Image courtesy Focus Features
Hello, Friends.
It’s February and here we all are with the first week of the shortest month of the somehow-longest already year behind us. The main discourse last week was rape, and holy fuck it was a lot and I am tired of it.
If you don’t want to read about that, scroll down to the section break, and you can just read the regular part of the editor’s letter. Or skip it altogether; whatever works for you.
A few weeks ago I watched Promising Young Woman. It was a movie I had been looking forward to for a while, and then COVID-19 fucked stuff up, but it’s finally available on VOD, in select theaters maybe (?!), and at my beloved Mission Tiki. When I first saw this movie, I was floored. Gutted, really. I watched it at home with my husband, Fritz, and then saw it again a few days later with my friend Brian at the drive in. Both times I had this immense feeling of hollowness afterwards—that sort of feeling you might get after you spend a few hours really hard-sobbing, you know? Like, Christ, what it is to be in this world, to be unapologetically consumed by men* who will and can hurt you. It isn’t lost on me that I watched this with two of the only men I have ever felt 100% safe with.
We’ll circle back to this.
Last week started with Evan Rachel Wood coming forward—along with several other woman—about abuse at the hands of Marilyn Manson. God bless Evan; I love her, and she has long maintained that she was horrifically groomed and broken down by an older man when she was a teen. Anyone paying attention knew who she meant, but she never named Brian Warner (Manson’s legal name) until now. This, of course, was met with derision from Manson fans, mostly men (and Anime avatars, which not always, but often, are bad news and shoes). “Why didn’t she say this before?” (she did). “She just wants fame” was my favorite— apparently, the extremely successful actress, who has been consistently working since she was young, is a nobody. We got his ex-wife, Dita Von Teese, weighing in with a passive aggressive statement about women ‘incurring’ abuse. It is, of course, impossible for Marilyn Manson, a man who has actually admitted to abusing women and teenagers in print, to be an abuser, because he… wrote AntiChrist Superstar or something? I don’t know, but as a woman who has experienced several sexual assaults and an attempted murder, it’s just real fucking annoying to see people running to protect the abuser and not the abused. It’s demoralizing. It’s depressing.
Can you believe the week managed to get worse from there?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on Instagram live, almost breaking down in tears at several points, to describe her experience with the 1/6 insurrection; how she feared for her life, how she knew people were there looking for her, to hurt her, to kill her, or maybe even worse. I couldn’t bear to watch the actual footage; the ERW stuff had me feeling raw. And people, especially men, hate AOC on a good day. I was not up for seeing them attack her or call her a liar. And the POETRY magazine stuff had me apoplectic, so like… how could I take any more?
Oh yeah, POETRY, true to their conviction of change for the benefit of the greater community, published a pedophile, a man who is accused of grooming and date raping students when he was a prestigious published professor at Allegheny College, a man who lured children with a Pomeranian, a man who had half a million child pornography photos and videos on his hard drive, in their February Incarceration issue (never mind the weird ass decision to have an incarceration issue during Black History Month!). A man who is not in jail anymore and who has tried to slip into the community again under the radar by masquerading as a Latinx man. And, when called out on it, POETRY did what they do best— they doubled down, then issued a slap-in-the face non-apology days later, days in which the poetry community drowned in the very triggering nature of CSA, pedophilia, rape… a never ending discussion that is still happening as we speak, a discussion where one side of the aisle is screaming at POETRY to take into consideration the feelings of actual rape victims, some of whom are victims of this very man!, while the other tried to devil’s advocate their way into hot takes such as “bestiality and pedophilia are human nature (???!!) and you’re just not evolved enough to have this discussion”, “can’t believe people are mad a convict was in an issue for convicts” (burying the lede, that dude was), and my favorite, from a man known to write rape poems about female poets in dizzying, violent detail: “pedophilia is just a mental illness, just let the man write!”.
Fuck off. I google every contributor we publish on my own every month, and I don’t even have Big Pharma funding me. If I find out a contributor is abusive, I do not publish them.
So often, victims of sexual abuse are asked to hold space for the abusers. Maybe they have changed! They are still human! They don’t deserve to be defined by their shortcomings! So often they are asked over and over to step back into the shadows so the discussion can be about how much we can reform rapists, and how much we should allow them back into our society.
So often, we are not asked, “How are you doing with all of this?”
We aren’t asked anything at all, except to get over it, and be quiet.
By Friday I was so done in by the weight of all this that even the mere presence of another person in my vicinity was sending me into a tailspin. In my ears was just a buzz of hate.
So here, this is where I circle back to Promising Young Woman.
