Like most things related to my sexual assault, it took me a couple of days to really understand why this makes me so uncomfortable. For one, as I've said before, my sexual assault is not someone else's political issue. It has nothing to do with Sarah Palin's view on emergency contraceptives (which suck), or who paid for my rape kit or whether I have the right to have an abortion. It just doesn't. It has a lot to do with how the system treated me, and continues to treat me, how the prosecutors and police department tore my life open and left me hanging and violated my Constitutional rights. I want those things fixed, because that's the only justice I'm ever going to see. Those things have nothing to do with this election, and Barack Obama isn't likely to get me justice any more than Sarah Palin is.

And, let's be frank, a lot of rape victims struggle with guilt, and struggle with saying "no." I have. And so if I was asked — by a friend, say, who works for the Obama campaign — I would have difficulty saying no. Because I am willing to talk about it, right? And I don't want McCain elected, right? And yet the whole time, I would be feeling uncomfortable and obligated because in my opinion, I've been attacked enough this year. So, I wouldn't want to be asked. I wouldn't want to be thought of. And I wouldn't find refusing easy. My point remains, as it did on Monday, that recruiting for what was an as-yet unscripted ad among women you don't know — as Kiersten Steward seemed to be doing when she said, "this is a big ask and I haven’t seen a script" — is not quite the same as asking women who are already willing to talk (or have, as part of speaker's bureaus) about their assaults. That women can or would volunteer to do so is great, and a testament to the courage of those women. But not everyone is there, and not everyone would know how to refuse.

On top of that, I have a little experience with how campaign ads use crime victims, from when Tom Tancredo's campaign appropriated the image of my close friend's murdered client for an ad of his own. I was so angry, and he (and her family) were even more livid. And the details of my sexual assault are as easily appropriated for causes I disagree with — immigration reform, say, or tougher sentences or more invasive sex offender registries. Where would it stop? I'm not sure it would. Using my sexual assault for this kind of political purpose, as Lindsay acknowledges, would be to open myself up for attack and — which is worse, to me, as I open myself up to personal attack every day I write — to lose what little control I have of how my story is told, when I am ready to tell it.

So, I acknowledge what Ann, Amanda and Lindsay have to say about having a real victim talk about their sexual assaults, and talk about the issues in the campaign, from who pays for rape kits to the necessity of offering victims access to emergency contraception — though, frankly, I think it's as disingenuous to suggest that Palin supports raping women as it is to suggest that Obama supports infanticide. But, for me, from my experience, I remain uncomfortable at the thought that my sexual assault and my politics would mean that someone would think to recruit me for a political ad. And I can't say that I'm super-pleased that so many people seemingly think I ought not to be.

On Recruiting Rape Survivors For Political Ads [Feministing]
Over the Line [Pandagon]
Obama Recruiting Rape Survivors for Campaign Ads [Firedoglake]
Palin Opens Up On Controversial Issues [CBS]
Obama Sought Rape Victim For Ad [Politico]
Tancredo Ad Writers Are Shitty Human Beings [Wonkette]

I'm not really sure how McCain's record on reproductive rights could be mistaken as anything other than anti-choice. Of 130 votes on reproductive choice in his legislative career, he voted against choice 125 times. Those votes include everything from voting for and co-sponsoring the Federal Abortion Ban (which criminalizes some procedures), to voting to define a fetus as human life. He voted to deny family planning centers federal health care funds if they provide abortions with any money (not just the federal government's). He opposed letting soldiers get abortions abroad with their own money and refused to allow the government to offer its employees health insurance that even covers abortion services. He stood against bills that would penalize violent and disruptive anti-abortion protesters and in favor of global gag rules and abstinence-only education time and time again. And, really, that's just the beginning of his anti-woman legislative record. McCain is no friend to any woman who believes it is the right of women to choose (or at least be allowed to know about) abortion, and that's before we get to his stance against the Lily Ledbetter equal pay bill this year and his recent statements on Viagra and birth control coverage.

Look, ladies who are flirting with McCain: I understand that he's kind of dashing, and he plays around with that damaged-flyboy-debonair-older-man thing. It was sort of cute when he was 40, and maybe even when he was 50. But now he's an old man who doesn't even know that the former Czechoslovakia is two countries. And he's sending out his Girl Friday to tell you that while he's going to do everything in his power as President to make sure you and your daughters and their daughters can never obtain a legal abortion in this country, he'll totally think about letting you get a bill that says you should get paid the same as your male counterparts and he might think about defying everyone in his party on a federal birth control coverage mandate. And girlfriend, if you buy that, let me introduce you to a couple of Congressmen who will just swear their marriages are shams and they're totally leaving their wives after the next election.

