The Case Against Us: Language as Misogynist Weapon

The familiar saying, “history is written by the victors,” can also be understood as “meaning is decided by those with power.” With a combination of lyrical prose, found poetry, and free verse, jaz papadopoulos’s debut collection, I Feel That Way Too, explores this truth in the context of how language shapes perceptions of sexual assault, addressing both the ever-present nature of gendered violence as well as how language can be used as a tool for manipulation.

I Feel That Way Too is divided into three sections. The first, “The Rules,” consists of two free-verse poems that highlight the no-win situation faced by sexual assault survivors, whom the speaker addresses directly:

Your

reluctance
eagerness
embarrassment

can and will
be used
against you

in a court of law.

Through use of anaphora, papadopoulos emphasizes the various “rules” that survivors are subject to in the context of a criminal trial, and effectively creates a lecturing tone:

Do not appear to be “on a team.” Do not
express anger or animus or desire
to sink the prick/collude/speak

to other survivors. Do not
do media interviews;
they can and will be used against you

in a court of law.

Later, survivors are reminded, “[d]o not thank him after the fact. / Do not send him flowers flirtatious texts any texts and certainly do not text / ha ha.” As the poem progresses, “they can and will be used against you in a court of law” repeats at the ends of stanzas, as if the poem is a list of rights being read to someone under arrest.

papadopoulos explores a distorted reflection of reality, in which women’s experiences cannot accurately be rendered by the language available under patriarchy.

In the brief poem that follows, “On the Other Hand,” papadopoulos closes the first section and underscores the difficulty that survivors face when it comes to being believed:

If
concussed
unreliable

memory
will
ensure

your
reasonable
doubt.

The book’s second section, “History of Media,” consists of nine “lessons," and was inspired in part by Canadian poet Anne Carson’s performance piece Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, in which Marilyn Monroe and Helen of Troy become one character. In her review of Carson's piece in Bookforum, Audrey Wollen suggests that Carson "dig[s] her heels into the muddy tangle of femininity and its image. Norma Jeane Baker of Troy takes the permanently doubled nature of womanhood seriously." Similarly, papadopoulos explores a distorted reflection of reality, in which women’s experiences cannot accurately be rendered by the language available under patriarchy.

“Lesson 2: Language” begins with three epigraphs, including one from cultural theorist Stuart Hall, which states, “[r]eality exists outside of language, but it is constantly mediated by and through language: and what we can know and say has to be produced in and through discourse.” In a profile of Stuart Hall for The New Yorker, Hua Hsu writes that culture “embodies an unconscious sense of the values we share, of what it means to be right or wrong.” This notion of culture as a site of ideological struggle is a key theme of papadopoulos’s collection, in which meaning is distorted by misogyny.

The language of patriarchy mediates our social reality. Written in prose, “Lesson 2” traces the definition of rape back to the Latin rapere, “to steal,” an origin which implied that, historically, it was “legally and linguistically impossible for a husband to rape his wife.” Only an oppositional, feminist reading of sexualized violence makes visible the otherwise hidden aspects of reality. “Lesson 4: Misunderstanding” describes the “fawning” response that vulnerable people sometimes exhibit in response to threat, a conflict avoidant mechanism that emerges as an evolution of the “fight/flight/flee” trifecta. papadopoulos explores this concept with reference to evidence from the criminal trial brought against former CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi in 2014, in which he was charged with four counts of sexual assault. The poem alludes to one survivor’s decision to send Ghomeshi flowers and draws attention to the fraught nature of how this detail may be interpreted: "One way of looking at it / Flowers express appreciation, gratitude, romance / 🡪 the event was consensual." When the judge delivers his verdict, in which Ghomeshi was acquitted of all charges, he finds the complainant’s behaviour “odd.”

“Lesson 7: Connotation” shows meaning-making at work through an examination of hair pulling. Once again, the section begins with an epigraph from Stuart Hall, which establishes how meaning can depend on context. After offering a literal definition—"hair pulling is a physical action which gives a sharp discomfort and may control the head movement of the recipient”—the connotations of hair pulling are deciphered in various contexts: playground fights, trichotillomania, BDSM play, and assault. This foregrounding is followed by a question: “Without BDSM signifiers but with ‘sensuous kissing’? the court asks,” to which the speaker responds colloquially:

Well, shit.

