It’s been a week.
I’m not writing to complain but rather to let you know that I wasn’t up for writing a newsletter today. So, please, go ahead and cheer me on for not succumbing to the old good-girl script of plowing through when I’m feeling drained. This is the work.
But there is something I would like to do this week— I want to talk to my Substack friend, Keith Bumgarner on a Live on Friday at 11 a.m.
You may remember Keith from his guest post here in February, “Finding Your Therapist: A Journey Worth Taking.”
For those who don’t know him, Keith writes about how as a high school student, a female teacher targeted him for sex. Like most predators, she saw something broken in him and knew it made him easy prey.
It turns out she wasn’t the first one to target Keith. He shares transparently about surviving both parental abuse and sexual abuse by a series of older women on his Substack, Don’t Let the Past Steal Your Soul.
With the Cornell 7 case all over the news, I want to talk with Keith about what it’s like to watch institutions look away, why survivors take so long to be believed, and why male survivors are almost never part of the conversation.
This will be a tender conversation. Come as you are, and take care of yourself if it’s close to home.
Here’s the link to join live:
https://open.substack.com/live-stream/389130?utm_source=live-stream-scheduled-upsell
As Ilona said, I was sexually abused repeatedly as a boy and an adolescent by adult women.
Regardless of that fact, it doesn’t make my experience the same as this young woman’s, and I can’t tell you from my experience what happened in that fraternity house. What I can tell you is how damaging it is when other people decide what a victim should have done, said, or remembered before they’ll take the harm seriously.
Here, there are serious allegations and serious disputes about the evidence. The prosecutor is reopening the case, and that process matters. So does asking whether the woman was heard carefully the first time, whether the university did enough, and what the men around her understood and did. Men have a responsibility in this conversation beyond saying that assault is terrible. We have to challenge the behavior and the talk that make it easier for someone to be treated as though her consent doesn’t matter.
Good on you not succumbing to pressures to perform. You be you!!!!!!!!!!