Triggers—A Question for Rape Survivors

Trigger warnings—does anyone remember approximately when those things started showing up on Web pages and in bulletin boards? As far as I can recall, I only started seeing them about a decade ago, when I subscribed to a mental health forum for reasons unrelated to this topic. The general rule of them there was, before you initiate a discussion that might cause any sort of traumatic reliving of an experience, you had to add a trigger warning (also called a trigger, TW, spoiler, or spoiler warning) to the subject line of your message. Common trigger warnings there included:

TRIGGER WARNING: SEXUAL ASSAULT

TRIGGER: SUICIDE

SPOILER WARNING: VIOLENT RAPE

TRIGGER: CUTTING

TW: SUICIDAL IDEATION

SPOILER: DATE RAPE, ACQUAINTANCE RAPE

TRIGGER WARNING: SELF HARM

In recent years, even outside of mental health, addiction, and survivors-support sites, trigger warnings started showing up more and more frequently. The three that I can recall seeing most often are trigger warnings for rape, for domestic violence, and for battlefield trauma. This makes sense. Aside from rape and domestic violence, the most common source of PTSD is combat, and the USA is just ending twelve years of war in two separate countries on the other side of the world.

I understand the purported purpose of the trigger warnings. They're supposedly helping PTSD sufferers to avoid any descriptive material that could trigger a painful recollection and, worst case, reliving of the source stressor. In fact, I've employed trigger warnings myself. If you go to the Amazon page for my recently published Urban Fantasy, Gifts, and scroll down to the Book Description, you'll see that the first line reads:

[Trigger Warning - drug-facilitated, forcible, and violent rape.]

Generally, I have two qualms about this whole "trigger warning" concept. First and foremost, if all you're doing in your message is referring to yourself as a "rape survivor," what's the point of the TW? I mean, if we're really afraid of the mere word, you've already stated the nasty trigger word in the subject line. This, in my experience, describes a good 66% or more of the documents I've seen with a TW in the subject line.  Seriously, if you're only going to mention the word once in your letter, haven't you already done just as much harm by naming the trigger in the warning? How, then, does your warning help anyone?

My second qualm will take a little background. Bear with me for a few more lines.

Recently, I was speaking with a therapist friend of mine, and she told me the most successful PTSD treatment available today—providing the greatest notable relief and the longest-standing successes—is a new form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) called "Prolonged Exposure" (PE) therapy. PE isn't really a new idea, just a revamped and more carefully modulated version of immersion therapy. Like all immersion therapy, the goal of PE is to get patients to a point where they can see, hear, read details of events similar to their own PTSD source without suffering any of the usual ill consequences (dissociation, hallucination, loss of sleep, loss of appetite, depression). Or, to put it more bluntly, the survivor of violence should be able to hear, see, or read about violence similar to what they suffered without reliving the experience.

Looking around on the Internet, the best lay-description I could find for PE is the one on the VA's National Center for PTSD. You can follow the link for more details, but the bare bones of PE is the following four steps:

1. Education - they teach you about the next three bullets.
2. Breathing - relaxation through breath control—something like Qi-Gong for beginners.
3. Immersion - in dribs and drabs, they start feeding you images like what you experienced to cause your PTSD. This might include stories, videos, newscasts, or even play-acting traumatic experiences.
4. Talking through it - this includes talking about your own experience and about those immersion exercises. This is where the actual therapy takes place.

My first reaction to PE was: Awesome sauce! I know some people who could really benefit from something like PE. Some of them have been suffering for over a decade. Sadly, like most psychotherapy, I quickly learned that PE comes with no guarantees. Although their success rates have been dramatic (I've heard and seen reports of upwards of 80%, which is phenomenal considering the variables involved), PE does not work for everyone.

My second reaction was to begin wondering about Trigger Warnings—in particular, my own trigger warning. If the most successful treatment for PTSD involves controlled immersion, is the widespread use of trigger warnings—the systematic conditioning of survivors to avoid reading about violence—is this doing PTSD sufferers a disservice? Now, I'm not so naïve as to think stumbling upon vivid descriptions of a violent sexual assault could ever be at all therapeutic for a rape survivor, but I have to wonder: when I provide that trigger warning—that little note saying "rape survivors should go no further"—am I perhaps circumventing a survivor's autonomous development of coping mechanisms? Am I protecting people or being overly-protective?

