme, there are people who act inexcusably and are

totally unable to admit it. Simply put, if someone hurts another person

and they are not emotionally present in the aftermath, simply put, it is

impossible to take their feelings into consideration. You can’t save

someone who doesn’t want help. In such a case, the person hurt and their

social circle need to do what is best for themselves, both to heal and

to protect themselves from a person they have no guarantee will treat

them well in the future. Maybe they will decide to shame that person,

frighten them, beat them up, or kick them out of town. Although kicking

them out of town brings the greatest peace of mind, it should be thought

of as a last resort, because it passes off the problem on the next

community where the expelled person goes. Because it is a relatively

easy measure it is also easy to use disproportionately. Rather than

finding a solution that avoids future conflict, it is better to seek a

conflictive solution. This also forces people to face the consequences

of their own righteous anger which can be a learning process.

Finally, the most important question comes from the person who was hurt.

The victimistic mentality of our culture, along with the expectation

that everyone is out to blame the victim, make it politically incorrect

to insist the person who has been hurt ask themselves, “what would have

made it possible to avoid this?” but such an attitude is necessary to

overcoming the victim mentality and feeling empowered again. It is

helpful for everyone who lives in a patriarchal world where we will

probably encounter more people who try to harm us. Its not about blaming

ourselves for what happened, but about getting stronger and more able to

defend ourselves in the future.

I know that some zealous defenders of the present model will make the

accusation that I am blaming the victim, so I want to say this again:

it’s about preventing future rapes and abuse, not blaming ourselves if

we have been raped or abused. The current model basically suggests that

people play the role of victims and wait for society or the community to

save them. Many of us think this is bullshit. Talking with friends of

mine who have been raped and looking back at my own history of being

abused, I know that we grew stronger in certain ways, and this is

because we took responsibility for our own healthy and safety.

In some cases, the person who was hurt will find that if they had

recognized certain patterns of dependence or jealousy, if they had had

more self-esteem, or they had asserted themselves, they could have

avoided being harmed. Unless they insist on retaining a puritan morality

this is not to say that it was their fault. It is a simple recognizing

of how they need to grow in order to be safer and stronger in a

dangerous world. This method focuses not on blame, but on making things

better.

The Most Extreme Form of Harm

Sometimes, however, the person will come to the honest conclusion,

“there was nothing I could have done (except staying home / having a gun

/ having a bodyguard).” This answer marks the most extreme form of harm.

Someone has suffered a form of violence that they could not have avoided

because of the lengths the aggressor went to in order to override their

will. Even shouting “No!” would not have been enough. It is a form of

harm that cannot be prevented at an individual level and therefore it

will continue to be reproduced until there is a profound social

revolution, if that ever happens.

If we have to define rape, it seems more consistent with a radical

analysis of patriarchy to define rape as sex against someone’s will.

Because will is what we want taken into the realm of action this idea of

rape does not make the potential victim dependent on the good behavior

of the potential rapist. It is our own responsibility to depress our

will. Focusing on expressing and enacting our will directly strengthens

ourselves as individuals and our struggles against rape and all other

forms of domination.

If rape is all sex without affirmative consent, then it is the potential

rapist, and not the potential victim, who retains the power over the

sexual encounter. They have the responsibility to make sure the other

person gives consent. If it is the sole responsibility of one person to

receive consent from another person, then we are saying that person is

more powerful then the other, without proposing how to change those

power dynamics.

Additionally, if a rape can happen accidentally, simply because this

responsible person, the one expected to play the part of the perfect

gentleman, is inattentive or insensitive, or drunk, or oblivious to

things like body language that can negate verbal consent, or from

another culture with a different body language, then we’re not

necessarily dealing with a generalized relationship of social power,

because not everyone who rapes under this definition believes they have

a right to the other person’s body.

Rape needs to be understood as a very specific form of harm. We can’t

encourage the naive ideal of a harm-free world. People will always hurt

each other, and it is impossible to learn how not to hurt others without

also making mistakes. As far as harm goes, we need to be more

understanding than judgmental.

But we can and must encourage the ideal of a world without rape, because

rape is the result of a patriarchal society teaching its members that

men and other more powerful people have a right to the bodies of women

and other less powerful people. Without this social idea, there is no

rape. What’s more, rape culture, understood in this way, lies at least

partially at the heart of slavery, property, and work, at the roots of

the State, capitalism, and authority.

