Radical Pleasure (blog entry 9)

                 The reading Radical Pleasure by Aurora Levins Morales is a short, but very powerful piece where she writes about surviving sexual abuse and torture as a child. From the dark, and evil experiences inflicted on her as a young child, she takes them and uses them to write a wonderful piece about the radical pleasure in the path of the healing process from sexual abuse. She explains why people who were abused need to reclaim sex, and how the process of reclaiming and surviving abuse is not linear, but has its highs and lows.
             Reclaiming sex is about being in control of your sexuality. It allows people who were abused to put victimhood behind, and become a survivor. Aurora Levins Morales views reclaiming sex as a need, but also an obligation. It is an obligation to oneself to take control of your life and be a strong individual. Every person is entitled to being a powerful human being who has total control of oneself and their sexuality. If you do not decide to leave victimhood and let your abusers hold onto your sexuality, you stay weak and wounded. You forfeit your responsibilities and give up control and hand it over to your abusers. "By making the damage done to us permanent and irreversible, we lock both ourselves and the perpetrators away from any hope of healing," (Morales, 284). Here, Morales brings up a viewpoint I had never considered about how if you do not try to heal, you are not only blocking yourself from healing and becoming a survivor, but you blocking the perpetrator of doing the same. "We saddle them with an even bigger spiritual debt that they have already incurred," (Morales, 294).  By allowing them to hold onto your control and sexuality, you lock them into being a perpetrator. It is not until you begin the path of healing to survival, when the perpetrator can begin to heal. By allowing them control you are remaking yourself by reflecting the abusers and are locking into and allowing the circle of abuse to happen. If the perpetrators have no one to control, they have a better hope of healing their minds.
                Healing and the path to recovery and survival from sexual abuse is a struggle filled with lows and climaxes. It is not a steady, linear path that brings you smoothly into healing. It is more of a radical up and down journey that is filled with pleasure, and shame while the survivor works on reclaiming their sexuality. "My sexuality has stuttered ever since, flaring and subsiding in ways I have not known how to manage, ricocheting from intense excitement to absolute numbness, from reckless trust to impenetrable gaurdedness," (Morales, 293-294). Survivors healing from sexual abuse have an inner struggle of learning to balance resistance, desire, and trust. Resistance is something that survivors have felt at their very core. Learning not pleasure, but forced interference with their sexuality. Trust is not something that they are comfrotable with or used to, and learning to trust and letting down their guarded resistance to give into healthy desires is hard for many survivors to do. Some days can be filled of highs with trust gleaming in their souls and welcoming pleasure into their cores, and other days can be filled with feelings of shame with a thick gaurded mind filled with resistance. Learning to control and keeping your emotions on a steady path is a struggle, and these emotions can come in waves knocking the survivor up and down along the path of healing. Similar to healing from a physical injury, there will always be the scar. With healing from sexual abuse, these highs and lows are the scars left behind creating radical pleasure. As Morales further explains how the scars are the "unsteady rhythms of fascination and disgust, obsession and revulsion through which we experience sex as evidence of what we know to be true," (Morales, 284). Healing is a process, and even when the survivors are healed, scars are still left behind.

Questions:
When she writes about how the survivors of sexual abuse need to heal to allow the perpetrators to heal, will the perpetrators want to heal? They are freed from one victim, would they choose healing or find another victim? Do perpetrators know abuse is wrong? Why do they do it?
Thought on questions:
 I think that healing for the perpetrator needs a realization that their actions are wrong and want to and make an effort to heal. Similar to how people who were abused need to want to heal for themselves, to reclaim their sexuality in order to flourish as a person, perpetrators need to want to heal. I would like to think that if the perpetrator knew their actions were wrong, they would stop them. But that may not always be true. Some individuals may be very troubled and find release with inflicting abuse. These are the people who need the most help and to learn how to channel their emotions in a healthy way. Some may abuse others because it was a learned behavior from their society, or it is how they learn to express their control.

                 Radical Pleasure by Aurora Levins Morales relates to Rena's presentation when she explains the road of healing and being a survivor is not linear. She says how it does get easier, but there are still waves of ups and downs that are still felt. When she told her story about how she is a survivor of abuse, she felt a strong reaction from her story that she does not always feel when telling it. Rena said she has now told her story many times, and she can tell it without feeling a strong reaction, but there are still times when recounting on her story she feels a wave of emotions. She felt one of those low waves during her presentation, and she may not feel those strong emotions the next couple presentations she does, but she may feel that wave again after she tells her story another six times. This is exactly what Aurora Levins Morales meant by radical pleasure. Morales explained how there are climaxes of trust and pleasure, and lows of shame and guardedness. These feelings come and go and are all part of the process of healing.
               Also a part of the film V-Day, where they showed people from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. One of the men in the film, Marlin Mousseau, used to abuse his wife. He said how it was a learned behavior; he grew up around similar violence. His two year old son once had to protect his mother from him. He learned his actions were wrong, and he is now a healed perpetrator. This relates to Radical Pleasure because Aurora Levins Morales writes about how perpetrators can be healed, and Marline Mousseau is an excellent example of this. He has changed his life completely around and is now a co-founder for a safe place that women can go called Cangleska.