Jess Banks schools you.

This post will be a jumble of thoughts because I can’t cope with the flood of memories too long held back. Strangely, it comes mainly from a place of gratitude because somehow I’ve escaped most of the everyday horrors that seem to be the price of admission for a woman living on this planet. And I say that in all honesty, despite the record of abuse, rape, and fear that mark my calendar of years.

Since my preschool years, most of my friends were boys because they wanted to play the games I wanted to play. Yeah, I wanted to be Princess Leia and Wilma Deering, but that’s because they shot the best. I also liked pretty dresses and fancy hair and Princess Diana and porcelain dolls. I was a girl who played with boys, and that has stayed true until this day.

When I was raped in high school, the camaraderie of boys became my refuge as well as my comfort zone. If I was surrounded by boys who thought of me as “one of them”, I didn’t have to fear that they would think of me sexually. I knew some of those friends would’ve liked to date me; I even kissed a few late in my high school career.

But to this day, I don’t know how many of them really thought of me as a girl. I do know that, if one of them got dumped by one of my girl friends, I was on the list of people who was invited over sometimes to witness the tribal mourning ritual they carried out. I didn’t understand why amateur piercings, and running in the snow in their boxer shorts was helpful; drinking bad liquor and listening to the Smiths were more understandable. I still hold my admission to those events in a special warm space in my heart. It felt like inclusion.

But that inclusion also took me to scary, awkward places sometimes. One night, walking on campus after a late play rehearsal, one of the guys led a pretend “campus tour”, pointing out the best places to rape a girl. Everyone joked about how to pick the right victim. A jogger with elastic pants, but not running tights because they’re too clingy and get tangled; a hippie girl with flowing skirts. Skirts like I wore. Everyone was laughing and tossing in ideas and playing along.

Including me.

See, I had ideas about where would be good places to drag a girl to hurt her on that campus. It’s because I walked home from that campus after play practice every night that spring. And the spring before. And the spring after. I walked as my knees shook and my teeth rattled. I walked fast, as fast as I could without sprinting.

And I made jokes, made suggestions, played along, as my heart clutched in my chest and bile rose in my throat. I blushed at the lavish praise and laughter the boys gave me for my witty cracks and horrible, horrible words.

Because it meant they didn’t know I’d been raped.

If they’d known, everything would’ve changed. I couldn’t have been one of the boys anymore. They would’ve had to think of me “That Way”. Not as one of the “safe girls”, but as a sexual body capable of being violated. Not as tall and strong and flexible, but as weak and vulnerable and overpowerable. Not as someone worth knowing, but someone worth avoiding. Shameful. Questionable. To be avoided.

So I played along. I thought of that walk many times when I was on my own campuses at night—as an undergrad, as a foreign student, as a teacher. I feel at home on college campuses; they’re home terrain to me. But when I see space between street lamps, or gauge the distance to a blue phone, or spy a particularly overgrown row of hedges, I think back to that game and wonder how many other boys have noticed those things, pointed them out to other boys with laughter.

And how many other girls have seen them too, and marked them bright in their mental maps: “Danger. Don’t go there.”

Last March, I stopped sleeping. I’m no stranger to insomnia, so at first I just thought I was launching into another warped cycle. I stocked up the Netflix queue and resolved to wait it out.

But it didn’t resolve. No matter how tired I got–well past the point in any normal round of sleeplessness where sheer exhaustion would keep me down all night–I woke up between 1:30 and 3:00am, and couldn’t fall asleep again until the alarm was about to go off to wake the kids for school. I couldn’t figure it out. I cut caffeine after 6pm, I stopped napping (no matter how much I needed the extra spoons that helped me steal back), I adjusted my night-time meds up a notch.

Nothing. 3am and wide awake.

And then I remembered: Exactly that time, one year earlier, I lay awake to listen for Connor’s footsteps on the kitchen floor, going for a knife to kill himself. I never heard those footsteps last March, thank the gods, and there was no such fear this March. But my body knew that anniversary better than I did, and it sent a clear message–“It’s March, and you need to keep your boy safe. You can sleep when the sun is up.”

We all have smells, sounds, textures, even lighting that bring us directly back to very specific times and places. The silky binding on a baby blanket. The smell of the cleaning fluid from that time in the hospital. The unreasonably comforting taste of Kraft Singles melted on Wonder bread. The suffocating weight of a body, even though it’s not the body, pressing down on yours. When I asked about how their bodies store memories, friends mentioned more of these than I could keep up with. There’s no doubt that sensory triggers own the key to our memory, whether we like it or not.