I understand that times are tough and you feel like it's all Obama's fault that Hillary lost and sexism is bad and Carly's so cool when you meet her, but please, please, please just stop and think about the issues. You know, those issues you claimed were so important during the primary when you talked about Obama's "present" votes? The ones you wanted people to vote on? The ones you swore you were going to vote on when you decried how pundits and pollsters portrayed all of us as led by our emotions and empathy after New Hampshire? Yeah, please think about those, and if you just have to spitefully vote for McCain in November could you maybe stop talking about spitefully voting for McCain in November despite the issues so that people can maybe take the rest of us women voters seriously? Thanks.
Senator John McCain [NARAL]
McCain Surrogate Fiorina Meets With Clinton Supporters [Wall Street Journal]
Unmasking McCain: His Reactionary Record on Reproductive Rights [HuffPo]
John McCain [NARAL]
After Voting Against Equal Pay Legislation, McCain Claims He's 'Committed To Equal Pay For Equal Work' [Think Progress]
John McCain's Birth Control Dodge [Washington Independent]
McCain Defends Czechoslovakia, A Non-Existent Country — Again [HuffPo]

My sexual assaults (yes, it's now happened twice) are not a political peg for other women to hang their hats on, and I should not and will not apologize to anyone for making decisions that were best for me. My body is mine — it doesn't belong to Feminism anymore than it belongs to the men who sexually assaulted me — and what I choose to do with it, or about it, is supposed to be my choice. To be told, subtly or otherwise, that my choices are invalid or anti-feminist is demeaning and condescending and in violation of the whole concept that feminism is about giving women choices and letting them make them.

I was sexually assaulted when I was 17. Without getting into the gory details, I was out on a date with an older guy, I was in a foreign country, I was comfortable with what I was doing (making out) until I wasn't anymore, and then he decided that it was a little late for all of that. My mind and, to a degree, my body, clicked off in the minutes that followed, and I guess most of my memories of it now involve the humidity that night, the dark, hearing his roommate snoring in the next bed and both hoping and fearing that he would wake up, and the rapidity and ease with which I began to immediately deny and justify what had happened to me. He drove me home and kissed me goodbye, and I never saw him again.

It took a couple of years before I stopped saying that I'd just had sex when I didn't want to.

Could I have reported it? I guess. On the other hand, I was 17, in a conservative country where I didn't speak their language or the (completely different) language of the man involved. I had 2 more days in the country. And the thing that I needed to do was not to tell the friends with which I was staying, and try to go to the police and explain and/or be castigated for going to his place, or making out, or having some sangria (or telling him I was 18), I needed, desperately, to deny it. I needed for that night to not occupy the place in my mind that it would've occupied if I could have called it by its name. I needed time, and healing and knowledge and I wasn't going to get that from a foreign police station or the legal need to revisit it constantly.

The first time I really told someone, he said I was making it up, obviously, since I didn't report it. Of course, he didn't say it to me, not then, he said it to the girlfriend who came after me, who threw it in my face when she next saw me and told some other mutual friends that I was making it up for the sympathy. (Lisa, by the way? Fuck you. I'm glad he got so stoned he puked on you at that party.) In a Women's Studies class later that year, I didn't admit to it even as we went around a circle and talked about our experiences with sexual violence because the mood in the room was definitely of the tell-for-the-good-of-the-Sisterhood variety. Several years later, during a fight with a boyfriend in which I told him he had to stop speaking to me in a certain way or else, he said, "Or else what? You didn't report your rape, what are you going to have the backbone to do to me?" I hung up the phone.

Legally, I can't talk about the second assault yet. Suffice it to say, it was far from a date-rape scenario and it was reported and the legal processes were as emotionally traumatic as the assault itself. Had I known how the system really worked, despite the fact that it was a stranger, I don't know that I would've reported it, had the situation not obliged me to involve the police in the first place in a state where you don't get to "choose" to press charges. What I eventually chose to do after weeks of increasingly disappointing meetings with prosecutors that left me feeling judged, crying, frustrated and angry, was to get myself a lawyer to represent me to the prosecutors, whose salaries I pay with taxes...and who should be representing my interests. It was far from a pleasant experience, and it makes me even more certain that I made the correct decision for me the first time and solidifies my position that it is not for me to decide or judge the reporting decision for anyone else.

See, the thing is, it's great to say that we should do this or we should do that for the sake of women everywhere. But no one — and especially not other women and supposed feminists — has the right to tell me or any other victim of sexual assault that being victimized and being traumatized leaves us responsible for making the world a better place (as though that's what's accomplished by reporting a rape, actually). We all have a responsibility to try to prevent them, to create a world where they are much more of an exception than the rule, where drunk girls or slutty girls or drunken slutty girls don't have to explain their behavior to anyone — regardless of whether they have been assaulted, or after having been assaulted — and where victims don't have to explain to non-victims the choices they made. My pursuing the prosecution of the one made no more difference in the world than not prosecuting the other. But maybe my talking about them both, maybe helping to ease the stigma of it for other people and create a space where I don't have to be ashamed of being a victim (or of how I chose to deal with that) will.
Assembly Survey Reveals Unreported Rapes [Independent]
Sleeping Around: Are Women Still Afraid To Report Rape? [IndyBlogs]