1. Know that, to rise to the attention of media gatekeepers, your rape story must clear a bar that love and murder and adventure and dragon stories don’t have to clear and be either horrible (gang rape, deep lacerations) or gilded (see No. 2).
2. Those gatekeepers are much more likely to pay attention if A) your assaulter is someone famous and powerful or B) the rape took place on the grounds of an elite institution.
3. Be aware that you will thereby benefit, in some sense, from the same power structure that enabled your rapist and, possibly, helped him escape retribution.
4. But remember the powerful literary agent who read your first effort to tell this story (this story that lives in your belly and bones) and sighed, saying your characters were great but that “date rape stories are a dime a dozen.”
5. Yours was not a story of date rape. There is no such thing as date rape. There is only rape.
6. But still, if they really are “a dime a dozen,” shouldn’t we be telling them?
7. Don’t complain. You are white/cis/lucky/healthy/have insurance. Or none of these is true. By whatever means, you have the ability to A) tell your story and B) bring it to the attention of others through the marketplace.
8. The marketplace is not a police blotter, after all, and in any case, almost nobody goes to the police. You are a realist. You do not consider yourself special because you were victimized. You probably did not consider yourself special before that, either.
9. Wonder whether this is why you were victimized.
10. Note your internalized complicity with a culture that holds girls and women accountable for male violence. Consider whether there is a legitimate element to this rationalization, in that it might be an attempt to claw back some measure of control from a moment of complete subjugation.
11. Learn to fire a gun. Understand how it feels like punching the sun and how for a frightened man, this is a simulacrum of power. Consider the relationship between this and sexual violence.
12. Memory: A few years after your rape, your dad seeing you in your new denim skirt from the Gap and saying, frightened, “You’re just asking for it in a skirt that short.”
13. Recommit. This is why you’re telling your story. You love your father; he loves you; change is possible.
14. Still, don’t let your parents read it while you’re still writing.
32. Hide the rest. Your children are a new generation. It might be different for them. It won’t. It might.
David Adams
Article URL : https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/opinion/lacy-crawford-memoir-rape.html