Those experiences don’t surprise me anymore, except sometimes in the strength and speed that they fold time neatly in half, delivering us back to a precise moment in the past. What does surprise me is how well my body remembers past events that my conscious memory has long packed away in mothballs.

This March wasn’t the first time I’ve felt the gravity of memory. For almost a decade, I’d get depressed and irritable in May, around the time of year I was sexually assaulted. And a year after my deepest dive into suicidal depression, I was so anxious and high-strung, I was absolutely intolerable with trying to make everything better than the previous August. Neither of these is surprising–many people who go through trauma of some kind experience difficulty with anniversaries of those occurrences, well beyond just realizing that significant time has passed even as it felt like the hours and days were barely creeping along since incomprehensible loss.

There are other things that can trigger buried experiences. I worked with a physical therapist who practiced myofascial release. Fascia is the connective tissue that links our musculoskeletal system; it covers every single muscle, fiber, and organ in our bodies. When our bodies sustain stress and trauma, it stretches and tightens this connective web, causing pain. And therapists practicing this technique help people unwind and loosen the places where the fascia is bunched up and causing problems.

My therapist warned me when we started that unwinding damage sometimes causes memories to rewind in equally powerful ways. He said my body remembered things I hadn’t thought about in years, maybe even things that precede what I consciously knew. He advised me to have some time free after each appointment, in case I needed time to recover emotionally. And he was so right. We unwound injuries and threats as old as I was: fear and bracing against an unpredictable alcoholic father, a rib-breaking high-speed run-in with a vaulting horse, and the car accident that most likely triggered whatever latent potential for fibromyalgia rested in my body. I cried at almost every session, and only once was it from physical pain.

Now, so soon after helping my friend through the first steps away from sexual trauma, I find that my pain levels are sky-high. I’m not eating much. Honestly, I’m drinking more, though still never to drunkenness. I feel ill at ease in my body, and I find myself devoutly wishing to change its landscape, whether with wax (don’t ask) or tattoo ink, or cloak it in clothes that aren’t heavy with past wearings.

I can’t afford any of that, though. So I just sit here, with this body that remembers too much.

Being right where you’re needed is exhausting. Don’t get me wrong, it’s also the most rewarding thing in the world, the thing that convinces you that all the trials you’ve endured aren’t just character building, but of redeemable use to other human beings. But I feel like I could happily sleep for a month.

Monday evening, a dear friend was raped. I got the text just as a panel on school pushouts was starting. Instead of mourning and raging at a distance, as I’ve done over the years when faraway friends went through their own trauma, I could do what I’d always wanted–even needed–to do: I quietly stood up, made my apologies, and raced to be with her within 15 minutes.

There’s something profoundly startling to hear your own words coming out of someone else’s mouth. Parents experience it all the time when their own favorite gems emerge from the miniature humans. But those dark thoughts of doubt, self-blame, and instinctive mistrust of your own reactions don’t sound right when you hear them out loud in another voice. She was full of “I shouldn’t have” and “I must have” and “If only.” It was hard to look at those ugly ideas in the light of day, and it gave me pleasure to shoot each one down with precision.

Eventually, she reached the conclusion that she wanted to report the assault. Several of the pieces of her story gave me that bone-deep certainty that this was his modus operandi, and that she wasn’t his first victim. She wasn’t content to be a statistic, and she felt safe enough and angry enough to do what she could to make sure she was his last victim. I worry I influenced her to do this because I wasn’t able to.

I went with her to the hospital, and apparently projected so much authority and right-of-place that it took a few hours for the staff to realize I wasn’t an official advocate from the local sexual assault survivors’ service. I held her hand, I made inappropriate jokes, I explained what would happen next. I told her to ride the waves of emotion without resistance or embarrassment, because fighting them would take energy she’d need for other things.

The one thing I didn’t have to do was advocate for her against skeptical or disrespectful people. Every single person we encountered treated her with credulity, sensitivity, and most of all, kindness. The nurse told us that police department, hospital staff, and survivor services had worked together to create an integrated, victim-centered care system. I want more women in our city to know this is the case. There are so many reasons women don’t report, and fear of bad treatment doesn’t have to be one, at least not here.