This is a dividing line between one kind of violence and all the other

forms of abuse. It’s not to say that the other forms of harm are less

serious or less important. It is a recognition that the other forms of

harm can be dealt with using less extreme measures. A person or group of

people who would leave someone no escape can only be dealt with through

exclusion and violence. Then it becomes a matter of pure self-defense.

In all the other cases, there is a possibility for mutual growth and

healing.

Questioning Rape

Sympathetic or supportive questioning can play a key role in responses

to abuse. If we accept rape as a more extreme form of violence that the

person could not have reasonably avoided, they need the unquestioning

support and love of their friends.

We need to educate ourselves how systematically patriarchy has silenced

those who talk about being raped through suspicion, disbelief, or

counter accusations. But we also need to be aware that there have been a

small number of cases in which accusations of rape have not been true.

No liberating practice should ever require us to surrender our own

critical judgement and demand that we follow a course of action we are

not allowed to question.

Being falsely accused of rape or being accused in a non-transparent way

is a heavily traumatizing experience. It is a far less common occurrence

than valid accusations of rape that the accused person denies, but we

should never have to opt for one kind of harm in order to avoid another.

If it is true that rapists exist in our circles, it is also true that

pathological liars exist in our circles. There has been at least one

city where such a person made a rape accusation to discredit another

activist. People who care about fighting patriarchy will not suspect

someone of being a pathological liar every time they are unsure about a

rape accusation. If you are close to someone for long enough, you will

inevitably find out if they are a fundamentally dishonest person (or if

they are like the rest of us, sometimes truthful, sometimes less so).

Therefore, someone’s close acquaintances, if they care about the

struggle against rape culture, will never accuse them of lying if they

say they’ve been raped. But often accusations spread by rumors and reach

people who do not personally know the accuser and the accused. The

culture of anonymous communication through rumors and the internet often

create a harmful situation in which it is impossible to talk about

accountability or about the truth of what happened in a distant

situation.

Anarchists and other activists also have many enemies who have proven

themselves capable of atrocities in the course of repression. A fake

rape accusation is nothing to them. A police infiltrator in Canada used

the story of being a survivor of an abusive relationship to avoid

questions about her past and win the trust of anarchists she would later

set up for prison sentences. [3] Elsewhere, a member of an authoritarian

socialist group made an accusation against several rival anarchists, one

of whom, it turned out, was not even in town on the night in question.

Some false accusations of rape are totally innocent. Sometimes a person

begins to relive a previous traumatic experience while in a physically

intimate space with another person, and it is not always easy or

possible to distinguish between the one experience and the other. A

person can begin to relive a rape while they are having consensual sex.

It is definitely not the one person’s fault for having a normal reaction

to trauma, but it is also not necessarily the other person’s fault that

the trauma was triggered.

A mutual and dynamic definition of consent as active communication

instead of passive negation would help reduce triggers being mislabeled

as rape. If potential triggers are discussed before the sexual exchange

and the responsibility for communicating needs and desires around

disassociation is in the hands of the person who disassociated then

consent is part of an active sexual practice instead of just being an

imperfect safety net.

If someone checks out during sex, and they know they check out during

sex, it is their responsibility to explain what that looks like and what

they would like the other person to do when it happens. We live in a

society where many people are assaulted, raped or have traumatic

experiences at some point in their lives. Triggers are different for

everyone. The expectation that ones partner should always be attuned

enough to know when one is disassociating, within a societal context

that does not teach us about the effects of rape, much less their

intimate emotive and psychological consequences — is unrealistic.

Consent is empowering as an active tool, it should not be approached as

a static obligation. Still, the fact remains that not all rape

accusation can be categorized as miscommunication, some are in fact

malicious.

There is a difficult contradiction between the fact that patriarchy

covers up rape, and the fact that there will be some false, unjustified,

or even malicious rape accusations in activist communities. The best

option is not to go with statistical probability and treat every

accusation as valid, because a false accusation can tear apart an entire

community make people apathetic or skeptical towards future

accountability processes. It is far better to educate ourselves, to be

aware of the prevalence of rape, to recognize common patterns of abusive

behavior, to learn how to respond in a sensitive and supportive way, and

also to recognize that there are some exceptions to the rules, and many

more situations that are complex and defy definition.

