Radical love happens in the post I link

Heather Corinna writes this post about what happened when she agreed to help promote both the “I was raped” t-shirt and conversations about it earlier this month.

It is a long post, a personal post, a thoughtful and insightful account of a person whose image (literally and figuratively) was spread in negative ways around television and the internet without her control.

What’s her account of what it felt like to be misrepresented and attacked got to do with radical love?

Well for one thing, Corinna shares some particularly violent emails in the post, from people who said they have been raped, and were angry at her for wearing the t-shirt or talking about it.  What struck me about her handling of these emails was how she spoke with compassion – for herself and for others who’ve been raped and (in my view also) misdirected their anger at her.  Her whole account really is chock full of discussing hatred and dismissal from a place of dignity and consideration. 

It stuck out to me because of an experience I had a couple of years ago where I was verbally attacked (and almost physically) in a public space by people I didn’t know and had done nothing to, for having had the gall to be unapologetic about not being into sexual humiliation.  I threatened one of them with physical violence, and was sorry at the time that he did not push me to actually carry it out. 

It was not just a case of not being able to have the same kind of calmer response to others’ wrongdoing  that Corinna had.  I was not even able to have the same kind of response towards *myself* that I found so affecting in Corinna’s post; I was as angry and disgusted with me as I was with those dudes who came at me.  I got a brief spurt of hate-email after the incident, and I can’t say that I would have reflected anything but hatred back at the authors if any one of them had identified themselves as women who had gone through what I went through and blamed me for the response I got, added to it with their own rage.  As it was, everyone who wrote to me self-identified as male, and because I felt no connection with them, I was able to hit delete on every one.

And that is what Corinna’s post made me think about also - how it is connection, not a lack thereof, that often makes me *less* forgiving rather than more so.

It’s not that I think I owe forgiveness or empathy to those who would try to increase my suffering as an outlet for their own pain.  It’s that it just surprised me to see someone do that, to see that it was even possible.  To wonder, why?  Why, while still clearly holding her attackers accountable, was she able to see the pain they also felt and not just her own that they helped cause?  Why was she able to feel for other people when they extended nothing of the sort her way?  Why, in her recounting of many people’s really terrible behavior, did she not feel justified flinging some mud herself?

[Note to anybody reading this - the above musings and this post in general are not a comment on and are not in any way related to the recent failures in the blog world.  No one that I have seen attacked has behaved badly in recent situations, nor are they responsible for how anyone else behaved, and although I have said things elsewhere about the crazyness, this post is also not about people who do the pile-ons or anything of the sort.  It may sound fantastical, but it's true - this is one post that is unrelated to the AM/Seal Press skullduggery!]

It is a radical approach in my estimations, to locate her heart’s well-being within the humanity of others.  To insist on seeing other people, rather than just their actions.  And the fact that it was done without fanfare or attempts to instruct – that is also what hit me.  She talks about a lot of things in that post; the part with the hate emails and her response to them is a small chunk.  It is not the point of her post to tell me or anyone else that the best thing to do, or even one possible good thing of many to do, is to not-hate back even if sorely provoked. 

The post seemed to have many points in my reading and re-reading of it, and I will leave it to those who click through to get whatever they get out of it for themselves.  But I will assert this much: it is radical to quietly insist on loving, in the verb sense, people who were raped.  It is radical to insist on speaking love, it is radical to refuse invisibility as a person who was raped, when being raped is mostly a much more punishable offense than carrying out the rape itself.  It is radical to think of those who are saying nothing, to speak love to them and sometimes (in my case, anyway) for them, rather than thinking only of those who say terrible things and/or would have you say nothing as well. 

Love under duress is a radical thing.