All throughout this, and since then, I’ve been able to say the things I wish someone could’ve told me. I don’t think my friend knows how meaningful and precious that chance is. And because if they’re worth saying once, they’re worth repeating, I’ll say them again here:

Nothing you did made him hurt you. You’re not wrong for wanting to find someone. There’s no way you could’ve known that when he agreed to the boundaries you carefully articulated, he wasn’t planning to respect them. You weren’t stupid to find him attractive and trustworthy–he was grooming you and putting on his best show.

You’re not wrong when you think things will never be the same. And the only way through this is forward; there’s no reverse gear in this car. Things and places that used to feel safe won’t feel that way for a while, and whatever you need to do to find comfort and refuge is okay. The sooner you get into therapy, the better. There’s never a need to go through this alone.

There’s no timer on recovery. There are no milestones that you need to achieve in a certain order or by certain calendar marks. You may not want to think about dating again for a good long time. You may want to take back control of your body and your pleasure sooner than you think you should want to, but that’s not wrong or “slutty” or even illogical. All you have to do is live through this at your own speed.

You’re not responsible for anyone else’s feelings, and telling people the truth doesn’t require you to shepherd them through their own emotional responses. People say things in shock that they don’t mean, so don’t invest too much in their first reactions. Some people just can’t make themselves emotionally available for this, and they may offer stuff instead. You’re not obligated to invent things for people who want to help that way.

Finally, you’re part of a not-so-secret society now. Our stories are remarkably similar, no matter how different they are. We’ve shared common thoughts, common physical responses. It’s true–this destroys some people. But it empowers many others, and how you choose to put your experience into action is up to you. And if you’re very lucky, someday you’ll be able to take what you’ve learned and make it work for someone you love, and it’ll all seem strangely worth it. Be sure to thank that person for letting you help.

A middle school near here had a lockdown today. Not a drill, an honest-to-goodness code red lockdown. I saw the news flash over Twitter that there were reports of shots fired. My heart stopped for about a half-hour. It’s not the school of anyone I know, but it’s close enough to my son’s age to fix in my mind’s eye until police reported the all-clear.

Turns out, it was a 12-year-old boy who called 911 with a locked cell phone (it would only dial an emergency number). It was a prank. A middle-school-aged boy thought it was funny to tell an operator that someone was firing a gun in a full school on a Wednesday morning, three months after the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Over 900 students, teachers, administrators, and staff were on lockdown for hours because nobody told a 12 year old never to ever call 911 as a joke, or if they did, he didn’t absorb the lesson.

And now he’s sitting in a jail.

Two other young men are sitting in a jail tonight, too, and will be for at least the next year of their lives, contemplating the horror they wrought on a 16-year-old girl in Steubenville, Ohio. They didn’t learn the meaning of the word “prank” either. They violated her body and her privacy because they thought it was funny.

How are we failing so completely to teach kids not to make decisions like this, or excuse them as humor?

I certainly don’t have all the answers; I probably don’t even have any good ones. But I want, for a moment, to explore the idea of consent as it relates to children. The current discussion around rape prevention in feminist circles focuses on the word “no” as insufficient, because the responsibility to say it still rests on the victim. If we teach kids that “‘no’ means ‘no,'” but if the victim is incapable of saying “no,” those kids with their miraculously literal (and literally miraculous) minds will understand that no one’s going to stop them.

And not too long from then, they’ll be adults who think no one’s going to stop them. This isn’t a slippery slope; it’s just time elapsing.

I’m the big disciplinarian in our house, and I draw a pretty strict line for my boys to toe. It’s not that the Darling Husband doesn’t have expectations as high as mine, but I think I’m more concerned about them following invisible social strictures, because I had to work so hard at their ages to just figure them out. Part of my mind still thinks I can save my kids the trouble I had by telling them how to maneuver, but I know that’s not the case.

More important to me, though, than whether they’re thoroughly civilized is whether or not they can make a good decision when left to their own devices. When I’m there, I can tell them the processes and rules. When I’m not, I need to know they’re capable of reaching the same conclusion. And just telling them over and over isn’t enough. The trick is, I have to let them do things and make mistakes to convey this lesson. And we parents aren’t very good at allowing a child to make decisions for themselves these days.

