Kimberly Dark

From Damaged Like Me: Essays on Love, Harm and Transformation (AK Press 2021) by Kimberly Dark

Damaged, Like Me

I.

I saw a porno snuff film for the first time in Las Vegas, more than thirty-five years ago. I was there recently for a professional conference and the memory came back slowly. Which boyfriend was I with? Did I get up and leave? I know I didn’t see the end.

I remember what shoes I was wearing during that snuff film. I loved them. So seventies, those shoes. A tall wedge heel with twisted jute wrapped around the whole platform, and then crossed over the vamp, with the leather—I don’t think it was real leather—and my painted toenails poked out the little openings in front. Just three of them visible on each foot.

I know I didn’t see the end of the film. I walked back out into the casino and got myself lost for a while. I remember looking down at my shoes and knowing I looked older than I was. No one would question me being in the casino. Or maybe they would. I couldn’t speak for a while after leaving the film. Better keep moving. I got lost in the casino, ended up back in the hotel room.

That was no boyfriend I was with. It was my stepfather. And no one questioned my return to the hotel room because it’s where I should’ve been in the first place, with my mother. I was eleven years old after all. I said I was twenty-two if anyone asked. Saying you’re twenty-one, when you’re lying, sounds suspicious. Like you just need to be old enough to drink. Twenty-two doesn’t sound so amateur. I’d done the math and knew just what date I needed to be born to be twenty-two.

I lied to adults easily. I said I was older if I needed to be older. I said I was fine and everything was good when it was definitely not good. It’s easier to say “everything’s good” than to be pitied for everything being not good when you don’t have the power to change things.

This is a story about how memory returns. It’s a story about pornography. It’s a story about dominion. “Why didn’t she speak up sooner,” is a popular question these days, with many women (and others) shaking loose memories of rape, assault, and moments with men when everything was definitely not good.

At eleven, I looked like I might have been twenty-two, if that’s what I meant for you to believe. I spoke with confidence and an assured, upright sexy that people said I was born with. Well, I must’ve gotten it somewhere. That’s what people said, but often in moments when it sounded like they needed an excuse.

I wandered out of the room where the film was playing and walked through the casino, then back up to the hotel room. My stepfather came in a little while after me. My mother admonished him gently for leaving me alone, letting me walk back to the room by myself. I had told her he was on his way. I walked up just ahead of him while he finished gambling. I didn’t say anything about that room full of mostly men, watching that film on a pull-down screen and his hot breath in my ear as the movie-woman took off her little jacket and laid it on the bed. The hot breath saying, “You know what happens in the end of this one, right? This is no regular porno. It’s something new. I had to get a special invitation to be here.”

She took off her dress and sat on the bed in underwear, long hair, just like mine, falling around her shoulders. I started looking around the room, realizing there were only a few bodies that looked like mine, that looked like the woman on the screen. I looked at the room on the screen, where the woman had become topless, roughly handled by the hairy-chested man. It looked like my room in that very hotel.

“After they do it, he kills her. It’s not fake blood either, like a movie. I mean he really does it. Can you believe that?”

And you know, I could.

You want this to be a simple story about a terrible incident. Of course you do. That will mean that you can feel a cathartic grief about it that positions you as a compassionate person on the right side of life’s many moral divisions. You hope this story will ask nothing from you but your outrage, compassion, and maybe a feeling of inspiration that if I can overcome hardship, so can you. You do not wish for this to be a story that requires you to think of how your own memories have been shaped by social expectations, how social patterns are formed and how we accept and even expect certain terrible things to happen. You don’t want to think about where you are standing in the scenarios I’m offering. You don’t want to think about how you devalue certain stories even as you believe in the human dignity of all people.

I can’t give you what you want. This is a story about how scenes are reconstructed when your body becomes a disaster site, an explosion, or more accurately, an implosion.

When they blow up those big Las Vegas casinos to make room for more modern big Las Vegas casinos, they implode the buildings so that business can go on all around, even while the destruction is happening. That hotel where my family stayed, where they showed that snuff film, isn’t there anymore. I might’ve remembered if I’d walked into the lobby and seen my feet on the pattern of the carpet, but it’s gone. Sometimes, we can take ourselves out of difficult circumstances, build our lives anew and forget. Sometimes we have to change details more actively in order to move on. Sometimes it takes something shocking to bring information back—like the face of someone who tried to rape you on television with the words Supreme Court Justice underneath. And suddenly, the fear is back and the profound sense of this is not right and someone needs to do something and suddenly, you realize you are someone.

