sheshe, i have a problem with this lock. i feel your message should be heard,

[Manifestor_of_Light]

52. Yes I care. And it starts with myself.

I have never been hit. My sister had worse husbands than I had, and she told me she had been physically abused like it was a deep dark secret. And said, "Don't tell mom and dad."

However, I have been abused in other ways, usually in subtle ways, with words or putdowns, even sometimes by my own mother or grandmother. Sometimes with years of psychological and emotional abuse by a partner. When I was a doormat and I was not told to stand up to it because nice girls would let men and authority figures control them and tell them what to do.

Men at work telling me I don't know this or that. Men ignoring what I say and then listening to the same exact thing said by a male five minutes later. And doing what the man told them.

Other, more serious abuses from decades in the past. Things that happened to me that we didn't have names for. We didn't have words for them or a way to discuss them. They were known as "bad shit that some men do sometimes to women". Things that women are terrified to report and when they are reported, they are not prosecuted.


Things that because we had no words for it we didn't really have a concept that we were violated. We knew we were hurt but not in a very specific way. Thought it was merely bad judgment on our part, when society was making sure we didn't recognize it as a deep hurt that made us suffer, because we were socialized to seek the approval of men. This was thirty-five, forty years ago.


I didn't discuss this with other women because I didn't feel like I knew any women to talk to that were on my intellectual level. All my good friends were men, nice men. Didn't go to consciousness raising groups. Knew I was a feminist because my parents knew I was brilliant and insisted I go to college, as an equal with men. Attempted to go into my father's profession as if I was a son. But had no group of women I felt I could relate to merely because of my gender. Saw my mother as a housewife who was a victim of the time she lived in and the restricted society she was in.