Bad Feminist: Essays (16 page)

The exhibit, as a whole, was overwhelming. As I moved from room to room, I thought about how much pain Dial bleeds onto his canvas and how he works with that pain in culturally savvy and responsive ways. Given Dial’s life story, it’s understandable that his work is a reflection of the difficulties he has experienced. I could not imagine that a happy ending would be possible.

And yet.

Room after room after room of the exhibit was filled with these massive art pieces, sculptures, drawings, most of them created using found materials and lived experiences. The last room of the exhibit, though, was saturated in bright color. It was startling to enter the room and see . . . redemption, salvation, triumph, hope, happiness, a happy ending after a long, sorrowful journey. The pieces in the last room of the exhibit reflected Dial’s spirituality and how he overcame serious illness. Everything about the artwork was vibrant, almost ecstatic, in a much different way from the rest of the exhibit. Dial’s
The Beginning of Life in the Yellow Jungle
is an explosion of yellow, an artistic musing on life and how it evolves. The assemblage has fake plants, flowers made from plastic soda bottles, a doll serenely composed, and because of how these elements are held together, with Splash Zone epoxy, you get the sense that everything is connected, both literally and figuratively. It was inspiring and refreshing to see an artist willing to explore happiness as much as he was willing to explore pain, anger, darkness, unhappiness. Dial’s art argues that both light and dark can rise from an artist’s experiences.

I have been thinking about happy endings in life, in art, in literature.

Dawn Tripp’s
Game of Secrets
is, as you might imagine, a novel about secrets—secrets among the novel’s characters and secrets the author withholds from the reader. Most of the plot hinges on Tripp doling out pieces of these secrets a little at a time. The story begins with an affair and a decades-old murder—sex, betrayal, death—the stuff of many interesting stories.

There’s some mystery to
Game of Secrets
, but mostly, a man is dead and we know it, even if we don’t know how he came to such a pass. The dead man was a father and an estranged husband and a lover.
Game of Secrets
is about many things, but mostly it revolves around the aftermath of this man, Luce Weld’s, death and how, for decades, it affects many residents in a small New England town. We think we know who did it—Silas Varick, the husband of Ada Varick, with whom Luce Weld was having an affair—but we can’t be sure.

The story is told from multiple perspectives across several decades, but the two main characters are Marne Dyer and her mother, Jane Dyer, who is the daughter of Luce Weld. Throughout the novel, Marne is engaged in the fragile beginnings of a relationship with Ray Varick, Ada’s son, and Jane is playing a game of Scrabble with Ada. In small towns, you can’t really escape secrets or Scrabble, and what makes
Game of Secrets
so readable is that, as a reader, you start to see that everyone knows a little something. Tripp makes it easy to piece together what everyone knows in order to see the whole story. The premise makes a happy ending seem nearly impossible because there are so many secrets that have been held close for so long.

In such an atmosphere, there’s bound to be unhappiness, sorrow, darkness, but these emotions don’t overwhelm the story. Instead, the awkwardness of these secrets creates a mournful tone. As I neared the end, I wondered how the story could have a happy ending for anyone involved. Because I was invested, I wanted that happy ending for everyone. I wanted the people in this town to find their way out of the darkness, to reach a place of redemption, salvation, triumph, hope, happiness, a happy ending after a long, sorrowful journey, even if I couldn’t see how that could be possible.

And yet.

There are happy endings in
Game of Secrets
for almost everyone involved, even though those happy endings may not look the way we expect happy endings to look. Just before his death, a man recognizes his son. A daughter finally begins to understand the mother who has long confounded her, and that daughter is able to grow, able to show her mother kindness. A husband tells his daughter his wife was the only one, has always been the only one, without regret. A woman makes peace with moving back to her hometown and tries to allow herself to love. A man remains open to love even when he is pushed away. The happy endings in
Game of Secrets
are subtle and incomplete but they are there, and it works because happiness itself is often subtle and incomplete.