I was in Las Vegas recently for a professional conference and as I rode alone in the taxi toward the strip, as the hotels came into view to my right, something in my memory came into focus. Maybe because I saw the lights from just that angle in the backseat of a different car so many years before? Who knows? Memory is not a recording device; sometimes, it’s a reckoning.

I’ve been capable of discussing my incest experience as a function of my culture’s failings for decades now. And still, details, stories that would seem like fiction if they hadn’t happened, can still emerge.

At first, in that taxi years later, I didn’t remember who I was with while I was watching that reel-to-reel film. I know I saw the beginning of that film, back in the late seventies, in one of the casinos. How old was I? Which boyfriend was that? Why on earth were we in Las Vegas?

Oh right, I was there with my mother, while she was dating the man she’d marry. Had she married him yet at that moment? Had he begun using me as his implement of pleasure, of shame, of devotion, of respite, of release? Had I yet become his courtesan, his tramp, his comedian, his conversationalist, his squaw, his half-breed, his Lolita, his stop-looking-at-me-like-that-you-just-don’t-understand-the-way-the-world-is? Was that snuff film before or after I was already…

It doesn’t matter when it was. It was just a curiosity, something he wanted to see, something he thought might shock me. Or maybe prepare me. I don’t know what he meant by taking me in there after my mother went up to bed. I didn’t stay until the end. I stood up with the film still moving on the screen, the woman being fucked and roughed up a bit. Her mounting fear was in the back of my throat. I walked back out into the casino and got lost because I could smell danger. The room on screen looked like my room in that very hotel. I think it was the Imperial Palace Hotel. Could that be right? It’s gone now. They use special explosives to destroy those buildings so as not to disturb the massive structures on either side. It’s erased, as though it never existed; something shiny is in its place.

A lot of people are talking about it these days: How can all these women come forward years after an assault and speak up now? This is a story about how we come to remember and become capable of holding the memory, rather than pushing it away. Often, one is less imperiled when the memory holds rather than slipping swiftly under the sea of consciousness. Is it possible for a woman to be un-imperiled, fully safe? I don’t think so. This is the story you need to hear and because it’s printed in ink, on paper, you can come back to it later, even if you can’t hold all of it now.

How did I remember? Slowly. I walked into the casino with confidence and an assured upright survival that people say I was born with. Well, I must’ve gotten it somewhere. That’s what people said, but often in moments when it sounded like they needed an excuse.

II.

I remember attending another conference, twenty-some years ago, not in Las Vegas. (This is a scene in the same drama. You won’t be able to see that at first, but it is. It will seem so different because I am no longer a child and hotels can contain varied activities and Las Vegas casinos are a little bit sleazy anyway. It will seem as though nothing is the same, but these stories are related.)

I was doing a speaking engagement about incest and activism for a group of therapists, social workers and psychiatrists. I had been invited to talk about incest and child sexual abuse as an outgrowth of sexism. I was representing a grassroots organization of survivor-activists I had co-founded in order to do community education and build survivor solidarity. My intention was to help this group to discuss how our broader cultural values undergird subtle acceptance of violence and the sexualization of children. I intended to discuss our interconnectedness, though we worked from different perspectives, experiences and training on this topic. I wanted to raise awareness about the social patterning in the prevalence of rape and incest and violence against children.

After years of peer support and training in sociology, my own understanding had shifted from seeing myself as an incest survivor, to saying that I was raised in an incest family, to discussing all of the ways that we each live in an incest-supporting culture. All of us. A sociological view on this topic might well help us make something new, I believed. I specifically positioned myself as an expert, based on my experiences—not just my training. To my mind, this was an important aspect of my credibility on the topic.

Those mental health professionals didn’t see me as a colleague. They saw me as an articulate client. An articulate patient. An angry fucked up woman with a wound I tried to justify sharing, but could never escape. For them, I was an aftermath, and breaking into the explosion site to do a little poking through the rubble was going to be the only interesting or useful way to interact with me. I could act like a colleague, and if I kept myself from mentioning all of this personal experience with the topic, they would grudgingly treat me like one, but that’s not the path I chose to take. And so there I was, talking about damage as though it was a site of wisdom, and to them, that was nonsense. Just nonsense. It can’t be justified, not with education nor language and certainly not by showing up at this meeting in my overly voluptuous “so, did you ever do prostitution?” body.

