WendyMcElroy.com | |
[Click on the icon of Marge Simpson's older sister to access all posts on this topic.] For over thirty years, I have been dealing with a vendetta by Sharon Presley. I can date it back to 1983, and probably before. The 30 years includes personal attacks on my husband for the "folly" of loving me, letters to publishers about my alleged "mental illness" and sexual smears that no feminist can make against another woman and remain a feminist. I have stayed silent for over 30 years. No more. I don't care if it means I leave the movement. I don't care if it means she does. The last launch of attacks by Presley -- which occurred a week or so ago -- is the last. It ends here. It is over. This will be a series of letters because it has taken over 30 years for me to respond and I now intend to respond thoroughly. I hoped I would never have to. But my silence is enabling her. So....what am I addressing in this letter? This letter is about my taking power back. In another life, about 40 years ago, I engaged in the common practice of having nude pictures of a sexually suggestive nature taken by the man with whom I lived: George H. Smith. We both agreed that they were "confidential," something for the two of us. Bullshit. From the beginning, they were passed around to his buddies and to women with whom George wanted to broach the subject of sex...often with the implication that I knew of and approved of the photo sharing. I didn't. I don't. And I am taking back the power of those photographs. The power lay in the shame I felt and I refuse to feel it any more. To the many men who have pleasured themselves to my photos, how dare you consider that fact to reflect badly on *me*. You are all pieces of human filth. To the professional colleagues who wrote to me after George circulated photos and stories at conferences, let me extend greetings to your wives and children. I refuse to be ashamed any longer. I refuse to grant that power to those who wish to harm me. So where is Sharon in this matter? Over the years, George accumulated photos of about a dozen women and he passed them around in sex sessions that he memorialized in a 6-month long thread at Objectivist Living in which she was an active participant, crowing and cooing about George's fabulous sex life. (And, yes, I have preserved every single post of the thread in case you are disposed to deny its inconvenient existence.) The sex life consisting of a saga of revenge porn photos and stories being driven through a very public forum hosted by a fellow who thought it was all rainbows and unicorns to slut-shame women who were George's (and his) victims. He was willing to make the victims of revenge porn cringe all over and over and over again because...oh, the fun. And there was Sharon... cheerleading the vaseline smeared photos that were passed around among various men...some of whose names and sex stories I know. Many I don't. Yuck. Truly. Ignorance is fine with me. So, tell me Sharon. between us girls. Did you take part in the sex sessions with photos...sessions that one of the other women "captured" on film called "rape"? How about the photos of me? The ones Mr. Smith assured me were destroyed... Oh, are my questions vulgar? Decades of passing these women (including me) around for the sexual gluttony of strangers...I guess that wasn't vulgar. After all, it was worthy of your chortling praise. Did the sexual violation of other women fall under the label of George's fabulous sex life? If it doesn't, if it didn't, then you need to apologize to every woman George Smith has psychologically raped amidst your chortles of joy. Jesus Christ, woman. Whatever you thought I'd ever done to you, and I've done nothing...how did you think that sexual degradation was a fitting response? Nothing on the face of this earth would make me harm another person, let alone another woman, in that way. And you laugh while doing it? I guess that is the human being you are. Never call yourself a feminist again. | |
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