![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leePrevious Chunks: see index!
Lois wasn’t “as bad” as Grampa, by conventional metrics—she only attacked us under his command, never alone, and she never seemed enthusiastic. However, she was our favorite aunt growing up, so our brain found her “harder.”
Dad, however nasty, was still the least painful of our immediate family to deal with; we already kind of knew he was a prick, and his sadism never overcame his caution. He always tried to remain in emotional control of himself, used condoms, tried not to leave marks, and if an environment seemed less than ideal, then he wouldn’t attack us. This made his limits and behavior far more predictable, and thus less scary.
Mom was terrifying, but she was also a victim like us; Grampa had abused her, Dad treated her badly, and we harbored hopes of saving her. For her to attack us herself felt like a terrible betrayal. She mostly focused on the physical, rather than the sexual, and she preferred forms of asphyxiation, since that left few marks and easily put us in mortal fear. She tended to put on raving performances that gave the impression that she had completely lost her grip on her actions and reality, and that unpredictability made her a holy terror. (However, seeing as she somehow never lost control in front of other people, asphyxiated us hard enough to cause us major damage, or attacked anyone else, it seems likely that this was a performance, rather than the real thing.) She also did some weird pseudo-religious stuff and seemed compelled to repeat it even when it didn’t serve her, which makes us wonder whether she was reenacting something that was done to her. It seems we’ll never know.
And finally, there was Bro, who was the least violent, the least effective, and by far the hardest. He was younger than us and had once been much smaller than us; we felt that we had failed him as a big sister, especially once memories started coming up that stated Mom was sexually abusing him, and in a way that seemed far more monstrous than her attacks on us. (As heinous and terrifying as they were, at least we were never under the illusion that she did them out of love for us.) She probably started attacking him when he was still in elementary school, if not before, and he grew steadily more and more sexually aggressive towards us from the age of ten on. He was most frightening due to his carelessness—he never used condoms, and Rogan had to do some pretty degrading things to insure we wouldn’t be impregnated. (Since, as a teen growing up in Texas, we had no access to birth control and wouldn’t have been able to get an abortion without our parents’ consent.)
How Could This Happen?
Some people may be staggered by the idea that one family could harbor so much rape. In most people’s minds, rapists are a special kind of evil, and to have so many in one family defies the laws of probability. But this isn’t how rape actually works, not in our family anyway.
(As a side note: some people seem to think that people beat and rape due to mental illness, but nothing in our experience or research suggests that this is true. Part of being crazy is that you’re crazy even when it doesn’t serve you. We go crazy in public, or at work, or in front of our friends, despite the consequences. If raping and choking kids was indeed a mental disorder, how is it that all of our relatives were somehow able to completely control it in public? Why did they never warn others, or turn themselves in, so as to protect others from their uncontrollable violence? For more discussion of this argument, we recommend chapters two and three of Lundy Bancroft’s Why Does He Do That?)
Our entire family tree was rotten, not because it was stuffed with an improbable allotment of unusually evil people, but because our family rules said cruelty and violence were okay, as long as you only used it on appropriate targets.
We were not special in our family. Everyone had license to abuse everyone beneath them in the hierarchy. Grampa abused Lois, Mom, and Uncle J, all of whom went and abused other children in turn. Dad abused Mom and us (and possibly Bro), and Mom abused Bro and us. That was just the privilege of being higher on the totem pole, as natural as parents’ desires trumping that of their children’s. The hierarchy was organized by generation, and within those brackets, people jockeyed for position, fighting notto be the lowest.
The power structure was inherently corrosive and corrupting, and we did not escape that. To show how this works, here’s a story: when we were a child, we beat up our little brother because Dad said we could.
We don’t remember how old we were—somewhere between seven and ten. We don’t remember the argument that started the whole thing either, only that us and Bro went to Dad to settle it.
Our father, being himself, told us to go into the backyard and duke it out, winner take all. Might made right.
This was no fair fight. Our little brother, besides being younger, was at the time tiny for his age, while we were large. There was absolutely no question how it would end. And indeed, we beat our little brother to tears. He ran crying to our father, but to no avail. Bro knew the rules. He lost. Dad had no sympathy.
(A few years later, Bro got his revenge; he put a bunch of pool balls in a sock and beat us with it, raising bruises on our back. That was just how it worked in our family.)
The really awful part, though, isn’t that. It’s the memory of the sheer vicious sadism we felt in hurting him. There was a rush of euphoria and power, a feeling that we could do whatever we wanted, and there was nothing Bro could do, because it was the right thing to do. If the rules said we could, then it was okay. There was this twisted sense of triumph, like we’d gotten the cheat code to life, the secret that would let us do whatever we wanted to whoever we wanted and still be a good person. All it required was an acceptable target, and we would not only get away with it, but be absolved of caring.
--to be continued in Lucky Part 13!
