Addiction

Shana introduced me to Phillip K. Dick when we were 16, he was part of the packaged world we collapsed into the oncoming reality in lettered mirror fragments and window shards.  Shana was a beautiful writer with true fascination of works she left me to roll in, my therapeutic sandbox of her cyberventure.  I don’t know how she’d feel about any of this, but I wish she were still here. So would anyone else who had the opportunity of knowing her grace, which she truly had more than I ever could. 

From Philip K Dick, a Scanner Darkly:

"Some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. "

"Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. "Take the cash and let the credit go," as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime."

In recent years it’s been trendy to call addiction a disease in the medical world and in popular PC language.  People I talk to are usually more forgiving of the subject, there’s the occasional fascist in denial who advocates for sterilization of addicts and I have been the occasional goose shit on a document reflecting my functionality that somehow is interpreted as more human than anyone else who hasn't had the opportunity to check off the boxes no one can fit in any more or less than me, as we overflow those boxes filled with all the history, love and pain of a family riddled with addiction. In spite of the presence of these disturbing attitudes, at least the public is more likely to acknowledge how much harder it is for some people to stay away due to genetic influence or upbringing. While it’s called a disease a particular person’s problem is usually kept quiet in social circles, or behind closed doors.  My peers talk about illnesses in general with varying degrees of discomfort.  It is a painful subject, but addiction is treated with a discomfort of not only sadness but shame. For many this discretion is important, without it people could lose their jobs and opportunities further perpetuating an addiction.  This silence shouts the underlying truth; people don’t want to lose respect and their better friends don’t want to compromise their reputation with gossip and that fear is justified.  No matter how much people call it a disease their eyes usually look downward on addiction with quite a different assessment of the situation.  Even most addicts feel vexed with guilt and confusion over how much responsibility to take for their habit. They have to choose to stop, voluntarily, but it’s not like any choice they’ve ever made and most of the time the difficulty of assessment leaves them using the drug but in an absentminded way, like going to the bathroom.  It’s technically voluntary movement, but even the thought to go to the bathroom is instigated by involuntary sensory motor systems that we can not directly control.  We can only estimate our body’s reactions to conscious decisions we made hours in advance about what to consume.  When we choose to go to the bathroom our involuntary movements, our voluntarily controlled movements and the links between the two in our gut and spinal cord mingle for a brief moment of synchronicity between choice and being, intensity and relaxation. This is in many ways exactly like doing a drug.  Except what if walking out into traffic was what you absent mindedly did when you got up in the middle of the night half dazed.  You’re at a party and you aren’t enjoying the conversation, you need an excuse to leave and the most socially acceptable way to bow out of the situation is simply to walk out into traffic.  Your body tells your mind in the morning and at night to make a “voluntary” choice to walk out into traffic, then after every big meal, eventually at every social gathering.  The quotes blanket the word “voluntary” because if you don’t do it you’ll become incompetent, sick, and obsessed with the idea of doing it.  Eventually it falls into its own category of bodily function right next to eating and sleeping, you go to work and do what you do almost without questioning the entire reason is so that you can seamlessly perpetuate these functions.  In your mind there are all these other things happening, but really you wouldn’t be doing any of it unless it were ultimately leading up to the point you could walk out into traffic.  Unlike bodily functions which ensure survival, your mind has tricked you into treating your rapid demise as a function that will insure survival.

Does this make it a disease? A summarized dictionary definition of disease:

‘a disorder of structure or function in a human, animal, or plant, especially one that produces specific signs or symptoms or that affects a specific location and is not simply a direct result of physical injury.’

By those standards yes, it is a disease.  The closest analogy to any disease not routed in conscious behavior I would compare it to is HIV or an autoimmune disease.   It’s like an autoimmune disease of our mind’s ability gage our basic comfort level.  Our bodies kill themselves by tricking our body into believing it’s an act of protection even though many of the proteins and cells are reacting negatively to the deterioration.  The comparison is contentious because we cannot choose to stop HIV at any given moment. On the other hand it’s much harder to choose to turn down a drug than it is to hold your pee at a reception, but it is possible. 

While it may technically be a disease by medical definitions, the knowledge that it is even possible to cure it with conscious change makes the label a white lie.  A soft word pillow to cushion the blow of the bullet that is medical students on clinical rounds joking about the poor stupid delusional crack head behind the hospital curtain who can clearly hear them.  That bullet that is family members and friends not saying anything to anyone, comforting them and encouraging them as they deteriorate until they finally give up on them.  It is the bullet of fundraising events and initiatives to stop crime and reduce poverty, that will not employ or host people who have a criminal drug record. The bullet has words etched in the side of it “But you could stop, you’re the reason this is happening to you.”

Thing is the only way to voluntarily walk into traffic without a severe death wish is to not think about it, to treat it like taking a shit, it’s just something you do.  We all do this everyday when we get in our car.  In most places in the US car collisions are the leading cause of accidental death.  Yet it is so normalized we are taught it’s a mark of independence when we receive our license. When we have enough credit to owe car and insurance companies a third of our income every month we have achieved a respectable status amongst peers and are trusted with more responsibilty.  We are trained to believe that polluting the earth and putting ourselves at the greatest risk for a sudden violent death is an efficient, practical, and responsible method to arrive and leave from destinations for any reason.  Everyone who is afraid of getting shot or mugged in their car is much more likely to die from unintended collision at the next intersection.  We know all of this, but we all do it every day anyway. The only thing in New Orleans that kills more people than car accidents every day is heroin. It is currently the leading cause of accidental death in the city according to the New Orleans DEA, and that’s only referring to opioids specifically. The amount of deaths directly caused by or related to other drug addictions pile on top of that sorry statistic burying so many beautiful individuals. 

“It is not a choice, it is a disease” “It is a disease, not a choice.” Neither are sound statements, the conflicting premises are not mutually exclusive.  We all have genetics for diseases, but with most diseases you acquire after birth just having a gene for a disease does not guarantee the disease will manifest.  You have to choose to smoke a pack a day and eat fried chicken. You have to choose to not exercise.  Sure, smoking and fried chicken are common knowledge examples, but I only gave three amongst hundreds of known and thousands of unknown much more subtle risks for any given illness. With any of the risks, it’s usually impossible to predict with accuracy how much it will impact a particular individual as predicted.  We all have heard stories about the man in the Cuban cigar shop who smoked for the last 40 years of his long life eating only hamburgers and didn’t die until he was over 100. Or the woman who did yoga every morning, ate her vegetables, didn’t do drugs, and died of cervical cancer at 35.  These factors are so overwhelming, individualized, and idiosyncratic that while we may be ‘voluntarily’ at risk for diseases all the time, we don’t say it’s somebody’s fault when they get cancer, or diabetes, or lung disease.  Furthermore, once they have it, there are life style choices that can encourage remission or prolong life, but it doesn’t seem as cut and dry as the answer that addicts have. The cure should be obvious. You do the drug, you get addicted, you stop the drug. you recover, so why is it the leading cause of accidental death?

Science traces the lie of our minds obtusely like a finger painting of thought.  The genetic predisposition for addiction is passed down through generations with increasing frequency as more addiction occurs.  Even without a family history, this cycle can begin independently with the introduction of a drug addiction to a single person.  Over time they’re genetic expression changes to accommodate their thought patterns, their descendents are thereafter more likely to experience addiction.  The more addicts in a family, the more likely proteins are expressed which heighten reactions within the ‘reward center of the brain’ in off-spring.  The ‘reward center’ commonly referred to in pop psychology articles is in reference to an area called the Nucleus Accumbens largely responsible for simple positive and negative reinforcement.  A nucleus is a high density cluster of nervous system cells or neurotransmitters.  The Nucleus Accumbens is located in the Amygdala, the largest localized neural mediator of emotional states.  The most well-known neurotransmitter involved with positive feelings or reward in this area is dopamine. The release of dopamine in the Nucleus Accumbens and the corresponding relay systems to other areas of the brain correspond to satisfaction. 

This system produces conscious signals that encourage us to eat tasty food, to do pleasurable activities, and generally encourages people to crave things they enjoy.  Usually it will have useful responses encouraging emotionally satisfying experiences.  The heightened physical stimulation from sex, sugar, an adrenaline rush, or a drug will also be mediated through this area.  The intensity of positive feelings per a given amount of a time is a physical phenomena.  Like any chemical reaction the solute or chemical component per volume of the entire chemical solution in a given time frame effects the intensity of a reaction.  The more you get at once, the higher the high and lower the low. Following the onset of relatively intense positive feelings, the return to baseline will feel unusually depressing. In a controlled environment this experience of reward is quantitative.  In reality the complexity of our conscious associations, our environment, and our context makes happiness or sadness much more than a scale you can read off of in a doctor’s office.  Every withdrawal from positive reinforcement, whether it’s somebody saying something nice to you or a drug will instigate cravings to do whatever it is that makes you feel good, but that all depends on who you are and everything else about that moment.

