Innocently, I sat down at this computer at the Brittania Branch of the VPL. I look right and see a book lying on it's face. I pick up the book, Ecstatic Sex: A Guide to the Pleasure of Tantra, by the authors of Tantric Love. I think, "Excellent!" and flip though the pages. As luck would have it, the page I open to has a heading, "Sexual Abuse." Now, I'm wondering what that topic is doing in a book about tantric sex so I read the four paragraphs there. And what should happen? I get blisteringly angry. This topic tends to be a flash point for so many of us, and with reason. But I hate pop-psyche blather. Case in point: "As healers and in Tantra groups, we have worked with many adults who were sexually abused as children. Sexual abuse destroys the child's ablity to grow and develop naturally...It harms the child so deeply that he or she will need years of therapy and healing on every level of body, mind, and sould to recover from it....At the very least, their sexual response will be damaged" (131--my emphasis added). Destroyed? Damaged? I object to this kind of hyperbole in regards to sexual abuse. I remember being in a grad critical theory class when a fellow student just happened to mention that survivors of abuse have "a poisioned sexuality."

I'm so angry about the whole thing I don't really even know how to begin expressing why it makes me so angry. For one, it's an unhealthy projection. Each of us are individuals and while sexual abuse is definately traumatic, the idea that all survivors are destoryed, damaged beyond repair, and poisioned by the abuse is the worst kind of essentialist thinking. For one, it denies the survivors of abuse distinct and individual responses and sends the messaged that once you're damaged, give up the ghost because there will be nothing left of your sexuality. It's a revictimization and I hate it.

They're kicking me out of the library *laugh* I wasn't shouting at the top of my lungs at a library book I promise!!!! In any case, I'm going to come up with a better response for why this whole idea bothers me as much as it does. More eyefull to come....