nerdyzebradog:

queeranarchism:

When I see young survivors of abuse and sexual violence writing death threats to other young people for writing the ‘wrong’ sort of slash fiction and engaging in other sorts of online violence in the name of making everyone have only unproblematic sexual experiences, I don’t see a coping mechanism or a teenage phase that they will grow out of.

I see abuse survivors translating their trauma into ‘I’m hurting so I get to hurt people’ and ‘I feel pain so I am right’. Taking the first step towards becoming abusers themselves. I see a very dangerous process that could be deadly if it isn’t interrupted.

And I can’t brush off this
sex-is-bad-conservatism-dressed-up-as-caring-about-victims bullshit
as something that is just online, far from me. It may have its origins in American puritanism, but it can take root much closer to my home quite easily because our social justice cultures are very Americanized. 

Whatever is happening on Tumblr generally rears its ugly head in my local activist community about two years later. Because surprise surprise, the same
traumatized young people eager to lash out at others to feel better
about themselves exist in my community too and they have Tumblr
accounts.

I see abuse survivors translating their trauma into ‘I’m hurting so I get to hurt people’ and ‘I feel pain so I am right’.

I fell into that trap after my “father” left. (I use scarequotes because he does not deserve that title, or any variation thereof.) Why? Because the only way I’d been shown to deal with emotions up to that point was to tear other people down without laying a finger on them, and let me fuckin’ tell y’all, I had a whole fuckening lot of emotions about the situation I found myself in.

I’ve said things that cannot be taken back, I’ve hurt the people I care about, and it’s only because I’m incredibly lucky that I have any friends at all today. Hell, I still fall back on the old habits of “spear their soul before they piss all over yours” when I’m deeply stressed out. I do my best to keep it under control, but it’s like the saying goes: Old habits die hard.

So please, folks. If you’ve been hurt like I have, do your future self the favor of getting into deep introspection for a while. Maybe therapy if you can swing it and feel like you can handle it. I won’t lie, it sucks thirty-one flavors of decaying donkey dick while you’re doing it, but the payoff…

Well, I don’t know if it’s worth it yet. I’m still tryin’ to get there.

But I have broken the cycle of abuse.

You can too.