Within your own particular neurological boundaries consciousness can alter the use of the internal stores of neurotransmitters and the electrical pathways they activate.  Everyone has a unique ability in a particular moment to excite or inhibit any positive feelings from a experience through dictating conscious awareness.  The more positive feelings associated with an experience under these conscious directives  the more these pathways are activated in response to similar stimuli (components of stimulation). The more the pathways are activated, the more available they become.  It requires less energy to make the same decision in the future, and more energy to make a different one.  This is true of the brain in general with any decision, with repeated excitatory stimuli of a positive experience this pattern is even more profound. In an addict the physical framework supporting this conscious pattern becomes nearly automated and produces desires and cravings in ways that are difficult to compare to any other human activity.  

With mild rewards that produce a steady slow positive reinforcement it’s easier to make a decision that weighs in all the factors we would ideally assess in order to maintain our health. Ice cream isn’t great for us, yet it tastes delicious and the sugar gives us a rush of positive feelings.  It’s usually relatively easy for anyone who isn’t a binge eater to stop eating before they get sick. This ease is possible only when the positive feelings produced by the reward center are meak enough to be potentially offset by conflicting signals from other areas. For example, the hypothalamus can relay info on bodily function telling you to stop eating because you’re full, or from the medulla to stop drinking because you’re nauseated. We can offset instant reward with frontal lobe activity relaying any necessary judgment that different activity is necessary, that’s how we know when we can’t eat and sit on the toilet all day because we have to pay taxes or go to work.

In contrast experiences like sex or an adrenaline rush produce an extreme and sudden positive experience with so much strong initial electrochemical activity it can temporarily overwhelm someone. It is immediately more difficult to weigh judgment of repeating the activity against any conflicting input.  We have to use more energy to maintain awareness of physical health, memories, inhibitive judgement, or any other manner of inputs which would normally factor into our judgment besides feelings of reward. The reward, and the subsequent craving as it diminishes becomes the central focus of cognition. 

When an external chemical synthetically induces the same excitement as an experience, like heroin or sugar, the same thing internally occurs as with a positive experience except for the return to base line is in higher contrast to peak excitement.  The withdrawal from the experience is more painful,  and the bodies ability to regenerate baseline is less attainable.  In most cases when we take drugs that increase a neurotransmitter well above normal levels, the amount of active receptors to bind that neurotransmitter diminish over time along with the conscious effects they produce.  The body attempts to downregulate our ability to react to the chemical so that the same dose produces weaker conscious awareness of its ingestion as we build a tolerance.  There is reduced subjective response to the drug, but the ingested substance will continue to have the same physical effects and risks with only a slightly altered effect compared with the new user. The effects of cognitive deterioration, impaired perception and motor activity, interrupted sleep, changes in glucose activity, and damage to digestive organs continue even as the awareness of the drug’s effects subjectively diminish.      

Experience and conscious decisions are mitigated and somehow produced by neurotransmitters in ways we may never fully understand, but they also activate neurotransmitters and direct them in ways we can observe both subjectively and scientifically. Regardless of prior chemical ingestion or experience, there is some variably independent component of our being that can change the ways that we react to the reward center. Anyone who has seen someone successfully quit a highly addictive drug against all odds knows this to be true, human choice can prevail. Withdraw rates from dopamine, the plasticity of the cells within the nucleus accumbens area, and the corresponding impact on a persons’ judgement can change throughout a lifetime, before and after drug abuse.  That being said I believe we only have so many attainable choices in life and these options are narrowed and platformed by our history and its effect on our biology. People who have experienced addiction of any kind will have a heightened sensitivity to their reward center.  It is easier for them to respond to a physically pleasurable activity with an immediate sense of craving that ignores potential risks, conflicting bodily feedback, and higher cognitive decision making.  This is reflected biologically in people who are genetically predisposed to addiction, they are more likely to rapidly down and upregulate receptors in response to a drug.  This biological disposition can produce a rapid tolerance, heightened cravings, intensified euphoria, and increased plasticity of the reward center. Furthermore, people from a genetic history of addiction are likely to have been raised in an environment where drug use is normalized as a coping mechanism in day to day life.

Many recovery programs are based on the foundation that once a person is an addict they are always an addict, the structural and functional cognitive changes are part of an incurable disease.  I think this is a necessary mindset for many addicts to have. the word disease seems often intentionally misinterpreted in such a way that removes any responsibility from the subject.  While I don’t believe that any person is wholly independent from their illness, it’s never fair to blame someone with an illness to an extent that would inhibit recovery or suggest they deserved to be ill.  No one intends to get sick, but some people have the foresight not to make out with everyone at the company Christmas party during flu season.  Who could blame the folks that do? After all some folks refuse to kiss anyone under any mistletoe, and they’re the first to catch the flu.  The pay off for being attentive, careful, and even unpleasant is often ambiguous or negligible.   It would seem intuitively less ambiguous with drug addiction.  You have to choose to take the first hit, the first drink, and then you have to choose to continue doing it.  While this may be true I’ve never heard of someone intending to be a drug addict, they simply lacked foresight in the face of ambiguous consequences in a game with much more at stake than work tension and a common cold.  

With the stakes so much higher, why would anyone risk it? Why do gamblers go all in after having the win of their life? What if choosing to take the first hit wasn’t like the choice to make out at the Christmas party, it was more like choosing to go to the bathroom to avoid an awkward conversation.  It seems subtle, socially acceptable, utterly normalized.  After you take the leak than you’ve realized what you actually did was walk out into traffic, but it was bafflingly difficult to perceive this event until you’d completed it.  Only moments ago at the party it had seemed much less ridiculous than kissing your coworker, it was simply a completely normalized and socially acceptable reaction, a bodily function.  What if, when you tried to stop choosing to go to the bathroom, knowing you’d end up in traffic, everyone around you continued to do it all the time.  Eventually all you have to do all day is go to the bathroom, until the point of stabbing abdominal pain and all of your coworkers are happily taking group trips asking what your problem is. 

Somewhere in your conscious mind you know that you’re not the problem, that they’re not just taking a leak, they’re walking in to traffic, but you have to know this with an abstract awareness and ignore that it seems as negligible and transient a risk as getting in your car in the morning.  You might die if you get in your car, in fact there’s a higher likelihood that you’ll die doing this than at any other point in the day.  There are other options, you can find something to do or somewhere to live that doesn’t require a commute, you could ride your bike.  Ok, so, why not try? That would involve an entire change of your lifestyle,  braving the weather on a bike over a non biking road, the risk of getting in a bike accident, and doing so many other things that seem so economically and logistically unpheasable that the very thought can quickly pass. 

 ‘No, it’s ok, I’ll just drive to work today,  I won’t die. I can control it.’  

‘I’ll just walk into traffic.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll figure something out, but today I’m just going to walk into traffic this one last time, I can dodge the cars’

Drug addiction is a choice and it is a disease; but it is not a normal choice, nor is it like any other disease. Unlike other diseases its complications are not entirely dependent on the internal mechanisms that instigate and maintain it, a component of the disease is a choice.    Unlike other choices, the choice to get healthier requires the addict to expend energy and employ will power that many will never subjectively know.  It is a disease of its own terrifying category, a disease that attacks our ability to make a choice, and then self perpetuates that choice.  It’s almost as if drugs produce their own sentience, hijacking our consciousness like a virus trying to prolong its life cycle in our minds.   There are as many medications and caretaking techniques available for addiction as there are for any other disease, but that nearly impossible choice is the only sour medicine that will ensure survival of the addict. Given care, if they’re making those hard earned choices an addict will survive, but they will not be cured. In order to cure an addiction, a person must restructure their entire conscious relationship to their reward system. 

One drug is only that: a button, the trigger accelerating a vicious clock, but we all look at that same clock to check the time and it was certainly ticking before the trigger was pulled. The heart of addiction is not in the drug but in the societal and internal structures of decision making that create the choice to take it in the first place.  Those downward glances at doctor’s offices and family gatherings, they see the stop button and want to tear it out of the walls of the addict’s minds in frustration. It’s just one choice!  One button!  Why can’t we just get people to push it or to not push it?  Thing is, it was never just one button, the internal clock is wired to an internal bomb, you have to cut the wiring just so or the entirety of our western societies’ faulty notions of pleasure and pain tear the patient, eventually the hospital, the city, and finally the country limb from limb. 

You take away the drug just right, slowly release the trigger, the bomb loaded with 4Cs and all of the internal mechanisms are still there waiting for a new stop button. 

The fatality of addiction is the oncoming traffic you walk into, but the disease is the desire to walk into it in the first place.  It is the inability to gage danger in the face of a mental goldmine of pleasure.  HIV is a disease, but it’s not what kills people, it just mames their bodies ability to detect and cope with danger.  We can not cure people of HIV yet, and many claim addiction can not be cured either, but at least death looks preventable on clinician paperwork if you can get people to live with their perpetual intense desire to ignore dysfunctional systems of reward that may or may not lead to likely or certain death.

