Thread by @Ebonyteach

Thread. (Those of us who came of age in the 1990s had better language & definitions, but the culture was the same as described in the 1980s. Assault was viewed as your own fault. The Internet -- and especially the social Web -- changed everything.)

https://twitter.com/shrinkthinks/status/1045754729140293632

(Trigger and content warnings, pls mute) The vast majority of women who came of age before 1990 did not have adequate terminology or definitions for sexual violence. *My cohort was the first to have them, but there were violent sanctions & even social death for women who dared.*

We came of age in the 1990s.

1990s sitcoms and the culture in general gave us the language. But you risked social death if it wasn't a stranger. You risked being retraumatized. #DesireeWashington

And speaking just about poor & working class Black US folk, you risked sparking a wave of retaliatory violence if you reported.

I knew my daddy and several uncles *would have ridden down there, shot first, and asked questions later.* (We Black, but we also Southern.)

I can narrate so many stories. The mainstream culture labels incidents as "Black-on-Black violence" that were really vigilante justice. One of my uncles is living with a bullet from confronting a violent ex of my auntie's.

(The world tells you our menfolk don't love us, but.)

On top of a culture that maddeningly labeled Black women/girls/femmes as being existentially invulnerable to that kind of assault, on top of not being believed if you knew your attacker even when those legal definitions began to emerge, some of us KNEW we couldn't say anything.

My folks almost put two & two together. I made like a heroine in a medieval romance novel & fled so deep into the church that my mother, grandmother & aunties were thrown off the scent of my pain... and wouldn't tell my father & uncles that I was lying & *something was wrong.*

In short, I did the Black Southern evangelical equivalent of "taking the veil" so that I didn't contribute to more Black death & interference from the racist CJ system. I also didn't want the social death of that narrative on campus and/or back home.

Violent men shatter our lifeworlds, altering our tomorrows forever. We each have different strategies of selfhood afterward. I did what I had to do in the spacetime I found myself in, with the knowledge that I had at the time. No regrets.

(He did stalk & fill my answering machine with death threats 2 years later. In some ways, that was more traumatizing than the initial incident. But that wasn't the last time I was stalked... and those are both other stories, not for Twitter.)

You feel sorry for me because I've never married? Honey. I am *good.* I've survived and thrived, clothed and (at least somewhat) of sound mind. I have friends and family. I'm not embittered. That, to me, is being victorious.

But I want better for the next generation of women.

I don't want the magic of our young people's coming-of-age moments to be stolen from them the way that so many of ours were.

(Holding my breath for my Gen-Z niblings. Maybe I thought I'd avoid such fears by not having kids. As it turns out, that's not how any of this works.)