If you are an incest survivor, maybe you’ve had that feeling that you were about to fall through the floor and that your world couldn’t hold you up, either. That’s what happens when someone you’re told to trust or depend on violates you sexually.
While incest may not be as violent as other sexual violations, like stranger rape or date rape, of all forms of abuse it usually creates the deepest wound. Of course, it can involve force, but often it is something that happens over time and involves a lot of seduction, manipulation, bribery, and lies. Fathers, especially, will often take their time convincing their daughters that the incest is their destiny. They will manipulate their daughters into believing that they don’t have a choice. This “destiny” line is just one of many myths that surround incest. Let’s take a look at some of the others.
MYTHS AND TRUTHS ABOUT INCEST
MYTH: “I need you to have sex with me because your mother won’t.” One popular myth is that men demand sex from their daughters because they are not “getting any” from their wives. Some men even go so far as to say that “your mother would want you to do this because she wants me to be fulfilled, and she’s too ill [busy, etc.] to meet my sexual needs.”
TRUTH: In fact, the clinical information we have is that men who molest their daughters usually continue to have sex with their wives.1 It goes without saying, of course, that regardless of whether they are “getting any” from their wives, they have no right to abuse their daughters!
MYTH: “It’s my job to teach you how to be a good lover.” Some girls are told that it’s their father’s job to teach them how to be a good lover. Their fathers tell them that they need to teach their daughters everything about sex.
TRUTH: Not only is it NOT the father’s job to teach his daughter to be a good lover, but, in a healthy father-daughter relationship, a father will be very hesitant and a bit uncomfortable to go into any discussion of his adolescent daughter’s sexual relationships. There are usually appropriate boundaries around these issues.
MYTH: Girls seduce their fathers, or “You’re so tempting [in those shorts, that dress], I have to have sex with you!”
TRUTH: Not only do girls not seduce their fathers, but they need their fathers to see them as their “little girls.” This helps a girl develop trust in family boundaries, and thus in the world. When her father does not sexualize her, she feels more secure and less objectified. The last thing a girl desires is to seduce her father. This is a frightening distortion.
MYTH: Young girls are very attracted to older men—their fathers, uncles, teachers, you name it! This myth is constantly being fed to us by Hollywood. Many films continue to show teen girls falling in love with men in their forties and older. Helped by the publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita in 1955 (which, by the way, has been made into a movie not just once but twice!), in which a pubescent girl seduces her pathetically unlovable mother’s boarder (substitute father figure) with her naive sexuality, we have held on to the myth that girls are often desperately attracted to older men.
TRUTH: There’s a big difference between things like acknowledging your budding curves and feeling the first blush of sexual feelings and preying on older men. And men should be mature enough to realize it! The myth that a child wants sex with her father or a father figure is, simply put, a lie perpetuated through film and literature and a general cultural sexualization of children. But, because girls really want to trust and believe the adults in their lives, it’s easy for men to take advantage of their vulnerability.
The book Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi compares the forcible sexualization of the character Lolita to the complete subjugation of Iranian women to men. It couldn’t be clearer that incest is a form of patriarchal control.
CORAL
Coral came to see me when she was in her early twenties. She was ten years old when her father started being sexually inappropriate with her, eleven when he started molesting her, and eighteen when the molesting stopped because she got out of the house.
From the beginning, her father told her that she needed him and that it was obvious from the way she dressed and looked that she really wanted him to sexually arouse her. When Coral started developing, he actually said that having her under the same roof was “like putting a plate of spaghetti in front of a hungry man. Of course he’ll want to eat it!”
About three years ago, Coral and her boyfriend got my name through a friend of a friend in my underground network of incest survivors. Before he had my name, he looked online and found a therapist. He called and told the therapist that his girlfriend just revealed her years of incest and she was in a panic state. The therapist said they could have an appointment in two weeks. He then asked around and found me. When they called me a few days after their first phone call to a therapist, Coral had already revealed the incest to her mother, who was now coming from Europe to see her. I said come in today. They did.
Coral’s boyfriend accompanied her to her first session. She was tormented by her past and afraid that she would never get over her incest. She explained that her boyfriend was the first person she’d ever told. The second was her mother, and the third was me.
In that first session, I learned that Coral was twenty-two and had just graduated from Juilliard with a degree in music. She told me that she had written a composition that had just won several awards. She was having trouble enjoying anything these days, though, she said, because she felt tormented about her father. Her father now had AIDS, and she was terrified that she had it, too, even though she had tested negative.
As she sat in my office picking at her fingernails and looking down at the floor, Coral rattled off her anxieties: “I’m having nightmares and these awful headaches. I pick my nails and skin and grind my teeth when I sleep. I wake up in cold sweats, I’m afraid to deal with my mother, who is coming next week. She is totally dependent and a mess. I can’t stand anyone touching me. I’m jumpy about everything. I cry at the drop of a hat.”
