(P1).
For Foucault (1978), one of the key vehicles for biopower in the eighteenth and nineteenth century was the perverse implantation whereby an explosion of discourses on sexuality came to produce a host of deviations against the normalising sweeps of the Malthusian unit. These violations, against the heterosexual couple and thus ‘normal’ sexuality, produced forms of
perversity that were to be annexed and implanted as population wide possibilities by medicine and the law. Foucault (1978) argues that this perverse implantation underlies the obligation to confess to sexuality. Given the confessional context of the interview, participants’ constructions of the perversity that must mark them emerged as a means to further demonstrate the intractability of the inversion of sexual ‘normality’ and, so victim worthiness.
Access to particular discourses (psychological, internet, media and/or non-normative sexual discourse) provided participants with a technology of incitement to self-identify as FSA victims. One of the strongest claims to this victim position was the reference to the ‘perverse’ sexual and gendered consequences of FSA victimisation. All of the participants constructed themselves in an unquestionable relation to perversity. For example, participants drew on psychological discourse by using their ‘psychological insights’ to make various connections such that these ‘perversions’ were linked directly to FSA. For example,
There was this naked girl [the perpetrator]. As I said, she was quite chubby. To this day...I still have this thing about obese or overweight women. It freaks me out completely. My ex-wife when she like puts on weight I couldn’t, I couldn’t have sex with her. I just couldn’t. She must...go away. You know? It’s quite difficult. There’s not too many anorexic women out there these days (P1).
And I think also, parallel to that [the exposure to FSA], my sexuality was also forming…I think I was at the stage where me and my friends at boys’ school were looking to each other’s penises and we were looking at all those that got hair growing on it and I remember having like sex with other boys but like not penetrative sex but just rubbing against each other and things like that. And also remember that me- I, I always...not always but I think I was, being exposed to that, I think I was sort of like the lead in terms of things like that. Like let’s do it this way, let’s do it that way and things like that…And I think at that point also my, my sexuality was forming because I was really aware that I was actually becoming attracted to boys. Not necessarily, um women…Which...made me struggle for a long time in my life thinking that maybe, did the sexual abuse form my sexual orientation cause I’m a homo, I’m a homosexual (P2).
What I do know is I don’t have desires or anything to do with kids or whatever. And even now, even with my friends, I’m always...I’m so, even people, my peers, it’s a known, I’m attracted to the older. The older…The six-year gap or more. That’s how terrified I am of being with somebody younger than me (P2).
I think...her getting pleasure out of it [the FSA events]…I think I dived in pornography because it became - I started to even almost abuse it myself. Finding out that then I also became like quite...I’m not going to say addicted but I also became...the whole pornography of it also became my basis in terms of entertainment…I think in terms of sexuality because I got to realise, I got to...I think the, the molestation made me get onto sex way before I was ready (P2).
P2’s comment that his sexually precocious nature as a child was a consequence of his experience of molestation marks a lifelong deviation from ‘normality’. Some other examples of the way that FSA was an instrument and outcome of perversity included:
It [the FSA event] definitely kept me away. From boys and stuff, for a long time. Um…like my first like boyfriend, I was sixteen but I also, like I didn’t, it wasn’t sexual at all (P3).
Now many years after the painful ordeal, it is affecting my relationships. I feel abused and pushed when women try to love me. Sometimes I even have dreams having sex with relatives and it’s a pain. (P4).
It’s made me sexually aggressive…It’s a wonder I haven’t got AIDS or…because the way I was going on, it was bad. I was literally sexually aggressive. If I saw you in a nightclub and I thought you were cute, within a day…ya (P7).
I would sleep with anybody who even indicated that they wanted to have sex (P9).
Participants also infused abuse into their reports on desire, sexuality and satisfaction in their lives. In keeping with the centrality of sexuality to subjectivity (Foucault, 1978), this compromised and will continue to mark their sexual selfhood and health more globally. For example,
I’ve had more dirty sex and only with a handful of women so...like even now, when I have sex, I mean the actual penetration doesn’t interest me. So, I would rather stimulate her orally or manually or whatever, then bring her to climax and then be quite happy just to leave it at that. It sort of becomes quite crazy in terms of like sex is not wrong as long as it’s not satisfying (P1).
