I just watched Lady Gaga’s new video for the first time and once again she nailed it. If there is one thing I’ve learned on Davidson’s campus– it’s the power of acknowledging pain. We tend to be really bad at recognizing pain, and then doing anything about it. Maybe that’s a human thing, maybe it’s a “I’m so busy what do you need ok I’m going to go study” Davidson thing. Maybe I’m just very cynical.
The power that Gaga’s video brings to the conversation about sexual assault is it’s unflinchingly (if I use that word am I an official *reviewer*?) emotional portrayal of the before, the during, and the aftermath. We tend to focus conversations about sexual assault around the policy, the law, the aggressor, and the aftermath. While these are are all integral parts– they are the public experience of one of the most intimate forms of violence.
Gaga also doesn’t exclude people from the conversation with this video. As a human being, I have good and bad days– which typically means some days I have the patience to deal with your BS and some days I most definitely do not and you will think I’m a bitch. For those moments when I don’t know what other words to use to convey pain, when I can’t quite communicate effectively the terror and the helplessness, or when you my conversation partner are having “none of my hippie bullshit” I will use Gaga’s video to help you see the pain that is so easily ignored when we look at survivors behind courtroom podiums. When we see survivors carrying mattresses around campus, and organizing vigils and talkbacks and rallies and all of these instances when we see survivors.
For every survivor using anger to cope, organizing events to ease his pain, there are others who can’t get out of bed, or who just don’t feel like saying anything but want someone to quietly listen. For every angry feminist friend you see supporting the rallies, there are supporters who grab you coffee and physically drag you out of your room to remind you that you do exist in a space that needs you.
We glorify a certain exhibition-response (and that response is great and valid) in this country and in doing so we tend to miss the quietly suffering, the quietly healing, the quietly surviving whose pain we don’t quite see and almost never feel comfortable acknowledging.
Thank you Lady G for reminding us of everyone that’s out there suffering in their own ways, and healing in their own ways, and the pain and importance of the support networks we all have. As a final reminder from the song: you don’t have to heal anyone’s way but your own.