Solutions

The typical proposal for responding to rape, the community

accountability process, is based on a transparent lie. There are no

activist communities, only the desire for communities, or the convenient

fiction of communities. A community is a material web that binds people

together, for better and for worse, in interdependence. If its members

move away every couple years because the next pace seems cooler, it is

not a community. If it is easier to kick someone out than to go through

a difficult series of conversations with them, it is not a community.

Among the societies that had real communities, exile was the most

extreme sanction possible, tantamount to killing them. On many levels,

losing the community and all the relationships it involved was the same

as dying. Let’s not kid ourselves: we don’t have communities.

In many accountability processes, the so-called community has done as

much harm, or acted as selfishly, as the perpetrator. Giving such a

fictitious, self-interested group the power and authority of judge,

jury, and executioner is a recipe for disaster.

What we have are groups of friends and circles of acquaintances. We

should not expect to be able to deal with rape or abuse in a way that

does not generate conflict between or among these different groups and

circles. There will probably be no consensus, but we should not think of

conflict as a bad thing.

Every rape is different, every person is different, and every situation

will require a different solution. By trying to come up with a constant

mechanism for dealing with rape, we are thinking like the criminal

justice system. It is better to admit that we have no catch-all answer

to such a difficult problem. We only have our own desire to make things

better, aided by the knowledge we share. The point is not to build up a

structure that becomes perfect and unquestionable, but to build up

experience that allows us to remain flexible but effective.

Conclusion

The many failings in the current model have burned out one generation

another in just a few short years, setting the stage for the next

generation of zealous activists to take their ideals to the extreme,

denouncing anyone who questions them as apologists, and unaware how many

times this same dynamic has played out before because the very model

functions to expel the unorthodox, making it impossible to learn from

mistakes.

One such mistake has been the reproduction of a concept similar to the

penal sentence of the criminal justice system. If the people in charge

of the accountability process decide that someone must be expelled, or

forced to go to counseling, or whatever else, everyone in the so-called

community is forced to recognize that decision. Those who are not are

accused of supporting rape culture. A judge has a police force to back

up his decision. The accountability process has to use accusations and

emotional blackmail.

But the entire premise that everyone has to agree on the resolution is

flawed. The two or more people directly involved in the problem may

likely have different needs, even if they are both sincerely focused on

their own healing. The friends of the person who has been hurt might be

disgusted, and they might decide to beat the other person up. Other

people in the broader social circle might feel a critical sympathy with

the person who hurt someone else, and decide to support them. Both of

these impulses are correct. Getting beaten up as a result of your

actions, and receiving support, simply demonstrate the complex reactions

we generate. This is the real world, and facing its complexity can help

us heal.

The impulse of the activist model is to expel the perpetrator, or to

force them to go through a specific process. Either of these paths rest

on the assumption that the community mechanism holds absolute right, and

they both require that everyone complies with the decision and recognize

its legitimacy. This is authoritarianism. This is the criminal justice

system, recreated. This is patriarchy, still alive in our hearts.

What we need is a new set of compass points, and no new models. We need

to identify and overcome the mentalities of puritanism and law and

order. We need to recognize the complexity of individuals and of

interpersonal relationships. To avoid a formulaic morality, we need to

avoid the formula of labels and mass categories. Rather than speaking of

rapists, perpetrators, and survivors, we need to talk abut specific acts

and specific limitations, recognizing that everyone changes, and that

most people are capable of hurting and being hurt, and also of growing,

healing, and learning how to not hurt people, or not be victimized, in

the future. We also need to make the critical distinction between the

forms of harm that can be avoided as we get smarter and stronger, and

the kinds that require a collective self-defense.

The suggestions I have made offer no easy answers, and no perfect

categories. They demand flexibility, compassion, intelligence, bravery,

and patience. How could we expect to confront patriarchy with anything

less?

Epilogue

Half a dozen lessons I might never learn, not until them troubles come

around...[4]

First off, this zine was meant to be descriptive not prescriptive,

although I own the suggestions I’ve laid out and continue to hold to

them. The hope was that the zine would encourage contextual, thoughtful

and critical responses to rape and abuse. It should be possible within

anarchist circles to have critical reflection about the use of

essentialist categories without being accused of being a rape apologist.