That was the first inappropriate question.

And then, “So, say something more about your self-harm patterns.”

At that time in my life, I thought sharing my own story, for the greater good, meant that I should answer every question asked. I wasn’t born answering every question asked, but I learned it. Sometimes it seemed like too much effort to resist answering. They were simply the wrong questions. I answered questions about drugs and eating disorders and recovery. I wanted to get back to my point about the “incest culture” but yeah, whatever. Answer the question asked. Now I know better. I was younger then.

They kept talking about recovery. My recovery. Not the culture’s recovery. The impossibility of recovery. What did that mean to them? “Recovery.”

At that conference, more than twenty years ago, a man stood up and told me that I would never fully recover. Or if I had—I mean, if I truly was what I purported to be: a fully functioning adult capable of forming relationships and having a family—then I was some kind of miracle and that maybe I could enlighten the group about my so-called “recovery.” I mean, psych wards are full of women who’d endured the same experiences I stood calmly describing, so you know, who the hell did I think I was?

Was he fucking nuts? That’s what I thought, back then. I mean, who’s entitled to call someone crazy? It sure wasn’t me. Some small part of my mind has been working on how to answer him all this time since.

I couldn’t find the right words, but eventually, I’d definitely had enough. I mean, well and truly enough, and I left that room, in the same way I’d left the snuff film, calmly, like I was just going out to the restroom, would return with my lipstick freshened. I left, looking down at my blue and white spectator pumps on my stockinged feet, clicking out of the room in my corporate drag, upright and confident, not sure what to say, but sure enough that he was an asshole who had no idea how to ask the right questions if his life depended on it. Fucking psychologists!

I’m not the type who would say that terrible experiences are there to teach us something. I wouldn’t say that, though they sure set you up to learn something if you can manage to learn it. I am still addressing that asshole psychologist, psychiatrist or whatever he was, along with every disrespectful person like him when I write and talk about the culture we collectively create. I learned something that day about the credibility others allow me to have and how it runs up against the credibility I have earned inside of myself, and in community with others who know that we are neither ignorant nor powerless. I learned how not to accept a diminished place, though one is given to me over and over again. I learned from those before me who remained undiminished by circumstances, and from my own ability to move out of harm’s way in one setting after another. I am still learning and have it in me to learn and teach.

How would your life be different if you could change the way you think about belonging? Rather than saying, “I don’t belong here,” you could say, “they don’t accommodate me here.” How would that help you find others with whom you could make positive change?

I am “recovered” in the same way that a tree which grows around the obstacle of a fence or an electrical line is “recovered.” That is to say, it was never broken. It simply grew around that which it could not move. And I am damaged in the same way that we are all damaged when something spoils the water supply and poison sinks into the roots of every tree in the forest, every small plant and every creature drinking at the water source. Poison alters every bit of soil for a long time to come. I am both damaged and recovered and undamaged and able to teach and show you something, doctor, because I care enough about others to be standing here opening my mouth.

You may see nothing but a disaster site, and my life is the aftermath and I am asking you to look more closely. I am the whole landscape, not just the rubble. I am still speaking to you, doctor, because I understand that the views you felt so entitled to express in public are still in the unconscious hearts of many. We need to keep working with ourselves and each other, even when we’d rather check out and let someone else handle it.

And doctor, though you think you know all about women like me, I know better than to let you frame all the questions. Some people take credibility for granted. Others wait their turn, even if it never comes. People like me know that we need to find creative ways to lay claim to the ground we were given at birth, to be contributors to the culture that holds us all.

I am speaking to you, doctor. Are you listening? You know victims—and you think you know them well. Does that mean you know perpetrators too? You probably know them better than you admit. Here is what I meant to say to you in that room twenty years ago: “Sit down and stop talking for a little while, especially in that nasty tone. I am here to teach you, sir, not to be your specimen.”

