Reviewing Trick Mirror & Reflecting on Sexual Violence
Early this month I read Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino and In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. They are both brilliant texts and moved me along certain thought processes I had begun at some point but that also had, due in large part to the overstimulation caused by Existing Online, become stagnant.
Trick Mirror is a collection of essays that talks about many things which include, but are not limited to: this Online Existence (Internet); Facebook’s social, cultural, economic, and political capital; narcissism; women in the media, women in classic literature, women in politics; drugs; Barre and hyper-capitalism; reality TV; Jeff Bezos and Billy McFarland; sexual assault; Ivy Leagues; and marriage. It sounds like a lot—and it is—but Tolentino is a sharp and critical writer. She cuts right through things that have been talked about to death by people with varying vested interests and political affiliations to reveal a perspective that is clear and challenging. I think the best thing about Trick Mirror is that it pulls discourse from all the corners it’s been abandoned (thanks to the Internet) and offers it back to us, paralleled by Tolentino’s insight and delightful self-awareness.
content warning: rape, sexual assault, intimate partner violence
I bring this up because her chapter ‘We Come from Old Virginia’—an important piece on the present culture, and history of sexual assault at the University of Virginia (UVA)—gave me the language and framework to process what I had been feeling about Raeesah Khan’s sharing in Parliament last October.
(Note: Before I go into this topic I’d like to make clear that I am not, at this point, interested in commenting on the bureaucracy or even ‘ethics’ of it all—although I understand these are difficult to simply remove from the equation—but would like to try, as far as possible, to just focus on the message Raeesah delivered and what it means for a society that has not yet learnt to reckon with sexual violence. I am also not condoning false allegations, I am only reflecting on why they are made.)
Tolentino’s chapter speaks to the 2014 Rolling Stone article ‘A Rape on Campus’ (it has since been retracted) written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely. It was an incredibly graphic account of a gang rape at a UVA fraternity, the following apathy from the dean, an apology letter from one of the assailants by way of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the finding that “only fourteen people had ever been found guilty of sexual misconduct in the school’s history [and] not a single person at UVA had ever been expelled for sexual assault.” This is hardly a surprising fact given that universities are a hotbed for both sexual violence and the disavowal of sexual violence accounts, while cheating, plagiarism, defacing of property etc. are met with immediate expulsion. However, what gave the article its eventual infamy was the fact that the victim’s account turned out to be different from what she had physically experienced.
At this point I will say that I do not see ‘an account that is different from one’s lived reality’ as synonymous with a lie or a fabrication, and the reason for this will be made clear a little later (I hope).
What Tolentino does in this chapter is impressive because not only is she able to locate the perpetual violence of sexual assault within the violent constructions of the institution (UVA was built by slaves and founded by Thomas Jefferson, a slave-owner); but she is also able to locate the reproduction of violence between Jackie (victim) and Erdely as the latter exploited the former to meet journalistic ends.
“But what strikes me in reading the two women’s testimonies is the way that the structure of the original violation, the language of force and betrayal, filters into the way that they interacted with each other—in the same way that Title IX1 procedures often end up replicating the patterns of invasion they set out to address and negate.”
The second half of this chapter opened the possibility and necessity of believing in the “truth of [one’s] imagined story”, especially in a world that takes false allegations of rape more seriously than rape itself. Here is where I thought of Raeesah. This system of belief is important not because we need to clutch at straws, relying on an untruth be it for ego or sanity or spite. It is important because the “imagined story” or the “categorical lie” is just one way a real story might find it’s way out of the river dirtied by men and the “power they’ve amassed through subordination, [and] the self-interrogation they ostensibly hold at bay”, washed onto the shore of someone else’s very similar, very real, very overlooked experience.
Do we be angry about false accusations and embellished stories? Or do we be angry about sexual violence and the twisted paths it sets people on in order to vindicate themselves and other people; to create an ordeal big enough that it can’t be ignored; to extricate from the cycles of violence that don’t seem to stop no matter how many stories make it to the surface & grab public attention? Can we be angry about the former when they are a natural consequence of the latter?
