Post by Scoot in Mother, You and I Are Not Bernadette Mayer comments

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This is incredibly written. It is undeniably erotic, which is harrowing to read given what's happening.

I don't think I can say it better than sesere said it in another comment, so I'll quote that here:

With stigmatized topics like these, authors often feel the need to "shake their head" so the audience knows this is wrong... often by having children innately recognise what is happening to them is wrong despite lacking the experiential toolkit to do so. I can't possibly articulate to you... how valuable it is that bitekiosk fully takes C---'s perspective...through even the most discomforting scenes in the VN, forcing you as the audience to recognize that C--- does not perceive this as wrong; she enjoys and wants more of what we understand to be sexual abuse. It's a uniquely distressing feeling where you feel almost like an uninvited voyeur foisting your horror and fear onto someone who is feeling neither of those things.."

I feel honored that you entrusted your audience with this reflection on something so personal. It is subtle in ways that I doubt mass media ever could be.

The fucked up things that happened to me when I was younger weren't much like this. Even so, I relate to the conflicted feelings you write about in your letters, and the conflict that I feel inside of my own gut while watching C---'s childlike acceptance of what's happening to her. The way it's possible to love, idolize, respect, accept, resent, and hate the same person all at once. The way the person who hurt you most can be the person you adore most in all the world. And you still feel that adoration while you're untangling that what they did was wrong.

Thank you, immensely, for writing this. I will be thinking of it for a long time.

bitekiosk52 days ago

Thank you for holding my twisted mass of feelings-guts and not immediately dropping it and sprinting to the handwash and eyerinse station. The kindness you and others have shown me has made this trust worth every fearful moment.

This VN would basically not have existed without Tampa, which was a kind of roadmap toward writing sexual intimacy as terrifying by leveraging the distance between the characters’ feelings about CSA and the reader’s. It is a naked depiction of grooming through abuse of trust and authority. The way consent and trust are warped and abused in that story mirrored my experiences in a way nothing yet had. I finally, finally felt known. It gave me language.

I used to envy survivors of more clear or direct violations of consent. I couldn’t understand why, and I deeply resented myself for it. And I felt a lot of shame for liking some of what had been done to me once I realized that it was wrong, that it shouldn’t have happened. But because I couldn’t really point to times I said “no” and someone else disregarded that, I didn’t feel like a “real victim”.

This VN is I guess the experience of coming to realize I was denied the possibility of saying no from birth. Which isn’t better or worse than having a “no” violated, it’s just different. But looking back at it is so frustrating when I realize that the adults in my life cultivated a very specific and unbalanced kind of hypercapability in me that served their ends and left me completely defenseless at the level of conceptualizing self-preservation, of enacting disobedience. I felt utterly used.

And that doesn’t even get to what you’ve pointed at, which is the struggle of disentangling the gutknot of conflicting thoughts and feelings that can barely coexist in a kid’s brain, in their body, but can’t not exist there because those are going to result from such an enmeshed, intimate, extractive relationship. The inclarity of it is overwhelming.

God, that reads like a really pessimistic, exhausted response. Sorry for that, lmao. Thank you for writing to me; knowing others have played this at all has been something, but getting to speak with people who found it worth sharing their thoughts and feelings about has made me feel a real sense of connection. Thank you.

Scoot42 days ago(+1)

Oh, I've also read Tampa!! Not sharing your own experience, it didn't have the same effect on me, but you're so right about it leveraging the distance between the characters feelings on CSA and the reader's. It's an interesting way of talking about the subject matter, and I generally prefer it to breaking the 4th wall to tell the reader "Yes I'm super aware that this is wrong. I need you to know that I know this is wrong." I also recently read Try by Dennis Cooper, which does a similar thing.

I prefer your writing of the mother/predator in Bernadette to the writing of the teacher/predator in Tampa. My biggest critique of the book is that she feels very flat -- she literally has one goal in life, and it's to prey on young boys. I appreciate that on a fictional character level (wheee, evil women being unapologetically evil!) but it worried me on a social level. Because I don't think that's how most predators actually are. I think it's rare that someone is so deliberate and focused, and much more common that someone has built up layers of excuses and lies in their head to cover for the hurt they've caused others. I think some people might read Tampa and think "Aha! This is what it's really like in an abusers head. It's simple, they're just evil. Unlike me, a totally different kind of person!"

I appreciate much more when a story forces you to confront that the "evil" people are not fundamentally a different kind of person. It's uncomfortable and makes me want to crawl out of my skin, but I think it's an important thing to confront, that everyone has the capacity for harm. And I find the mother in Bernadette to be that kind of character. She is having a terrible time, she is absorbed in herself, she is legitimately struggling and starved for companionship. I've had all of those feelings, although I've never taken it in the direction that she has. But she is clearly a regular human. The people around her are failing her all the time, too -- turning a blind eye to the way she treats her child, like why is there a kid at the party where everyone is drunk? Her environment is shaping her into a worse version of herself.

Separately, I really feel you about wishing violations of consent were more clear. Although in my experience, experiences always feel murkiest from your own perspective? You can see the wrongs done to others as clear as day, compared to what happened to you.

Most things I dealt with were coercive but not blatantly non-consensual either. Coercive control and abuse from my "best friend" in grade school has genuinely affected me the worst and longest -- despite her not being a romantic partner or family member, she successfully controlled my entire life and isolated me from friends and partners. For years I was filled with regret, convinced that I was cruel and abusive to her. It kind of only clicked when I saw the queer variation of the "Power and Control" wheel and realised how many tactics she'd used against me....while I never utilised any against her. There's not many existing narratives that touch on that flavor of trauma. (I suppose maybe I have to write one, haha)

Honestly your response didn't come off particularly pessimistic or exhausted, although it would be valid as hell to feel either of those things. I'm very glad you've been able to feel connection from talking about this with me and others! <3

itch.io

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