Understand, I'm not arguing for the elimination of all trigger warnings. I would just like to see a little healthy debate on the topic. So, whether you're a survivor or not, I'd like to hear from you. Where do you stand on the use of trigger warnings? Who should employ them? When? Where?

Thanks.

O Frabjous Day!

Title: Gifts

Author: D. G. Grace

Genre: Urban Fantasy

Print Length: 342 pages

Seller:  Amazon Digital Services, Inc.

Release date: March 2014

Announcement time. Gods, finally.

Almost two years ago, in just under a month, I wrote the first draft of the novel Gifts, which is now for sale in the Amazon Kindle store.

After running through a few rounds of edits, I browbeat my wife and several friends into reading and re-reading the novel. I got some great criticism.

Other stuff happened.

So, finally, with all my revisions completed, the novel reformatted for Kindle, and armed with a striking cover created by the brilliant Kathy Grace, I committed my novel to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing.

I am proud to say Gifts is not your typical Urban Fantasy: no crime-fighting werewolves, no sexy sparkling vampires, and no zombies of any sort. Urban Fantasy does, however, provide an excellent medium for a  gritty, occasionally violent examination of themes of sex, gender, and orientation.

[Trigger warning: drug-facilitated, forcible, and violent rapes]

For me, the fun part is (mostly) over. The novel is written. Now the really dirty work of marketing begins. I'll be querying reviewers who are interested in blogging about new Urban Fantasies. If you know anyone like that who might be interested, please let me know. I'm already overwhelmed by how many book review blogs are out there.

Sweet Mystery of Life - eh, not quite

[Trigger warning - rape]

A friend of mine recently posted a Facebook link to an excellent article on Huffington Post (yeah, they still occasionally get one right). The piece, A "Rape Culture" Tutorial for Naysayers, by Toula Drimonis provides an excellent outline of the history and pervasiveness of rape culture. She opens her article with a description of the kind of replies she inevitably gets from well-meaning (mostly male) rape culture deniers any time she posts an article showing that rape culture is alive and showing no sign of weakening. She calls such replies "mansplaining" (not her coinage, but certainly appropriate to these circumstances). I call them the knee-jerk defense of the privileged.

I guess it should come as no surprise that the first response my friend received to posting the link came from a well-meaning rape-culture denier. Said denier (who, yes, denies being a denier) made it clearl he had not read all of the article by suggesting replacing the term "rape culture" with "street harassment culture." His objection to "rape culture," he said, is that the phrase is misandry and therefore politically unwise in terms of garnering support from male allies. When I pointed out that he was engaging in precisely the behavior described in the article, he accused me of delivering an ad hominem attack. My first thought upon reading his claim was, "O shit! He can read my mind!" I promise, I did not call him any of the things I was thinking—not even dumbass.

(*Sigh* Okay, I admit. I actually did call him a dumbass. Repeatedly. But I erased every use of that and similar terms before I published any of my comments. I double-checked.)

In part, I have to admit that I get it. I understand the sourfaced response some men throw back every time they hear "rape culture." Some of it. Not all of it. Certainly not all of it.

I don't get the jackass judges who recently allowed rapists in the US and Canada to walk basically because they thought the victims in question, in words they carefully avoided making explicit, were asking for it. I don't get Congress allowing the rape culture within our own military to run rampant. I don't get Candy Crowley of CNN lamenting that the Steubenville rapists are "poor boys" whose "lives are over" because of the notoriety of the Steubenville rape trial. I don't get the assholes who respond to every woman who complains of sexual harassment by posting suggestions that they just need to be raped. I don't get the guys who feel they have a right to treat women (verbally, physically, and legally) like subhuman sex toys.

I DO get that no man wants to feel he's being held accountable for a crime he didn't commit and wouldn't think of committing. More specifically, when I first heard them, some of the claims about rape culture seemed a bit far-fetched. One such claim was the repeated reference to the pervasiveness of  "rape jokes."