The whole endeavor of childhood is currently an exercise in coercion and control, rather than consent. It starts early: mothers who may not have much choice about whether or how to be pregnant or give birth seek to reclaim control by exercising their choice about issues like circumcision and vaccinations. We turn day care and school choice into a major undertaking that continues to be pushed back further and further into infancy–it seems inevitable that parents will consider which schools are accepting applications before attempting to conceive–rather than waiting to see which environment best suits the child’s personality. School attendance and activity is mandatory, with little or no flexibility for the majority of students. Parents who juggle complex schedules don’t consult children about when (or even whether, sometimes) to have lessons, homework, dinner, or bedtime, passing on the lack of control they may experience in their work and social environments.

Parents obviously want what’s best, but the simple fact is that almost no one bothers to obtain a child’s consent for anything. When they do, it often conforms to the illusion of choice, which is a helpful vehicle in speeding through more fundamental objections. Which jacket do you want to wear, red or blue? It’s shower time; here, choose your shower setting and temperature, the color of your towel. Would you prefer carrots or peas as your dinner vegetable? “No” only gets you a restatement of the choices or a deferment, rarely a conversation about why they’re objecting. That’s not surprising; “no” is a powerful word, as kids discover early on, and in a world where they’re so powerless, they often use it without checking to see if it’s really needed, just because it gets a reaction.

I’m not proposing that parents be completely permissive and let their kids boss them around, or be rude, or break all the rules. And I’m certainly not going to relinquish my control as a parent to make judgment calls that keep my kid healthy, safe, or in line with a program that benefits everyone in the family. Sometimes, you’ve just got to take one for the team, and I’d like to think I do a decent job explaining to my sons why that decision is necessary at that time, and when they might next make a decision for themselves.

But if taking a shower or eating vegetables or doing math homework is always a matter of when, not if, even when the child has legitimate objections, is it any wonder that our kids don’t know that they can say “no” to a child molester or abductor? What good has it done them before to say “no”? And why should they listen to someone else say “no” when it’s never worked for them when they didn’t want to do something. Silence isn’t the same as consent, but neither is age a replacement for asking.

When the ultrasound tech asked if we wanted to know the sex of our second child, we said yes. We’d already decided with our first son that the advice that made the most sense was that which suggested that we’d mourn the child who didn’t show up if we waited until birth to find out. I’d been so sick with both pregnancies: 20 hours a day for 5 1/2 months with the first one, and 24 hours a day for what would end up being 7 1/2 months with the second.

I still had hopes of joining the great matriarchal line of my family with a daughter of my own, and I’d been suffering badly with this pregnancy. So when it didn’t even feel like the tech had touched the ultrasound wand to my belly before she announced, “It’s a boy,” I burst out crying. “No, no! He’s okay! Everything looks fine!” she said in a frantic rush, as if she’d never before had a wildly hormonal woman on her table.

“I’m not worried,” I said, waving at the Darling Husband for a tissue. “It’s just another goddamned boy!”

It took me several years to come to peace with the fact that I am, for better or for worse, a Mother of Sons. All my dreams of braids and warrior women and Girl Scouts were exchanged for a clothing section 1/3 the size of the girls’ one and a future of ripe smells and gross habits.

Where I found that hard-won peace, though, was this: I was born to raise sons who are ready to be good men in this world of ours. And they’re amazing so far, if I do say so myself. The people they are have already changed how I feel about so many things, much like Ohio Senator Rob Portman has been changed by the experience of raising a gay son, as we learned this week. And if who we know changes who we are, I’m sure they’re changed by knowing a mother like me. (If only other men would have the transformative experience of knowing a woman….)

Especially this week, it feels like the next generation of men has a great deal to correct for their forebears. So this is my promise to the world, ten years after I began this great endeavor of mothering boys:

I am raising sons who will know that the best way to stop rape is to not rape.

I am raising sons who will wonder why anything would fail the Bechdel Test.

I am raising sons who will believe that consent of every kind is an inalienable human right.

I am raising sons who will stand on the side of love for everyone.

I am raising sons who will know that a mother has a woman’s body and everything that goes with one.

I am raising sons who will not be grossed out by breastfeeding.

I am raising sons who will be capable of comforting without fixing.

I am raising sons who will know how to take criticism and blame as easily as credit.

I am raising sons who will value their own bodies as much as those of others.

I am raising sons who will prefer their romantic encounters in the 1st person plural: “We,” not “I.”

I am raising sons who will leave the damn seat down and dry.

I am raising sons who will know the pleasures of folding warm laundry and cooking for loved ones.

I am raising sons who will understand that all bodies should be as varied and valued as all minds.

I am raising sons who will treat the names and images of fellow humans with as much care as their own.