We are all holding on so tight to these labels and I think it is

apparent that they are not working for us.

The zine was meant to parse out what wasn’t working about our

ever-expanding definition of rape and assault. It was an attempt to call

the innate judicial reasoning behind accountability processes into

question. It was meant as a critique of innocence and guilt, not an

attack on people who identify as survivors.

When we rely on appeals to innocence, we foreclose a form of resistance

that is outside the limits of law, and instead ally ourselves with the

State ...When people identify with their victimization, we need to

critically consider whether it is being used as a tactical maneuver to

construct themselves as innocent and exert power without being

questioned. That does not mean delegitimizing the claims made by

survivors— but rather, rejecting the framework of innocence, examining

each situation closely, and being conscientious of the multiple power

struggles at play in different conflicts. [5]

Giving voice to the “multiple power struggles” at play is an

uncomfortable process. Many people have offered feedback that they did

not like the zine because it perpetuates the myth that abuse is a

dynamic between two people and that feels like blaming the victim. It

was never my intention to downplay the pain of abuse. I do, however,

think that abuse is participatory and that it is useful to understand it

as such in order to heal. My criticism of an essentialist understanding

of victim or survivor is twofold: first, not everyone uses those

categories with honesty or transparency, and second, even when they do,

I am not sure that these identities really help you heal.

Personally, I don’t find it helpful to think of myself as a victim or

survivor. I realize that the identity of survivor was meant to address

the focus on passivity that occurs with the term victim, but in practice

I think the two terms are not always well delineated and the same

associations and assumptions often accrue. These identities make me the

subject, the passive receiver, of another’s violence or abuse. In that

reading of the situation, the power to end the cycle lies firmly with

the active party, the “abuser.” That is a balance of power that I am

uncomfortable with. In order to not feel completely helpless it has been

necessary for me to honestly reflect on the parts that I played in

unhealthy dynamics and violent situations because those are the things

that I have the ability to change.

I started writing about accountability because I was grappling with why

I felt so angry that I was supposed to identify myself as the right kind

of victim in order to get support. It made me angry because I did not

want to continue to be defined in relation to someone who had taken so

much from me. I could not continue that relationship; in order to put

myself back together I needed to cut all ties. I also could not wait for

the person who harmed me to redress their ways before I began to heal.

It wasn’t realistic. I would have waited forever.

Think of what your body does when you cut yourself. Along with blood

clotting and the immune response, your body builds a network of collagen

to isolate the wound site. This allows white blood cells to clean up the

area without spreading the infection. Continuing to define yourself by

the pain that others have caused you creates dehiscence and keeps the

wound open.

Accountability is so tied up in adjudication and external affirmations,

or condemnations, that it can be very hard to modulate and process

shifting feelings as you go through different stages of healing. Being

someone’s rape victim or survivor of abuse is not emotionally healthy.

Every time a scar starts to form some part of the community process

requires you to reference back to the initial pain as if it were new,

and the scab gets ripped off. This can lead to chronic inflammation that

can go systemic and eventually poison other relationships in your life.

Community processes that offer support based on victimization lend

themselves to focusing and fixating on painful experiences. I have been

raped. I was in an abusive relationship, and when I left I was stalked.

Those experiences disrupted my life for a long time. I did not deserve

to be treated that way, but I was not a passive participant. Being

honest about participatory abuse is not the same as self-recrimination,

and analyzing unhealthy dynamics is not a form of self-blame—it’s a form

of self-reflection.

I have a hard time understanding why people are so offended at the idea

that abuse is participatory because it was the epiphany that I was also

responsible for my terrible caustic relationship that allowed me to

leave. I stayed in a damaging relationship for so much longer than I

should have, even after I realized it was abusive, under the absurd

delusion that we were going to “end cycles of violence” together. We

weren’t ending any fucking cycles, we were continuing them.

Until I rediscovered my agency I was totally paralyzed. How could I ever

feel safe if nothing I had done contributed to the abuse? What could I

change about the way I loved? Did I just need to implicitly know if

people had that tendency in them?