The code is broken: a hegemonic reading prefers to maintain the sexual
integrity of the man in question; an oppositional reading remembers that
marital rape has only been criminal since the late twentieth century, and
even then, is not criminalized globally.

Reasonable doubt, common sense and all that.

Barbie, an icon of patriarchally constructed womanhood, appears in two of the collection’s lessons. In “Lesson 3: Circulation,” she represents a paradox. Her name, which shares its root with “barbarian,” suggests an enemy. Barbie also owned her own “Dream House” in the days before women’s equal access to mortgages was codified under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974. But the speaker admits that the nature of meaning as it concerns women is slippery: “It is impossible for anything shaped as a woman / to be well understood / especially in public.” In the final lesson, “Blame Women,” the speaker addresses their daughter, and confesses to feeling helpless to protect her from the ills of misogyny: “I don’t know how to explain to you / my fad dieting, food restrictions, exercise regime,” or “the things that men and boys will say, shout, whistle.” They consider shielding their daughter from Barbie’s existence—“Birthday invitation reads No Barbies Please”—but also offer an alternative suggestion: that when their daughter does encounter this icon (“inevitably, against all my attempts and insertions”), she create something of a poppet from Barbie, invest her with the soup of misogyny—“take her iconic body, make it an emblem of our grief and fear”—then discard her in an attempt to free herself. The lesson ends with a polyphony of voices that highlight the blame placed on women throughout history, from figures such as Helen of Troy, Joan of Arc, and Barbie to complainants from the Ghomeshi trial:

The chorus swells: her fault her fault her fault
Joan of Arc
her fault
Barbie
her fault
Complainants 1,2, and 3
her fault her fault her fault.

In the book’s longest and final section, “I Feel That Way Too,” the speaker describes their response to the trial and how it triggered memories of their own assault. With support from a counsellor, Tara, the speaker faces the challenge of coping with memory and conveying the experience, relying on the metaphor of stickiness to suggest the hold that assault has on a survivor:

When Tara asks what
happened, I will say
the worst was how I stayed

sticky for so long. Full
week after camp ended I reach
for the fridge and the handle

grabs back
                     holds on till
                     throat crawls
with flies, till vision
rives with long—
black—hairs.

This final titular section is punctuated with pages that display photocopies of erasure poems based on newspaper articles, and fragments of minimalist black and white photographs, creating a collage-like effect. The presentation of text on the page also varies. One passage detailing suicide prevention training is printed in landscape orientation. This variation within the section could suggest that the speaker is gathering fragments of the self in an attempt to heal.

Word substitution here seems to function as a “talking around” the speaker’s reality, perhaps to create a layer of protection and avoid the vulnerability of using commonly understood words.

The section segues into a Jabberwocky-like poem that suggests a guided meditation: “Lie on your back in a balanced and relaxed potential,” it begins, with nonsense words substituted for the ones we’d expect (here, “potential” in place of “position”). “See if you can locate exactly where you feel your heartthrob,” the speaker instructs, and continues:

Now, move your fool down your babble,
past your cavities and brides and belly,
down to your pelvic abeyance. Rest your audience
gently on this region, including your volta and vamp.

Word substitution here seems to function as a “talking around” the speaker’s reality, perhaps to create a layer of protection and avoid the vulnerability of using commonly understood words. Likewise, “origin” replaces “orgasm”: “Do you feel an urge / to stimulate yourself further, maybe even to origin?” This can be read as a clever coping mechanism; reaching one’s “origin” suggests the reclaiming of power and voice in which the collection culminates:

I offer my hand and she rises like a feather stirring.
The shoreline is peaceful, no more running horses, only liquid light.
Air warms our lungs, and we drink and drink. Once we’ve each become
              as big as can be,
we unlatch our mouths and scream.

I Feel That Way Too experiments with language and form to critique the treatment of survivors of sexualized violence. By shining a light on misogynist construction and distortion of meaning, papadopoulos offers hope for a way out of the darkness.

Additional sources:

Hsu, Hua. “Stuart Hall and the Rise of Cultural Studies.” The New Yorker, 17 July, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/stuart-hall-and-the-rise-of-cultural-studies

Wollen, Audrey. "Fatal Attraction." Bookforum, February/March2020. https://www.bookforum.com/print/2605/anne-carson-s-new-play-brings-together-marilyn-monroe-and-helen-of-troy-23843