If an addict does choose to stop using their drugs of choice, they’re usually inclined to adopt a new addictive substance or habit, getting a new stop button then quickly succumbing to the same habits they knew previously.  The varying levels of intensity of the new stop button might make their behavioral adaptation to the disease more or less apparent.  They may switch from alcohol to amphatamines, or simply to AA meetings, television, coffee and cigarettes, exercise, televangelism.  These activities are so grossly disparate in their nature, many of which don’t entangle external chemicals.  Sure the addict may be at less risk for sudden death with compulsive AA attendance or coffee benders than if they choose to smoke meth everytime they want a drink… but the underlying mind set of their addiction, their subservience to their mentality, their handi cap, and their own persistent belief in their lack of agency is what truly holds the disease next to the ticking of their heart.  It is a disease that effects many people who have never even used narcotics.  Addiction is embedded in the mental framework of western culture, the extreme physiological and neurological manifestations of which are biologically expressed in addiction. The disease of addiction is born from a systemic mentality very much on the same coin that diabetes has physically manifested within the extreme negligence of a society that increased average sugar intake by at least 300% over the course of a few centuries, fabricating a need alongside a fabricated dependence on the slave trade economy to those willing to sell their souls to sell others.  

We are in a culture that commends a feeling of satisfaction so great it comprehends no obstacles, not even death.  Freedom is not just a sacrifice of security, it is over coming electrical short cuts, short circuits- automated judgments. The opposite of freedom is addiction, forfeiting willpower to the lie that I'm not good enough telling others to tell me just to make sure I remember it lest I almost forgive myself.  The phenomenon of addiction is neither mutually inclusive or exclusive with the actual existence of any externally manufactured and targeted chemical force. Blaming an addict or a drug undermines not only the internal emotional conflict an addict scientifically experiences, but it also white washes the entire drug war, the ill fate of those who graduated from the DARE program, and the amount of money private prison systems make off of the American peoples in the corporation of justice that's simply a word costume for contemporary race and class based slavery with a xenophobic swirl.  It's a well versed money making machine, but how often do more sober individuals stay on that soap box when deciding how to handle 'that guy' at a party.  How much compassion do I give myself or anyone else when we are ostracized, self isolated, and finally made to feel like a victim to chemicals, systemetized discombobulation, disorientation, and romances of desirable disengagement. We believe there is a love that is worth self harm, there is a positive feeling that is worth risking illness, there is a state of mind that is worth increasing likely foul behavior and imminent deterioration.  The romantic notions of self destruction, and the concept that their antithesis necessitates the apathy and blind conformity of the bourgeoisie is, in lew of any possible measurement likely the greatest predictor of addiction.  It's walking in to traffic as if it would properly overwhelm my aversion to a company Christmas Party full of horny zombies.  There are physical structures in humans to support these notions unto death once you simply introduce any ingredient that is as harmful as it is enjoyable. These physical structures are succeeding and developing from generation to generation through conscious acceptance of our own demise in the face of self loathing hedonism. The truest momentary pleasure is usually depicted as the thrill of near death, I’d love to instead celebrate the synchronicity of odds with my self awareness. I want to be happily surprised with myself as much as I want to know you feel it too. Self awareness is neither bourgeoisie, nor self destructive.  It is an awareness I want to make sexy, satisfying and truly rewarding within my ability to see all of the outcomes and have them overwhelm me. Wishful theoretical rambles but I must do it with so much more than a wish and yet so much less, or I will wash away in a sea with more dangerous litter than poison.  MOOP Miscellaneous objects out of place.  I refuse to become moop, a tragic trace burners pick up so they can keep partying in obscenely treacherous environments on some huburous distortion of hallucinagenic invention.  I want it to be a slow stead self awareness growth, a tumor that infects me with joy and bleeds electrifying beauty from my pours like electron dances between ours and yours. True stability without the material guise of my honky goose femme glitter shit CV or candid status updates featuring only two checkboxes for my job and my lover.  It is stability not security, in fact this awareness comes at the greatest risk of breaking all concepts of sanity.  It is so painful, arduous, and overwhelming that I go through life and accept so much unnecessary pain avoiding this awareness like so many others.  Many believe it's too much to compute, to change, but it as simple as any condescending med school student would think refusal of a crack pipe is.  It’s a simple no, I won’t do it, I will be the change.  No he can’t objectify me, no I don’t have to get married, no I don’t have to work in a cubicle, no I don’t need to drive that car to work, no I don’t have to look cool and tattooed, no I don’t have to bite the bullet, no… I don’t have to sacrifice my well being, my life, to this coping platform laid down before me, and the only escape is so much more than a narcotic, it’s an entirely new way of being.  It is a life that I have to figure out in America as a community with you, with all of us, within communities, and build communities doing it regardless of our histories with a particular narcotic or obsession or self reflection.  I have to pay the bills, you have to feed your children, we have to go to school, we must stay at this job, but fuck we can take anything within our power away as long as we find something more beautiful to replace it.  Sometimes you have to swim against the current to even know it's direction let alone be carried by it's flow. Death is never worth the thrill, love is never worth death, ideas are never worth self mutiliation even in our eternal paradox.  My truest romance and spontanaeity is knowledge, awareness, skilled decision making.  Responsibility is bravery, it is not cowardice and defaults.  The moment when I reward myself with candy, with spending money for making money, with a night of black out drunk damage for aceing a test, with doing X amount of drugs for wethering a sour relationship, these are the moments that lay bricks on a highway with unlabeled exits. The fast lane and the middle lane are all still on this highway that we have built with no speed limit, no signage, and a death wish masked in the desire to ‘get there’.  Burn it down with me, walk through our fear of melting into intentional mutation, when we see each other with no road or destination or journey beyond each other and ourselves then I will truly be cured.Chill the fuck out and there's no great glass elevator to chase only levels to comprehend in all directions where our wits begin.

Song Lyrics: Stuck At a Green Light

She's in my soleless shoes
failing to scale the wall I kicked in.
We're out a line in The John
Golden toilets lined down the bar

I watch
you watch
her watch
you.

Wishing you would just watch her
but your eyes are only for smiles

I was her, I was her
but instead I am
instead I am
I am

Backed in the corner with jukebox machines
backsides displayed for me
or center stage on a trampoline
it doesn't matter, you still can't see me

I watch you watch her watch you
wishing you would just watch her
but your eyes are only for smiles
I was her but instead I am

The tears of melted cigarettes
clinging to the granulated cement
a black and white motif
high contrast fondness witness
the thrifted memories housing my grief

I watch you watch her watch you
wishing you would just watch her
but your eyes are only for smiles
I was her but instead I am

forgotten in the storm
trying to reach you
left alone with a car radio
I don't know your sheepish morse code

I watch you watch her watch you
wishing you would just watch her
but your eyes are only for smiles
I was her but instead I am

stuck at a green light
on a high speed route to nowhere

Song Lyrics: Nudist Model

I peel culture off my body
etch it in my poise.
Did you see that drawing?
That's how I make a livin',
that's how I've been givin.

Five drinks down my paycheck is spent
night audit guests ask me for sex
hell no
hell no!
Pick me up
move me around
recreate mona lisa's frown.
Take a shot throw it back with me,
negative space still
sweat and breath!

Take it off, fuck just take it all off!
Take it off I said, take it all off!

Isn't she just a nudist model,
me? I'm the nudist, crudest, rudest model.

Burn magazines and MTV
slip off the image
try on your skin.
This strip ain't a tease
I'm beggin on my bare knees!
See the work of art crawlin out my pits,
that's how I make a livin'
that's how I feel like givin'.

Take it off! Take it all off!
I said take it all off

nudist model.
I'm the nudist, crudest, rudest model!

Puritans had sex and diarrhea
Neitzsche threw up and Kierkegaard beat the monkey!
I'm the same
don't stare,
just draw me mother fucker.

Take it off, take it all off!
I said it off, take it all off...

nudist, crudest, rudest model.