Now, please don't mistake my position. I fully understood that such a pervasive presence would be poisonous. If men (women too, really) learn to think of rape as something comical, it makes it very difficult to take rape accusations seriously. If rape is something laughable, why should anyone ever want to prosecute?

No. My problem with claims about rape humor was something different. I couldn't believe it existed. I am at a loss to explain my own blindness, but I just couldn't think of any examples of anything you could call a rape joke.

Rape jokes. It hurts just saying it. I get a sour, nauseated pain in the pit of my stomach at the thought of laughing at a rape victim. How the hell could anyone tell a rape joke? To hell with the joke teller. How could an audience sit still for a joke, a story that ends with someone being raped, and laugh? Sure, I know humor can be pretty damned brutal at times, (Q - How many men does it take to tile a bathroom? A- Depends how thick you slice them.) but rape humor? I know lots of insensitive jokes. I had no difficulty digging around in my memory and dredging up jokes belittling women, men, queers, transgender people, various races and creeds. Blond jokes. Pollack jokes. Aggie jokes. But rape jokes? Really? I had some vague notion that we might be talking about variations on the dumb blonde joke, in which some mentally defective woman perhaps gives herself up sexually but erroneously believes she's done something clever. But, no, I couldn't even come up with anything like that.

Finally, I remembered one. A blatant rape joke. And I was devastated.

The joke in question is one of the principal set-pieces in a major motion picture. I've seen that movie dozens of times. It's generally a very funny movie, and one of the biggest jokes in the movie—established near the film's beginning but only realized near its climax (seriously, no pun intended)—is a rape. The movie?

Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein.

I'm sure anyone familiar with the movie knows the joke (although it now feels pretty uncomfortable calling it that). The set up for the joke begins with Madeleine Kahn's first appearance as Dr. Frankenstein's fiancée, Elizabeth. She's shown to be controlling and touch-averse, a bit of an ice princess. They part, touching elbows in farewell because Elizabeth won't let Frankenstein touch her hair, her face, or her dress.

Jump ahead to Transylvannia, Dr. Frankenstein decides to build the creature according to his father's specifications. In accordance with those specs, the creature has to be oversized. Frankenstein's assistant Inga (Teri Garr) notes: "His shvann-shstucker will be enormous." Shvann-shtucker (sorry if that's not the right spelling) is a bastardized scrap of language, combining a Yiddish slang word for vagina (shvann) with a bit of faux-German tacked on to mean sticker.

Later, when Elizabeth arrives in Transylvannia to spend some time with Dr. Frankenstein, she talks of their coming nuptials, but she still refuses to allow the young doctor any kind of intimacy. Soon thereafter, the monster kidnaps Elizabeth and carries her off to a cave where, when she regains consciousness, he rapes her. We don't see much of the actual rape. The monster leers. The damsel cringes and threatens. The monster begins unbuttoning his pants. The camera turns to Elizabeth's face. As the pants come down (or so the shadows suggest) she sees the monster's legendary shvann-shtucker, to which her first response is "Woof." She struggles and tells him to stop, but the monster falls on her. A couple of grunts later, Madeleine Kahn belts out the chorus line of a Jeannette MacDonald standard, singing a full-throated "O, sweet mystery of life at last I've found you."

Afterwords, following what Elizabeth describes as "six or seven quickies," the monster runs off, and Elizabeth tells us she's in love. It's supposed to be funny—ironic in that the frigid cocktease just needed to get raped to solve her sexual problems and make her realize that what's really important in life is a big dick and a man willing to wield it liberally.

Now, I realize that explaining a joke kills it, but I don't think I could possibly do enough to deliver the death this particular joke deserves. I'm going to miss Young Frankenstein, but I don't think I'll ever be able to sit through that movie again.

This so-called joke is just one small example of rape culture. Like Rhett Butler's rape of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind (1939), like Howard Roark's rape of Dominique Francon in Fountainhead (1949), like the Mysterious Stranger's rape of Callie Travers in Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter (1973), the monster's rape of Elizabeth in Young Frankenstein (1974) serves to normalize rape (O, and as to that claim of  misandry, it might be useful to remember that Gone with the Wind and Fountainhead were written by women). What's worse, these examples show rape to be a useful tool for correcting and controlling petulant, unruly women. As long as audiences continue to watch and accept movies like this, to laugh at Elizabeth's afterglow, to smile knowingly at Scarlett's cheerful morning-after demeanor, even to smirk at Callie's comeuppance, rape culture will continue to thrive.

