I came upon this idea later in life than some of you may have. Thanks to an abusive childhood and a fairly demanding church involvement in my teens and twenties, I was about 30 when I finally gave myself the freedom to take on a hobby just because I enjoyed it.
For me, I grew up never feeling good enough or worthy. I needed someone else to tell me it was OK for me to do something, or heaven forbid to spend money on something just because I liked it.
As you might imagine these sorts of activities are severely traumatizing, and Lauren’s response in the article I linked makes that clear. I also want to address the more subtle trauma here though. That trauma comes from those of you who will read this story and immediately respond “well she shouldn’t have been taking those photos”.
I want to be very clear here. That statement is 100% blaming the victim. This is the same exact thing as saying a woman shouldn’t have walked alone at night, or had a drink, or a child shouldn’t have been so friendly with strangers, etc. Lauren didn’t do anything wrong. What she and her husband do inside of their marriage is none of our business, no laws were broken, nothing untoward was going on. She was just a wife living her life and she was hacked. The person who stole these photos was the one breaking the law. The people sharing and selling those photos were breaking the law. Save your moral outrage for them and the people requesting to have these photos used to create fake rape videos because she was a rape victim.
Anyone who can read the entire story and walk away indignant more at her for having taken photos that were perfectly legal and a personal choice instead of the people who have violated her are simply violating her again.
If you pay attention to the news at all, I’m sure you’ve seen something about Larry Nasser over the past couple of years. You may even be fairly familiar with the story. If so, the Netflix documentary Athlete A might not offer a lot of things you don’t know to some extent or other. But, you may want to watch it anyway, even though watching it and hearing the stories will be difficult. I did a couple of nights ago, and had a couple of thoughts about it, in no real order of importance.
Once upon a time, there were mental health asylums across the US. But, they weren’t great, and some of them were even mistreating patients. So, we closed them. The thought was that community-based services would be better, and now that we were closing the asylums, surely the resources necessary to pay for and staff these…
You may have noticed that things have been a little sparse on the blog and social media front for the last week or so. That’s because I’ve been up in Ohio following the passing of my Mother. In fact, I spent my birthday yesterday flying home, on planes, in airports, and then on the road,…
As many of you probably know since I’ve mentioned being away from the online community for a bit, last week my wife’s dad passed away, just 5 weeks after her mom had. Obviously, the grieving process for us is still very much ongoing, and will be for quite some time.. But one thing that has…
Subscribe to our Newsletter
See a sample before subscribing here
If you’d rather use RSS – that feed is here.