Quick Hit: Lidia Yuknavitch on the pervasiveness of male violence

*Trigger warning*

Lidia Yuknavitch, whose wonderful new book I just finished reading (review forthcoming), has a must-read piece at The Rumpus on how women “travel through male violence like it’s part of what living a life means.” It begins:

In a bar, with friends, listening to a man I’ve admired for years saying this: “Enough with the sob stories, ladies. We get it. If I hear one more story about some fucked up sad violent shit that happened to you, I’m going to walk. You win! You win the sad shit happened to me award! On behalf of my gender, I decree: We suck!” Laughter. The clinking of glasses. Again the secret crack in my heart. Stop telling.

The first time I saw my father’s specific sadistic brutality manifest in physical terms, I was four. My sister was flopped across his lap, barebottom. He hit her thirteen times with his leather belt. I counted. That’s all I was old enough to do. It took a very long time. She was twelve and had the beginning of boobs. I was in the bedroom down the hall, peeking out from a faithlessly thin line through my barely open bedroom door. The first two great thwacks left red welts across her ass. I couldn’t keep watching, but I couldn’t move or breathe, either. I closed my eyes. I drew on the wall by my door with an oversized purple crayon — large aimless circles and scribbles. Not the sound of the belt—but her soundlessness is what shattered me. Still.

The rest is about molestation and domestic violence and rape and abortion and just generally how “we are forced to watch how our culture still doesn’t get what it means to live every moment of a life in the body of a woman.” You should really read the rest.