It’s possible to listen better, to see more, even when—like that doctor—it was not our original training. You can see the way men and women look at each other at work and on dates and in porno films, and TV shows, and all the little bombs waiting to go off just become part of the scenery. No one need speak of them aloud. Every landscape is like one of those children’s magazine puzzles. The instruction says, “Find forty bombs in this picture.” And at first you don’t see any. Then you do. And there’s another and you’re on a roll, so there’s one and there’s one and there’s one. Of course, turn the image on its side; there’s one over here too.

III.

How do your memories come through?

Can you remember what shoes you were wearing when you first felt that you were better than another human being? Or does a scent bring back the feeling of arousal when you know you’re going to get what you want? Maybe it’s the feel of your sweater sleeves under your fingertips that lets you recall your own abuse, or how your privileges will let you hurt others later. If you have ever looked away from something painful—I think all of us have—how do you sit quietly through the feelings of danger you must surely feel at times?

Now, how do you come to question what you were taught? What obstacles did you grow around, or did the poison you drank from our common water-source become a cherished part of your daily sustenance?

How do you make sense—now, as an adult—of the first pornography you ever saw? How old were you? Where did you see it and what did you feel in your body?

You may wonder how this question is relevant to the discussion of incest culture and social change. We are talking about the terrible things that happened to me as a result of that snuff film, aren’t we? But not even really as a result, because there was no cause and effect circumstance that could bring indictment. This isn’t relevant, you say, but look closely at the image where you’ve been asked to find forty bombs. Turn the page to the side, then upside down. Turn it clockwise, and then counter-clockwise. All of these stories belong in the same book where we learn to see what we cannot see. These stories hang together in the same web of slender, powerful strands that connect one thing to another. This is still the same story.

When you were eleven—the age at which most men started watching pornography of their own volition—what did you learn about sex and how did you make sense of it? If you saw pornography, were there images of people having sex with each other, or of women enjoying subjugation? How did you make sense of what you saw, in the context of your everyday life? If you were a boy, somehow you knew that girls your age did not seem like they would enjoy watching such things. You don’t assume they watch such things and for the most part, you’re right. If you were a girl who was interested in sex, chances are you got very different messages about your interests than boys did.  Even if no one called you a slut, you knew that would be the name for you if you spoke too much about it.  Children are often taught that men and women are just different, or that boys and girls are different— or maybe that adults are just different from children.  The messages about how sex can be something other than lust or duty are out there—but like crackling on a radio. No clear information comes through.  If you didn’t consider other possibilities then, might you consider them now and add nuance to that memory of your first pornography and how it felt in your body?

People of all genders can enjoy sexual dominance, sexual submission and a wide range of other innovative sexual practices, so why would I bother gendering this conversation at all? Patterns illuminate what we’ve hidden from ourselves. They are like the hints at the back of the magazine where each bomb is outlined in dark ink. And while an interest in sex, the ability to innovate sexually and handle erotic power are the domain of all people, there are clear patterns in how dominance and submission in media follow pre-established lines of oppression in our culture. Humans are both creating and consuming media and while overt sexism and racism (which include humiliation and name-calling) have been removed from most popular media, they have not been removed from pornographic media. All people are capable of sexuality and most have erotic urges. Deviations are interesting, of course, and often, the larger patterns go unexamined.

How do you make sense of what you see on the screen when you watch pornography now? Do you think about it at all, or is it just normal that “sex for pay” is so stylized? It is styled for its main consumers: men and boys. How do you understand yourself as a consumer? How do you think you can tell the difference between consent and slavery and coercion born of circumstance beyond one’s control?

The most important question for all of us, in a consumer culture is: How do we understand the difference between sex and what sex-as-industry has become?

Pornography is a multi-billion dollar industry and one we rarely discuss openly, in the same ways we discuss fair wages and worker treatment at Walmart, McDonalds, and Amazon.  If we don’t start considering how to create systems that draw distinctions about agency and give women control over their own sexuality and livelihoods then we are absolutely encouraging slavery—and in an industry where youth is prized, we’re encouraging child sexual abuse as well.  People who are regular consumers need to place themselves as such, rather than remaining the naughty children who watched that porn the first time, the first ten times, for the first ten years. 

I worry that we’re losing the erotic wisdom that could be prompting acceptance of diverse bodies, greater pleasure, understanding, and love. I’m in favor of sex and creativity and erotic brilliance. Consenting humans are magnificent and they should use every media they can conceive to amplify and share their fortune.

