Variations on Sleep Paralysis
Jordan Davidson
preface
After Roe v. Wade was overturned, I decided it was time for me to get an IUD. At the time, I wasn’t sexually active, so the IUD was only for emergency purposes — because of other health issues, it was unclear whether or not I could use emergency contraception, and I couldn’t use any estrogen based birth control at all, unless I wanted to clot off something important and get a long series of hospital trips.
But just in case, let me be explicit: I was getting an incredibly invasive medical procedure so that if I was raped, I wouldn’t get pregnant because I didn’t have the right to an abortion anymore. The gynecologist was shoving a speculum into my vaginal canal because five people raised their hands. So as I lay with my legs spread in stirrups, my vaginal tearing, my tissue bleeding and me screaming with my hands convulsively raised above my head, it felt a lot like the Supreme Court was actively fucking me, not just fucking me over.
And why did they decide to fuck me?
Who knows.
Why did they say they decided to do it?
Stories. Biblical stories. Stories where women are degraded, mistreated, and offered as bargaining chips.
I wish the Bible was the only example of how casually rape culture stalks in the spines of our literature, but one of my favorite stories when I was a little girl was sleeping beauty. So, when I had access to the internet, I went and Googled the original. I don’t like that story very much at all anymore.
In fact, when CORTEX decided to write an issue where we subverted fairytales, I think my heartbeat sounded a little bit like Sleeping Beauty. You see, there’s no love in the original. No kind prince, no fighting dragons—just a man, who sees a beautiful girl asleep and rapes her. Sleeping Beauty doesn’t wake up to this; no, she wakes up nine months and change later, when the twins she’s given birth to suck the spindle out of her finger looking for her breasts.
And it’s not just Sleeping Beauty that hinges on both violence and sexual violence. It’s the stories that fill our “Western Canon”: Iliad, The Odyssey, the Greek Tragedies, the Conception of Persephone, the Transfiguration of Medusa. It’s almost everything in Ovid. It’s the originals of our children’s books, like Snow White, Bluebeard, and Thumbelina, and it’s their remakes, like romanticization of colonization in Pocahontas, and how Aurora, Snow White, Ariel, Jasmine, and Belle are all minors when they marry the significantly older, adult princes
So I wrote a poem. I wrote from inside Sleeping Beauty’s head.
Before I discuss the specifics of that poem, and the admittedly disturbing imagery in it, I do want to say that I am not a survivor of sexual assault or rape. I’m writing from my fear. I’m because of the two medical procedures I’ve gotten just in case. Because of the times I’ve ducked into buildings after being catcalled, afraid. Because of the men who put their hands on my shoulder while I’m waiting in line, because when I was a child my family used to tell me I needed to change my clothes, because even though I should be able to wear what I wanted without getting unwanted attention, that wasn’t the world we lived in. Because I’d be safer when covered.
The terror in the poem is mine. The physical imagery is mine too, from my IUD appointment, where they ultimately failed to put the device in because I was in too much pain for them to ethically continue, even though I told the gynecologist she could keep going.
But there’s a lot in this poem that isn’t mine too. There are the conversations I’ve had with survivors about this poem changing my word choice, the structure, the way I talk about could. There’s not a lot I can say about those conversations because they aren’t mine to talk about, but I think it’s important to tell you they’re there.
I also can’t tell you how to interpret this poem, but I can tell you you’ll probably be disturbed. A lot of people have been viscerally, physically uncomfortable. You don’t have to read it; I’m not sure how many people after this essay will. But I think it’s important to be published, because it’s important to say that women are more and worth so infinitely much more than the way we’re captured at the end of fairytales.
I’d like to say this scream is ours.
And maybe I imagined the man the way I imagined so much else:
Shadows leering from these walls,
Their spindle claws pressed so cumbersome against my mouth as I struggled to lift a finger,
An eye, a foot,
One nail after the other, perhaps a molar, maybe in retaliation, certainly as cry.
But no sound could break these thread edged chords.
The birds shed their wings, all gone still,
The crickets lay in wait in their window sills,
But I swore the roses were whispering, their voices caught with desire.
You see, I’d wrapped my hand around them before,
Given them the taste of what they did not have before,
Then broke blue away from red and flesh away from thorn before,
Until then in their calm, licentious state, they took.
Dismantled in dilation,
I was split to silent prayer against prowling lips that sucked with and by my bloody tissue—
I tried.
I tried and could not claw and could not win resistance from silk sheet ropes wedded to mahogany,
And only on awakening do I re-taste the power to scream,
I cry: his face is blurry, and I remember all of it.
His face is blurry, and he shares it with my daughter,
And every crowd chants liar, liar,
But I chant in bygone coulds, reminded by my parasite, swaddled in suckling clothes, who teethed the spindle from my finger and broke my limbs to motion.