Inglourious Bigots

Arizona SB 1062 is dead. There is hope for the human race—even in Arizona.

Hurrah for tolerance!

Right?

Sadly, not so much. Look, don't get me wrong. I'm happy for the Arizona LGBTQ+ community. At least they'll be spared the indignity of state-sanctioned hatred. For now. But, if you think SB 1062 was the last or most threatening attempt to outlaw Arizona Queerness—well, I wouldn't hold my breath.

Jim Wright, my fellow ex-Navy, progressive, All-American curmudgeon—in his latest Stonekettle Station entry—explains part of what I find so unsatisfying about Governor Jan Brewer's veto of SB 1062. Great work as always, Jim. Like Jim and like Quentin Tarantino's Lt. Aldo Raine (Inglourious Basterds, 2009), I prefer my evil bigots clearly labeled. Okay, maybe carving swastikas in their flesh is a bit much. Still, a law requiring them to wear white robes and swastika armbands would make it so much easier to know who I can trust. Goddamn bigots and homophobes insist on looking like everybody else. Sneaky bastards. Perhaps a tattoo or a small brand…

Whoa! Am I really advocating branding bigots? Carving swastikas in the foreheads of people like Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter? Jan Brewer?

[Hmmm, you know, now that I think about it,…
*Sigh.* Don't tempt me.]

No, I know better. The examples of outspoken assholes like Limbaugh and Coulter notwithstanding, bigots are not leopards. Human beings are reasoning beings. They can and do change their spots (well, their minds). Admittedly, such a drastic change as Ann Coulter embracing tolerance is extremely unlikely, but we have to be able to hope.

So, no swastikas in the foreheads. And now, thanks to Governor Brewer's veto, no swastikas carved into Arizona law. Tant pis.

Beyond the lost opportunity to label hypocrites, however, I have another serious qualm about the veto. As a number of commenters have already noted (Jim Wright and Jon Stewart are not the only two to notice), many Arizona Conservatives wanted this bill vetoed. The past week's media responses showed Arizona that SB 1062 was a step too far. They'd overestimated their ability to sell their religious freedom canard. That's not the same thing as recognizing that the law they were suggesting was, as Jon Stewart notes, "morally repugnant."

So, to summarize,

• I am relieved for the LGBTQ+ community in Arizona
• I agree that SB 1062 was morally repugnant 
• I don't believe bigots should be permanently labeled

And I still object to the veto. Think about it. Arizona SB 1062 would have been easy to demolish in court. The first time anyone brought SB 1062 under legal scrutiny by trying to enforce it, the courts would have been tripping over each other to rule it unconstitutional. It would have been a great precedent to have on the books. Now, the AZ lege will go back and try again. Next time they're likely to narrow the focus of the law (SB 1062 was so broadly worded, it could have been used to discriminate against anyone based upon any religion). They'll couch their homophobia in a stealthier cloak, and we won't have easy access to a legal precedent.

Congratulations, though, to my queer friends in Arizona. You dodged a bullet this time. Be diligent, though. Next time, it might not be so easy to see it coming.

Sex, Gender, Orientation

Here's a simple pair of questions for you: If you woke up tomorrow to find your sex changed, would it affect your gender? Would it affect your orientation?

To be a little more direct, if you're female and woke up in the body of a man, would it change your gender or orientation? Ask enough people, eventually you'll get every possible combination of yes and no answers to those two questions. I find it mystifying that most respondents answer these questions with unequivocal certainty. Why mystifying? Who do you know who's ever experienced such a change? Sudden, unbidden, complete? No one.

So, how can you be so sure?

