Because a Fish Doesn’t Report Water
#WhyIDidntReport
To the fish, water is all around. It has always been there, through everything. If fish had culture, you’d find references to water sprinkled all throughout their stories and songs.
But maybe they wouldn’t talk about it directly much. Maybe they’d try to build the best little fishy lives that they could: Connect with each other. Build relationships. Have hobbies. Focus on the good things. Not spend all their time analyzing the sway of the tides that ebb and flow.
Maybe they’d rather think of themselves as the heroic salmon overcoming the stream. Or the cool catfish in the warm summer mud. Or the sly octopi. Definitely not those lazy barnacles getting knocked about in the flow, no ambition but to cling to where they are. No, these fish have other stuff going on. Big stuff. Cool stuff.
I’m reading through #WhyIDidntReport and #MeToo posts thinking, “How do you choose one story to tell?” I was born into an ocean of rape culture. And since we all participate in culture, everyone’s behaviors have been shaped by rape my entire life. And that is no exaggeration. That is my heart’s honest truth. That is the ocean as I see it. I could pull out stories one drop at a time until the lakebed runs dry, but I don’t have the strength to make it to the deep.
We call it “rape culture” because it is a prevailing swamp that we, as a society, have normalized all throughout our culture. We enshrine it in our art and our customs. It soaks our expectations around behavior, identity, and power. We find it seeping into to our most cherished relationships.
We ignore it, where we can, so that we can live our lives. Maybe we get too good at ignoring it. Maybe we make it a joke because humor helps us cope. But we haven’t really thought through how harmful jests can be when released into the wild. Maybe we get so numb to it that we don’t notice we’ve pass it to our children, packaged as an aspiration… or as survival. Better scholars than I have laid this out at length.
But if all of this is true. If we are all awash in this cultural waterlog, half-unaware and pulled by streams that we do not fully understand, then how can I “#MeToo” on anything short of my entire life?
Rape might happen in secret hidden places, but rape culture lives in the light of day — everyday. Right in front of your eyes. You all see it all the time. At some point you have to turn away in order to go to work, to make dinner, to catch some beauty where you can.
Do you know who is going to feel like a piece of wet garbage if I express every single ordeal floating through mind as I scroll these hashtags? The people who love me. The people who want with all their hearts to have protected me but didn’t. The people who saw what was happening but didn’t understand what it meant. Or maybe they didn’t know what to do. Maybe they were fighting their own toxic mental scripts. Maybe it was a defense mechanism to not believe.
Do you know who is not going to feel one shred of self-doubt? The people whose own behaviors have actually caused me harm. The perpetrators of abuse who are pounding their fists demanding due process because they know that the process was built for them.
So I don’t know. I’ve learned that you have to give people the details or else they can’t conceive how bad it gets. So we tell our stories. That’s how we advocate for ourselves… and for each other. But I’ve also learned that the details weigh heaviest on the hearts of good people. And everyone I know is submerged in old wounds right now. How am I going to ask them to anchor mine as well? And who will I wish I had protected tomorrow? And…
Wouldn’t I rather be an octopus?
Because…
We are never not in water.