I am raising sons who will reject carelessness that approaches maliciousness.

I am raising sons who will derive power from the happiness, not control, of others.

I tell stories all the time. I’m no good at plot, though, so the stories I tell are almost always from my own life. And because my memories are so vivid, I enjoy coloring in the details and senses so the listeners can feel like they were there too. I’m also a total ham, and I love making people laugh, so you’ll get no quiet recitation of facts–if I’m telling a story, there are wild gestures, silly voices, dramatic pauses, and rhetorical flourishes.

I don’t have much of a filter, so there aren’t many stories from my life that I haven’t told to somebody at some time. And much of the activist work I’ve been involved in over the last year, especially on marriage equality and improving access to healthcare, has revolved around the power of personal stories to move people to connect with their own stories and act on common values.

Some stories, I’ve told literally hundreds of times, like how I met and married my husband. Others, I’ve had to grow into telling over the years, and I only pull them out when there’s an important point to be made.

All these stories, they’re pieces in the mosaic of me, and I’m content with that pattern.

But I don’t expect them to change on me, especially those whose roots lay decades in my past. Yet that’s what happened last night, and I’m still reeling from how a shift in perspective can alter a story I thought I knew by heart.

I attended a community meeting about the state anti-bullying legislation I’m working to get passed into law this legislative session. It was a bit of a drive for a Tuesday night, but I’m keenly interested to see the diverse and passionate coalition we can build around the need for stronger protections for all our kids. The meeting took place in the heart of the Anoka-Hennepin School District, where the lack of clear anti-discrimination policy can be measured in young lives lost.

After a breakdown of the legislation and the likely timeline through the Capitol, we did a mini-workshop on telling compelling, personal stories about why a better anti-bullying law matters to us. Before sharing a quick story with another attendee, each of us took a minute to scratch notes on a worksheet of prompts about our own experience with bullying, the values and emotions those experiences evoke, and why now is the time to fix this.

I’ve talked about my older son’s horrific experience of bullying in kindergarten before, and when I’m asked why I’m so engaged on this issue, that’s the story I tell. Sometimes, I talk about the friends who were beaten up and harassed in high school for their appearance and what it supposedly said about their sexuality. Obviously, though, the anguish and devastation of a mother who can’t protect her son when the school wouldn’t act is far more effective than secondhand memories from 20 years ago.

But because we’ve been dissecting the language of what constitutes bullying and harassment on such a minute level, the question “Were you ever bullied?” tripped a different wire last night than it ever has before.

I don’t go around broadcasting the fact that I’m a sexual assault survivor, but I’m not shy about sharing that when it can bridge a space that isolates someone who feels alone in his or her similar experience. What I share less frequently is that my assaults were the culmination of a ten-month abusive relationship–textbook, really, with repeated passes through honeymoon, deterioration, confrontation, and alienation, before the pattern repeated once again.

Because this was a high school relationship, and my abuser was in many of the same classes and activities I was, a major portion of the drama unfolded on school property. To my older and better trained eye, I can now see the stalking and harassing behaviors that I just accepted as either romance or punishment. Following between classes. Cornering for long talks at my locker, in a practice room, under a staircase. Blocking me from leaving those spaces until he’d had his say. Physically threatening behavior. Physical abuse. Telling lies to turn friends and teachers against me.

I was harassed for almost an entire academic year, and not a single school official once stepped in.

I don’t blame anyone for this, in large part because I know that the people who were concerned were actively misled by my abuser, and I’d been convinced I deserved what was happening. But I am suddenly, acutely, aware that if a clear policy had been in place that defined bullying and harassment, supported by training for teachers and staff on how to recognize and intervene, that relationship would never have gone on for ten months. I wouldn’t have been isolated and stalked. And ultimately, I wouldn’t have been raped, because the whole pattern would’ve been stopped before it escalated to that ultimate violation.

When I first told my parents I was raped, almost three years after it happened, my dad set up a meeting for me with one of his grad students who was also a survivor. She showed me a piece of blank paper, and said, “You see this paper? Like this, it takes up almost all of your field of vision. This is your rape, right now.” She folded it in half, and then half again, saying, “Time does this to your experience. It makes it smaller, bit by bit. Therapy helps, but time does most of the work. And eventually,” the paper was just a small, thick square now, “it’ll be so small, you can tuck it the furthest corner of your pocket and almost forget about it. It’ll always be there, but you won’t have to take it out until you want to.”