My manifesto on Rape Culture (in progress- all comments welcome)

 
I first started writing this paper on rape when I was 24.  Jackie Fuch of the Runaways had just opened up to the press about her experience with former Runaways manager Kim Fowley and Bill Cosby had just been outed as a serial rapist.  Now I’m 27. Over the last three years an onslaught of powerful men have been taken to war with themselves, the public and the media over accusations of rape and sexual misconduct.  The growing list includes Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Garrison Keillor, and many more who have come to the fore front of at first minor blogs, and then over time more major news networks including Huffington Post, Morning Call, Fox News, NPR, CNN, and the New York Times.   Some of these men have been brought to justice, but public confusion over the definition of rape, how to discern between these cases and how to legally or socially approach the subject has remained disturbingly ambiguous.  The most formidable examples of this confusion include the charges brought against Donald Trump before he was elected president still abating consequence at the border of the white house. The trial struggles for air in a silence that is testament to our nations enveloping head trip that has only driven us farther into our own denial since I first began writing this piece.
The conversations I hear in blogs discussing the ‘Me Too’ movement, news coverage, bars, barber shops, restaurant kitchens, television shows, and radio networks make it clear to me that this issue is not just legally confused.  People are torn apart on their insides over it.  Rapists are in denial and victims are often only heard through a distorting megaphone even when they’re only whispering.  I don’t want to reduce anyone to a hash tag, or to tell my story for the sake of an acknowledgement the internet could never grant me. I speak now because I genuinely believe I share a sickness with the American public that has grown deep into our genitals at some varying level, it’s a sickness worth diagnosing.  A chauvinist psychiatrist with a fetish for beige once brutally told me, “Only fools diagnose themselves.”  While this may be the only provision of clarity he ever gave me it is also true that I can only speak for myself with a high degree of certainty I’ve rarely afforded psychiatrists.
I’ve been hearing the phrase “rape culture” since I was 16.  I was 24 before I finally felt like I was listening for the first time. My life flashed in front of me like the film reel montages at the end of detective films, except for it was really the end of every romantic comedy I’d ever seen.
I took the phrase “no means yes” far too literally for years.  At 19 I was the only girl in my philosophy class having a discussion with 20 men about the politics of rape. We were studying the Catherine Mackinnon legal case from the 1980’s associated with the Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance. Mackinnon was holding the porn industry accountable for encouraging rape culture.  Her argument was that when imagery of women depicting rape scenarios is filmed in a pornographic nature it encourages young men to consider rape as an attractive act.  Everyone in the class concluded without dispute that the attorney must be ‘mad.’ While I still don’t believe that pornography is a driving culprit of rape culture I cringe when I reflect on those classroom discussions. At the time I blindly supported my peers disgustingly ignorant antics which suggested that exclusively the severely mentally impaired could confuse no for yes. 
The confusion of rape culture and pornographic abuse is not linguistic or hallucinogenic in nature where ‘no’ is literally taken to mean ‘yes’, nor is it even a confusion so much as a conviction in the collective subconscious that in our culture rape doesn’t exist.  Rape is a phantasm invented by the mentally ill, predominantly women.  To the sane individuals in our culture, no is sexy and yes is irrelevant. “No means yes,” is a metaphor that translates arguing to cute, being afraid to endearing, being intimidated to being hot, being angry to asking for it, getting slapped to being caressed, and getting off with someone to jerking off with an illusion. After all, hey, you never know when you might just get a little tipsy and stumble into a vagina.
It is socially acceptable today amongst mainstream youth that a rape, a Saturday night between kinky lovers, a smut film, and a pornographic film may all include people being tied up, strangled, beaten, whipped, bruised, and bloodied.  Or perhaps one of the people is just lying there, taking it with a gag in, perhaps tearing a little while the other growls, “Yeah fuck me bitch.”  These scenarios may all look similar at a snap shot, while they feel entirely different.  How do we discern and codify the very disparate natures of these scenarios? Popular culture and common sense usually jump straight to the question; did anyone say ‘yes’?     
This word is huge.  The moment a single yes isn’t given verbal consent is replaced.  What takes its place is physical agreement, body language, circumstance, assumptions, heuristics and mental shortcuts.      ‘Yes’ is sufficient to define consensual sex, but can ‘yes’ or its absence define rape?
Take two people who are deeply in love.  They come home and slowly peel off each other’s clothes, tenderly feeling the magnetism between each other drawing them closer, before they begin having sex without a word exchanged.  All of the body language, the smiles, the breathing, and the movement are synchronized and unmistakable forms of a silent and beautiful understanding of mutual power and consent.  Neither party ever said yes, neither party exchanged a single word. Is this an example of rape? No it is not and I’m sorry for anyone who believes otherwise. I don’t want to live in a world where this is rape. If this is rape than some of the most spiritually illuminating moments I’ve shared with another person are as criminal as the most scarring moments I’ve shared with another person for the sole reason that in both scenarios I did not say yes, but I did not say no either.  While it’s wise to use language as much as possible, it is not necessary.
What about the word no?  Can “No” define rape? Granted the word no is sometimes replaced with code words like ‘red’, but that is a discussion that needs to occur verbally.  In the absence of a discussion, no is no. As even the misogynist 19 year old in me noted, you’d have to be unusually disturbed to carry on with a conscious conviction that it is not rape if the victim is verbally saying ‘no.’  When ‘no’ isn’t acknowledged verbal consent is not replaced, it is ignored.   The moment that verbal consent is ignored, a paralysis steals over the body.  It is the most dehumanizing experience, one that strips a person of their agency and leaves them speechless no matter how much they say.  While no is obviously sufficient to define rape even through the more callous and academic lenses, it is not necessary.
Take, for example, the story that Jackie Fuch’s bravely released to the press the week I first began writing this article, it was released in 2015 in the Huffington Post.  Former member of The Runaways described getting extremely intoxicated at a party.  She went to go lie down and as she slipped in and out of consciousness Kim Fowley, her former manager, sodomized her in front of a crowd of onlookers.  She had not been conscious enough to say ‘no’, but she certainly would never had said yes. 
Fuch’s story is as undoubtedly an account of rape just as clearly as a woman screaming “no” in a back alley.  If ‘no’ is unnecessary to define consent, and the absence of yes is insufficient, then how do we identify rape? Fuch’s deeply moving bravery, and the extremely corroborated and torrid accounts of Fowley’s misogyny suggest that perhaps circumstance and character can identify rape.  Afterall, I have thus far been using intuitive examples.  Ought we not be able to intuit from circumstance what is criminal and what is consent?
I wish I could expect this of the general public, or at the very least from all the people that go to the same parties as me, but neither is possible.  It took more than thirty women taking on allegations against Bill Cosby over a thirty-year time period before the press widely publicized and credited the evidence.   Curiously the networks chose to do so after years and years of allegations they picked the same week as the death of Michael Brown.  This was a racially sensitive time period when organizations were focused on stifling justice with misrepresentations of black people in the media as criminal and intimidating.  While I’m extremely glad that Bill Cosby has been held accountable, I’m extremely pissed off all the major networks waited over thirty years to air the story until it was back to back with coverage of a shooting indicative of the racism inherent in law enforcement tactics. When I asked fellow students why they thought it took so long to acknowledge Cosby’s crimes they assumed it was because he was such a paternal figure.
That must explain why Fuch’s allegations were immediately met with accusations that she wanted money and publicity now that he’s dead, it must be because Fowley was such a paternal figure.  Oh wait.  Fowley never produced Fat Albert, Fowley got famous after auditioning 13 year old girls responding to an add he wrote looking for adolescents to form a band of personal sex toys. Fowley took teenage girls away from their parents and gave them heroin.    While many people deny the story who have public relations motive to do so, just as many have corroborated it who are more likely risking their public relations to say anything at all. How long will it take for people to believe Fuch’s story?  How many other women will have to come forward? If Cosby needed 20 will Fowley only need 10? 
Rape is so prevalently considered as if a myth, you’d think it was a god damn unicorn.  Years of corroborated evidence seems to not be enough to convince people of rape.  Unless someone immediately walks into a hospital badly beaten with someone else’s DNA in them, convincing the public let alone a jury remains a small chance.   Recollections of no verbal consent, character and circumstance by multiple eye witnesses are not enough to condemn a rapist.  Despite this a male friend of mine recently confessed at the time this story was released that he was concerned that rape charges would be brought against him. 
I asked him earnestly where this paranoia came from, if he had in fact raped anyone. He adamantly replied no, he hadn’t raped anyone.   He is a college student and he said he felt that men being wrongfully accused of rape in college cultures has spiraled out of control, that it’s a “serious issue not being addressed.” I was enraged.  That is the only serious issue that has been addressed.  Eight of my friends’ personal experiences during my undergraduate years involved male rapists, the four who were arrested were later believed unanimously by jurors in court when they denied all allegations.  None of the queer or male victims I knew felt comfortable pressing charges publicly. The victims who did come forward were straight cys women who were always found guilty of lying until proven innocent.  None of them ever successfully filed criminal charges, at best one of them managed to get a student suspended from the university.  The reason that there has been increasing publicity over the last five years at colleges over rape cases is because colleges breed one of the most exacerbated rape cultures with the least self awareness.  Like rape itself, rape culture is some abstract unicorn people learn about in feminist film studies, they don’t see it when it’s right in front of their faces.  Most of the cases that have been publicized involve women having had to have filed law suits and corroborate with other women in order to pressure the school to acknowledge the problem.  The press has only gotten progressive enough in the last five years to pick up on any of it, and only the most normative women that can at least identify with other narratives confident enough to come forward.
