i. recently i have been thinking too much about who gets to decide what constitutes "violence". as a term, it seems innately self-describing. almost like a natural fear, violence feels like the shiver of a rattlesnake: we would know violence, surely, if it was shown to us. and if there is violence, there would be someone committing that violence.
ii. my body is the present-tense subject of past-tense violence. it can be odd to sit in a class and be discussed as a statistic, a number rather than a participant. why is it that the discourse around assault always feels so academic? removed from the experience and safely clinical, the topic seems almost erudite, hypothetical. in this way, i almost feel separated from the actual memory: on the page, the word assault is too clean for what actually happened to me. the censorship on social media agrees with me: we can't even language what's happening, it would be too affronting for advertising.
iii. the ruling class determines how violence is assessed and how it is narrated. this is obvious and also too-incredible to summarize: capitalism is at the heart of so much passive violence. burning a warehouse is called "violent" by the ruling class, but poverty wages are not violent. protesting ice is "violent", but the actual actions taken by the federal government (and by police forces) are never violent, they are "necessary". getting an abortion is "violent", but extremely high maternal mortality rates is not violent, even though some estimates say that 80% of those deaths were entirely preventable. we are all at the mercy of capitalism, which is not violent. our anger about this is violent.
iv. my friend gently asks me: "do you want to talk about the website?" but i don't want to talk about the website. i look up and out the window. i am neither surprised nor shocked by it. i feel an uncharacteristic numbness. it is simply too large for me to grasp at this time, a pain that feels communal and also individual, an impenetrable and unpronounceable scream. i still struggle to write it, even now. those four letters are so large to me, and rupture inside of my spine. like ants.
v. i have found, in my life, that it is determined not violent if the victim is in a feminine body. it is not violent if the victim wasn't perfect. if the victim wasn't white, or able-bodied, or neurotypical, or straight, or cis. in general, "sex crime" - rape - just isn't seen as a "real" crime. it isn't violent like how murder is violent. we watch fully grown adults on tv equivocate about how it would be violent if we were under ten, but that 15 isn't really that young. if we weren't a virgin, or if we dressed wrong, or had a drink, or said the wrong thing, or existed: it isn't violent. so the violence is flexible. so some of the fault can be shared back into our flesh, as if the original rending wasn't a deep enough cut.
vi. to survive in this world, one is taught to accept a certain level of violence as rote; as acceptable. one can watch the birds for the cultural impact it represents, although certainly what happened to tippi hedren was violent. this pattern will extend perfectly, forever. we can shop at target if we just feel guilty about breaking the boycott, that isn't violent. there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. and sometimes this teaches a detachment, a casual acceptance that some people are just going to be used as parts of the machine, which is not violent. if a person dies due to an insurance coverage denial - that is not violence. that's just a tragedy.
vii. these tragedies are everywhere, it seems. it is probably true that someone in your classroom has been a victim of sexual assault, isn't it? we rarely consider how often we've met a perpetrator of these events. instead, the survivors seem to spawn in, our mouths bleeding, shaking. we are just a tragedy of the system, a null data point. every person that we stand next to is similarly eradicated from their own experience: it is a tragedy that you couldn't afford life-saving surgery. it is a tragedy that police gunned down another person. it is a tragedy that ice took your neighbor. it is all just an unpreventable, inconceivable tragedy.
viii. talking about it makes my skin crawl, but i think it is probably true that many men just never saw women as human people. i think it's probably true that capitalism and conservativism encouraged this dehumanization. of course it's intersectional; that the more removed from power your identity may be - the less they are encouraged to see you as a person. because if you are dehumanized, violence does not count against you. (i don't know why i'm telling you this. you knew, didn't you? we all knew).
ix. i am in therapy due to my previous partner's domestic violence. recently, when trying to word how that violence has changed me: i find myself speechless. i keep saying: "but what does that word even, like, mean?"