How do you pick “undamaged” lovers? How could I ever fall in love, and

more importantly break up with anyone again, without being afraid?

Different choices along the way could have kept things from getting so

fucking crazy at the end, and it is both naïve and dangerous to pretend

otherwise. Acknowledging that doesn’t mean I deserved to be mistreated

or stalked; but it does mean that because I understand the bad choices I

made, I can make better ones in the future.

I realize the rejection of victim or survivor identity is harder to

stomach when it comes to violent sexual assault, but even with rape one

can go through a process of critical reflection. This, of course, does

not absolve the assaulter from responsibility. No one deserves to be

sexually assaulted or is ever to blame for being raped. We must

differentiate blame from self-reflection. In order to move on with my

life and regain the ability to work and travel alone it has helped me to

focus on the things I have concrete control over. It has been useful to

take stock of what kind of situations I put myself in, who I trust, what

kind of contingency plans I make and what weapons I am actually

comfortable using. Will being proactive about these kinds of

considerations keep me from all future harm? Probably not—it’s a fucked

up world out there. Will these considerations give me a more grounded

sense of control and remind me of my own power to deal with and affect

the course of potential violence? Yes, I think so. This of course brings

us to the issue of retaliatory violence and the zine being criticized

for “glorifying violence.”

I think Stokely Carmichael got the heart of why we must be wary of moral

narratives about violence:

The way the oppressor tries to stop the oppressed from using violence as

a means to attain liberation is to raise ethical or moral questions

about violence. I want to state emphatically here that violence in any

society is neither moral nor is it ethical. It neither right, nor is it

wrong. It is just simply a question of who has the power to legalize

violence. [6]

I don’t have an absolute moral or ethical justifier for retaliatory

violence, because one should never work in tactical absolutes. No

solution or approach will be appropriate all the time. All I can do is

clarify in what context retaliatory violence makes sense to me. I think

people who are violently physically assaulted should be able to beat

their rapist. However it is essential to understand karmic/proportional

retribution.

I don’t think retaliatory violence is appropriate for situations that

were not physically violent. Responding to physical violence with

physical violence is understandable but responding to gray area

miscommunications of consent with physical violence is manipulative and

unnecessary. I also do not think it is appropriate to ask others to

enact violence if you cannot bring yourself to participate. If you can’t

do it yourself (with help), then you need to pick a different kind of

revenge. The point is catharsis, isn’t it? A beating will send a direct

message, but nothing can really communicate the experience of rape—only

the anger and despair that come afterward.

Violence should be approached with humility and as a final resort. It is

worth noting that it may not make you feel better, it may make you feel

worse—it’s hard to know beforehand. Revenge is intimate, and not always

healthy. Protracted campaigns of shame and intimidation continue to tie

you emotionally and psychologically to the person who hurt you. At some

point the best revenge is separating yourself in the ways you can and

trying to live a happy life. This doesn’t mean you have to forgive to

heal. I hold to my bitterness because it keeps me safe, but because I do

not expect others to join me in that hatred it has been easier, with the

passage of time, to let some of the pain recede.

To those who feel I gave up on transformative justice too soon, perhaps

I did. I think if I lived in a different kind of community I would have

more faith in transformative justice. I have heard that these models

have worked in other kinds of communities. Within the anarchist scenes

of North America however, I just don’t see the cohesion, gentleness or

longevity required for transformative processes to work. People are too

transient. I am not an optimist at a structural level. It’s not

something I am particularly proud of so perhaps I shouldn’t be

suggesting others accept my dismal assessment of anarchist “community.”

Really the discourse of transformative justice is hard for me to take at

face value because the person I was in an abusive relationship with was

very adept at using that kind of language in a manipulative manner,

while the person who raped me had absolutely no point of reference for

anything so radical. “Breaking cycles of abuse” is an enticing and lofty

goal but sometimes I fear that all it means is that we put tons of time

and energy into pieces of shit who will never address their

socialization. At what point is it just not your fucking problem

anymore?

This of course gets to the heart of most people’s problem with the zine.

It was criticized for not offering a productive solution. I admit, I

don’t have one; there is no one solution. A tendency towards myopic

essentialism got us into this mess, a fancy rewriting of the

survivor/perpetrator dualism with slightly more nuance sure as hell

isn’t going to get us out. We should be discussing what consent really

means.