Considering how difficult it is for victims, men, women, and queer individuals to have rape acknowledged I was puzzled by my friends’ genuine fear of being falsely accused.  Granted there is some horrific possibility that he was a rapist in denial.  Yet he was so afraid of being accused of rape he stopped sleeping with women for years.  This was extremely offensive to me, he was so convinced that women lie about rape that he feels that even if he slept with a woman in good conscience he might have been accused. He is not alone.  An increasing amount of news articles have come out in the last three years advocating recorded consent, usually targeted at a male audience.  I first saw one I’m still trying to find again in 2015 written by a mother to other mothers telling them to encourage their sons to digitally record consent.  The idea of being handed a recording device before I sleep with someone is demoralizing.  I don’t care how casual sex is, if I can’t trust someone’s level of inebriation or their general character I shouldn’t be sleeping with them at all.   I understand that people enjoy having sex with folks when they’re still getting to know each other, I still enjoy that.  However, I’m often risking a lot by doing that and it’s landed me in dangerous situations.  I consider the risk mutual between all partners.  It’s not fair to take away the risk of me accusing assault when I have no way of removing the risk of being physically assaulted after a simple ‘yes.’  While I prefer to be communicative sexually, if someone were thorough enough to completely record my consent they’d have to film me legally break down every single kink or oddity or simple change of heart I may have over the course of the interaction. Besides completely killing the mood, it would be demeaning and impossible to digitally record the whole consent unless the entire sexual act was filmed.  While I can be trusting to a naïve extent, even I know better than to record everyone night stand I have with a friend even if I wanted to.  We should not be asking how to avoid false accusations, we should be asking how to make clearer boundaries of trust throughout a sexual interaction.      
While trying to understand Sam’s perspective he admitted that he had known people who had been undoubtedly wrongly accused despite obvious consent.  He said that he had been at a party with two hetero friends who were both tossed.  They had known each other a while and had been sleeping together for sometime.  Both were too drunk to very clearly remember what had happened the next day, but the female was completely blacked out unbeknownst to the male.  When she awoke she felt as though she has been raped, underwent severe emotional trauma and accused the male friend they were with of having raped her. This story is not uncommon, unfortunately I’ve heard it too many times to count.  My friend Sam did not see what happened after they went in the back room.  She might have said no or he might have done something that pushed boundaries of what is acceptable to do without asking. It might have been physically obvious that she did not want to have sex once they got into it, or she might have changed her mind, or just been far too gone to have ever consented, in other words it may certainly have been rape.  Simply because someone is looking happy at a party before or after a sexual event, because they’ve slept with that person before and because they choose to go into a back room with each other does not mean that what occurred was not rape.  Not having further details on the situation, I’m inclined to believe that it was.  I told him all of this but also that if he was so concerned that she had lied you’d have to wonder why anyone would lie about being raped.  Most people have difficulty admitting they were raped at all. 
This is when his fear truly crystallized to me.  It was not that he did not believe that the woman felt as though she had been raped, he did not believe that she was lying.  Nor did he believe she was delusional beyond being a very well maintained black out drunk.  He also did not believe that the male really felt as though he had raped her.  He didn’t think that it was or wasn’t rape, he felt uncertain as to how to identify rape and thought that it might be ambiguous.  Sam is not alone, I’ve unfortunately spoken with many others who feel that the gray area of rape does exist.  This leaves many in Sam’s position.  If it is unethical to sleep with someone without trustworthy consent, then everyone who cannot trust their own definition of rape to be the same as their partners cannot sleep with someone.  This seems like a comforting resolution, but the severely saddening and truthful reality is that currently if people abided by this resolution a staggering amount of the male population would have to resort to abstinence.
The fire and knots in my stomach would like to condemn to a life of abstinence everyone who is so deeply carved by rape culture that they cannot recognize their own perpetration of sexual assault.  Unfortunately, abstinence is always an unrealistic and unhealthy solution to a problem that is so widespread.  It is only my recognition that I have been as crafted by 80’s romance films, 20^th century literature, and day to day conversation as every other child of the 90’s that reminds me of how deeply this issue effects all of us.  I am not sympathizing, excusing, or empathizing with rapists, only acknowledging that we cannot expect anyone to be born without some amount of indoctrination by rape culture. Such a broadly fucked spectrum needs to be met with introspection by everyone without exception.  Even if I could be omniscient and single out everyone who has committed rape and condemn them, I could not place blame on any one group of individuals as solely responsible for reinforcing an unhealthy appetite for masochistic gender norms, misogyny, and sexual violence.  Rapists and rapists alone are responsible for their crimes, but to varying degrees everyone consistently contributes or denies the continuation of a culture where rape is somehow more ambiguous than theft, arson, or aggravated assault. Given the thought I’ve had to put into restructuring my reactions and learning how to heal, it took me a very long time to come to terms with any notion of a spectrum when it comes to rape culture.
Throughout college I’d heard the word ‘grape’ and I had to exercise extreme concentration to convince myself that it was a fiction made up to allow rapists an out.  Implying that rape can ever be ambiguous makes the line between rape and sex seem ambiguous.  This is ridiculous, hurtful, and terrifying.  How can I live in a culture where people can treat rape as if it’s no more intentional than getting drunk and standing up too fast in a kayak? Date rape, or the dreaded ‘grape,’ is not treated like a malevolent crime by a staggering amount of the press and general public that has surrounded me. It has widely been perceived as if a crime of negligence, as if you might rape somebody if you’re not being careful.  What the existence of the word grape means, is not that there is some nebulous version of rape but rather that there is a subcategory of rape wherein the victim’s agency is taken away and the perpetrator didn’t notice. The perpetrator might not notice because to them the victim didn’t have any agency in the first place.  Sometimes the victim doesn’t even notice because culture has stripped them of their awareness of their agency before the rape even occurred. This is what it means to live in a rape culture, to be raised as a victim.
When I was 19 I came home on break from college. I was at a party with a lot of friends.  Up until this point in my life I was mostly interested in women, I’d never slept with a guy before.  At the party though I met a guy who was a graduate student in environmental science.  At this point in my life I lived and breathed awareness of the coming Armageddon of climate change so I was instantly attracted to him.  I started kissing him at the party.  He asked me to come back to his place. I told him I was on my period, so I couldn’t really do too much.  He said we’d figure something out.  That should have been an immediate red flag, but I was just flattered to have attention paid to me.  One of my friends tried to tell me not to go, I didn’t listen. It turned out I knew his roommates and had hung out in his house before which was only a block away from the party so I agreed.  I was wine drunk at this point.  We got back to his house and took off all our clothes.  I wasn’t sure what to do with the guy, it would’ve been pretty gnarly for him to go down on me so I tried to have lesbian sex with him.  I was sucking him off and scissoring him when he told me, “This isn’t how this works.” He suddenly flipped me over and started having anal sex with me.  I was cringing from the inside out, lying there passively rather stunned. I told him, “I don’t think this is working.” He didn’t listen.  The next morning I cuddled with him.
For weeks I didn’t react.  I thought it was an entertainingly absurd kind of homoerotic way to lose my virginity to guys.   Until one day I went to go give blood a few weeks later, and suddenly realized as I approached the station that I couldn’t give blood, he hadn’t been using a condom. Sitting down in a garden, crying, I thought to myself why. Why would an attractive graduate student so insensitively tear me apart unless they had HIV or some incurable illness that made consensual sex a difficult option for them.  Then it occurred to me what had happened wasn’t consensual.  Of course, I was there, I was naked, I was drunk, I hadn’t even managed to say no, or stop.  So like most rape victims I blamed myself, how could it have been rape if I didn’t realize it right away?  I didn’t tell anyone for months what had happened.  More than anything I was convinced, probably correctly, that he wouldn’t have considered it rape, for that reason I felt much more comfortable calling it ‘grape.’ For years I thought the most damaging and traumatic part of the experience for me was being considered a rape victim.  Unable to fully understand why, labeling myself as a ‘victim’ made me feel dirty, defiled, dehumanized.  My insides seemed to fold in on themselves and make me convulse. 
When I read Fuch’s story five years after this incident it meant a lot to me, for many reasons, one of which is that the story detailed how all the members of the Runaways and the party of individuals who witnessed Fowley’s crimes did not acknowledge them. To this day Jett claims it didn’t happen. In response to this Fuch spent a long time repressing the knowledge that what had happened was traumatic.  When I heard her story Fowley’s actions were so obviously deplorable it helped me realize that when people now hear how I lost my virginity to guys they see my situation as obviously awful for its own reasons.  Yet at the time, amongst friends, when it wasn’t happening in the abstract everyone seemed to withdrawal from judgement.  They were afraid of that ‘dirty word’, “rape.”  I tried to call the graduate student to get him to tell me why he had done it and what his perspective was,  but he wouldn’t pick up the phone and never called me back.  My friends said that if I didn’t think it was a big deal then I was probably right, and the few that knew better I resented for feeling sorry for me.  I couldn’t handle feeling any weaker than I already felt.