In Elizabeth Schambelan’s n+1 essay titled ‘League of Men’2, she writes:
“This is the story I’ve come up with, about the story Jackie told: she did it out of rage. She had no idea she was enraged, but she was. Something had happened, and she wanted to tell other people, so that they would know what happened and know how she felt. But when she tried to tell it — maybe to somebody else, maybe to herself — the story had no power. It didn’t sound, in the telling, anything like what it felt like in the living. It sounded ordinary, mundane, eminently forgettable, like a million things that had happened to a million other women — but that wasn’t what it felt like to her. What it felt like was lurid and strange and violent and violating. I have no idea what it was, whether a crime was involved. There’s a perfectly legal thing called hogging, where guys deliberately seek out sex partners they find unattractive so they can laugh about it later with their friends. Maybe it was something like that, or maybe it was much milder, an expression of contempt that was avuncular, unthinking, something that transformed her into a thing without even meaning to. Whatever it was, this proximate cause, she didn’t know what to do about it. To figure out how to go on from that moment without dying from rage, you need something she didn’t have. You need self-insight, or historical insight, or at the very least a certain amount of critical distance, a wry appreciation of the ironies of it all. She didn’t have any of that, and that’s why she lied, knowingly or unknowingly — or, most likely, both at once.” (emphasis mine)
I didn’t agree with everything Schambelan was saying in the essay, but this part shifted so much for me. In the beginning I was disappointed in Raeesah too; I felt that she had put all other accounts of sexual assault in jeopardy, that all the ‘progress’ we had made in terms of believing survivors was moot. But the truth is, it is precisely the fact that accounts of sexual assault can and continue to be taken lightly that individuals like Jackie and Raeesah find themselves telling someone else’s truth when the opportunity presents itself. Someone has, at some point, been gang-raped on campus. Someone has, at some point, had to encounter their assailant in school. Someone has, at some point, been disbelieved or further traumatised by law enforcement (see the comments on Sharul Channa’s post). These things might not have happened to Jackie or Raeesah as told by them. But they happened. And given the slim chance to recount the failure of a system, with all the macabre details people need to pay attention, to platforms as wide-reaching as Rolling Stone or a publicly streamed Parliament session, I now cannot say that I don’t see why they did it.
Tolentino writes that “women’s bodies have always been test sites upon which governing hierarchies are broken down and reiterated”. This is true both in terms of the disproportionate amount of violence that men inflict on women’s bodies and the disproportionate amount of energy dedicated to witch-hunts instead of interrogating the system that pushes women into desperate dead-ends in the first place.
After Rolling Stone retracted their story, the president of UVA then, Teresa Sullivan, published a statement condemning the magazine. She wrote, “Irresponsible journalism unjustly damages the reputations of many innocent individuals and the University of Virginia. Sexual violence is a serious issue for our society, and it requires the focus and attention of all in our communities”. This is, of course, a devastating return to square one. Opportunistic journalism about sexual violence perpetuates the problem because it narrows in to a sensational story while failing to consider the fact that it is the culture of zero accountability, the prioritisation of reputation, the lawless freedom of men, and the poor infrastructure in place to deal with incidents like these that makes opportune sensational news to begin with. Sexual violence is a serious issue but for as long as power remains focused on pedantic, individualised instances of fact-checked violence (in some cases to locate blame and in others to obscure it) while turning away from violence that is committed and reported daily, women’s bodies will continue to be blemished by assault, memory, and shame.
There are two things Roxane Gay brings up in her article ‘The Careless Language of Sexual Violence’3 that I think are useful for reflecting on this a bit further.
The “intellectual distance between violence and the representation of violence” that we as a society have allowed; and
The “right stories” about the topic of rape.
What we are seeing in the aftermath of Raeesah’s sharing i.e. the state’s careful architecture of a deceitful woman, solidifies the double standard when it comes to how people in power want violence to be presented to them for consideration. Victims are expected to be clear where their experiences have been harrowing; virtuous where their bodies have been violated; and trusting in a system complicit in the cycle they are trapped. How has that ever been possible?
“There is no glorified interpersonal behaviour that can be used to explain robbery or murder the way that sex can be used to explain rape. The best-case scenario for a rape victim in terms of adjudication is the worst-case scenario in terms of experience: for people to believe you deserve justice, you have to be destroyed.”
There is no right or satisfying story about rape. And sometimes, when you haven’t been destroyed by an assault (physically or otherwise) but are traumatised nevertheless, it feels necessary to borrow someone else’s destruction in the off-chance that someone might take you seriously, so nobody else will ever have to go through what you went through (or worse) ever again. In that moment, you feel like you’ve been given a chance to fix something that’s been broken for so, so long. So you take it. Everything else is just noise.
Title IX is the federal prohibition of sexual harassment and sexual violence in schools in the US.
Schambelan, E. (2017, November 9). League of Men. Retrieved from https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-28/essays/league-of-men/.
Gay, R. (2011, March 10). The Careless Language of Sexual Violence. Retrieved from https://therumpus.net/2011/03/the-careless-language-of-sexual-violence/.