minna

last-snowfall:

zillah975:

nowisgreater:

bossymarmalade:

nezua:

being hit as a child teaches you many things, i’d guess. mostly, it teaches you that might makes right. and as a child, you will have no argument against that. and so it is likely that you will learn it well.

being hit as a child may teach other things. but below and beyond intellect and language, it teaches you rage. because as a child, in the context of physical autonomy, your sense of justice is fully developed. it is perfect, like a little sun shining in your center. nobody needs to specifically teach you that it is unjust for a larger person to deal violence to someone so unfairly matched to defend themselves. your rage will spring from your natural born sense of injustice, and no lesson or lecture will mitigate that. and neither will anyone need to explain to you what happens, eventually, to trust spent foolishly—such as on a rain of blows launched in a few moments of dis-ease. 

and even if you cannot articulate that with your yet-limited vocabulary, being corrected or punished with physical force places violence in your mix; on your map; in your bones. sows it within you. stores it in so many still-burgeoning cells to blossom one fine day, dotting the body then with splashes of karma…like a time-bomb harvest under the skin of a new planet. whether that body self destructs later in some way, or aims the blasts outward is yet to be seen. but a harvest will be realized.

violence is radioactive, as my old professor put it.

I wouldn’t use karma in that context.

And I don’t think that anybody other than myself gets to make declarations about how I deal with, make sense of, and embody my experiences with getting licks as a child.  

Come on, I thought this was fucking baseline shit here.  

Seriously. Please do not tell me how I feel or felt about getting spanked. I certainly didn’t feel rage or that it was unjust. I mean, I didn’t like it, but if I got spanked, it was because I did something my mom had specifically told me not to do, and I KNEW THAT. I knew I was doing something I shouldn’t, and I got caught doing it, and I got punished. Of course I was not happy about getting punished, but I would have been just as unhappy with getting time out or whatever.

(And I am not saying anything about whether or not people should spank their kids. I don’t have kids and don’t plan to, so if anyone wants to jump on me and put words in my mouth about that, please stop right now. I am just annoyed at being told how I think about having been spanked myself.)

My dear friend and I once had a horrible, nearly friendship-ending argument about spanking. The short version is that she said it was always abusive, and I said, “my parents spanked me, are you saying they were abusive?” (bearing in mind she knew my mom and, I thought, loved her), and she just repeated that it’s always abuse.

After the fight, when we had both calmed down some, we discovered that when I said “spanking,” I meant half a dozen smacks on the behind, and when she said “spanking” she meant being beaten with a belt.

I actually wouldn’t characterize the spankings I got as a kid — which were rare, and only came when I’d done something that could have gotten me badly injured after having been told not to do it — as violent. Hers, on the other hand…well, her dad is a terrific guy and loves her more than life, but when she was little, the kids all walked on eggshells around him and his explosive temper. A very different situation from mine.

I wonder how often these kinds of disagreements are based on the same misunderstanding that my friend and I had. Probably not as often as I would hope.

Not as often as you’d hope, but also often enough. I have a friend in psych school whose teacher put a hard moratorium on anyone ever saying “I was spanked as a child and I’m just fine, so a simple spanking isn’t a big deal”, because (to paraphrase) she could guarantee there was at least one person in the room who had been “spanked” by being hit by a 2x4.

But there are also a lot of people who have their very rigid extrapolations, or who assume that because being hit by a 2x4 for “playing too loud” is (needless to say) very damaging, being swatted with the flat of a hand on a fully clothed behind because you ran out into the road after your parents made a rule of “don’t let go of my hand” is exactly the same thing, no shades of grey, no differentiation. Or, as indicated in first paragraph, that anybody who was bothered by “being spanked” (without any talk about what this means) is a mewling weakling. And that’s without getting into people arguing from genuine bad faith or a desire to Make The World Be Like Them on both sides.

In a world where people can declare one another the Devil over whether or not they breastfeed, this is a minefield.

(However, I am totally with the poster who says you do not get to fuckin’ decide how I feel about my own damn childhood.)

(via chloehasalotoffeelings)