For my WRIT 340 class, we were tasked with responding to a prompt inspired by this NYT Opinion collection: What one piece of culture captures the true spirit of our country?
I grew up as a fearful child. While my world was filled with jump rope at recess, library trips with grandma, and frozen yogurt with all the toppings, my brain was quite paranoid for an eight-year-old. Perhaps I read fantastical books with magic spells and sudden tragedy at too young an age, but I often stayed up all night fearing spontaneous fires or targeted monster kidnappings or some combination of the two. When I did fall asleep, a nightmare would likely take my brain in the same paranoid direction. Not very fun, to say the least. And not very fun for my mother who I would run to in tears, asking for some explanation to settle my confusion at the state of the world and its seemingly endless doom.
Somewhere along the way, I realized that many of my fears were not so rational. Of course, I heard scattered tragic stories on the news, but ultimately existed in a protective bubble of my ignorance, held together by the refusal from my family to truly expose me to the harsh realities of being a woman in America. I was able to separate the fantastical of my books from the world around me, yet could never shake pondering why bad things happen. I thought, bad things happen to other people. I am safe and I am loved and I am protected. But then somewhere further along the way, I grew up again, and my family could no longer protect me from the once-forbidden truths. In an unwanted blur of adolescence, suddenly my paranoia was not so far-fetched.
I now walk by myself with a pit in my stomach, overthinking every passerby. I hold my pepper spray close as the sun goes down. I meet a friendly industry professional who might be too friendly. He jokes to me, “I’m happy to help in your career. Don’t worry, I’ve never been arrested. She dropped the charges.” I don’t think it's funny. A stranger finds my portfolio website and starts to harass me online: “lindsey I’m really sorry if i made you felt bad I just wanted to know you i felt a positivity in you.” I block this stranger immediately, but don’t recover from the gnawing fear as fast. The stories of women being raped become the stories of friends and peers. The fears of monsters and sci-fi doom from my childhood are nothing compared to the real world and its real monsters. I live in daily paranoia simply by existing as a young adult woman. And yet, I know I am lucky.
***
Chanel Miller was not so lucky.
On January 17, 2015, Chanel Miller woke up at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in shambles. As if waking up from a nightmare, the impossibility of rape something that happens to other people became the very real statement on top of her hospital documents. Rape victim. Emily Doe. Her identity as a 22-year-old UCSB graduate, daughter, sister, and friend was instantly gone, degraded to victim.
She recalls in her viral victim impact statement, “My sister picked me up, face wet from tears and contorted in anguish. Instinctively and immediately, I wanted to take away her pain” (Baker). In the moment of trauma and horrific understanding of what had occurred, Chanel immediately thinks of her younger sister. She is unknowingly conditioned to protect her loved ones, already apologizing for her own victimhood. The guilt would continue for Chanel through the next three years of her trial, regretting the unthinkable positions of agony for her family and friends. They could never prepare for the necessary support Chanel would need. And Chanel could never take back the pain she caused her loved ones in return. Or in actuality, the pain that Brock Turner, the rapist, caused them all.
Of course, it didn’t feel that way for Chanel. Or for the thousands of people who blamed her for what she wore, how much she drank, and why she was even there in the first place.
As women in America, we are first conditioned to be afraid. Next, we are conditioned to apologize for our fear, not wanting to be seen as weak, irrational, and a victim. When the aforementioned industry professional began to make me uncomfortable, I felt guilty for my fearful reaction. “He is just trying to be nice,” my brain told me, so I continued to smile and nod while simultaneously wishing for an escape. I convinced myself I was being irrational, as women often do, until I looked him up after and found countless articles connecting him to the #MeToo movement. I still felt guilty, even after my fears were justified. Understanding gender power differentials leads me to feel weak for my fears, yet I apologize further because I do not want to create negative consequences for myself. It is always easier to make nice, stroke fragile egos, and apologize first. I do not want to find out what happens when I stand up for myself.
While women aim to minimize the consequences for our reactions to fear, we often focus first on how our tragedy causes devastating consequences for those around us. Throughout her memoir, Know My Name, Chanel recalls the likelihood and anguish that her sister could have been the victim on that fateful January night. She dreaded calling Tiffany to update her on the trial, wishing she did not have to testify as a witness. Her sister, still a college student, deserved to be laughing with her friends in the library instead of missing midterms to testify in a rape trial. While she wishes she could take back the event, she never wondered why it had to “happen” to her: “The only thing running through my head when my sister picked me up that morning was "Thank god me. Thank god me, and not her” (Miller, 274). Chanel was not worried about the brightness of her future, but rather the brightness of her sister’s future, understanding her fate as something that happens to women in America. Chanel’s life had been tragically altered, frozen on the night of January 17. She did not want to freeze the lives of anyone else.
When a strange man starts to pay attention to me at a bar, I flinch and create distance, a response that many women know well. Our guts train us to be afraid before we have a reason to, which can be fueled further by the implicit bias that contributes to the racialization of fear in public space. UC Irvine’s Kristen Day conducts research on the often homogenous grouping of men when discussing female fear, noting a crucial need for the intersection of gender and race in interpretations of power and fear (Day). As a white man, Brock Turner was previously immune to many of the fears that are, consciously or not, placed on men for their race, size, and sexuality. His race and class privilege even mitigated outrage in the aftermath of his crimes, with a lenient initial sentencing of only 6 months (Stack).
