Netflix recently released a film starring Mila Kunis called ‘Luckiest Girl Alive,’ a story about a gang rape and school shooting survivor and the massive trauma these experiences cause her from her teenage years well into her adult life.
On the night after watching the movie I had a long series of nightmares. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this movie is highly triggering for anyone who has been a victim or survivor of sexual assault.
Victim v. Survivor
In the movie, a documentary filmmaker is trying to convince Ani (portrayed by Mila Kunis ) to talk about her experience on camera, promising to protect her. Instead, he forces her to face her aggressor with no previous warning and proceeds to ask her if she prefers to be referred to as a victim or as a survivor.
‘Apparently it’s a big thing these days’. Yes, it fucking is a big thing, these days.
As someone who has experienced her fair share of s%&t experiences, personally I feel like I am survivor of sexual assault, but I am a victim of how society reacted to me being assaulted. Let me specify, not all of the time, but most of the time.
This movie actually helped me in one fundamental way: it made me feel less alone in my experience of dealing with what happened years after it did.
It showed me how others don’t believe the victim, leading to Ani almost doubting what she went through. The day after she is gang raped, the boys at school treat her as if nothing had happened, her boyfriend, who also raped her, basically tells her not to exaggerate what she believes she has experienced whilst the others hug her and tease her as if everything was completely normal.
I will write this here for anyone who, like me, sometimes wonders if they made it up or if they brought harm upon themselves by being too nice, too kind, too flirty: you didn’t.
No is no.
Maybe is no.
Someone badgering you into something is no.
I recently had an experience where someone assaulted me and then right after proceeded to kiss me goodbye with a smile. It all happened in the middle of my work day in central London. I thought I had gone mad. I called one of my best friends and apparently I kept saying I was confused, that I was shocked. I just remember not being able to figure out what had just happened.
Do you know what confused me? The person pretending that everything was fine. It made me question myself.
Even more worryingly than others not believing you, sometimes you are not sure You believe yourself.
I don’t know what people who haven’t experienced this kind of trauma will take away from this film, however I can tell you for certain that seeing that scene opened my eyes. Seeing the aggressors’ ‘everything is okay’ reaction on the day after rape and consequently by watching this scene feeling completely uneasy about it, angry, shocked, made me realize how I had been gaslighted by my own aggressor. This happened to me more than once.
It is already so hard to fathom that something this horrific can happen to you in real life that when the other party involved gaslights you and normalizes what happened, you may even believe them over yourself.
Coping mechanisms
Throughout the movie we discover the coping mechanisms Kunis’s character put into place in order to overcome her trauma. Above all, she built a life where she is hoping to feel like she is in control.
Regaining control is such a big part of dealing with the trauma.
Ani finds a man who is not going to hurt her emotionally nor physically, as she will never truly love him. We can see she tries to have violent sex with him, on some level potentially replicating what had happened to her in the past. If this is what the screenwriters were trying to portray, it’s called repetition compulsion: you keep re-living the same experience in the hopes that the next time you do you are able to ‘solve it’, or put a different ending to the same situation, yet in truth you are never able to.
Ani used to be chubbier when she was younger, according to her own self description. As an adult she binge eats, clearly having developed an eating disorder. Binge eating typically occurs to those who don’t know what emotions they are feeling and that are not able to cope with these emotions.
Control comes into play in every aspect of her seemingly perfect life, a job that is respected, perfect clothes, body, manicure, hair. The perfect man, the perfect future. Yet absolutely nothing is perfect, despite all of her coping mechanisms, she faces constant panic attacks and flashbacks.
If you have experienced any kind of sexual violence, you are likely to see yourself in one or more of these coping mechanisms.
Yes, it can still be sexual assault if it wasn’t violent
When rape or an attack is violent, understanding what just happened can be (but not always) more straightforward. That said, I have unfortunately learned that there are other types of violence. One of which is obtained by coercion.
Coercion occurs when someone convinces you or wears you down or negotiates with you in order to obtain any form of sexual act.
Here is how it’s described in the Women’s Health website.
