The Lies We Tell Ourselves

Certain members of society would rather choose to ignore the reality of child molestation and incest; they live in a reality where—by their own choice and in order to maintain the illusion of humanism—incest does not exist. Sociologists and anthropologists have traditionally regarded incest as disruptive of the family and therefore disruptive of the social order. By contrast, feminism has suggested that, paradoxical as it may seem, incest is actually produced and maintained by social order: the order of a male-dominated society. The patriarchial social order generally sides with those certain members of society in accepting the reality wherein incest does not occur. But if there is no such thing as incest, what happens to the incest victim? If she knows that she was violated, and yet all those around her demand that incest is not real, where does she turn for help? [T]his feeling of “unreality” is not merely the effect of the incest survivor’s history. That is, it is not the “return of the repressed”; rather, it is also an artful reconstruction of the survivor’s present, a set of coping mechanisms or survival strategies however “psychotic” they may appear and however self-destructive they may seem, which are actually clever ways of surviving within a dominant order that produces the incest survivor as an impossibility. If, then, there is no such thing as incest and incest victims, there is no room in reality for incest survivors. Not only is incest marked as a founding taboo and therefore presumed not to happen if the culture is to retain its illusion of coherency, but also, then, the survivor is not meant to survive. The fact that she does is due to her ability to create her own system, her own symbolic if you will, that is necessarily discordant with the dominant order’s symbolic. In other words, the incest survivor knows that reality is a ruse that masks the Real, but she is forced to articulate this knowledge through a conceptual system that cannot be interpreted by dominant codes as other than pathological.[. . . .] For of course this sharply divided reality for the survivor is generated and maintained by its reference to an ideological system that insists upon choosing between the two [i.e. two seemingly mutually exclusive ideas, like how could “he” both love me and hurt me?]: whereas the person who inhabits both spaces simultaneously—or worse yet perhaps—balances perpetually on the border between them, is rendered psychotic. In the end, for me, my family renders the following communities of people unreal. To say it another way, my family believes the following groups of people are lying about the thing that they all have in common (which makes them all psychotic) or they are all psychotic: non-believers (that is, people who don’t believe that belief in Jesus is the only way to Heaven), homosexuals, incest victims, and incest survivors. When I speak, my parents are thus four times removed from anything I might say. They see me through veils of their own design; veils they created out of dire need to believe in a world that does not exist. If, in their minds, I am pathological four times through from different angles, how can anything I say be real for them? We do not exist on the same planet. We do not speak the same language. Hart, Lynda. “Bearing (to) Witness: The Erotics of Power in Bastard Out of Carolina.” Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. 166-203.