On Recovery...

I found this today, and it is such an accurate representation of this type of struggle, more than any medical or professional analysis I have ever read. Makes me realize that I still have a lot of self-work to do.

From Yessaid.com:

"This record is about the search for wholeness and clearly focuses on divisions.." 

How does Tori respond when she sees those reviews of her new album which dismiss her as a "weird chick" or reduce her to a sex object? 

"It's a classic case of control, don't you think? In the States I'm presented as a sex object and questions in interviews usually focus on that. And in Britain I'm 'weird.' Either description is a copout and an easy way of avoiding having to face what I'm really talking about in my songs or really want to talk about during my interviews. And, again, it is harder for me to deal with women do it. And they do it a lot, particularly in America, just write about my being a 'sex symbol' whatever that is." 

"I understand that they don't want to fuck me, they want to fuck themselves. Let's take it to its most naked form here. They see an energy that they want to be a part of. Forget about the journalists, they have another agenda. But the people in my audience really do, I believe, want to tap into the energy force I've awakened in themselves and they feel a oneness at that level, which is something higher than simply sex." 

"I've wanted to fuck guys who had a primitive energy on stage but once I meet them and talk with them I realise I don't really want to fuck them but I want to get close to where they're coming from. I talked about this to a wise woman in the desert and she said 'you want to suck his energy, isn't that what you want?' and that's what it's all about to me." 

What would Tori say to those who might respond that fucking is indeed just about the physical pleasure involved, particularly a fan's fantasy of fucking her, or his, hero? 

"To me that's a whole different thing, like someone needing to own, to possess someone else's energy, to fulfill something in themselves that is empty. Why do we have heroes in the first place? To compensate for what we lack in ourselves. It shouldn't come down to the act of fucking... To tell you the truth I can't deal with the fact that some fans would just perceive me that way. They don't have a clue about all my problems that are involved, in terms of my sexuality. If they did, perhaps they'd change their minds!" 

During her time in New Mexico, Tori also had to try and come to terms with the silencing of her own sexual energy, a question she couldn't help but relate to the development of cervical cancer in her body and the lingering after-shocks from being raped. 

"Being in that place in north New Mexico I was forced to come to terms with myself on every level. And what I definitely and to come to terms with is my violence and my withholding, from myself, of my sexuality and how I'd withdrawn from passion in my own life. I know I wrote about my experience of rape in Me and a Gun, but it's another thing to really go back inside myself and see how that experience seeped into my cells, how the disease has spread." 

"A part of me has been unable to open up intimately since I wrote Me and a Gun. After so many years I wondered what was it in me that cannot be juicy, that is so dry, except when I play music? I can go out and channel this energy during a show yet the moment I walk backstage afterwards I close down, sexually. And in New Mexico I did finally realise that I have to take responsibility for the fact that the man who originally violated me is not stopping me now- I am. But, still, there is a part of me that hasn't been able to open up since I came to terms with Me and a Gun. And without Eric [Rosse], my boyfriend, I couldn't work my way through it right now." 

"I never talk about this and it helps the healing process to do so. Because people out there must be told about the self-loathing that follows rape and how it's the greatest breakage in divine law to mutilate themselves, as I have done. Emotionally, I mutilated myself by feeling I'm not worthy of being loved and fucked, and being able to love and fuck at the same time. I was straining toward the reconciliation the last time we talked but the last frontier was crossed when I got the illness. At that point I had to deal with so much trauma in that part of my body and psyche. I do believe repression of that nature can cause the disease." 

Tori pauses and having gathered her emotions again goes on. 

"I also feel that the great frontier was crossed when I confronted my own violence, which is also what the album Under the Pink is all about. Even though I had been working my way out of that violent experience I realised thtat I would remain a victim of it until I recognised the violence in myself. And my willingness to give up my Victims Anonymous badge followed my realising that the withholding of passion and pleasure, from myself, was a form of self-violence. I told you before that seeing the movie Thelma and Lousie, years after the rape, finally made me feel like I wanted to kill that man but, instead, I now realise that what I did was kill a part of myself. I already had the hatred that women feel for themselves in the Christian Church in terms of their sexual response: that tyranny of believing that love is one thing and lust another, instead of being able to join them together. That was where I first began to be segregated, within myself." 

"On top of that I took from the rape that man's hatred of women, so much so that I couldn't access parts of myself. It's as though a computer chip has been put in, to cut out contact with your core self, your central energy source. And that hatred ran so deep that I just numbed myself to survive. Even sexually, after the rape, I became the vampire, I drank but would not let the men drink. And I had to be a hooker to have sex. Having felt I let myself, and all women, down because of my total vulnerability the night I was raped. I then had to continually tell myself I was in complete control, so I had to feel like I was getting paid." 

"Even in Baker, Baker, on this album, it says I'm the one who was endlessly unavailable, to Eric, even when having sex. And now the only way I'm getting out of all this is with him. The only way back now having taken so much hatred from one man is to accept so much love from another. But it's a long, slow process." 

"Okay, let's get to the core of it all. What this means is that Eric has to say 'I am not the man that raped you and I will not accept that concept.' When we make love he'll leave the lights on and say 'look at me, what's my name?' and I'll say his name. And even more importantly, he'll say 'what am I doing? I'm fucking you, say it." 

"And I'd try to say 'you're fucking me.' Then he'll hold me as tightly as he can and say 'And I love you, I adore you, I treasure you'. So I am healing that way. And we're healing, because as you can imagine, I am hardly an easy woman to live with. Or to love. But I am finally ceasing to see myself as a victim, which is the only way out of all this..." 

"I really do feel as though I was psychologically mutilated that night and that now I'm trying to put the pieces back together again. Through love, not hatred. And through my music. My strength has been to open again, to life, and my victory is the fact that, despite it all, I kept alive my vulnerability." [Hot Press - February 23, 1994]