Even before she confessed to feeling like a basket case, I explained to her that whatever had happened was not her fault. I had to repeat it at least five times. At first Coral sat frozen, then she finally broke down and sobbed.
Those words opened up the floodgates for Coral, who had blamed herself for years. Now, three years after Coral first heard those words—“It’s not your fault”—she wants every girl who has survived incest to know it’s not your fault, either.
CORAL’S STORY
Cats in the Courtyard
My father took away my adolescence. It started in Greece, when I was ten, but the first time he raped me was after we moved to Holland, when I was twelve. From the ages of twelve to eighteen, I was abused by my father sexually on a regular basis. I was forced to perform oral sex, to receive it, and to have intercourse with him whenever he demanded it.
My father is a multilingual professor of literature. His teaching had us traveling around the world. He is egocentric and has a major persecution complex, but he has cultivated a public image of being very intelligent and wise and calm. He always had some strange theory, but he was a professor and writer so people just accepted that he was a bit eccentric. There was this aura around him, like he was a Zen monk or something.
At home he could not keep up the persona. At home he was less guarded and felt entitled to be moody, controlling, and belligerent. He basically ruled our house. His thoughts were the right thoughts, and my mother and I had to attend to his every mood and desire. He was very forceful in expressing his opinions—so much so that you felt that if you did not agree with him, something in you was inferior. He told us which classical music was superior, which literature to read, and things like that, and there was simply no discussion. What he said ruled.
My mother was a seamstress and costume designer, and she also managed my father’s finances and bookkeeping. She catered to his very whim. She took care of the house, cooked our meals, woke me up in the morning, and put me to bed. I remember feeling totally dependent on my
mother and getting a lot of love from her, and I remember her love as fun love. Unlike my father, she was never smothering, telling me what I could and could not do, and I remember she played games with me. But honestly those memories are from when I was a very little girl.
I have a lot of blank spots in my memories of my childhood. From what I have pieced together with the help of therapy, I know that when I was a child my father never played with me, though he could be playful. He’d joke with me at times, and he always encouraged me to read. But the truth is, I was on my own a lot as a child. I can remember one summer when I was about six years old and my parents tied the house key to a string and put it around my neck. I was to entertain myself during the day as I wandered around the town and return home by evening.
It has taken me years of therapy to realize that my mother was very afraid of life. What she thought she’d found in my father was a support system; with him she did not have to think on her own. It’s pretty clear to me that my father mattered more to my mother than I did. She would rush around to get dinner on the table for him every night, even though he said she didn’t have to cook if she didn’t want to. She knew that if dinner was not on the table when he expected it, he would go on and on about how hungry he was and how he was a better cook anyway and all that. I learned early on that what he said was not always what he meant. He may have said we did not have to do certain things, but there was never really any choice.
I watched this very closely and learned that the rule of our house was not to upset Daddy. He had an explosive temper, and at times he would throw fits, screaming and breaking things. My father was a master at manipulating reality. As long as we did what he wanted us to do, the household would run smoothly, and my mother would be calm.
When I was very young, my father would leave for months at a time to teach at another university for a semester in other countries, and my mother and I would bond. I would sleep in the big bed with her, which was a huge treat. When I climbed into her bed, I felt very safe and cozy. We would play and eat when we wanted to, travel where and when we wanted to, and just relax. I remember feeling safe those times.
These were also the years in which my parents let me spend summers at my paternal grandmother’s. I remember those summers as fun and playful. My grandmother lived in the countryside, and I played with my young cousins and all the animals. As I got older I stopped spending summers there. I don’t know why.
At some point my mother started being the one who traveled a lot. She would leave for a day and sometimes a week at a time to make costumes for a play. I don’t actually remember sleeping in the big bed with my father (this is one of my memory gaps), but I think it was assumed that when Mother traveled I would sleep with “Daddy,” just as I did with her when he was away.
When I was ten years old, my father started holding me just a little too long when he would hug me. I don’t have any clear memory of being sexualized at ten, but things definitely got uncomfortable. I know he used to have me sit on his lap a lot. The first time he abused me sexually I was eleven. At least that’s the first time I remember clearly. We were still living in Greece. I remember staring out the window at the garden downstairs when he came up behind me and touched my breasts under my shirt. I was wearing white summer pants and a little red top that I really loved. It had little bows on the side. I was wearing little white shoes with black dots. I even remember the underwear I was wearing. I was just starting to develop breasts, and I felt really good in my pretty outfit.
I loved all animals, and I loved watching the cats in the courtyard as they played. As I stared at the cats, my father French-kissed me. My legs started shaking. I was supposed to go to a piano lesson, but he took me to his bed and performed oral sex on me. I remember shaking all over and just focusing on the thought, “Soon I will be at my piano lesson.” I don’t remember exactly what he said to me, but I know he was telling me that what he was doing would feel really good. I don’t think I said anything.