Sexual coercion is unwanted sexual activity that happens after being pressured in nonphysical ways that include:
– Being worn down by someone who repeatedly asks for sex
– Being lied to or being promised things that weren’t true to trick you into having sex
– Having someone threaten to end a relationship or spread rumors about you if you don’t have sex with them
– Having an authority figure, like a boss, property manager, loan officer, or professor, use their influence or authority to pressure you into having sex
In a healthy relationship, you never have to have sexual contact when you don’t want to. Anything sexual without your consent is assault. Sexual coercion means feeling forced to have sexual contact with someone.
I wish I knew the statistics of how many people have been a victim of sexual coercion in life. Women and men. Personally, I don’t think I know many people who haven’t.
This is possibly the one type of attack that most leaves you wondering if it was your fault in the first place.
It’s not.
This movie is triggering
I didn’t realize until I watched it as I had no idea what the movie was about, but if you have experienced rape or sexual assault, you should know this movie is triggering. I had nightmares and my anxiety levels are higher after watching it.
I don’t know how I feel about it yet.
Something model Emily Ratajkowski said this week resonated with me, she said that we need to stop fetishizing women’s pain. Emily said this in relation to Marilyn Monroe’s biopic ‘Blonde’. Having watched it, I had to asked myself the same questions.
Did we need to visually see these rape scenes? No. Could we have known that this took place in another way? Yes.
Will people who have never experienced this be able to feel the seriousness of the situation without having some kind of visual in 2022? I truly don’t know.
Maybe visually portraying a violent rape scene was an opportunity missed, an opportunity to show that sometimes rape isn’t violent, that sometimes it leaves us wondering if it was even non consensual at all.
We weren’t beaten up, tied up, maybe we could have found a better way, a way to escape.
Did we freeze? Did we say no loud enough? Did we only say no once?
While she is being raped by her boyfriend, Ani tries to push him away and he kisses her hand, pretending he doesn’t know that she is saying no. Pretending he thinks everything is okay. Later in the film, this makes her wonder if he hadn’t realized altogether that he was in fact raping her.
Gaslighting a sexual assault survivor is just as bad as sexual assault
If there is one takeaway I hope people who haven’t experienced sexual assault have from this film is that survivors need your support. Flashbacks can come back though the years. Coping mechanisms may have a role in our lives even after extensive therapy.
Even after all the help we could get there will be days where we will wonder once again if we could have done something different, or if we made it up. Days where we feel isolated, alone.
On other days we experience the exact opposite, it’s all too vivid, it’s all too real. We know what happened. We were there.
Which days are better? Maybe the ones when we don’t think about it, the ones where we don’t have to re-live the trauma.
This is why it’s so important to know that this movie is triggering ahead of starting it, so you can choose whether you want to watch it or not.
I asked myself, would I watch it again knowing this? Maybe.
In a way I am glad I watched it because this was the first time I was able to see from the outside just how absurd it is to doubt yourself when your assailant is pretending that nothing happened, to your face, the next day. As an ‘outsider’, watching the boys gaslight Ani makes me so angry, it makes me want to step in and protect Ani. As an ‘insider’, sometimes it’s harder to step in and protect yourself.
What we all need to know
Like with everything in life, awareness is key.
Today I know what gaslighting is, I know what assault is, I know that when I say no, once is more than enough.
I have learned that if I get assaulted the easiest way out is fingers in one eye of the attacker and knee in his balls and run (someone from secret services shared this tip with me).
I now know that you have to believe yourself first, that when your instincts tell you that something may not be quite right, you don’t need to stay and be a kind and polite person in case your instincts were wrong. You get up and you leave. You don’t need to justify to anyone why you felt unsafe, you don’t need to stay because you may inconvenience someone else with your rudeness.
If you feel like anything is wrong, you leave.
Most of all, to all of you out there who have experienced something traumatic and keep wondering why it happened to you, what you could have done differently to stop it or if it even ever happened, I want you to know that you are not alone.
Book and screenplay by Jessica Knoll
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: iStockPhoto.com