If you don’t know the premise of this movie, here it is.
Cassie’s best friend was raped while they were in medical school. Her rapist suffered no punishment. Unable to cope, she commits suicide. We don’t see this; this all happens before the movie. She’s a non-entity but she is still, in a way, the main character. Cassie has devoted her life to scaring men into realizing that they’re predators; she acts drunk at bars, and when they take her home, she snaps into sobriety, asking them what they’re doing. She is stunted and frozen in her grief; this is all she has. Then she has an opportunity to confront her friend’s rapist. So, things happen.
Brian forwarded me a fairly vitriolic tweet thread about how this was the worst movie ever. I get it; the movie is going to be polarizing. But it seemed that the main complaint (beyond it being “poorly directed”, which it certainly wasn’t, but whatever) was “I wanted to see men die, and I didn’t.” Ok, I don’t know what to tell you. Same, I guess? But that’s now how rape works. We rarely get to see rapists die. If you want to see rapist die, there’s a movie called I Spit on Your Grave that might help. (I also saw a few complaints about the movie veering into “copaganda”, a claim that baffles me to no end, as cops are in it for all of 23 seconds, but I dunno whatever, it’s not for everyone). In real life, there is rarely justice, and honestly any attempt at self-preservation and holding a perpetrator accountable is met with more violence and harassment. That’s just the way the world is. Cassie tries everything, and she is never better off for it. She is stuck where she is, and nothing unsticks her. Even her only attempt to remove herself from her perpetual misery ends up in disappointment.
(I also saw, in the same thread, the critique that this movie was “another white woman centering herself in someone else’s trauma”. That is a very valid critique for most things; but is the suffering and death of a best friend not traumatic in its own right? My best friend died when she was 19. I am still traumatized by it. Am I centering myself in her trauma? She doesn’t have any anymore. She’s dead. But at this point I am rambling.)
I was grateful for this essay by Carmen Machado that I felt resonated a lot with how I feel about it all.
After this week I have thought about rape far too much, much more than I usually do, which is to say I think about it a lot, all the time maybe. And this week, more. My rape, the rapes of my friends, the rapes of women who could not move past it.
The way POETRY is handling this debacle is despicable. I have no love lost for them; as I wrote both here and here to them on Twitter, I find them cancerous, I find them repulsive. They should be extracted from the poetry community after a hefty disbursement of their funding to all manners of charities set up for communities they have inflicted abuse on over the years: the Jewish community, the Black community, rape and abuse survivors. But they have that big pharma money to fall back on every time they fuck the fuck up, so why would they bother? They won’t change unless people force them to.
And the sad reality is we are never going to be free from talking about rape. Every public conversation will open up wound after wound, over and over again. It’s just never going to stop. And I am so tired of it, I am tired. I don’t want to talk about the ripple effects these conversations have on people.
But I will. I’ll keep talking about it. Because I think, until things change, that’s all I can do.
So I ask you: How are you doing with all of this? Are you ok? And if not, how can I help you?
**
We have another solid issue for you this month, which I am grateful for. And I am pretty excited to be debuting our new feature, It’s Good, Actually. We created this category so that people can defend the terrible movies they love, and while Kyle Seibel didn’t go in a direction I was envisioning, it was so goddamned good that I chose it as our inaugural piece. Do you like terrible movies? Tell us why you think they’re good, actually. We have staff work from Zora Satchell, Gabriel Ricard, and Alex Schumacher; we have stunning work from Darren Demaree, Kristin Garth, and Susan Yim Rother, among others.
We’re inching closer to our April Pop Culture issue. We’re open until 2/28 for submissions, then we’ll be closed for March.
Spring is coming soon.
I wish you all the health in the world. I hope that you think Drunk Monkeys as a safe and cozy corner of the small lit world; it’s all I ever want it to be. Please, please, let me know if I am fucking up at all, or missed something somewhere along the way. While I strive for what I consider vague perfection, I am not perfect; I am a mother who is wrangling a toddler and teenager while working part time and dodging my work-from-home husband in a two bedroom apartment. I do my best but can always be better.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention it is Black History Month; while Black history is American history and we should be mindful every month, why not put some energy into uplifting and financially contributing to Black writers, artists, and like, everything else? We are retweeting calls for assistance or links to books/ writings all month on our Twitter account. If you want us to amplify you or someone else, just send us a tweet and we’ll throw it out to the world.
We’ll see you next month, universe willing. Thank you for being here with us.
Always,
KCH
EIC
*I say men, but obviously not only men are rapists or abusive, just as not only women are victims of rape and abuse.