When it comes to sex, I’m not a sex person. You know? I’m more, I’m very more sensual like with a partner and all that but with sex and whatever I still carry that whole thing of it being too intimate and I don’t wanna, it’s really difficult for me to share my, what pleasures me ultimately with a
person because...I don’t know, does this make sense but I feel like they will see a connection to my sister (P2).
There were sexual problems in terms of, like very dysfunctional you know? Unable to perform, drinking and low self-esteem (P1).
Well, when I first started having sex, I had a problem with um…what is that called? Vaginismus? (P10).
Again, this is not necessarily different from constructions of victims of male sexual violence - especially where the victim is a boy or man (see Myers, 1989). Discourses concerning nondisclosure, trauma, revictimisation, guilt, self-blame, memory loss, the cycle of abuse and perversity are thus all mobilised to frame victimhood across the gender divide. However, in addition to these typical sex abuse discourses, one clear discursive theme arose in the data that does not emulate classic sex abuse narratives. This was the participants’ construction of FSA as more emotionally damaging than sexual victimisation at the hands of a male.
6.7.8. FSA as more emotionally damaging than male sexual violence
I know that that betrayal is there for my father as well, but it’s not as bad. It’s not as big (P9).
While the participants took recourse to the construction of female sexuality as harmless in accounting for their reported reluctance to disclose abuse, their positions implied the inverse in their reflections on the present and the future where abuse takes place at the hands of a woman. Rather than aligning their narratives to the conventionally imagined innocuous female sexuality, these participants constructed FSA as a special case of betrayal, damage and disruption of selfhood. In short, FSA was constructed as hyper-damaging. P5 had only been exposed to FSA but felt that if her perpetrator were male, she would have experienced less shame. She stated that, “I can’t explain why it’s more shameful that it’s, that it’s a lady than with a man”. Other participants actually had exposure to both male and female sexual abusers (on separate occasions). These participants maintained that the emotional damage was far worse under the sexual coercion of a woman. This was particularly confusing for P1 who felt that the actual sexual violence was more injurious under his male abuser yet his emotional response to the FSA event was more severe. Similarly P9 compared her response to her mother’s sexual abuse to her reaction to being sexually abused by a group of boys with the following statement:
I felt much more violated by my mother. I felt much more betrayed that...that she could hurt somebody...in a way that...it actually felt surreal. It’s like I just started to think...this, none of this feels right. Whereas I don’t think I had that thought for the boys (P9).
The tendency to view FSA as more emotionally damaging than male sexual violence can be understood as a function of the gendered constructions explored earlier in the chapter. All of the participants (at various times) mobilised constructions of masculine aggression and virility and feminine passivity and maternity; male sexual violence was thinkable and FSA near impossible. FSA directly contradicts the essential ‘truth’ about women and thus abuse by a woman was constructed as the embodiment of emotional betrayal and trust. In keeping with the discursive loading of women as caregivers, participants who reported the most severe emotional reactions were abused by their mothers. Given the absolute ‘unnaturalness’ of a maternal sexual abuser, these events are constructed as even more perverse and more damaging. Reconciling the emotional custodianship of modern motherhood with the immorality and pathology attached to the sexual perpetrator seems impossible for these participants such that an everlasting, hyper-trauma must mark this construction of FSA. It therefore seems that the ability for subjects to occupy an FSA victim position requires casting female sexuality as potentially aggressive. This in turn is dependent on the integration of this knowledge into broader constructions of victimhood. Given that FSA remains peripheral to modern conceptions of sexual transgression, woman as abuser implies a very particular form of discursive arrangement in which the abuse represents not merely a transgression on the individual body but perhaps, more specifically, a transgression on motherhood as the embodiment of custodianship and care and perhaps ultimately, the last bastion of human safety.