Comments on:

by: Jan

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 05:47:31 +0000

Thank you, Heather, for sharing your painful stories and your knowledge……..
No one should have to experience abuse or rape or inappropriate behavior.
Jan

by: Trixie

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 05:28:41 +0000

It makes me so mad that you have to explain this/that people REQUIRE an explanation to understand simple things, like what CHILDHOOD means. I hope people do read it though and fucking GET it.

And yeah, it seems like we (people born in the sixties and seventies) were growing up right on the cusp of awareness/publicity/discussion/tolerance-in-infancy gaining a foothold; I wonder how many people are truly aware of what a marked difference there is between being a kid and teen in the eighties vs. in the nineties and onward.

by: Kristina

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:59:22 +0000

Heather,
Reading this left knots in my stomach. I don’t know how any woman– any woman– could read this and not identify on some level. I think we all have endured some event, whether it was “a friend” groping us in a crowded high school hallway or the leers of a neighbor over the back fence or inappropriate jokes made by a father who should know better, that put into question everything we were taught. You don’t have to be raped to identify with that moment of shock and unease that tells you what you think you know and what are true are two different things. Unfortunately, I think far more rapes occur than are ever reported because, even now, so many women and girls don’t have an understanding that rape is not just what we see in the movies.

I was a teenager in the 80s and things have improved in some ways– and in some ways, we’re still not preparing girls for the little boys who will flip up their skirts or snap their newly acquired bra straps or coerce them into oral sex because it’s not really sex.

Thank you for sharing this. I’ll be linking back to it just because I want everyone I know to read it– especially the mothers of daughters.