I’ve taken out that experience, unfolded it from the tiny corner where it resides, for many reasons–sometimes, just to reassure myself that I can fold it back up and shove it out of sight whenever I want. But my realization that I do have a personal experience of bullying and harassment feels like that paper suddenly has a message written on it, one that I’ve never seen before because I haven’t really spread and smoothed the whole experience out for examination in such a very long time. And though it doesn’t make sense, it feels like the paper won’t fold back up again quite the same way, or quite as small again for a long time, now that I’ve seen that writing.

I’ve had a thousand things to say since Missouri Representative, and Senate candidate, Todd Akin opened his pie hole and let the crazy-ignorant cat out of the anti-choice bag. And I haven’t been quiet, but I try not to turn this exclusively into a current affairs blog. I am able to let an event pass without commenting on it. (Theoretically.)

I’m a rape survivor. It’s fairly common knowledge among those who know me, and I’m way past shame. It’s been more than 20 years now. It was a “legitimate rape,” even though I knew my rapist very well and I didn’t scream. I didn’t ask to be raped, even though I was dating my rapist, and I’d turned down a ride home earlier in the night. I didn’t get pregnant, not because I was a virgin or because my body “shut that whole thing down.” I didn’t report my rape, not because I knew it was my fault, but because I needed to survive a whole year with him in my small school, in a small town.

You never forget that part of yourself, and you can’t run away from it. My freshman year of college, I started doing strange things (stranger than usual, I should specify). I became physically self-destructive–I stopped eating for the most part, and I exercised to the point of foundering. I had nightmares every time I fell asleep. On winter break, I finally told my parents what had happened. My dad arranged a meeting with one of his former students, whom he knew had also survived an acquaintance rape. She said it would never go away, but like a piece of paper, time would fold and fold again what seemed massive right then, and while I’d always have that little square to carry around, it wouldn’t fill my world forever.

I went to counseling at Rape Victim Support Services when I returned to school, and found out I had textbook Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The only uncharacteristic thing about it was that I’d successfully suppressed it for so long, until I was somewhere it was “safe” for it to emerge. After I completed the program, I went back to the crisis center that facilitates RVSS’ services, and trained to be a counselor as well. I found community, and understanding, and purpose, as well as a set of skills that I use every single day. Most of the time, all this feels a very long time ago. Almost no scars remain that haven’t turned into the roots I feel unequivocally positive about.

But what started as anger has become strength and a fierce insistence on the truth. So when a long-time acquaintance said there were “worse ways for [rape] to happen,” I responded with a vehemence that surprised me. And when the Independence Party candidate for the 4th Congressional District said, in a live MPR debate I attended Tuesday at the MN State Fair, that there are “many, many different kinds of rape,” many which women claim just to get the abortions “they’re giving out all over the place,” I barely managed to keep my seat, channeling the rush of ferocity into shouts of disagreement and chants of “Rape is rape!” that you can hear on the broadcast recording. And when I arrived at a friend’s house mere minutes after she got the news that her gay son had been raped yesterday, I let Emergency Lass take over and stand by her, helping her think clearly when she was in shock. My own tears and shaking came later; only hugging my sons eased them at all.

Don’t write Todd Akin and his kind off. He’s not a fringe wingnut–he’s the six-term Congressional Representative for his district, and until he accidentally said exactly what he believes on tape, he was leading his opponent, Senator Claire McCaskill, in every poll. I know people who claim pregnancy is a sign the rape wasn’t that violent or unpleasant. I know people who reject the CDC estimate of 32,000 rape-induced pregnancies in the U.S. last year. I know more people than I’d like to think of who think that, in some cases, at least one victim had to have, on some level, wanted it, to take the chances they took.

Please, spread the word: There is nothing you can do that means you were asking to be raped. There is no involuntary physical response that means you deserved or wanted it. There is no kind of rape that’s more or less horrific than another. Virgins get raped. Married people get raped, sometimes by their own partners. People who only go out in groups get raped. Men get raped. Gay people get raped. Mothers, sisters, and daughters get raped. Friends get raped.

Not one of them wanted it. Not one of them deserved it. Not one of them should be doubted or taken less than seriously. Not one of them should think they’re alone. Not one of them will ever forget what happened to them. Rape is rape. It’s not a sexual act–it’s an act of power. Rape is terrorism of the most personal kind imaginable. Don’t settle for anything less than that full truth.

