I’m taking that creative writing class and I just. Okay. Guys. Explain me a thing. WHY have I read two stories in this past semester about rape? I mean, I guess the one was more about abuse followed by murder (see my rant here), but still, Christ. Honestly I’m going to meet with the teacher about the most recent one, which I’m supposed to critique for Thursday, and just be like, “I fucking cannot do this. I am not objective enough to say shit about this girl’s writing. This is pages upon pages of a girl who witnessed the rape of someone she considered a friend and did nothing, and I have spent way too much time on the wrong side of that equation to be objective here.“ I just. Do not understand why rape is the thing. Like, guys, it’s not like it’s edgy and cool, okay, I promise, people have been hideous to each other since fucking Ur was nothing but a twinkle in the eye of some random ape. They’re not treating it as a very deep trauma and dealing with the fallout and handling it with as much care and compassion as possible, it’s not even fucking productive, it’s just annoying, Christ, fucking STOP.
Also, I honestly don’t care if it makes me a cultural heathen, I don’t like weird abstract writing that’s intended to ‘push the boundaries of what we think of as prose.’ Like, no. It’s not a failing on my part if I want to read fantasy novels with, oh, I don’t know, plot and characters and literally anything other than obsessive navel gazing. The next time I have to read the literary equivalent of that very famous piece of modern art that’s literally just a piece of plywood painted uniformly blue, I am going to scream.
FUCKING UPDATE.
So I got out of responding to the rape story, but I still had to go to class so that I could respond to the OTHER story we read (see above re: fucking abstractist writing that I still hardcore do not like). And I was like “All right, I can live with this, I got my iPod, I got my Fall Out Boy, I got my writing, I can do this.” But I forgot that the classroom is really small and my seat is very close to the teacher, so I couldn’t, like, crank my music to the point where I couldn’t hear anyone talking and so I ended up listening to the talking. And fuck me I’m angry.
Pro tip: as a teacher at a college that specializes in taking people out of like sophomore year of high school (I dropped out and started college at 16), it is your goddamn job to express clear ethical and legal boundaries. Admitting that rape is wrong is awesome, but it is ALSO WRONG to abandon a rape victim when you have every opportunity to help them. You should not ever be talking about how well a student puts the reader into the mind of a witness and makes their decision to not help understandable.
Also, there was a lot of talking about “Well, I feel like there was some confusion about consent between the boyfriend and the girlfriend.” Let’s be clear here, folks, if I wave a knife at you and you say “Oh no, don’t stab me,” and then I stab you thirty-five times in the chest, the cops are not going to be like “Well, I feel like there was some confusion between the stabber and the stabee.” That’s not how it works. If the girlfriend says no, pushes the boyfriend away physically, and reaches out to a bystander for help, that is not ‘confusion,’ that is pretty fucking clearly not consent. Like, you know what, if you’re going to make me fucking sit through this story, you’d better at least have the stones to admit that your student turned in a story about rape and you forced the rest of the class to read it.
I’ve reached this point of universally being furious with everyone in my writing class. Even the people I like. Literally just existing in the class is enough to make me angry with you, by, like, transitive properties of loathing. And my teacher can fuck the entire way off and not make snide remarks about my writing anymore just because I don’t fucking turn in weird abstract rape stories.
FUCKING EDIT: Did I forget to mention that it’s actually literally illegal to do nothing to aid the victim of a rape? LOOK AT THIS. You can be charged as an accessory to literally whatever the perpetrator is charged with.