Being considered a rape victim should be a mechanism by which people are held accountable for their actions, not a term that defiles and weakens the victims.  Not only that but the term should not feel questionable, you don’t trip over something and stick a hair brush up a girl in front of a room full of people, you don’t stand up too fast and start having anal sex with a 19 year old.  The obvious signs of non-compliance would typically be the wincing, the frozen stiffness with eyes shut and teeth gritted.  Why would it not occur to everyone, to neither me nor the graduate student that what occurred was unacceptable until I started exhibiting symptoms of PTSD.  How could this possibly be considered a ‘gray area’ of rape even by the most obtuse and insensitive individual? Only recently it occurred to me that what I was experiencing in the months after he had sodomized me was the shock of dehumanization, it’s the same category of shock people feel when they are incarcerated, detained, and shut down by the system.  It’s the feeling of not being trusted, not being believed, and not being listened to. The fact that I wanted to say no and didn’t feel able to and even felt that it would’ve been rude to bothered me even more than the actual physical aggression.  I didn’t feel like my words were important and that didn’t occur to me as strange because fundamentally that wasn’t an unusual occurrence in my life.  This is what it means to be part of rape culture.
 In the last decade people trying to rectify this situation have reared their heads increasingly at issues that arise specific to hook up culture.  More conservative individuals suggest that when sex was a bigger deal it was less appropriate to have sex when you’re tossed and rape was more clearly identifiable to both parties. Hook up culture provides a socially acceptable mechanism in many urban and college environments for people to take advantage of each other while they’re drunk, to use them for sex and then abandon them.  Heteronormative hook up culture promoted by so called 'pick up artists' such as Tucker Max and several other unsavory individuals have also used hook up culture as a platform to propagate the sexist double standard that reinforces rape scenarios by identifying permiscuous men with sexual prowess and women as ‘sluts’ if they say yes or uptight ‘prudes’ if they say no.     
Conversely hook up culture has also been parceled with the feminist movement even in many hetero communities.   Before hook up culture existed women were expected to marry the men that they slept with.  Women used to rely on men to protect them, and now women can abandon men just as easily as men abandon women.  Within feminist circles in college or media outlets I often hear about hook up culture in casual conversation as a positive and necessary venture that simply fulfills needs. “Fuck, they just haven’t had sex in way too long,” or “God I needed to get laid.” There is a persistent belief in hook up culture that getting drunk and ‘laid’ is inevitable, so why should it have to be dramatic or get in the way of work, school, and personal goals and achievements?  In queer communities hook up culture seems to be even more prevalent, and it’s frequently suggested either explicitly or implicitly around me that abandoning stringent sexual norms and relationships lends itself to progressive acceptance of what used to be considered ‘sexually deviant’ behavior.  Even if they aren’t mutually inclusive, it’s certainly true for me that when I was already abandoning normative sexual conduct in the act itself it was less of a leap to abandon normative romantic courtship rituals and visa versa.
Do we blame hook up culture for blurring the actions of criminals and creating situations vulnerable to oppressive forces? Or are they avenues to relieve repressed and outdated mindsets?  Considering all the different avenues I’ve seen sexual activity take in different communities it seems obvious to me that we can not blame hook up culture for creating vulnerable situations anymore than we can give it credit for opening the world to idiosyncratic sexual identities.   Just as with marriage, nothing about hook up culture inherently makes someone open minded and pleasant, but nothing about it stops them from being a violent asshole either.  So why is so much of the conversation surrounding sexual assault focused on hook up cultures?
If someone is violent in hook up culture there is no reason to believe they wouldn’t be just as likely to be violent in a monogamous circumstance.  One night stands only provide more opportunity to become intimate with someone with entirely different social expectations of how to approach a sexual interaction.  If someone walks into a violent situation with no prior history it might be easier for the victim to identify the crime than if it is experienced within a pattern of multiple violent events that occur in an abusive relationship.  Its also logical that violent people are more likely to find it increasingly difficult to find partners who will tolerate them and resort to random isolated acts.  In any event the violence of rape has more to do with the guilt and self hatred the perpetrator has toward their own sexuality than the nature of their relationships, but people who feel ashamed of their sexuality might be more likely to unleash their violent urges on people who they identify as shamelessly or casually sexual.  Therefore the violence of rape can not be cured by altering the frequency or diversity of sexual partners.  It is an extreme manifestation of self-loathing and of sexuality that could only be so prevalent in a culture that has condemned casual sex and feminine sexuality for centuries.  The only hope of curing this endemic of violence is to cope with the cultural loathing of sexuality as a society.  As we all learn to cope with how it has effects us individually we can create an environment in our day to day lives that will ultimately demand rapists to acknowledge their crimes with the same degree of awareness that we expect of other violent offenders.
Everyone I’ve ever met including myself experiences some degree of discomfort and guilt towards their sexuality even if they fuck around more than Betty Page and have read every progressive urban romance novel to come out in the last thirteen years.  We’ve got a few decades of sexually ecstatic literature and cinema up against centuries in our minds.  Sex has not been accepted in western culture since paganism, since then the body and sexuality have been demonized and even blamed for the plague.  Traditional Christianity is known for its very peculiar take on sexuality as an indulgence of the body that is not of the mind or spirit, but as something unholy and unpure.  For hundreds of years in Christianity the most sacred individuals were virgins, and prostitutes were sinners for their indulgence in earthly materials like money and sex.  The rampant abstinence upheld by the Catholic church is still failing children and ministers alike in religiously influenced school systems throughout the United States.  To have sex, particularly for a woman, is to be shamed. The bible explicitly founded the concept of education on the idea that women are too untrustworthy to handle being naked, and that’s why we should all wear clothes unless we’re fucking. Sound familiar?  It’s observations such as these that make me wonder how much has changed in the last 2000 years.
What has happened between a time in western history when women were burned on the cross for seducing men out of wedlock and modern North America? Today women are instead sent to insane asylums for reporting the boy in their dorm room they barely remember, or exiled for trying to expose their abusive minister.  How have we failed to learn more in such a great expanse of time, learning about sex repeatedly for thousands of years? 
At the time of the Runaways when Fuch was assaulted Rocky Horror picture show was about to hit theaters, everyone was reveling in an embrace of sexuality and abandonment of the dysfunction of our country’s European cultural heritage.  The late 60’s sexual revolution of free love was only intensified by the glam rock era.  The mainstream slowly began its hesitant embrace of many personalities and categories that up until that time had been deemed by the religious and medical community alike to be perverted and mentally ill. The Runaways blossomed in an environment rebelling from the idea that sex and sexuality should be suffocated.  One of the most compelling and perturbing parts of Fuch’s story is that the same band simultaneously participated in a culture that didn’t acknowledge sexual violence while becoming pro sexuality feminist icons. 
The sexual revolution gave women an opportunity to reclaim their sexuality.  This has been a dominant and driving force in the development of 20^th century feminist philosophies.  Just a few years ago a giant golden clitoris statue was built in New York City as an emblem of ‘clitoracy,’  giving the world an opportunity to focus on female pleasure.  The Runaways were forerunners of this mentality, they were young women who were giving the world permission to make orgasmic sounds on stage.  They were in fishnets and short shorts, corsets and boustiers, giving it there all.  At the time they were sex kittens, but they are remembered as female heroes. Ironically the fishnets and the boustiers, the outfits of sexual delinquency that became defined by Rocky Horror and punk rockers alike, they were put on the girls in an act of objectification by Fowley. 
The internalized mixed message of the sexual revolution is not exclusive to the Runaways, nor has it died off, we are surrounded by it.  Miley Cyrus and Nicki Manage are publicly hounded for allowing themselves to be sexualized by their producers, meanwhile the same western media sources condemn Islamic culture for forcing women to conceal themselves.  We are told to embrace our sexuality in the same sentence we are told not to be sluts.  Those who advocate for hook up culture and sexual revolution as feminist movements often fail to reconcile the desired freedom of effeminate sexuality with the truth of it being demanded.  I still have a hard time reconciling the two when I go out in a mini skirt enjoying my body and then am demeaned by endless shouts from strangers on the street.
Prostitutes, glam rockers, Rocky Horror fans, Miley Cyrus, Nicki Manage, The Runaways, mainstream porn costumes for women, and sorority girls on a Saturday night all dress in vaguely similar revealing clothing.  They are all embracing their sexuality, helping us abandon the conservative mindset that sex is shameful.  They are also appearing in the media limelight of a culture with a historically dominating assumption that if someone dresses this way then sex is something they not only embrace, but that they have sex frequently with multiple partners and that they consider sex a somewhat meaningless act of pleasure.  While no one’s sexual preference should be assumed from their clothing, there is a deeper assumption in this misguided belief that sex can ever be meaningless. Disguised in the progressive glitter of the sexual revolution is the contradictory and hegemonic internalized structure, that in order to embrace sexuality we must make it meaningless.
In conventional and mainstream American Media we have done this by differentiating two kinds of sex.