The Rachel Maddow Show reported, on their Tuesday 14 Feb 2012 episode, about a bill recently passed by both houses of the Virginia State Legislature that would require a transvaginal ultrasound for any woman who wants to have an abortion in that state. Governor Bob McDonnell, a Republican, has said he plans to sign the bill when it arrives on his desk.

Plenty of other state legislatures have advanced measures requiring ultrasounds before a woman can obtain an abortion [1]. There is no medical function for this procedure. The logic seems to hinge on the idea that, somehow, seeing the little bean with a flickering heartbeat will convince women who haven’t fully thought through what they’re about to do to stop and treasure the full humanity of the creature growing inside them. This may well be the case for some women; for others, it’s just one more hoop that must be jumped to obtain a medical service that is both heartwrenching and necessary.

But the Virginia variant is the first of which I’ve heard that requires an ultrasound performed not by swooshing the wand around in a schmear of goo on the abdomen (transabdominal ultrasound, or TAU), but by inserting a hard plastic probe several inches into the woman’s vagina (transvaginal ultrasound, or TVU). The American College of Radiology and the Radiological Society of North America say that TVU can be useful in early pregnancy;  TVU can detect a pregnancy as early as 30 days’ gestation [2]. It’s also good for getting a better look at the uterus and ovaries [3], but a 1991 study reported that ultrasonographers gained additional information from TVU over TAU in only 35 percent of cases [4].

Ultrasound image of a first trimester fetus

Frankly, in the first trimester, there isn’t a whole lot to see, no matter how good the picture. Subjecting a woman to an ultrasound before abortion is a strategy; whether or not it is an effective one is an issue of contention. A 2009 study published in the European Journal of Contraception and Reproductive Health Care found that, when given the option, 72 percent of women chose to view the sonogram. Of those, 86 percent said it was a positive experience, but not one changed their mind about the abortion. 83 percent said that seeing the sonogram image did not make the decision any more emotionally challenging than it already was [5].

But none of these things are why Virginia legislators want the specific requirement for transvaginal ultrasound on the books, though. They want it to be intrusive. They want it to be uncomfortable. They want it to be humiliating. They want to show that the state has the power to make you submit to this penetration before you can do what you want with your body.

And there’s a name for that: Rape.

The Code of Virginia § 18.2-67.2 describes the felony of  object sexual penetration as

“…inanimate or animate object sexual penetration if he or she penetrates the labia majora or anus of a complaining witness, whether or not his or her spouse, other than for a bona fide medical purpose…and [t]he act is accomplished against the will of the complaining witness, by force, threat or intimidation of or against the complaining witness or another person….” [emphasis mine]

This is no light offense–it carries a penalty of “confinement in the state correctional facility for life or for any term not less than five years.” There’s also an interesting clause in the penal code which says that

“where the offender is more than three years older than the victim… shall include a mandatory minimum term of confinement of 25 years…where the offender is more than three years older than the victim, is for a term less than life imprisonment, the judge shall impose, in addition to any active sentence, a suspended sentence of no less than 40 years.” [6]

The Virginia law would require women to sign a consent before the ultrasound procedure, but since the state would be effectively holding the woman’s medical choice hostage to obtain that so-called “consent,” I believe there’s a strong argument to be made for coercion, which is also illegal and invalidates that consent.

Before anyone mistakes my intent, I’m not proposing that ultrasonographers should be thrown into jail for abiding by the pending bill if it’s implemented. I’m proposing that the legislators and governor who pass this law should be thrown into jail for conspiracy to commit felony rape.

Rape is psychologically devastating. It wreaks changes on a person’s life and outlook that are no less than tectonic. Survivors are simply never the same. All this, I know from personal experience. If preserving the physical, mental, and spiritual health of the woman is truly the chief concern of the legislators behind the unprecedented wave of attacks on a woman’s right to choose, they wouldn’t heap degradation, humiliation, and involuntary, unnecessary physical penetration on those women.

Unless that’s their real goal. And if that’s the case, any claim that they’re on the side of the angels should be laughed right out of the room.

[1] http://www.guttmacher.org/statecenter/spibs/spib_RFU.pdf

[2] http://www.prochoice.org/education/cme/online_cme/m4ultrasound.asp

[3] http://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info.cfm?pg=obstetricus

[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1785220

[5] http://www.livescience.com/12886-abortion-sonogram-research.html

[6] http://law.justia.com/codes/virginia/2006/toc1802000/18.2-67.2.html