I was shaking the whole way to the piano lesson, and when I got there I couldn’t play the music, I was shaking so much. I don’t think he did anything else for a while after that, though he may have tried to initiate something at other times that year because I do remember his complaining that I was always going off with my mother and did not give him much chance to be alone with me.
He raped me for the first time when I was twelve. We were living in Holland by then; we had just moved. My memories of it are like a sped-up film. He started to kiss me, and I fought with him, and I told him I did not like this and that I was a virgin and wanted to remain one. But he kept insisting that this was what I needed to do. He got angry. He screamed, “Enough of this!” and then stood up and pushed me and said, “Get naked and get in bed, now.” I went into the bathroom and stayed there, then I got into my pajamas and got into my bed. He came and got me and put me in his bed, then climbed in, too. I was wearing my underwear and socks and three T-shirts under my pajamas; he was naked. I kept turning away from him and rolling onto my side.
I don’t remember how one thing led to another, but at some point he took off my clothes, put a condom on, and began raping me. I was screaming and he covered my mouth. At that point I was present (I hadn’t taught myself to leave my body yet), and I was in excruciating pain. Afterward he teased me and laughed at me and asked me why I was making such a fuss.
We hadn’t been in Holland long, and I was having a hard enough time as it was. I did not speak English or Dutch. I had no family there, no friends; my mother was traveling a lot to build her career as a costume designer. I had no protection or resources. My father could be so persuasive. He said that having sex with me was the natural way of things, and he cited all these examples of animals in the animal kingdom who are initiated into sex by their fathers. He babbled on about rituals and coming of age. He said that in the Jewish religion there is a ceremony called a Bat Mitzvah to celebrate the transition from child to woman and that he wanted to initiate me into womanhood by having sex with me.
Thus began my father’s invasion of my body and my soul. Any chance he got, he had intercourse with me, and/or forced oral sex. Because my life at home was a living hell, I built an elaborate other world, a fantasy world, and I had easy access to it. This world had elaborate characters with complicated story lines, in most of which I was a heroine saving abused orphans. In this other world, I was always strong and invincible. My memories of that world are so strong. My imagination and that fantasy world gave me deep comfort. I could be back in that world at any moment. It seems I was always in that world when I was at home.
When I asked him why he was doing this to me, he said, “That’s like putting a plate of spaghetti in front of a hungry man and asking him why he wants to eat it.”
It took me a long time to realize how much that line affected me. It must have been my fault; after all, I was the spaghetti. It must have been my fault I started to develop and was getting more attention from males.
He also said one thing that really got to me. He said that mothers know; they just do not discuss it with their daughters. He convinced me that my mother knew and was fine with it. When my mother would leave for her trips and say, “Take care of Daddy,” I began to assume that this was some kind of secret code and she really did know what was happening. Everything felt really crazy and unsafe. In my spare time I would try to keep busy. I taught myself to speak English because I always had a dream to live in New York City. I practiced my music, I stayed after school.
And then I found some friends—the kids you might call rejects—and I embraced punk culture. I related to the angry ideas groups like the Sex Pistols were expressing through their music. I was always fighting with teachers, always getting into trouble. But then I’d go home and have to deal with my father’s sexual demands, and there I’d be, this passive little girl, all my strength had disappeared, just waiting for it to end.
The one time I refused to comply, my mother was away on a five-day trip. I think
I was fourteen at the time. I screamed, “No! I will not! Keep away from me!” and ran to my room and locked the door. There was a way to lock my door with a key from the outside, and my father actually locked me in my room and told me I had to stay in there without food or water until I came to my senses. I stayed in my room for at least a day and a half, until I felt faint and had to eat or drink something. Then I gave in and asked him to let me out.
Before I could even eat or shower, he raped me. After that experience of being locked in my room, I figured it would be easier to just let it happen, and then it would be over with and I could get on with things. I learned to leave my body and go somewhere else during the rapes. I would count or sing a song in my head or do my homework, and I’d go numb. My body would not respond or get pleasure.
I kept hoping each time would be the last time for a while. From what I can piece together, I was doing a pretty good job of protecting my psyche from what was going on; I was kind of splitting off the incest from my feeling life. I went out with my mother whenever I could, my friends, and kept as busy outside the home as I could and tried never to be alone with my father.
Sometimes my father would talk to me during the rapes. Sometimes his voice was like a buzz in the background; other times I remember him saying that he was a really good lover, and how lucky I was to have him as a lover. But I was always numb. Sometimes he would not say anything, and sometimes he would tell me that I didn’t have to do it if I didn’t want to. But the one time I asked not to, he became cold and angry, started screaming at me and really scaring me, and when my mother came home he made up some lies about bad behavior on my part and gave us all a really hard time. It was clear to me that I was better off just doing what he demanded. The few times he did not force me, he took it out on my mother and on me, becoming even more controlling, demanding, and angry.
Invisible Girls Page 10