[CN: Men­tion of sex­u­al assault. R*pe.]

Hi, folks,

I think it might be Thurs­day before you see this offi­cial­ly, but I’ve been writ­ing it for most of Wednes­day while Pam Bon­di memes drift up my Face­book feed with a dis­turb­ing reg­u­lar­i­ty.

I’ve been forth­right that I’m a vic­tim of sex­u­al abuse, although it’s been a long time since it’s come up. It’s like dig­ging at a scar—I can’t always tell if it helps or makes things worse. There were years of assaults in my younger years that fit into that weird grey area of grudg­ing con­sent where my wish­es were ignored. (And also a sus­pi­cious pat­tern of trig­gers I’ve dis­cov­ered over my life that may have had to do with some­thing that hap­pened when I was too young to remem­ber.) It took my ther­a­pist nam­ing “coer­cive rape” for me to under­stand that say­ing yes when I did­n’t want to have sex in order to avoid get­ting into an hours-long fight was maybe not the scari­est or most oft-por­trayed-in-the-media form of rape, but that my con­sent was just as ignored. And that went on mul­ti­ple times a week for years.

And on top of that, there has been at least twice where a clear and unam­bigu­ous “No” was total­ly ignored by my part­ner at the time.

There’s this Die Form song I can’t real­ly lis­ten to any­more. I skip it when it comes up on my iPod and the one time it blast­ed in a club, I took a step out­side for a while to recom­bob­u­late. I can lis­ten to most Die Form songs, which is for­tu­nate because all their songs sound kind of sim­i­lar and I like them, but this song is very dif­fi­cult for me to hear. It has the line “syn­thet­ic flesh” repeat­ed over and over again. It makes my skin crawl because it brings up these crys­tal-clear mem­o­ries of this moment of me say­ing no unam­bigu­ous­ly, but it did­n’t mat­ter. And with her on top of me and me lying there just hop­ing it would end soon, she start­ed lec­tur­ing me about how “pas­sion­ate” she was and how my reac­tions were going to fuel her pas­sion and if I would get into it more, she was more like­ly to have an orgasm. (And if that sounds an awful lot like,“Babe, can you fake it, so this is hot for me,” that’s exact­ly what it felt like.) And I remem­ber she had to repeat her­self about a cou­ple of things because that “syn­thet­ic flesh” line was real­ly loud.

So today with Pam Bon­di in front of the House Judi­cia­ry Committee—and real­ly every sin­gle time the Epstein files have been in the news, or when sex­u­al assaulters hit the news or get SCOTUS con­fir­ma­tions or get away with it, and a third of the coun­try comes to bat for them in a way that overt­ly attacks the vic­tim, it’s a lit­tle bit like lis­ten­ing to “syn­thet­ic flesh” (the actu­al song is called “Doc­tor X”) on a loop and reliv­ing that moment over and over and try­ing to reach back through time and han­dle it differently—use the bound­aries then that I now know how to use. It’s been… hard.

So this is just by way of say­ing that if this isn’t some­thing that affects you direct­ly, if it’s loathe­some news of a revolt­ing atroc­i­ty that you won’t put up with, but it does­n’t hit you deep in places that trig­ger some of the worst mem­o­ries of your life, maybe it’s worth con­sid­er­ing being just a lit­tle extra gen­tle with those of us for whom it does.