RTd this stuff earlier and it’s worth to look at it here. too. SPREAD THIS PLEASE. This is from Lisa Bloom, she is a lawyer and she is awesome!
(Source: teafortwo29, via windbladess)
quick question for all the fuckboys and rape apologists: why is it when alcohol is involved in rape, the female victim drinking makes her more culpable for the crime committed against her, but the male rapist drinking makes him less accountable for his crime?
(via clockwork-mockingbird)
All right, yeah, you know what, I’m fucking sick of watching these news stories scroll past. I’ve kept my mouth shut for a while now and I am fucking DONE.
Fun story about me that you may not know: I’ve been sexually assaulted six times. That number might be one up or one down depending on how you want to quantify sexual assault. Is it a forced kiss? Being held down? Being poked and prodded? Being felt up? Where do you want to draw the line at “I didn’t say yes to this”? According to the statistics, it’s not an ‘if’ for me on something like this, it’s a 'when.’
And let me be perfectly fucking clear. Not one of those occasions happened when I was wearing less than my usual uniform of a t-shirt and jeans. These were guys I knew. More often than not, this happened in public, at school, with more witnesses than I could shake a stick at. In front of peers, friends, teachers, whatever. The first time it happened, I was in the fourth grade. I was eight. I punched the kid in the face and I was the one who went to detention. From a teacher who had watched the entire thing, every day for a month. I was the one who was punished, and the boy was taken to get an ice pack for his cheek.
Because “violence is never the answer,” right?
Because “boys will be boys,” right?
Because “well, sweetie, he just has a crush on you,” right?
Because hush, honey, this is the price I pay to live in this world. Because being pretty is the rent I pay, because if a guy doesn’t think I look “damn fine” at any given moment, then I’m not a person to them, but if I do look good, then I was asking for it. Because when I take a guy to the ground for laying hands on me in an unwelcome way, I’m taking it too far, and he’s the victim. Because it’s all about how “he’s a young man with such potential” but “well, see, she’s had a lot of boyfriends,” so it’s all okay. Because boys are all about their sparkling future, but girls are all about their past.
Because this isn’t about some hypothetical situation, when you say things like “well, but is it really all HIS fault?” It’s not. It’s about a human being whose life was destroyed, and it sure as shit wasn’t the rapist.
Because, hey, let me ask you a question.
If it’s me–in two, five, seven years, if it’s my picture under a headline with the work RAPE in bold, are you going to blame me? Are you going to ask me if I was 'dressed slutty,’ or if I was drunk, or if I was walking alone? Are you going to be asking if it was my fault, and talking about how the person who attacked me was 'such a nice boy’?
Because if your answer is yes, I don’t trust you now, and I sure as hell won’t trust you then.
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.
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.
When I was 13 years old and curious about sex and love, I asked my mom if she had had sex before marrying my father (of whom she is still married to, and has been since before I was born). She said that that wasn’t really a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question. I said ‘sure it is, you’ve either had sex before him, or you haven’t’. She brought me onto the couch and sat me down and told me about the boy she liked when she was young and how one night she snuck into his house while his parents were gone and they were kissing and he said they should have sex and she said that she wanted to save sex for marriage and he laughed and basically took all her clothes off and he raped her and as my mom was telling the story she cried and this was the second time I had ever seen my mom cry. She was 12 when it happened.
In grade 8 I got a call from my friend in the middle of the night and she was drunk in the park crying and told me that she went out that night with some other friends and they drank a little and her guy “friend” starting flirting and yes she laughed at first but then he tried to pull her shirt over her head and she pulled away and he ripped her shirt and it was her favourite shirt and then he pushed her to her knees and HIS BEST FRIEND HELD HER JAW OPEN WHILE HE FACE FUCKED HER. And so I went to the park and picked her up and took her home and slept in her bed with her except we didn’t sleep because she just cried and her mouth bled and this was four years ago but I still have to be the one to bring her items to the till it the cashier is a man, and she still has anxiety attacks and she’ll get a rash all over her body and I just want to kill those boys but instead they are still walking around. And I’m in the bathroom with her, dabbing at her skin with a warm cloth until it returns to its regular colour.
And in grade 9 one of my closest friends was kinda seeing this boy and so they hung out one night and then she said that she really had to be getting back home and he said that she wasn’t going anywhere until she gave him what he wanted and he parked the car and took off her clothes and she said no and he ignored her and so she laid in the backseat totally limp and just cried and it wasn’t even sex, he just masterbated by using her body instead of his hand and she came to school the next day with vodka in her water bottle and she drank all day and I had to fight her to get the alcohol away from her and she just cried and threw up and I skipped class while I held her hair back and that same boy texted me a month later, asking if I ever wanted to hangout sometime.
And in that same year my very best friend who has never even kissed a boy, confessed to me that when she was 9 years old, her 12 year old cousin made her give him a hand job and he told her that was what cousins do and he gave her a chocolate bar afterwards and she told me that he probably doesn’t even remember it but that it’s something that she’ll never have the luxury of forgetting.
And in grade 10 I knew a girl who invited her best friend over to watch Disney movies and then he started to put his hands down her pants and she said no but she is 130lbs and he is 220lbs and he called her a tease while she tried to fight him but he used one hand to hold her down, and the other to put inside of her and i was the one to push her inside of a classroom and stand in front of her while calling the police when he showed up at our school looking for her and she was so damn scared.
And a few months later I skipped class and was in the car with a guy who i had had unprotected sex with in the past while under the influence of cocaine but this time I was sober and I insisted we use a condom but he told me he couldn’t feel anything while the condom was on so he ripped it off and I said I refused to have unprotected sex again and so he just grabbed me and forced himself into my mouth and I was crying and he pulled me onto him and I just came saying “stop” over and over like a broken record but he must’ve heard something different because he went until he came and I just sat naked in the backseat while he drove me back to the school and said “we should do this again sometime”. And I had five showers that night and I scratched at my skin so hard to try and rip his fingerprints off of me, I still have the scars.
And I found out soon afterwards that that same guy had raped a classmate of mine, 5 months earlier and she told me about how he brought her McDonald’s first, and how he said they could take things slow and she told me about how he didn’t listen to her either. And he goes to our school and so after she told me about her incident and I told her about mine, we decided to report it to the police and the trial is currently still going on and he told people about it, except in his version we are just “asking for attention” and all his friends talk about how bad they feel for him. As if HE is the one that still wakes up screaming. As if HE felt like his skin no longer was beautiful, no longer belonged to him.
And I held her in my arms as she bawled after giving the police her statement. And she did the same for me.And I met a woman a year ago in a paint store and she had a service dog and I asked what the dog was for and it turns out that she had been so brutally raped and abused in her life, that the dog is literally trained to keep men away from her.
And I’m so FUCKING SICK AND TIRED OF THIS WORLD WE ARE LIVING IN. How many rape victims eyes have I already looked into? How many more will I? And how many more friends will I hold while they shake? Because I don’t know how many more I can take. And who the fuck still has the nerve to make rape jokes? And… Something just has to change. Please, someone just start being that change.
-16 year old girl
Did I reblog this already I dont care
(via lathori)
