Guilt and "Agency": Stormy Daniels, Donald Trump, and Deserving

I was struck by and somewhat upset by Stormy Daniels's in the 60 MINUTES interview saying she felt she "deserved" having sex with Donald Trump even though she didn't want to. I hope she's come to realize that that feeling of "having it coming" (as an FB contributor pointed out) is itself a kind of victimization.

I hope also that Daniels's comment renews a discussion.

Three background stories I can add to such a discussion:

(1) Years ago, the National Organization for Women (NOW) chapter in Butler County OH met with a rape counsellor, and we went through an exercise on how one should counsel a woman who'd been raped, including a woman who felt she somehow had invited the rape or "deserved" it. Some of the participants quite correctly denied that our hypothetical "she" had done anything wrong and deserved rape but repeated variations on "There was nothing you could have done"; "There's nothing you can do to prevent a rape like that" — and it got pointed out that it's a bad idea to substitute for guilt a sense of helplessness. (The rape counsellor counseled us to say "It *wasn't* your fault" and then say less and listen more.)

(2) Even longer ago, a rehab person told my father that he couldn't help having had a stroke, but "Invalidism is a separate disease"; she insisted strongly that he *could* choose not to become an invalid.

(3) A member of a local Jewish congregation is a survivor of the Nazi death camps. One occasion when she was being introduced as a survivor and that was dwelt on, she said that she had lived a long life and had done many things and was not *merely* a death-camp survivor.

There are horrific exceptions — some prisoners, e.g., children in abusive families — but much the time people can't avoid being hurt, but we can avoid becoming victims. It is a delicate issue, but in various senses of "we" we need to help people who've been harmed to heal and to not "get over it" but use the experience in ways that they can feel and be empowered.

We (in those various senses) need to help people lose a sense of guilt while retaining and strengthening a sense of agency. We need to help people — where it's possible — to recognize they've had a literal or figurative stoke but not become an invalid; to understand they've been hurt but to be a survivor, among other things, and not, at their core, a victim.

"Survivor": A Problematic Term

Cannibalism was reported by Flavius Josephus during 

the siege of Jerusalem by Rome in 70 AD,

 and according to Appian, the population of Numantia 

during the Roman Siege of Numantia in the 2nd century BC 

was reduced to cannibalism and suicide.

            The story I tell below is fiction, but one "based on a true story," or, more exactly, based on my reading and listening recently to a short series of depressing (audio)books that do things like elaborate on the horrors glossed over when you find a sentence in a typical old history such as "the City of Outopos fell," or was saved, "after a protracted siege."

            Ready? You've been warned this will be an unpleasant tale. Anyway —

            During the Siege of Outopos, little Nano was a survivor and a savior of her family. When the Outopians were reduced to eating dogs and cats and rats, Nano was one of the best hunters in the town. When even the rats grew scarce, Nano would steal food from the soldiers and then from the neighbors, taking for herself only what she needed to be strong enough to find food and defend her family's meager stores, and defend her family.

            Toward the end of the siege, her family and friends had all died off except for her parents and Dano, her little sister; and when Dano began to show signs of a wasting illness and could no longer pull her weight, it was Nano who knew the differences among "mercy," "taboo," "sentimentality," and "squeamishness" — and slit the little girl's carotid artery and windpipe as cleanly and coolly as a Shoykhet of thirty years experience and field dressed Dano as efficiently as any game keeper could.

            Indeed, Nano — near miraculously! — indeed Nano even found wood and a couple of pieces of sea coal for proper cooking, and the roasted Dano was the difference between her and her parents' living to see the relief of Outopos or joining the pile of corpses to be thrown into the nearest mass grave.

            So they lived. A survivor was Nano, and a minor savior, too, a girl who loved life and her family, a person who saw what needed doing, and did it.

            See where this is going?

            "Survivor" nowadays comes out of the usage from the 1960s and after for survivors of the Nazi death camps, and our intentions in that usage are mostly good. But there are often problems.

            For one thing, we talk of someone's surviving a plane crash or an auto accident, and there's a serious problem with the idea that a rape not only might be fatal but possibly should be: an idea out of such pernicious art as Birth of a Nation, where rape — at least of a White woman by a Black man — is "a fate worse than death," or out of an 18^th-century piece of pious pornography like Samuel Richardson's Clarissa.

            For another thing — well, there is my "Parable of Little Nano" and the full(er) horror of sieges and death camps and other extended atrocities: the choices such atrocities force upon victims if those victims are to survive.

            It may be permissible in a situation to choose evil, e.g., to do what is necessary to survive. Indeed, it is a moral imperative in real dilemmas to choose the lesser of two or least of several evils.

            To choose evil, though, is to choose evil; to do evil is to do evil.

            Killing and eating one's sibling is an evil act, even if one shares. My imagined heroic little Nano, however — and her real-world analogs — is and are beyond our judgment.

            She survived.

            Good. With luck she'll recover and get on with her life. If asked about the siege, she can say, "I survived, as did my parents," and she need say no more.

            We can say, "She survived," if we like, but then we should shut up. And more so in other, non-imaginary cases. If the victims want to talk, we must listen. If they don't want to talk, we should respect that decision.

            In any event, to repeat a point: with words like "victim" and "survivor," we non-victims should speak and write with very great care.