There’s fucking, and then there’s making love.
Making love allows sex to transcend the physical body.  It is the sex that indicates that the relationship between those having it extends beyond sex.  It is a ‘spiritual’ experience.  Fucking is sex that is about the physical body.  When you fuck the physical sensation of orgasm is the end goal.  Fucking is about excretions, it’s a swear word. We piss, we shit, and we fuck. When we embrace sexuality are we embracing making love? Or are we embracing fucking? Is anyone disturbed by the fact that it’s still common place to distinguish between the two?  According to Christian puritans, missionaries, tenants of the post-colonial North American culture the body is simply a house before we reach our purer spiritual state.  Shitting, pissing, and fucking are simply things that get in the way of us being the godly monks we would be if we weren’t slaves to the modern media, to pleasure. Thanks to movements like the one’s The Runaways were born in, today’s youth seems to overwhelmingly agree that this attitude is unhealthy bullshit in spite of what our rampant cussing might suggest.  After all, that’s why the 1960’s happened, that’s why free love happened, that’s why the Runaways happened, right? 
Sex. Drugs. Rock n’ Roll.
The taboo. Only forty years ago it was a popular stance to vote for censoring sexual language out of rock music and making pornography a felony was the most progressive piece of legislative feminism on the ballot.  Today Pussy Control by Prince plays on the classic rock station, and Rocky Horror Picture Show is considered a burn out cult.  We can access pornography for free in videos by thousands anywhere, anytime, any day. Have we really come so far? At times I’ve looked at my fondness for the club scene, for the underworld, for the sex parties, and I’ve wondered if we’re really embracing sexuality or if we’re simply redefining our guilt and still feel doomed to burn at a steak while we call ourselves open minded freaks.
In our pornographic language we expect actors and actresses to talk “dirty” to each other. They are “fucking” and it’s “filthy,” “just nasty.” It’s fun that we can be so blatantly physical, be so taboo, we can make our excretions public. We’ve been told not to have sex by the church, some of us by our schools, some of us by our parents.  But there’s nothing wrong with our bodies, there’s nothing wrong with physical pleasure, so we’re going to have sex with everyone damnit!  Of course it won’t mean anything, than we’d be in a relationship.  That would mean we’d be making love, then it would be a spiritual experience. As it becomes more acceptable to have sex before marriage, to have sex casually with someone for a few months, for some money, or maybe even for a night, our excuse is that all we’re doing is ‘fucking.’  Even in amateur pornography, which is praised for its intimacy, the married couple that is feeling it when it’s the 20^th time they’ve had sex on a webcam that week is unlikely to be doing anything we’d consider ‘making love.’ It’s often portrayed as a biological need. “We have needs.”  All those phrases ricochet through my memories of high school nostalgia films; “It is just physical, you’re only fuck buddies, you’re just experiencing the pleasure society has tried to repress for so many years.” As if the physical experience of affection is not mental, and that sex is not an inherently affectionate mental experience.   “You’re going to let go! Just fuck them, and then you’ll go your separate ways and not give a fuck.”  “After all, you both have needs, it was just a lay, you were using each other.  People should be ok with being a little physical right?”
Unfortunately this fairly ubiquitous and unspoken ideology of the millennium, the ‘radical’ new relationship to the human body and ‘acceptance’ of our sexuality has been largely based on bullshit.  Accepting our bodily sensations as heathens, as sinners, as fuckers, is not just an ironic gesture by sweet transvestites and Transylvanians.  It is a rampant belief in youth culture that is perpetuating the same puritanical ideology it intended to rebel against.   If you’re not religious I presume you believe our souls, our emotions, our mental states, are physical entities.  Even if you are religious, you might be on this materialist band wagon of sexuality because you believe god expresses the soul through the miracles of our nervous systems.  Now that the mainstream has accepted this, we can accept that no matter how much of a player you are, no matter how much you’ve worked as a prostitute, no matter how many porn films you’ve directed, your physical experience of sex is spiritual. Fucking IS making love, and making love IS fucking. It doesn’t matter if you don’t want to be in a relationship with your good friend who you happen to find really hot, if you’re having a one night stand, or if you’re getting paid 500 fat ones, sex is intimate.  We are physically enveloping each other, we are mentally enveloping each other, we are risking genetically combining with each other.  Sex is as spiritually intimate as it is physically intimate. To believe otherwise is not only bullshit, it is the assumed philosophy of a rape culture.
If sex isn’t spiritual, it’s not physically pleasurable either.   That is not to say that all things that are physically pleasurable would be considered spiritual experiences.  For example, eating ice cream is not a spiritual experience, well at least not all the time.  In contrast we can’t simply choose to transcend our bodies when we ‘make love’ and act like we’re just eating ice cream when we ‘fuck.’ It’s because the very particular sort of physical pleasure that comes from sex comes from the very living and human source of that pleasure so it invariably invokes affections that are irrevocably binding.  To believe otherwise is delusional.  It is true that we all develop an idiosyncratic connection to sex between our central and peripheral nervous system.  Our psyche’s complex connections through the medial preoptic area and spinal relay systems are only grossly understood.  What I say is coming from my subjective conviction as a lover, not as a neuroscientist.  Neuroscientists get rats off and monitor electrodes implanted in their brains, I’m just reflecting on my own life.  I will take to bat any neuroscientist who claims there’s information to contest my theory that when people have sex it intrinsically connects them as deeply as they could connect to each other through any other medium.  My definition of sex is not exclusive to penetrative sex or traditional homosexual methods, but includes all other forms of intimacy people consider to be their equivalent of sex physical or emotional.
When you eat some ice cream, or use a dildo at home alone, the physical sensation is coming from an inanimate object.  That object is a means to your orgasm, a means to your ends. When you have sex with someone they are an end in and of themselves. Sex is the only social physical representation of giving where we are mutually an end and a means in and of each other.  The ‘end’ and the ‘means’ are one and the same and may not even include an orgasm, just a physical and social reciprocity with another.   To suggest that sex can be performed without this fundamental belief is to objectify others.  Not only would that be using someone, it implies that it is possible to objectify or to be objectified and have it be harmless. Having a spiritual relationship towards sex does not mean that sex should be shameful, in fact it implies just the opposite.  The illogical conclusion of post black plague medieval puritans should have dissolved a long time ago, but apparently it hasn’t.  Spirituality in sex does not mean that it should be hidden, or that it should be reserved for your life long partner, but it does mean that it is an intimate interaction with another human being.  A person who cannot be used to an end, who will be connected to you and associate you with very strong emotions, even if for only a few moments in time, even if only for one night or for a few hundred bucks. Even when someone is paid for sex I consider them a spiritual healer, prostitution being amongst the most under credited and abused fields of psychology.
The spirituality inherent in sex, and in our physicality, stops us from being objects.  Our culture has continued to deny ourselves the physical nature of our spirituality over the course of our ‘rebellion.’ So many are still ashamed of sex, and are still ashamed of their bodies.  When people are ashamed of something, when they feel that something demoralizes, deindividualizes, or objectifies someone, it becomes a tool of oppression. That is why raping someone is different from breaking into someone’s house and so much more scarring than punching someone in a barfight.  It is violating their humanity, it is a hate crime that holds so much more weight than the physical damage to the individual.  Rape is a violation of humanity not because sex is private or taboo, but because sex is beautiful and it is not just another milk shake on a hot afternoon, it is not just a wallet full of money.
When the game is up, the alibi is gone, the victims have come forward, and the DNA tests have been sampled, the robber confesses and the rapist does not.  Without the rapists’ confession, even without overwhelming evidence to the contrary, rape victims are not believed.  Even without the pressure of evidence, murderers confess out of guilt more often than rapists.  Rapists don’t often appear to ever believe they have raped anyone.  There are of course varying degrees of violence and denial, but how could someone be so unsure as to be as innocent as I’m convinced my friend Sam is and decide to reform to abstinence out of fear of ‘accidentally’ raping someone?  How could anyone not know they’ve committed the worst sort of violence?
We already know if someone says no at any point and that is ignored than that is rape.  Most people are comfortable with this fact.  There are of course, still the violent offending rapists who choose to ignore this, however, most cases are more complicated.  There are people who say yes, and then stop saying anything, and leave situations feeling violated and stripped of their agency.  There are men who have raped women and genuinely seem to not believe they have done anything wrong.  Those who feel obligated to engage in sexuality, or who feel the need to meet each other’s expectations regardless of their own desire, to reach some standard, all originate with objectification and the disassociation of sex as a form of communication.  This turns into a vicious cycle where anyone can be oppressive. I’ve observed or been party to many women, queer, non binary and otherwise identified individuals who wanted hook up culture to be a way to embrace sexuality, but inadvertently abused it to objectify others and reflect their own oppression from cys normativity on to their intrapersonal relationships.   There are women who have assaulted men and do not believe they did anything more than get a good ‘screw’ in on a Friday night.  Men frequently don’t believe or acknowledge that it’s possible to be assaulted by a woman, and even if they do they frequently fail to recognize it when it occurs.  I do not want these situations to be conflated, confused or lumped solely into an isolated category of offenders who temporarily lose empathy or hearing on account of their misogyny.  On the contrary I genuinely believe that men, women, queers, transsexuals, non binary folks, transvestites, and every other identification out there alike have been born into a culture where hearing is impaired to begin with in different ways for everyone. For anyone who lives with unfair power there is just a higher risk of being hard of hearing, and it makes criminal activity in this realm even more difficult to recognize or admit. In order for predators to recognize their own crimes they must see the victims as human and learn to respect them and understand consent with more than just their ears.  In order for victims to stop being retraumatized they must want to pleasure someone else and communicate, and have faith in their sexuality without  seeking validation or reinforcement for following orders.   
