I was going to make this an edit to my last post, but it stands on its own.
How to prevent rape.Yes, I'm sick of those e-mails that tell me to carry umbrellas, watch what I wear, don't let myself be caught alone in a room with a guy - I'm sick of being told I should never let my guard down. I'm sick of being told that when rape happens, it's just a girl exaggerating or trying to cause trouble. I'm sick of having rape
trivialized, to the point that the next person who tells me it's just a bit of unwanted sex is going to have to deal with me verbally laying into them until my fingers are too tired to type/my mouth is too dry to speak. What I'd
like to do is gut them, to castrate them, then tell them over their screams that it's only a little wound, not to make such a fuss. Pain is in the mind of the perceiver.
If nothing else, that's what Take Back the Night rallies tell people - it's okay to grieve. It's okay to be hurt. There are going to be days when you can't drag yourself out of bed, periods of time when everything hurts. Smells can trigger flashbacks, sounds too. It's okay. It's normal. It's not what you want, it stops you from acting the way you feel you should, but it's what happens anyway. I'm not fostering a culture of self-pity here, but nor do I think that denying your own pain is productive. To slice away the part of you that was wounded in an attempt to be wholly clean and incomplete - no. Because then you lose, not just to someone else, but you lose part of yourself, and it's not a game because it's your soul and your mind and your
heart, and if you let someone damage you to the extent that you have no choice but to cripple yourself just so that you can survive, then they're hurting you twice over, once for the inital incident and once for the self-sundering. And they'll never stop hurting you, because you'll always remember.
And I know I said 'when you let' right after protesting the use of the phrase 'she was raped', but the thing is, getting raped is not the victim's choice. How a person deals with that
is their choice. Sleeping around, swearing off sex, hiding away, hating yourself- they're all different ways of reacting, some more destructive than others, some less. The latest rally had about 50 girls all jammed into a small room, and I know that wasn't everyone. I know there were people too scared to come to a private, Safe Space meeting. A full third of all females have to deal with sexual assault at some point in their lives; it's jumped up from one quarter. How long before it hits 50%, and then 100% so that it turns into a standard experience for women, as normal as having blatantly sexual propositions tossed your way by complete strangers when you're just walking down a street and trying to get home?
Go ahead. Say that I'm borrowing trouble. Say that feminism isn't needed any longer, that we're practically equal anyway and that rape isn't really all that much of a problem. Please do. I'd love an excuse to hit someone with my copy of
I Never Called It Rape. Because it's getting
worse. Not better. Worse. With all our supposed moves forwards, the fact still remains that the incidence of rape has gone up, not down.
And home's not safe either. A quarter of all families will have a child molested by a family member at some point; one million American women endure domestic violence each year. (And those
statistics are on the conservative side). Not to mention that again, most rapes are committed by people that the victim knows - and
yes, marital rape does count and it
is possible to be raped by a boyfriend/crush/ex. Still counts.
If you say no, if you don't want it, it's rape.
That simple.
It doesn't matter who you've slept with before, it doesn't matter what you were doing when you said stop. It doesn't matter what you were wearing, what you drank, or how badly s/he wants you. If you don't want it, then it's your body and ultimately, your choice. When someone rapes you, they take that choice away from you. They don't make up your mind for you; a person's default is not 'yes'. They simply remove your chance to say 'no' by refusing to acknowledge it.
What it all comes down, basically, is that
real men accept the responsibility to not harm another person, and it needs to stop
going unpunished. I'm not an idealist, no matter how you stretch the word. I'm well aware of the fact that most victims aren't believed, and that even when it does go to court, it's hard to win a case, standing in front of a jury that'll judge you on how you act, dress and speak, operating from the assumption that you must have done
something to provoke an attack.
I know that police prefer the victim to be battered black and blue, half-dead from physical violence, rather than deal with the tricky grey areas of physical intimidation and how if a girl knows her attacker is stronger than her, and that fighting back will just result in her getting raped and beat up both, she's more likely to give in without fighting. In my school, when we had a quick seminar about self-defense, we were told to fight as much as we could but not if we thought it would endanger our lives or if we couldn't win. One of the girls summed it up as "lie back and try to not think about it"; the girl I liked best fiercely said she'd carry a knife on her and "kill the fucker". In retrospect, those lessons were only for girls. None for guys.
If I'd been the girl then that I am now, I might have questioned that, asked why we get trained to defend ourselves but why they don't get told to not make it necessary for us to know such things. Back then, though, rape was barely even a blip on my register. It was only as we grew up that my friends started to coming to me, telling me that a friend of their father's raped them, that their boyfriend raped them, that it wasn't true they'd had sex [name deleted] because he'd forced her and she couldn't say otherwise because nobody would believe her...
Rape is
underreported.
Rape is a
weapon.
Rape
ruins lives.
And 'no' means 'no'. Always.
Always.
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