Sometimes, and especially as a writer, I feel like I have no idea what happiness is, what it looks like, what it feels like, how to show it on the page.

I have no problem with darkness, sorrow, pain, or unhappiness. I have no intention of straying from these themes in my writing. But. In considering the Dial exhibit and
Game of Secrets
, I wonder how we can complicate these themes that pervade fiction and art so we can also achieve a more complete, complex understanding of happiness. Happiness is not uninspiring if we don’t allow our imaginations to fail us. I want to believe there is substance to fairy tales. I want to believe there’s something to hold on to, even when dealing with the slick smoothness of idyll, of joy.

There are crimes and then there are crimes and then there are atrocities. These are matters of scale. I was shaken by an article in the
New York Times
about an eleven-year-old girl who was gang-raped by eighteen men in Cleveland, Texas. The levels of horror to this story are many, from the victim’s age, to what is known about what happened to her, to the number of attackers, to the public response in that town, to how the story was reported. There is video of the attack too because this is the future. The unspeakable will be televised.

The article was entitled “Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town,” as if the victim in question were the town itself. James McKinley Jr., the article’s author, focused on how the men’s lives would be changed forever, how the town was being ripped apart, how those poor boys might never be able to return to school. There was discussion of how the eleven-year-old girl, the child, dressed like a twenty-year-old, implying that there is a realm of possibility where a woman can “ask for it” and that it’s somehow understandable that eighteen men would rape a child. There were even questions about the whereabouts of the girl’s mother, given, as we all know, that a mother must be with her child at all times or whatever ill befalls the child is clearly the mother’s fault. Strangely, there were no questions about the whereabouts of the father while this rape was taking place.

The overall tone of the article was what a shame it all was, how so many lives were affected by this one terrible event. Little word space was spent on the girl, the child. It was an eleven-year-old girl whose body was ripped apart, not a town. It was an eleven-year-old girl’s life that was ripped apart, not the lives of the men who raped her. It is difficult to make sense of how anyone could lose sight of that fact, and yet it isn’t.

We live in a culture that is overly permissive where rape is concerned. While there are certainly many people who understand rape and the damage of rape, we also live in a time that necessitates the phrase “rape culture.” This phrase denotes a culture where we are inundated, in different ways, by the idea that male aggression and violence toward women is acceptable and often inevitable. As Lynn Higgins and Brenda Silver ask in their book
Rape and Representation
, “How is it that in spite (or perhaps because) of their erasure, rape and sexual violence have been so ingrained and so rationalized through their representations as to appear ‘natural’ and inevitable, to women as to men?” This is an important question, trying to understand how we have come to this.

We have also, perhaps, become immune to the horror of rape because we see it so often and discuss it so often, many times without acknowledging or considering the gravity of rape and its effects. We jokingly say things like “I just took a rape shower” or “My boss totally just raped me over my request for a raise.” We have appropriated the language of rape for all manner of violations, great and small. It is not a stretch to imagine why James McKinley Jr., in his reportage, was more concerned about eighteen men than one girl.

The casual way in which we deal with rape may begin and end with television and movies where we are inundated with images of sexual and domestic violence. Can you think of a dramatic television series that has not incorporated some kind of rape story line? There was a time when these story lines had a certain educational element to them, à la “A Very Special Episode.” I remember, for example, the episode of
Beverly Hills 90210
where Kelly Taylor discusses being date-raped, at a slumber party, surrounded, tearfully, by her closest friends. For many young women that episode created a space where they could have a conversation about rape as something that was not just perpetrated by strangers. Later in the series, when the show was on its last legs, Kelly would be raped again, this time by a stranger. We watched the familiar trajectory of violation, trauma, disillusion, and finally vindication, seemingly forgetting we had sort of seen this story before.