Brock, the star Stanford swimmer and picture perfect example of white American potential, had so much to lose. The rapist may have lost everything at the power of his own hands, but Chanel lost everything too, even ownership over her own body: “I was terrified of it, I didn’t know what had been in it, if it had been contaminated, who had touched it. I wanted to take off my body like a jacket and leave it at the hospital with everything else” (Baker). As a defense mechanism, Chanel detaches herself from the trauma of her body. Female bodies are already treated like an accessory, objectified for the gaze of others. The ‘jacket’ of a female body is too big, too small, too colorful, too wrinkly, and the list goes on. Chanel wished her body was as disposable as Brock treated it: just something he could take off, toss in the dumpster, and return to the prestige of Stanford swimming without a second thought. He never liked that jacket anyway.
***
Chanel understands the political implications of this fear, connecting this preservational mental dance to the submissive narratives we have been told by our leaders. When a vulgar tape of our former president on Access Hollywood was released, his commentary on female bodies was dismissed as simply locker-room talk. According to Chanel: “Trump says, I don't think you understand. Just words. You are overreacting, overly offended, hysterical, rude, relax!!!” (Miller, 278). We are berated for our fears by our own government, by the ones who are supposed to protect us.
Our anger is minimized by our conditioning to be quiet, respectful, and in many ways, inferior. Chanel exclaims of her reaction to institutionalized fear, “So we dismiss threatening statements and warning signs, apologizing for our paranoia” (Miller, 278). We apologize for overreacting to your abhorrent comments about our bodies. Our anger is minimized by our conditioning to be quiet, respectful, and in many ways, inferior. We act as perfect victims in our collective female suffering. And somehow, it’s always our fault.
It’s been our fault, for thousands of years, for always. The history of female hysteria proves a deep-rooted connection to these modern-day themes of female guilt and apologetic fear. Dating back to 1900 BC in Ancient Egypt, females were first diagnosed with hysteria as a mental disorder, connecting to the abnormal movement of one’s uterus. Greek history continued this theme of female madness and “melancholy” of the uterus in the inability to give birth. In the 13th Century of Christianity, this female “disease” was associated with the devil as cause for delirium. Women were blamed for their connection to the devil and widespread fear surrounding the “woman-witch” grew across Europe (Tasca, et al.). This legacy lives on in the continuation of women guilted for their pain and objectified for their bodies, “setting the stage for the modern tendency to assume women invent stories of rape, abuse, and violence” (DePrince).
History tells us that we were mad. Our government tells us that we are dramatic. And we tell ourselves that we shouldn’t feel all of the things that these systems have created, even afraid to upset a man by walking away from him at a bar. Chanel writes, “It is enough to be suffering. It is another thing to have someone ruthlessly working to diminish the gravity of validity of this suffering” (Baker). We are paranoid all of the time. But it means nothing. We ruthlessly search for some way to protect our sisters, our daughters, our children, and our friends, in a country that will not protect us in return. As Americans, we lie to ourselves. We refuse to acknowledge the overdue change needed within our own borders to save lives. We self-preserve, protecting our families, and hope there will be a day when it doesn’t feel like we are pretending anymore.
***
As I read Chanel Miller’s memoir, Know My Name, I felt ever more sensitive to the fears I must carry in this body of mine in this country of ours.
At times, the book became too difficult to read. I would close it in a fit of anger for her tragedy, wanting to erase my awareness and return to the ignorance of childhood. Instead, when I close her reality, I must open my chapter to the world in which she experienced such violent injustice. I exist in the same world in which my fears are so invalid that I feel the need to apologize for them.
I pass a back alley and think of the pine needles Chanel found gripping to her limbs, a reminder of the senseless time, place, and manner in which she was violated. When I throw something away in a dumpster, I shiver at the thought of the unthinkable things that the dumpster may have seen. I think of my older sister and my heart shatters to imagine the collective love and pain Chanel and Tiffany felt for each other throughout grueling years of trial. I want to give my sister a hug. I want to give Chanel a hug. I want to give America a hug.
Baker, Katie J.M. “Here’s the Powerful Letter the Stanford Victim Read to Her Attacker.”
BuzzFeed News, BuzzFeed News, 3 June 2016, www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katiejmbaker/heres-the-powerful-letter-the-stanford-victim-read-to-her-ra.
DePrince, Anne P. The History of Hysteria in Women’s Lives | Psychology Today,
www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/from-awareness-to-action/202303/the-history-of-hysteria-in-womens-lives. Accessed 6 Dec. 2023.
Day, Kristen. Being Feared: Masculinity and Race in Public Space,
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1068/a37221. Accessed 6 Dec. 2023.
Miller, Chanel. Know My Name: A Memoir. Penguin Books, an Imprint of Penguin Random
House LLC, 2020.
Stack, Liam. “Light Sentence for Brock Turner in Stanford Rape Case Draws Outrage.” The New
York Times, The New York Times, 6 June 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/06/07/us/outrage-in-stanford-rape-case-over-dueling-statements-of-victim-and-attackers-father.html.
Tasca, Cecilia, et al. “Women and Hysteria in the History of Mental Health.” Clinical Practice
and Epidemiology in Mental Health : CP & EMH, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2012, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3480686/.
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