We have done a good job of defining healthy sex as an active yes—and not

just the absence of no, but is that really a standard we practice and

how do we hold people to it? If consent is a continual process what

expectations do we have about how no gets communicated? Intimacy is

complicated and we are all damaged in our own way.

Who is responsible for identifying when yes becomes no? I would like to

propose that we are responsible not only for obtaining a yes from our

lovers before proceeding and keeping those lines of communication open

but, more importantly, we are responsible for vocalizing our own yes or

no. We need to redefine healthy consent as communicating our sexual

needs in a proactive manner.

If that doesn’t happen we should be able to say, “you didn’t notice I

was dissociating, can we talk about PTSD and trauma?” That conversation

seems more productive to me than, “you raped me because you didn’t

notice I checked out, even though I didn’t say no.” It needs to be okay

to make mistakes and we need a language for hurt that doesn’t default to

the worst kind of hurt ever. Hyperbolic language leads to a ranking of

pain. Does everything need to be called assault or rape before we help

our friends work through it? We need an intermediary language, something

between “that was perfectly communicated every step of the way,” and

“you assaulted me.”

At a spiritual level it is important to ask why couldn’t I vocalize my

needs? What kinds of conversations, or partners, do I need in order to

do that? We should not expect our lovers to read our minds. We need to

make contingency plans. Healthy sex should involve telling your lovers

what you want them to do when you check out. We are all responsible for

our own happiness, pleasure and safety—these things are too important to

outsource.

As for getting through the dark days, the only concrete advice I can

give about sorting through the pain of assault or abuse is don’t turn to

a larger community for support—turn to your friends, your chosen family

and a therapist (if you believe in them). Don’t expect that people who

were not already close to you will understand the situation or be able

to respond or empathize in a way that feels good to you. They probably

won’t. Get as far away from the person who hurt you as humanly possible

and don’t take on their fucking process. Settle into the isolation and

pain, because it’s going to be with you for a long time. Understand your

part in the experience not because you deserved it, or because you were

to blame for it, but understand your part so you can play a different,

healthier, role in the future.

Ultimately, I think I have come back to a state of relative homeostasis

again because I took the time to consider what parts of the abuse and

rape were mine to carry and which ones weren’t. The process has been

slow and painful. I think I began to heal when I stopped caring so much

when, or if, it happened. I made my peace with being broken, and as I

accepted the damage the scars slowly keratinized. I no longer care if

the people who hurt me have become less caustic, because I am not

responsible for them. I also don’t care if people who are not close to

me understand what happened. Accountability processes are much too tied

into social currency, reputation and propriety. I will not be held

hostage to the theoretical dictates of a false anarchist “community.” I

try and hold myself accountable to the community of people I have real

ties to—those I parent, work and struggle with. Beyond that circle I

have found the idea of accountability doesn’t hold up well under strain.

It’s not that I don’t believe in accountability—I do, just with a little

“a.”

[1] Ed. note: This piece has been slightly revised since it was first

published in The Anvil on December 5^(th) 2010. One paragraph was

removed.

theanvilreview.org

[2] It should be noted that the substitution of “survivor” for “victim”

does not entail any actual critique of victimhood, or how victimhood

embodies a patriarchal and legalistic role. Those who wish to end

patriarchy should feel no affinity with the victim-mentality. It is

important to distinguish a political critique of victimhood from a lack

of support for victims. It is understandable that we sometimes fall back

on victimhood, a socially recognized powerlessness, because it is one of

the only identifiable ways to access support, and taking a different

route requires more intention and energy than most people can muster

during a vulnerable period in their lives. We should have compassion for

the people who, lacking other clear options, fall into the role of

victim while acknowledging that it is time to create alternative

narratives.

[3] http://anarchistnews.org/node/19486,

http://www.crimethinc.com/blog/2011/11/24/g20-conspiracy-case-the-inside-story/

[4] Gillian Welch. “Only One and Only.” Revival, Alamo Sounds, 1996.

[5] Wang, Jackie. “Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of

Safety.” LIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism Volume 1, 2012, pg 162.

[6] Carmichael, Stokely. Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to

Pan-Africanism. New York: Random House, 1972.