{"id":19409,"date":"2015-01-17T09:21:31","date_gmt":"2015-01-17T17:21:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=19409"},"modified":"2015-01-17T09:22:17","modified_gmt":"2015-01-17T17:22:17","slug":"the-politics-of-being-a-man-who-survived-childhood-sexual-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=19409","title":{"rendered":"The Politics of Being a Man Who Survived Childhood Sexual Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I said in the blog post<\/a> I wrote about the artist\u2019s grant I received this year from the Queens Council on the Arts<\/a>, I plan to use the blogging I do, as well as my newsletter (click to sign up<\/a>), to share with you the process of preparing for publication my second book of poetry, Words for What Those Men Have Done,<\/em> which continues my exploration of how being a survivor of childhood sexual violence has shaped my life. At the heart of the book, for me, is \u201cFor My Son, A Kind of Prayer<\/a>,\u201d which weaves together four different narratives: of my son\u2019s birth, of my own sexual abuse, of the rape of a young girl in the Congo, and of a visit to the urologist. (The link will take you to a draft of the poem on my blog. It has also been\u00a0published at The Good Men Project<\/a>, in Voice Mail<\/em><\/a> magazine, and is forthcoming in the anthology\u00a0Veils, Halos and Shackles: International Poetry on the Abuse and Oppression of Women,<\/em> which will be edited by Charles Fishman and Smita Sahay.)<\/p>\n

One of the longest poems I\u2019ve ever written, this piece presented some very specific challenges, not least of which was finding language that would work as poetry to describe precisely how the abuser I mention in the poem violated me. While this challenge raises the very interesting, and I think importan, question of what it means to make art out of such ugliness, it was not the most difficult challenge\u00a0that I faced. Rather, the hardest part of writing \u201cFor My Son, A Kind of Prayer,\u201d was resisting the temptation to wear my violation as an essentalizing badge of difference, as if the experience of being abused had emptied me of everything I might have in common with the man who assaulted me.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written elsewhere<\/a>, and in some detail, about the paradox of being both a man who has been sexually violated by other men and a man socialized to embody, whether I choose to act on them or not, precisely the values of manhood and masculinity that legitimize that kind of violation.\u00a0I\u00a0plan to\u00a0write more about this paradox as my work on Words for What Those Men Have Done<\/em> progresses\u2013especially, I think, as I prepare the public presentation I need to do in order to fulfill the terms of my grant. Here, for now, I will simply say that my understanding of this paradox first took root in me, as did the process of my own healing, when I was in my twenties and discovered in feminism<\/a> a language that I could use to name what my abusers did to me as abuse.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor My Son, A Kind of Prayer<\/a>\u201d does not try to resolve this paradox, but rather to illuminate what if feels like to live within it, which is something poetry can do\u2013that art can do; that I hope Words for What Those Men Have Done<\/em> will do\u2013that other forms of expression cannot. As I said, I\u2019ll be writing more about this as my work on the book progresses. Meanwhile, I\u2019d like to share with you links to two organizations that provide education, support, resources, and advocacy for men who have survived sexual violence: MaleSurvivor<\/a> and 1in6<\/a>. I hope you\u2019ll check them out.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted on my blog<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I said in the blog post I wrote about the artist\u2019s grant I received this year from the Queens Council on the Arts, I plan to use the blogging I do, as well as my newsletter (click to sign … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-men-and-masculinity","category-rape-intimate-violence-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19409"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19411,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19409\/revisions\/19411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}