{look upon my works, ye mighty}

Link of the Day: This Is War.

Nope, not a political link. It's about Animorphs, actually, and why the final book ended the way it did. While procrastinating on writing final papers, I've been cleaning up my tags and found out that I had an Animorphs tag, which led me to a very old entry where I discussed a letter that nyrhtek had linked to wherein K.A. Applegate discusses the end of the Animorphs series.

And I hated the end of the series. I really, really loathed it. I wanted to scream and fanwank about it when I read it though thankfully, I didn't have a livejournal or a deadjournal back then to rage about it.

Why thankfully?

Because I was completely and totally wrong to hate it as I did. She had a really good reason for ending it the way she did and just because I hated it on a personal level and was horrified at what happened to my favorite chars, well, reading her letter got me over that. Especially the following paragraph:

Pretty soon you'll all be of voting age, and of draft age. So when someone proposes a war, remember that even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows and grieving parents.

A-fucking-men.

...And now I want a Tobias-hawk icon. Or maybe a Rachel-Tobias one. Canon ship ftw, in this case. Which is another reason why the Animorphs books are awesome -- they're good enough to make me ship a canon pairing, which is pretty rare where I'm concerned. I'm picky about shippings and pairings and unless I like both characters in a pairing, it's unlikely I'll like the actual pairing as a whole. And I'm even pickier about female characters, because there aren't that many of them to begin with and I tend to get a little irate when I keep empathizing better with the male chars than the females. Nothing against guys but it would be nice to have some female characters out there that I can understand and really get behind, you know what I mean?

So, Rachel/Tobias? Totally my rock-solid OTP there. Hits all my buttons and has two of my top three chars from the series. Occasionally my top two depending on what I've been reading recently.

Edit: I have an Animorphs icon now. XD Text is Elfangor's hirac delest, image is of Rachel and Tobias dancing. With apparently Ax-the-Afro-Andalite in the background.

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.

Ah, "slut." A compact little word, forceful even in the way it sounds, starting out with a hissing sibilant and pushing off of the tongue through the L and U, and then that nastily crisp T. "Slut." Say it a few times out loud. Roll it around in your mouth. "Sssslut." "Sss…lllut." Say it again. Notice that it's difficult -- almost impossible, in fact -- to pronounce it neutrally. It's got a sneer built into it, that word. It's not as twangy and unthreatening as "tramp." It's not as easy to yell as "whore." "Whore" is built for screaming rage and dishes flying through the air, with a nice gusty H at the front and a big old roaring R bringing up the rear. Not "slut," though. "Slut" is muttered. "Slut" is whispered. "Whore" comes in like a punch, but "slut" tingles, like a slap. "Slut" hides behind the teeth. "Slut" is for when your back is turned.

"Slut" is for when you don't act like a lady. "Slut" is for when you sit with your legs apart. "Slut" is for when you wear it short, tight, without a bra, cut up high and down low and around the side, because, see, "slut" is also for when you have the nerve to enjoy your body in front of women who hate their own bodies. Don't strut. Don't dance with soul, or lick your lips. Don't look too good; don't think you look too good. Digging your own self is slutty. Making your own good time is slutty. Who do you think you are, anyway? Knees together, slut.

"Slut".

Read it, love it and never use that word again.