I craned my neck in attempt to name the source of the dull throb beneath the skin on my back. Meridionally, right down the center, were a series of consecutive bruises leapfrogging along my spine. Recollecting an article I read about the warning signs of leukemia and its pattern of unsourced skin patches threatening the kind of fatality everyone likes to exempt themselves from, I deduced that sexual assault was comparable in some respect. The bruises, lavished in their over-ripe pigmented blush, were the epidermis’s form of self-disclosure upon its porcelain embrace. I plunge my fingers as far as they can reach, thrusting violently against the lining of my esophagus. My eyelids are primed in a particular shade of violet. I see my mother weedwacking in our garden barefoot, dressed only in her stained eggplant-colored nightgown, the one I remember from the Sunday mornings escapades of my childhood. It’s tattered jersey released begrudgingly at the seam, caressing the dirt in it’s articulate movement about her ankles. “It’s man’s work”, she croaked in an exasperated but spiteful tone, as she trailed the vegetation’s fuel across the linoleum sheet that championed a smug illusion of tiles patterned across our kitchen floor. The grime was always swept into the crevices, the places we couldn’t reach. Somewhere between the molding and the bristles of superficial cleanliness, it lay untouched in a pitiful dormancy, an exclusive exhibition for the subconscious audience, pristine filth tainted only by its own self-awareness. I think of the bruises. Their exquisite tapestry of finely threaded ambitions, so intent on their recreation, they had so much potential. He had so much potential. I sit in the shower. The concavities of my spine grind against the porcelain as I shift into half fetal, half butterfly, knees speaking the hollow tongue of forced contortion. I lay there a while and let myself steep my thoughts into a full-bodied fragrance. I see his abdomen first, the stretch marks engulfing his hips, and then, my eyes lingered on the cigarette burns that picketed his chest, the Hail Mary’s of his father and his father’s father, generations of inbred workings of the church plunging my own vomit down my throat. The cherub face looked down at me, blond ringlets grazing his eyelashes, face cloaked in a healthy pink sheen. “You’re a big girl, you can take it”, says the mask. The cherub face was too easy to love in it’s obvious naivety. I felt the infancy of emotional swelling in my throat abort at its union with his semen. It was inconspicuously thriving somewhere within the folds of my esophagus tissue, and as time passed, gracefully evolving under the pressures of my delusion. I vomited to asphyxiate said delusion, to catalyze the painful experience and lyse the emotional swell, precipitating the negative membrane shift of my thoughts that was necessary to my reconstruction of mentality.
No one likes to associate themselves with the tainted or the impure. We actively remove ourselves from the individuals who remind us of the presence of grime: the boisterous woman on the bus in cellular confrontation with her cheating husband who fellow transit riders shield their gaze from, the homeless man continuously berated by local passerbys, the dinner party guest who politely refuses the wine because of her alcoholism only to receive injudicious stares, they are all contenders of filth. Even from the earliest years of childhood, parents barricade their kids from other children who guise themselves in an uncleanliness derived from poverty, mental illness, physical illness or diversity. In many circumstances, survivors of sexual assault face the pervasive threat of this ideology when sharing their experiences while endeavoring to salvage what remains of justice or the potential of a sociocultural shift. Violence against women is commonly perceived as the open-palmed force of oppression, its innocuous silhouette. The individuals in power, most frequently white males, continuously facilitate this misconception via a passive, solution-oriented methodology at dealing with gender inequality, potentially because they are the benefitiaries of centuries of oppression. What are women to do when day after day they’re forced to consult a checklist of preventative measures to take before leaving the security of their homes? Thrust themselves into the outstretched arms of the men who encourage them to coat their fingers in date rape drug-detecting nailpolish, among the plethora of other absurtities invented to ward off potential attackers? Such innovations only permit delusions of safety and actually instigate victim blaming by giving survivors the impression that their assault could have been blockaded if only they had “xyz”. Survivors of sexual assault are forced right back into the arms of their attackers because the dirt, the stigma, the idea of purity that we create, rejects them elsewhere. What makes purity so dangerous is the limitation of it’s residence, it’s ability to thrive only the absolute. Therefore, it exists as a humiliating and distorted caricature of cleanliness.
Humans are consumed by the idea of reaching an immaculate state of being, and accommodating their definition of purity to veil their role in the continuous, but inadvertently polluted by-products of its pursuit. From infancy, we are conditioned to tether the acquisition of cleanliness to the promise of exchanged purity, longevity and goodness. We supposedly are closest to this ideal at birth, upon which Tabula Rasa the idea of being born with a “blank slate”, asserts itself as a reference point to which individuals continuously return throughout the course of their lives in either motivation to reach some sort of introspective awakening of purity, or to reflect on their lives with an air of lament. This duality of clean vs. dirty is observed within nearly every facet of our perception. For example, from an early age, children are told that mess is bad. Parenting generally entails the removal of what we like to designate harmful or toxic encounters with dirt, germs, etc. through the encouragement of compulsive bathing, hand washing, and isolation from disease. However, what we fail to acknowledge, is that later in adulthood, this germophobia is a chief contributor in the degradation of our immune system, and actually provokes the onset of more sinister diseases, namely in application to universal cultural symptoms, ignorance . Similar to one’s natural response to the presence of a feral but once domesticated animal such as a cat, we sometimes coax our ignorance of dirt by naming it and giving it a place to reside, sheltering it from detrimental stigma. However, this seemingly thoughtful action has the potential to backfire because most diseases are asymptomatic to their onlookers. When retrograding the history of the human race, the role of cleanliness vs. uncleanliness is quite evident, especially in its relation to poverty, race, and gender. We choose to ignore the acts of uncleanliness and their gravity in order to maintain the illusion that our lives are clean and untainted, which further propagates this epidemic. Soaphead church is a reminder of the dangers of the pursuit of purity. We were faced with a jarring perspective in which we saw the definition and application of cleanliness gone disastrously awry, which contoured the flaws within our previous character’s views (such as Mrs. Breedlove), pointing to cleanliness as the culprit of her unhappiness.
Oddly enough, dirtiness is only used in relation to goodness, in it’s in reference to sexual acts. However, it’s paradoxical that the very sexual acts themselves defy the social construction of purity, placing women in the double bind of utilizing their sexuality for social validation, positioning themselves somewhere along the continuum of sexual objectivity with a militant resignation, while simultaneously facing the judgment surrounding promiscuity and impurity. Additionally, sexual abuse towards women and nearly any kind of domestic violence, is eroticized by social media sites, such as tumblr, where blogs devout to bruises and blood photographed through a filtered lens revel in the glamour of their faux-artistic absence of color and sephia tones. This further crafts violence against women into a trend, akin to the white suburban eating disorder “trend”, credited in part, to the Mary-Kate Olsen fan base.
The fetish with purity and cleanliness is particularly destructive to survivors of sexual assault. Our bodies are fastened with a second-hand label, we are worn goods left to tread in the viscosity of continuous victim blaming regurgitated from somewhere within the supposed “gray area” of sexual consent. Women who have been branded the term “ruined” by sexual assault are conditioned by these social constructs to feel worthless and filthy to all surrounding individuals with the exception of their attacker, which we see in Muchette. Furthermore, our culture permits abuse by bestowing on the oppressor, a perceived ownership of purity, and by arbitrarily segregating pure from impure within the female gender. Assault assumes it’s locus on the surface of what my mother calls, “man’s work”, and according to those in power, all we can do is repress what’s inevitably perceived to be, biology. What do you visualize when confronting the phrase “man’s work”? Business suits, hard labor, presidents, innovations, authority? I see bruises.
