… They could not undo what was done, but they could record it, photograph every millimeter of it, seal it into bags, force someone to look.” I understood their gloved hands were keeping me from falling into an abyss. “Another microscopic camera snaked up inside of me, the internal walls of my vagina displayed on a screen. She is stripped, swabbed, examined, photographed inside and out.
With unsparing detail, she describes what happened next: trying to figure out why a police officer and a Stanford dean are in her room, trying to find her phone, trying to make sense of the night. Miller wakes up in the hospital, with pine needles in her hair, her underwear missing, debris in her vagina. If you aren’t already angry, consider that the genre of survivor memoirs is a thing that exists, and that Miller joins the likes of Jaycee Dugard and Michelle Knight, abductees who wrote about the horrors they endured in their captivities.) And that is where my memory goes black, where the reel cuts off.” (A good thing, as it spares us the specifics of exactly what happened after Turner got her alone behind a dumpster, the kinds of details that have become commonplace in the small but emerging genre of survivor memoirs.
“I was bored, at ease, drunk and extremely tired, less than 10 minutes from home. She sipped warm beer, tossed down vodka, went outside to pee. In January 2015, Miller was 23 and a recent college graduate when she went to a fraternity party with her sister and a friend. “Know My Name,” by Chanel Miller, the young woman whom Brock Turner, the so-called Stanford Swimmer, assaulted in 2015, is one of the rescued, a memoir by a writer who dived down into the darkness, pulled herself up and out and laid her story on the sand, still dripping, with its sharp edges intact. I picture those stories like a drowned library, an underwater Atlantis of movies and books and performances that will never be. What about the jokes we’ll never hear from the women who decided that success as a standup wasn’t worth watching Louis CK masturbate? What about the documentaries we’ll never see from Charlie Rose’s victims, or the performances we’ll never see from Harvey Weinstein’s?Īnd what about the would-be comedians or actors or writers or journalists who were raped or assaulted as young women, and who were stopped before they got started, silenced before they could speak? These fans don’t ask about the women who’ve been sidelined or silenced or who have abandoned their chosen fields. When a man gets #MeToo’d - which is to say, when a man experiences the consequences of his offenses against women - a predictable cry emerges from the predictable corners of the internet: What about his art? What about the jokes he’ll never tell what about the books he won’t write what about the films we’ll never get to see?
0 kommentar(er)
