 Ashley. Sham! Yes! Ah! Ha ha ha ha ha! Let me just be honest and say that this conversation kind of terrifies me. And today we're talking about rape. It terrifies me because I'm afraid of saying the wrong thing. It terrifies me because I have my own unprocessed experience and it terrifies me because I am afraid of opening myself up for other people to share their experiences. And for me not being in a place where I know how to respond appropriately, or that I don't necessarily even want to be a sound board for so much pain and grief. And so for that reason, I very rarely talk about this. If somebody talks about sex and intimacy for a living, this is just a topic that I refer a lot out to. And I will have some experts on here who I referred to at the end of this episode because I think that there's incredible minds who are just beautiful people who devote so much and have given themselves over to learning how to manage a particular kind of pain that is so relatable, but so difficult to talk about and to find spaces where you can talk about them. So I just wanna say the reason I felt compelled when you said this, and let me just backtrack. I talk on this podcast about intimacy and every guest that we have, I say the interviews are the best when it's a topic that you really care about. And this was the topic that you said was really important to you. Why? I think because we know that sexual assault is a lot more common than any representation in media or news would indicate. We know that it's very, very common. And because we know that it's common and it happens to all kinds of people in different situations, I think we should be open to having conversations about what the aftermath of that kind of violation does and or can do to a person's intimate experience. I think we've seen it go one or two ways in a lot of our representation, which is that a violation of a sexual nature causes a person to either shut down when it comes to intimate experiences or it causes them to become wildly promiscuous in a way that is destructive because they are doing it without intention or without any real care for themselves. There are other options. There are other ways. There are more ways than those two ways for this situation to turn out. And when I was sexually assaulted because I am a survivor of sexual assault, I felt like something was wrong with me because I did not have one of those two reactions. And I thought those were like the sanctioned victim reactions and I'm glad to have found out that that wasn't true and that that wasn't the case. So I wanna talk about it because there is a chance somebody out there needs to know that this isn't the case. I am so grateful for the line in your book, rape is not sex. And I don't know why those four words never occurred to me or I've never come across them. And again, in full disclosure, I would say that I probably don't lean into literature or education in this realm that are around non-consensual experiences. So maybe that's just a me thing. I'm not saying that that's the common experience, but I had never heard anybody say that before or never heard it put that way before. Can you tell me about those four words? Absolutely. When I was growing up, there was definitely if not in books or in media, the societal and cultural belief that when someone sexually assaulted you and they raped you, that what they had done was have sex with you without your permission. And that messes up a lot for a young woman, for a 14 year old girl who is also being raised in purity culture, believing that what had happened to me had not just been a crime or a violation against my body, that it had taken my ability to say yes to sex, that it had taken that from me. That my first time having sex, which was supposed to be this very precious thing about my body, that choice was now gone and there was no getting it back and there was no option for seeing it any other way from any other perspective. When I realized that what had happened to me was not sex, not only was it freeing for me from an emotional standpoint, but it also put into perspective the fact that my virginity was considered a commodity. And I had to think about that. Is my virginity a commodity? Am I less valuable without it? And it took a really long time for me not only to understand that, A, whatever virginity was, I had not lost it in that moment. That's not something that somebody can take from you. And B, that what had happened to me, the definition of what had happened to me was simply rape, not for sex, not non-consensual sex, it was rape and that is separate from sex. And I wish, oh my God, I wish that anybody in the whole world had told me that before it happened. I wish that anybody in the whole world had told me that if it happened to me that what was to blame was not my budding sexuality or my blossoming body, that it was just a decision that someone else made to be violent. When you talk about your sexual assault and what happened to you, because you've been brave to share your entire story in the way that it does and every article that I have read about, because you started off actually, one of your biggest viral pieces of work in that essay that you first wrote was about your rape and your sexual assault. And with that conversation comes the dialogue about your dad as a sexual assaulter and your knowledge that that has to come together but still being brave enough to stand up and say this is a topic that I wanna talk about is really cool. Thank you. Why did you decide to do that? Because being a survivor of sexual assault and being the daughter of a man who committed sexual assault were things that were part of my reality, part of my thought processes, part of what was running around my mind quite a few days of the week. And I process through talking about things and through writing about things. Not only are there a ton of people who grew up the child of an incarcerated person, if we look at the rape statistics in this country, how would it be possible that people who commit rapes don't have family members or children? How would that be possible? It's not possible. So why don't we ever hear anything from those people? Why don't we ever hear anything about how another person's choice to take away another person's choice affects you and your family and your life and your emotional intelligence and your livelihood and all of those things? Why don't we talk about it? And I realized we didn't talk about it because we felt like being related to someone who did something like that said something about you. If you have a parent or a sibling or a cousin, an uncle, a friend who does something like that and they go to prison and they are being held accountable, you are supposed to pretend that person doesn't exist and you are definitely supposed to pretend that you don't think about, care about or care for that person anymore. And that was not my reality. And I knew that that didn't mean something was wrong with me eventually. I knew that my capacity to love and care for my father, even as I knew I could not forgive him for his transgressions didn't mean that something was wrong with me or that I had done something wrong. Welcome, Jim and Ika. I am so excited to have you because you're calm. Thank you. Your energy is so grounded, is so calming. And before we press record, I was like, what are the right questions? What are the wrong questions? What are this? And you're like, hey, just whatever you wanna ask is totally fine. And you said I'm completely comfortable answering whatever it is that you wanna talk about when we press record. Yeah. So let's break into this. You listened to the Ashley Seaford interview. I did. I would love to hear your reflections on that. And if you're comfortable giving people some jump off points if they had reflections on that, how do they start conversations within their given toolbox right now? Yeah, I love the conversation. I think the conversation, one for me, being a survivor or a victim because language and also having a parent that caused harm to others, that's a mindset and trigger warning because I would love to drop those. I was in the room when my mother was murdered by my sperm donor. So this is why I say I'm a child of trauma because that is the first thing that moved me through. And even being like, I'm so sorry. Yeah, I was just telling your sister, I was like, this is so, it's like a bio thing now. Like I'm like, here's my bio. It's a detail of your life, but it is a very sad, sickening detail. It's a detail that structured my movement to get me here, right? Like, is it sad? Yes, if I was older, would I have been more affected? Probably, I was one. But hearing her talk about asking him why and he was like, it was a choice. I was like, ooh. But what I loved about the interview, it was very honest and also it hit on the sexual side of things. Yes. And I love talking about that in the sense of people are like, how are you okay? I'm like, stop talking to survivors in this drop voice. I'm like, we're still people, we're still sexual beings. And also like the way we look at sex, may it have changed? Yes, may it not have? Yes, I was a super sexual person before, I'm a super sexual person after. But also that's not everyone's narrative. So I think that conversation was beautiful to like open up because people don't talk about it. I mean, people don't talk about trauma in general. And then the vulnerable, anytime I hear someone's vulnerability of sharing their story, because you never know how it's gonna land. And also vulnerability is just scary because you never know how it's gonna land and or how people will try to use it against you. Because that's what we see, right? Like when people are like, I was raped, were you? But well, let's ask and I'm like, one to 2% of people lie. It's not a fun thing to just wake up and be like, you know what, today I'm gonna ruin someone's life and say I was assaulted. Like, no, because it's not just about that person. Now this is your life, your name is all over it. Love is in friends, love is in friends. I'm gonna take you on a trip, baby, I don't pretend, I said, love is in friends, oh. I'm gonna hold you down down to the end, I said.