One response I get is that gender is a mental construct, so changing someone's physical sexual attributes does not alter gender. Okay. I can see why you this might be so. If you don't ever feel female, can you actually identify as female? A growing, vocal transgender population says no. Still, this concept of gender as a construct remains unfamiliar to most people, regardless of education. Liberal talk show host Piers Morgan recently made himself look crude and transphobic in his interview with author Janet Mock, primarily through a simple lack of understanding. Matt Kailey, in his blog Tranifesto, succinctly explains the things you should never say to a transgender individual, and Piers, in all fairness to his detractors, hit almost every one of them. Katie Couric fared even worse in interviewing Carmen Carrera. Both hosts, I would contend, simply did not understand the concept of gender construction (okay, Couric also asked some blatantly stupid questions, tantamount to, "So, tell us about your genitals."). You see, when you use a phrase like "gender construction," many listeners mistakenly interpret it to mean that gender is a choice. No. Gender presentation is a choice. A preference for one set of gender pronouns is a choice. Even sexual morphology (to the surgical degree) is a choice. Gender? Not so much. Your mind and body will tell you whether you're male or female (or neither or a little of both), but you really don't have much (or possibly any) choice.

So, if you are decidedly female in your sexual morphology and gender, and you get inexplicably transformed physically and biologically male, are you female or male? Initially, I'd guess you're probably going to remain female. The question that arises for me is, how long will you remain female? How much of gender construction is reasoned? How much genetic? Consider, if you were initially a typical, average woman, and some magic suddenly poofed you male, what would that mean? Understand, I'm talking about male all the way down to the chromosomes. So, let's say you were initially 5'6" tall and weighed 120 pounds and sported all the usual female curves: breasts, buttocks, hips. Internally, of course, you had all the usual female plumbing and lots of female hormones. Microscopically, your cell nuclei contained no Y chromosomes. Let's say you were in your early thirties. You might even have had children.

But after the change, you're 5'11" and 185 pounds. Your skeletal structure is denser. You have larger joints, larger muscles, a larger nose, more body hair, and a blockier jaw. Your bloodstream contains massive amounts of testosterone. Your voice is deeper; your plumbing is different; you need to shave every day or grow a beard. You, in other words, have Y chromosomes.

So, assuming this change is permanent and irreversible, in a month or two, in a year, will you still think yourself a woman? Personally, I doubt it.

On a related topic, what about your orientation? If you were a normal straight woman, are you still attracted to men? Now, this one seems like a no-brainer to some folks, but I'm not so sure. A lot of (mostly self-appointed) sex experts like to claim that the brain is the most powerful sex organ. That may be, but does that mean the brain—the mind, really—can trump the endocrine system?

Consider this: when my baby brother (straight, married three times, father of two) was just 7 years old (I was 9), he and I discovered my Dad's cache of Playboy magazines. Yes, they were at the bottom of his sock drawer.  Our parents found us out, and my mother insisted that my father talk with us. Not The Talk, but she wanted him to answer our questions—if we had any—just to be sure we didn't go through high school asking pretty girls to show us the staples in their abdomens.

My brother asked what has to be the Classic Boy's-First-Look Question: "Daddy, when I look at those pictures, why does my pee-pee get hard?"

Seven years old, easily five years before puberty, chubby little pre-tween cherub with no concept of sexual orientation, seeing a naked woman gave him an erection. His body already knew his orientation (he'd seen naked men in the changing room at the swimming pool with no such effects). This was not a mental effect or a learned attraction. He didn't even understand that the erection had anything to do with attraction. And his story is not unusual.

My point is simply that orientation just might be largely genetic. So, if it were possible to change your chromosomes from XX to XY, would it affect your orientation? To make matters even more complex, what if you were initially a lesbian? Would you, as a man, still be attracted to women, or would the gay genetic function cause your attractions to shift?

I'm not trying to force a decision on these questions. I honestly don't believe we can answer them. Eventually, state-of-the-art transgender surgery might be able to accomplish something like this, but at the moment, we're a long way off.

I've written a pair of novels exploring some aspects of these questions—one urban fantasy (Gifts) and one science fiction novel (Ain't No Grave). In both, I examine the transition from male to female. Gifts is available for Kindle as of 13 March 2014. I'm planning to market the science fiction novel through more traditional channels.

I will let you know when each book is available.

Think I missed something or that I'm just way off target? Let's hear your version.

Vampires, Werewolves, and Zombies

The photo at right is just a reminder that, yes, Ansel still rules the roost.

