You’re free to define your experience however you want. You’re not free to define it for others. Defending this take is effectively defining this experience for other people.
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Replying to @hanawie @Aella_Girl
I’m a survivor too, and it is actively detrimental to my mental health to deny that what happened to me was assault. You don’t have to define your experience that way, but it’s not up to you to define it for me or anyone else.
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Replying to @hanawie @Aella_Girl
Not to pile on - just thought of this. I have a not-so-average way of processing what happened to me too, but I don’t advocate that everyone should use it because everyone, every experience, is different. There’s no one way to process these experiences.
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Replying to @hanawie
I absolutely agree, and hope I conveyed this in my post. People have different ways of dealing with it and they're all valid - but my point was exactly that. There is no one true horror or good, and cultural expectations are huge in defining how we think about this.
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Replying to @Aella_Girl
If you can acknowledge that defining that experience as bad works for some people, you have to admit you can’t also define what hurts everyone. If you believe in moral relativism, you have to believe in people’s right to define morality for themselves.
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Replying to @hanawie
I generally agree. I do also think that moral definitions tend to come from popular culture at the time. This doesn't make them wrong or not useful, but it does make them good candidates for really questioning. I think questioning and updating can often be really useful.
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Replying to @Aella_Girl @hanawie
Like, for example, I accepted the cultural narrative that what had happened to me was Very Bad, for years. And when I finally managed to question this narrative deeply enough, I realized that this narrative wasn't working for me, and then found healing.
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Replying to @Aella_Girl @hanawie
The trick is that questioning the narrative was really hard to do, cause the pain around what had happened was absolutely massive, and I didn't want to invalidate it. But I want to question the things that are hardest to question. That's where the juice is.
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Replying to @Aella_Girl
I’m just saying you can’t have it both ways. Either it’s okay for everyone to define their own experience, or sexual violence isn’t that bad and no one should worry about it.
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Replying to @hanawie @Aella_Girl
Also everything is defifined by culture. Human beings are social creatures, so social constructs are inherently important to our basic functioning. They change and develop over time, but that doesn’t strip them of their meaning.
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Also can I say thank you for being reasonable? Out of all of the responses I got to this yours is nearly the only one where I feel like you're actually engaging with me and bringing up good points. I really appreciate it. I had wine at the airport and now I'm tearing up
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