I got into an argument with a friend about whether writing about rape is misogynist. It wasn’t an argument really. I got so nervous that I killed the conversation almost immediately by putting words in his mouth. He asked me if I had read Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, which is a series of short stories on bull fighting.

I don’t think I could have read Death in the Afternoon before I started writing about sexual violence and healing from it through therapy. I have had such an aversion to any depiction of violence because I identify with the person or animal that is suffering and I am terrified of the motivations, emotions and power of the person enacting the violence. I can’t even watch nature documentaries. Like some of the spectators Hemingway describes, I identify with “the most obviously abused thing” in the bull fight, which is the horse.

My friend had underlined this passage from the introduction, and it struck me too:

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you truly felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion you experienced.

I am wary of  writing about intimate violence because of the ways that the writing can affect others or be taken out of context on the web. My own memories are foggy, my identity is fragmented and still fused together with those of people who have harmed me, power and control are cross-wired with affection and desire in my brain. What does it mean to write about what I feel, distinguish it from what I was taught to feel, and to access what actually happened in my own past? Can there be a language for (trans)men to talk about experiences of sexual abuse and the way abuse shapes desire and sexuality without reproducing violence against ourselves or others?

Hemingway writes that those who identify with the horse are capable of the greatest cruelty and goes on to describe how the audiences demand that the horse wear protection, not in such a way that prevents the horse’s suffering, but only in such a way as it prevents the audience from facing the suffering, while making death slower and more painful for the horse.

I don’t disbelieve Hemingway’s account of these audiences, but I’d make a different interpretation about the meaning of their behavior. I remembered talking with another friend about about the Buddhist principle of not exposing oneself intentionally to gratuitous depictions of suffering, because there is enough real suffering within the world. This conversation may have been in reference to our mutual aversion to Game of Thrones. Those audiences that identify with the horse will make the horse suffer more greatly only if they are unwilling to face their own suffering and to accept their responsibility for the horse’s suffering. She told me, “bearing witness to suffering is one thing, but practicing compassion for self is critical until you can witness suffering with compassion but not self-immersion.”

I’m still wondering, as I write about sex and violence with (con)fused subjectivities, in abstract language, on the open web, what is my responsibility to myself, and to my reader?