Nearly every other movie aired on Lifetime or Lifetime Movie Network features some kind of violence against women. The violence is graphic and gratuitous while still being strangely antiseptic, where more is implied about the actual act than shown. We consume these representations of violence and do so eagerly. There is a comfort, I suppose, to consuming violence contained in ninety-minute segments, muted by commercials for household goods and communicated to us by former television stars with feathered bangs.

While rape as entertainment fodder may have also once included an element of the didactic, such is no longer the case. Rape is good for ratings. In Season 4 of ABC’s
Private Practice
, Charlotte King, an iron-willed, independent, and sexually adventurous doctor, is brutally raped. This happened, of course, just as February sweeps were beginning. The depiction of the assault was as graphic as you might expect from prime-time network television. For several episodes we saw the attack and its aftermath, the narrative arc of how the once vibrant Charlotte became a shell of herself, how she became sexually frigid, how her body bore witness to the physical damage of rape. Another character on the show, Violet, bravely confesses she too had been raped. The show was widely applauded for its sensitive treatment of a difficult subject. The episode that began the arc, “Did You Hear What Happened to Charlotte King?,” was the highest-rated episode of the season.

General Hospital
, like most soap operas, incorporates a rape story line every five years or so when it needs an uptick in viewers. Emily Quartermaine was raped, and before Emily, Elizabeth Webber was raped, and long before Elizabeth, Laura of the infamous “Luke and Laura” was raped by Luke, but that rape was okay because Laura married Luke so her rape doesn’t really count. Every woman,
General Hospital
wanted us to believe, loves her rapist. In 2010, the rape story line on the soap offered a twist. The victim was a man, Michael Corinthos III, son of Port Charles mob boss Sonny Corinthos, himself no stranger to violence against women. While it was commendable to see the show’s producers trying to address the issue of male rape and prison rape, the subject matter was still handled carelessly, was still a source of titillation, and was still packaged neatly between commercials for cleaning products and baby diapers.

Of course, if we are going to talk about rape and how we are inundated by representations of rape and how, perhaps, we’ve become numb to rape, we have to discuss
Law & Order: SVU
, which deals, primarily, in all manner of sexual assault against women, children, and, once in a great while, men. Each week the violation is more elaborate, more lurid, more unspeakable. When the show first aired, Rosie O’Donnell, I believe, objected quite vocally when one of the stars appeared on her show. O’Donnell said she didn’t understand why such a show was needed. People dismissed her objections and the incident was quickly forgotten. The series is in its fifteenth season and shows no signs of ending anytime soon. When O’Donnell objected to
SVU
’s premise, when she dared to suggest that perhaps a show dealing so explicitly with sexual assault was unnecessary and too much, people treated her like she was the crazy one, the prude censor. I watch
SVU
religiously and have seen every episode more than once. I am not sure what that says about me.

It is rather ironic that only a couple of weeks before publishing “Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town,” the
Times
ran an editorial about the “War on Women.” This topic matters to me. I once wrote an essay about how, as a writer who is also a woman, I increasingly feel that writing is a political act whether I intend it to be or not because we live in a culture where McKinley’s article is permissible and publishable. I am troubled by how we have allowed such intellectual distance between violence and the representation of violence. We talk about rape, but we don’t carefully talk about rape.

We live in a strange and terrible time for women. There are days when I think it has always been a strange and terrible time to be a woman. Womanhood feels more strange and terrible now because progress has not served women as well as it has served men. We are still stymied by the issues our forbears railed against. It is nothing less than horrifying to realize we live in a culture where the “paper of record” can write an article that comes off as sympathetic to eighteen rapists while encouraging victim blaming. Have we forgotten who an eleven-year-old is? Perhaps people do not understand the trauma of gang rape. While there’s no benefit to creating a hierarchy of rape where one kind of rape is worse than another because rape is, at the end of the day, rape, there is something particularly insidious about gang rape, about the idea that a pack of men feed on one another’s frenzy and both individually and collectively believe it is their right to violate a woman’s body in such an unspeakable manner and watch the others take turns.