The First Longing

Dear T.V.,

It's been four calendar days and tonight was my first night of longing for your anesthetizing presence.

I will confess that today at work, at the suggestion of my boss, I consumed you in full view and alongside my coworkers. As you recall, that was the one of the conditions in which it was permissible to invite you back into my world and it is so soon after leaving you that it seemed second nature to drink you in, and I did.

Five hours were given to you.

During commercial breaks I did minor work related productions of sending emails, but I know you don't care about that.

Like an recently spurned lover, you only wish to know how I had come to crave you this evening, and how intensely those cravings were. You wish to know only how this longing translates into suffering in you absence, my love.

Welcome to 2018! The first 48.

**CONTENT WARNING: Discussions of sexual assault, misconduct and rape.**

Welcome to 2018! 

I hope your New Year celebrations were...well....I hope they were whatever it is that you hoped they would be. 

I personally,chose to not go out. This was not out of any moral superiority but rather a deficit in the discretionary funds in my bank account (ha!). I stayed in and posted lots of stories to Instagram and Snapchat. And in the first hour of 2018 I did what I said I would do and that is to take the necessary steps to begin this journey of "NO T.V. in 2018." 

Evidentiary support to this claim can be found in this video below: 

Video content (for accessibility): my T.V., DVD player, Roku box and all my DVDs are packed away in a dark hole about four feet deep and behind a large blue plastic storage bin that is about two feet high and three feet deep. The contents of this storage bin are of sentimental value and by extension, are infinitely more valuable than the electronics stored behind them. I also cancelled my Netflix account. Music by Jasmine Janai: Discretion

I discovered that I somehow still owned a copy of Woody Allen's Scoop. Given Allen's questionable relationship with his stepdaughter and his shitty statements in response to the Weinstein allegations in which he essentially asked for people to disregard the experiences of the women involved (Allen dismisses them as "poor women")  in favor of compassion for the perpetrator, I threw the DVD in the trash. And yes, I know that Allen tried to clarify his statements, claiming ignorance to the severity of the allegations (how fucking nice it must be to not have to consider or be aware of such things) but I still refuse to support him. 

I want to explain why I refuse to support him. For me, when someone dismisses the experiences of victims, and asks for the humanity of the perpetrator to be prioritized, that person is an apologist for the misconduct. By being an apologist you are saying that the experiences of the victim is secondary to remorse, so-called illness or humanity of the perpetrator and it forces people to focus on the perpetrator rather than the victim. Usually, victims are bullied, shamed and discredited making it very difficult for them to come forward. And depending on the gender of the victim there can be deep social stigma that makes it impossible for them to come forward at all based on how they see others in society or in various circle (close or distant family or social circles) being responded to when coming forward- or even treated with regards to discussions about sex or sexual agency. 

This apologist narrative forces me to pose these question, "Why is the humanity of the perpetrator so much more important than that of their victim? Why was the humanity of the victim not considered important enough to not engage in the assault, and why is the humanity of the victim not considered worthy of love, support, compassion, understanding and care once they came forward? Why is the perpetrator deserving of these things over the victim?" 

That's some fucked up shit. And a line I don't tow.