But on to the topic at hand. A few weeks ago, I watched a movie on cable. Sorry, I don't recall the station. The movie was one of those annoying found footage things in the mode of Cloverfield (which I loved) and The Blair Witch Project (which sucks out loud), and it relied heavily on stop-motion models that, sadly, looked like something Ray Harryhausen might have created while on a bad acid trip--in the third grade. Despite these serious flaws, the movie, Troll Hunter (originally Trolljegeren, Norwegian with English subtitles), is nothing short of brilliant. "Brilliant" I say, because the existence of the trolls, complete with information about their biology and ecology, is delivered with an air of nonchalance. The hunter of the title knows what he's doing, and he's spilling his guts to the junior journalists in this tale for reasons that ring true for anyone who has ever experienced bureaucratic stonewalling. Even the cheesiness of the troll artwork and the cliche of the found footage (complete with unsatisfying in medias res ending) could not diminish the brilliance of this story.

Then, after ruminating for a few weeks, it hit me: Troll Hunter had another strong point in its favor as a fantasy movie. It contained no vampires, no werewolves, and no f@<#ing zombies. I'm sick to death of all three. How do the networks and movie studios keep churning this shit out? How many questions are left unanswered in the VWZ trinity? Last year (2013), I went to the World Science Fiction convention in San Antonio. I met a half dozen people who were trying to push their self-published zombie novels. To my horror, even the smart and personable Paolo Bacigalupi (2010 Hugo Award winner best novel for The Wind-Up Girl) has written a young-adult zombie baseball novel.

Zombies. Why'd it have to be zombies?

I guess the zombies bother me most of the trinity. The brain-eating walking dead spawned by George Romero and others are really nothing like the traditional zombies of Voodoo tradition. Zombies have been done to death and beyond. Seriously, is anyone really afraid of shambling corpses? Even if they run like the dead in Zombieland, would something like that really scare you if it came at you, open-mouthed or muttering something about brains? No. Of course not. You'd nod, say, "nice costume," and that would be it. Even if--against all possible logic--this were a Real Thing, if a walking corpse could attack you--how dangerous is a rotting corpse, anyway?

Seriously, if you want to write fantasy, and you're determined to work from traditional horror or fairy-tale elements, please don't write another goddamn V,W, or Z story. Even witches, ghosts, dragons, angels, and demons have been less exploited in recent years than the trio, but there are lots of other areas to explore: goblins, trolls, ogres, fairies, elves, manitous, brownies, pixies, nixies, sylphs, unicorns.

Revisions and reacquaintance (trigger *sigh*--RAPE mentioned)

Okay, so I got the two books Kindle-ready and--I changed my mind. I might still publish the story collection on its own. "Otherwise" is a great story (I know, I'm not supposed to say that, but if you want to argue: follow the link on the right labeled "Otherwise," and then post your opinions) that got published in a low-circulation magazine nearly twenty years ago and vanished. I've been told repeatedly that the premise has been done before, but I found no truth to that. Yes, many SF writers have posited a FTL or hyperspace or time-travel system that causes madness, but I don't remember any that posited schizophrenia as a prerequisite to piloting.

Anyway, back on topic, I read a bunch of instructions on writing query letters (garbled, confused, often contradictory) and trie to write a query letter for the book I was then calling Boys Will Be Girls.Well, the writers (mostly semi-pro) on one of the major writers' forums ripped my query to shreds. What's worse, they tried to shred the premise. I won't share all that garbage here, but the problem, essentiallly, was my fault for giving the wrong impression of the book in the query.

One helpful writer of YA fantasy novels pointed out that my query and the title of the novel were misleadingly  cheery and playful for a story about a curse placed upon a serial rapist and murderer. With that in mind, I'm rewriting my query letter and tentatively renaming the novel Gifts. Sounds a bit generic, I know but the tone and topic are a better fit.

I'm also querying agents for a near-future SF novel, Ain't No Grave, which I finished this past month. I'm working on a third novel, have a fourth started, and I'm punching out short stories and trying to get these query letters polished during lulls.

So, this is why I haven't gone back to work on Celeste (sorry, Crystal). I could also claim that working on Celeste gave me a lot of ideas about how I wanted to build my characters (thanks, Crystal).