I am concerned about pornography as industry, the business of it, the hierarchy in it, the patterns that inspire desire in a misogynist child-using culture. How do you get so close to a blast site without getting hurt? How do you do it, again and again, light the fuse and run. Do we even know how well we’ve learned to plant the bombs?

Snuff films in the 1970s may well have been a sales-stunt, not involving actual death. And still, an audience emerged and another audience on the fringe of the first who wouldn’t say they wanted to fuck and murder someone, but would watch it nonetheless. For curiosity-sake. For shock. For fun. Like my stepfather.

And now, decades on, it’s normal to see women choked and humiliated, eyes bulging—just normal in pornography—funny to some—and normal. Of course choking and humiliation are erotic expression for some women. But most women? How many eleven year-old girls? What is normal? Who is on the receiving end of normal?

I think these are good questions. I don’t want a society of obedient boys who wish they were watching porn but abstain from it for the sake of decorum. I want a society of men who have come to understand their sexual urges as part of their vast humanity and who simply cannot be turned on by another’s victimization. I want processes by which we seek to know the difference between sex and oppression.

Submission without oppression.

Dominance without oppression.

These are possible.

Look who’s asking the questions now, Doctor. You are implicated in this culture we create, and so am I. Every person we meet, every message and image we consume has helped to create us and this is good news because we are culture-makers too. We are capable of creating culture that honors human expression rather than casting some people in narrow roles with no exits.

How do we recover from what my incest family and our incest-supporting culture did to me? What of the people you know and love who never told you about being abused because they couldn’t bear the burden of your listening? How can we listen now? Did you look at the woman on the screen being fucked and interpret sounds of pleasure, or sounds of her choking or images of her receiving treatment that you know, I mean you know, must hurt or damage or kill? Did you believe it when she stood up afterward and acted like everything was good? I mean, she laughed after she did that disgusting humiliating thing. Surely, that means she’s in on the joke.  Surely she got paid. This is what you tell yourself.

How can we make space for those who say, “This is not good.” How can we hear them and make sure the world holds them too?

Work-for-pay is often still different for men, women and other-gendered people. No act of desire is unfettered by economic consequences in a world where pornography is an industry. How do you love and get turned on and fuck and honor and feel and live? We can choose what’s sold as sex in our mutual culture.

One of the most common responses young men have nowadays to watching images of sexual humiliation is that “it’s hilarious.” Peggy Orenstein found this in her research for the book, Girls and Sex. Those boys are spectators, being entertained; they usually feel no empathy. They think they can construct distance through language and collusion. They think they have distance, but I think they are mistaken. Might they remember those girls being humiliated, years from now, once we’ve engaged a deeper erotic wisdom and everyone’s pleasure matters? I hope they remember, and weep, as they look down at their shoes, their hands, up at their surroundings and know that they were hurt by cultural expectations too.

None of us are undamaged, but some of us learned to survive, then thrive and celebrate being alive in whatever amazing shapes our lives have taken. All of us have formed ourselves around the obstacles we found as we grew. It’s just that some of us can name those obstacles and others remain ignorant. They think themselves fully formed and perfect in their perceptions. Not damaged, like me.

The above piece is the title essay from my last published collection, Damaged Like Me: Essays on Love, Harm and Transformation (AK Press 2021). The content addresses pornography and child sexual abuse – and also interaction with a mental health professional. It’s tricky business sorting out sex and sexuality from the ways in which sexual abuse are normalized in dominant culture. Mental health providers are part of that tangle, as they are not always allies to those labeled as victims. 

Kimberly Dark is a writer, sociologist and storyteller, working to reveal the architecture of everyday life so that we can reclaim our power as social creators. She’s the author of four books, including Fat, Pretty and Soon to be Old: A Makeover for Self and Society and Damaged Like Me: Essays on Love, Harm and Transformation. Her essays, poetry and stories are widely published in academic and popular publications alike. She teaches for Cal State Summer Arts and travels to offer keynotes, workshops and lectures internationally and online. Her topics include social inequality, social transformation and the role of appearance and identity in our everyday lives. Her work is represented by Speakoutnow.org. Learn more and sign up for The Hope Desk newsletter at www.kimberlydark.com.