Swimmer Diana Nyad has penned an extraordinary piece for the New York Times about surviving sexual abuse by a coach when she was a girl: "My Life After Sexual Assault." It will almost certainly be a familiar story to many women and girls, terribly so. It was familiar to me.
And it prompted this thought:
I thought, as I read this piece, about how there are many variations of our cultural "success despite adversity" tales, but none of them include sexual assault. That, too, is a terrible silence. https://t.co/MmXuq7OzTx
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) November 9, 2017
There are people who insist that no one doesn't object to sexual abuse (immediately wrong, because its perpetrators don't), but here is further proof: Sexual abuse is so normalized that it's an expected part of female lives.
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) November 9, 2017
For millions of us, it never really goes away. I am grateful to Nyad for saying that. And I am angry at a world that doesn't let us say with frankness that what we've survived is something that makes life harder, and changes us for the rest of our lives.
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