Even if we consciously know that sex is not a sin but we act as though it is, we all slide down a slippery slope with varying degrees of violence wherein we forfeit our agency and our ability to recognize agency when we have sex.  Of course the terms ‘naughty’ and ‘filthy’ are meant to be hyperbolic, but I question how much the average citizen of the United States has really let go of their self hatred.   The illusion of fucking has become an insidious guilt laden violation against ourselves and others.  This does not mitigate rape, or relieve the rapist of their wrong doing.  It only means that people have a cultural platform upon which to strip themselves of their own humanity long before they do it to somebody else or before someone does it to them.  I think a lot of people lose sight of others humanity when they take their clothes off, even if they had held it so dearly just moments before when they were ‘decent’.  Stripping someone of their agency is doing just that even if it’s a crime dependent on a broader culture phenomenon.  It is still an act, and a severely violent one.  Just because it occurs often or because we make ourselves vulnerable to it does not mean it is inevitable.  There are still those who see my body as my person, who regardless of their gender and everything we’ve been through have helped me relearn my own body as a spirit and not a slot machine gambling at the virtue of my consent. 
It wasn't until I met enough of these individuals that I was able to reflect on occasions when I knew I had consented verbally and yet I still felt violated during or after the act.  I’m not even referring to back alley scenarios or drunken soirees.  Sometimes I was just at home having a not so quiet night with someone I knew well. In spite of the apparently consensual nature of these scenarios there were several different experiences that felt inexplicably post traumatic, reminiscent of rape even and I was left speechless and detached.  Then I’d start to feel dirty, like a victim.  That’s when I’d realize that even though I’d said yes it had felt like the word was meaningless. I could’ve gone limp and they wouldn’t have noticed, it didn’t feel like it mattered whether I’d said yes.  I’m not remembering scenarios in which I was interacting with known rapists or anyone who had formerly assaulted me. Rather, these are people who would certainly stop if I said no, but who had no idea how to physically connect to me and did not seem to notice. I felt like an object, like a blow up sex doll, like my body had lost its mind.  The pain and confusion was indescribable.  Over time with many different people this reinforced my indoctrination of the puritanical ideals of a rape culture, under the guise of feminism and progressive norms within hook up culture.  This indoctrination is not dependent on or inherent in my sexual encounters’ brief nature, nor in their kinky or unusual character, that is where the conservative and older critics of hook up culture are so sorely misguided.  The only relevance to my encounters being kinky or brief is that my sexual preferences are convenient and popular mechanisms to abuse in order to treat me like an object. The goal of the interaction was not to experience me it was to use me, even if I’d go back to being a human being in their eyes as soon as I put my clothes back on and had initially agreed in the heat of the moment.  In attempting to understand how someone could interact with me so listlessly I had to ask myself why I didn’t make any attempt to stop it, or at times even encouraged my own dehumanization.     
Being raised in a rape culture, being trained to be a victim, meant that every time I started sleeping with someone I risked slowly allowing my sense of right and wrong to become superfluous.  I wanted something I felt guilty for on some level and over time my thoughts, my arguments, and at many points my faith in myself became completely dependent on whatever purpose I served to the person who I would make my new owner for that span of time.  The result is that I’ve been subservient before I have been ordered around, I’d been so unaware of this that when the orders came I still felt surprised and accosted. When I turned around years later and looked back on myself I thought, “I’m a feminist right? I know it isn’t my fault they were assholes, but seriously how did I tolerate it for so long? How did I stay in abusive relationships like this? I could have walked out the door.”  Then I see others around me doing the same thing, while everyone wants to be supportive, to rightfully blame the aggressors, they sit there vexed in frustration wondering why people don’t just exit the situation. My guess is that many minds have played the same trick on them my own had.  It used to be that after a few nights of sleeping with someone I was not the same person I was when I first met them. When I first met  people I was more confident than a rebel manifesto, taking up the whole room with a no apologies demeanor, an expert at first impressions.  Every night I ‘fucked’ after that I would make myself smaller and smaller until I was the size of a toaster, their toaster, even if they didn’t want me to be. 
I thought I was ‘embracing my sexuality’ but I was often just undergoing a slow detachment from my agency. I didn’t feel dirty just because I was a rape victim, I felt dirty because I was having sex as if I still believe puritanical ideals and I wasn’t even raised by strict Christians.  While it’s not my fault I was raped, the only reason that I froze when I was raped even the first time was because I didn’t feel allowed to say no in a state of transient objectification.  In order to change that others not only need to learn to respect each other’s agency, we must learn to reclaim the agency we all have within us by letting go of our disdain towards our sexualities. 
Reclaiming my agency does not have to mean building muscle, yelling at men, doing hard drugs, having lots of sex and leaving in the middle of the night, or being ok with wearing fishnets. It does not mean that arguing at parties is the new flirtation, or that I’m strong enough to use my fear as foreplay.   Embracing my sexuality as a woman does not mean becoming a misogynist, but it also does not mean I have to give up kinky power play. It does not mean annihilating hook up culture, outlawing pornography, putting away the sex toys, telling everyone to dress like a nun, and shutting down all the rocky horror showings is the answer.  We can not deny our history but we also can’t run back to the mistakes we’ve been making as a society for decades.  It has been shown circumstance, verbal discontent, and character is not enough to identify rape in our culture let alone convince the public when it has occurred.  Whether or not we have sex in pleather masks with whips and dildos or in lavender bath salts by candle light probably doesn’t matter, honestly I think everyone has to answer that question for themselves.  What matters is that our experience is genuine and not manufactured, that we learn individually to dissociate objectification from sexuality, or rather reinfuse sexuality with our own meaning, intimacy and meditation.  If you are Christian it is a form of prayer, if you’re a dominatrix role playing it’s the higher art of intimate improvisation, if you are not inclined to use your genitalia at all it can be the complete moment of oneness between touch. Sex is the conversation beyond the deepest conversation any of us can have, whatever that means for us.  Even if both parties leave the next day, people shouldn’t end the conversation by saying “yeah whatever,” leave without saying goodbye, nor should they act like mere acquaintances next time they see each other.
To have sex as a means to our own end, a resolution to self consciousness, a way to experience physical pleasure, a dopamine influx, or inhabit an image is to blind consciousness from the inevitable unity of mind and body.  This is to fool oneself into believing that a person can be an object of desire. Objectification is the deconstruction of agency, and it paves the way for people to ignore agency in themselves and others and not even realize it. To ignore agency is rape.  This is to make the line between sex and rape one that is horrifically blurry when people forget or never even learn what it means to have agency or respect in the first place.  Far too many of us forfeit our agency, or the agency of those in front of us the moment we take off their clothes.  It must stop, things need to change. 
  I do not want women to be afraid of sex because they’re afraid they won’t be able to stop it, and I do not want men to be afraid of sex because they’re afraid they won’t be able to identify consent.  I do not want everyone with a non binary or non traditional concept of their own sexuality to feel dislocated by pop culture imagery of sex and relegated to objectifying head trips.  I do not want to live in a world full of recorders in the absence of passion.  That is why I’m on my hands and knees, in pumps and chains, asking simultaneously as the motherfucker that can take up a whole room, for the world to recognize that sexualities’ corruption was not cured by the sexual revolution. We need to reinvent the sexual revolution on our own terms. We all need to learn to touch each other again, slowly, carefully, until we relearn every square inch of each other’s bodies as something more than skin.  Every erogenous zone is an extension of our mind with an infinite array of neurological possibilities.  We are so much more than a yes or no question.
Unfortunately, I don’t think many people are ready to hear that yet.  So let me say this in conclusion, if asking a yes/no question feels more like a preventative measure then a genuine the beginning of a conversation then assume nothing and question yourself instead.  If you don't feel comfortable asking necessary questions, or you’re not even sure what questions you need to ask, sex should be abandoned altogether until there is more reciprocity and mutual comfort.  Abstinence only programs are trite misguided ineffective programs.  However, I do believe it’s important to educate everyone that sex has inherent conditions and we must be prepared to accept the consequences. For example, everyone should be educated about STDs and reproductive systems before they start having sex.  It is equally important for everyone to be educated about consent and recognize their ability to see someone’s sexuality and humanity in the same gaze before they have sex.  I realize that this is not a mindset that will be structurally or systemically reinforced over night, but it is a beginning of a new pathway at a fork in the road between celibacy, emotionally corrupted sex, and outright rape.  If we cannot enforce this in ourselves, then we will never be sexually mature enough to avoid the growing pains of a culture learning to reject what has formerly been an inherently violent and painful approach to sexuality.

-feminism and class, azis ansari, epstein, and differentiating circumstances of sexual assault