Rape is the only crime on the books for which arguing that the temptation to commit it was too clear and obvious to resist is treated as a defence. For every other crime, we call that a confession.
I’ve gotten more angry asks about this post than I have actual reblogs.
imagine hearing “well if he didn’t want to be shot, he should have worn a bulletproof vest” on a trial
The thing is, though, it is said, in the case of racial minorities and vulnerable people. How often has a black person been shot just for driving/walking/ringing the cops for help/wearing a hoodie/playing in a park? How often do people say they should have behaved differently, as though their actions were a logical precursor to their murder?
How often do Jewish people, Sikhs and Muslims get blamed for being ‘too’ who they are in public? Especially women wearing a headscarf or men wearing a turban? How many are told, ‘well, what did you expect?’ when they try to report a hate crime?
How many queer people are blamed for their own murders and assaults simply for existing in public spaces? How many are told that if they just made an effort to be normal, they’d have been safe? How many were assaulted when they were actually passing, but were outed as queer and found themselves trapped and abused by people who felt angry at being ‘tricked’?
How many disabled people have been murdered just for not being normal? How many autistic children and adults are killed by their caregivers annually, or subjected to torturous therapies to try to cure them? How many interviews, articles, memoirs and documentaries justify this cruelty in the name of normalisation and blame the disabled person for the impact of their disability on their families?
People have always blamed victims. Yes, it happens to victims of rape and sexual assault, and always has done, and is disgustingly regularly reported as justification for what happened. But it happens to others too. Also, please remember that the rates of rape and sexual assault of people of colour, queer people and disabled people are far higher than the general population, and that it is far harder for these victims to access the justice system, compensation and health/support services.
this was so emotional and heartbreaking and i absolutely love her 💖
If you’re going to tell me that everyone has the ability to heal,
that everyone has the ability to recover,
then I’m going to ask why I am still covered
in so much shame I rarely go a day without butchering
my own name? Why I can still take a punch
better than I can take a compliment?
Why I teeter so constantly between flight and fight
it’s like I’m trying to beat the daylight
out of my own fucking sky,
like my body will never stop fighting him off.
Do you understand how certain I am
that I could have torn my nails into his wrist
pulled out his pulse
deactivating a bomb?
I could have called that peace.
I could have called that not checking my window
a hundred fucking times every single night
before I fall asleep.
What if I don’t want the monster
to stop being a monster?
What if that’s the only anchor I have left?
What if my sanity depends on being able to point
at the bad thing and say, That is the bad thing.
Haven’t I already lost enough time
losing track of who the enemy is?
I’ve spent half of my life not knowing the difference
between killing myself and fighting back.
What if I don’t want healing
as much as I want justice?
What if I don’t care if justice
looks exactly like revenge?
Do you think I don’t know that I can’t
want revenge without strapping the bomb
to my own chest?
That’s how the dominoes of trauma fall.
You become just another thing about to detonate.
And whatever part of me that could believe in healing
was the part he stole.
So go ask him for my forgiveness. Go ask him.
Upon discovering my therapist willingly shares an office space with a male therapist who is an accused sex offender supposedly recovered from his urge to rape 13-year-old-girls — Andrea Gibson (via unlikelywarrior)
the most important thing to me ever is bi kids knowing that it’s ok to be 10% attracted to women and 90% attracted to men or 10% attracted to men and 90% attracted to women and still feeling ok to identify as bi, and still feeling like their identity is valid, and still feeling like they can lead fulfilling lives with both (or other) genders. like that’s just so fricking important.
I’m a bi adult and you know what? I needed this. Thank you.
it’s also important to remember that it can be a fluid % like sometimes it’ll be 50/50 some times 10/90 and then drift into a 45/65 or even 2/98 and it’s still okay. It’s just where you are at that time in your life.
You’re also still bi if there’s a gender you’re in theory attracted to but in practice can’t date because prior domestic violence, rape, or sexual abuse has made that gender Not Safe for you. You’re equally valid as someone who dates whoever they’re attracted to without trauma. Be kind to yourself, and don’t force yourself to date outside your comfort zone for the sake of meeting some kind of false standard.
I’ll keep reblogging this until people stop defending rape jokes
Not to be “that guy” but everyone who jokes about rape is ugly
Tbh this is the one time I’ll support the “it’s not just men” because everyone needs to cut this tf out
I’d like to caveat this with there being forms of survivor humour that are crucial to processing and healing trauma, particularly between two people who have been through the same kind of shit, so don’t police that if you don’t know what it’s fucking like. And even then, if one person is triggered by it, the other should be sensitive of that. But that’s between survivors, so unless you’re a survivor of rape or sexual assault, you don’t get to joke about that kind of experience.
It’s definitely a positive thing that all these sexual predators in Hollywood are getting outed, but I hope we’re also prepared to make the connection between these allegations and exactly why so many former child stars end up dead or institutionalised before they turn 30. These are not unconnected phenomena. Like, I realise the whole “former child star meltdown” meme is a comedy goldmine, but maybe some awareness of what we’re really laughing at?
^^^^
The percentage of drug users who are child abuse victims is not a small one. And there is a connection. Think about it.
Cure promises wholeness even as the world pokes and prods, reverberating beneath our skin, a broken world giving rise to broken selves.
All my life, I’ve rebelled against the endless assumptions that my body-mind is broken. I’ve resisted. I’ve ranted. I’ve turned my back on brokenness. Occasionally I’ve tried redefining wholeness to include that which is collapsed, crushed, or shattered. But mostly I’ve just flat-out refused brokenness and the perceptions of weakness, vulnerability, and tragedy that come with it.
I dream of a big pottery bowl painted in intricate patterns.
But however much I refuse and, in those refusals, tell an important truth, I have to say: I am also profoundly broken. My father and the cell of perpetrators to which he belonged shattered my body-mind. The violence they inflicted winds through me. I could quibble over words and call myself damaged. But the starker, blunter broken calls to me. It speaks of fragments and shards, an irrevocable fracturing. And fracture me they did, using sexual violence, physical violence, and mind control that I can only describe as torture. I won’t write the details or try to capture the terror and pain in words. But believe me: what they did broke my body-mind. It shaped every part of my life. This is not hyperbole, not a claim to perpetual victimhood nor a ploy for sympathy, but rather an enraging truth.
I turn the bowl in my hands, lose myself in its patterns.
Twenty years ago I walked through the world detached from body-mind and emotion, skittish, fearful of human touch, hearing voices and seeing shadows, plotting suicide. When it became clear that I had to deal with this damage or end up dead, all I wanted was to be cured.
The ideology of cure would have us believe that whole and broken are opposites and that the latter has no value.
I spent years in therapy and bodywork. I practiced self-care and built a support network. I found community. I dug into shame. I helped organize Take Back the Night marches, put together rape prevention trainings, wrote about child abuse. I never spoke directly about my desire for a cure, but really I felt desperate to fix my broken self, to emerge into a place where the twenty-four years of torture I experienced as a child and young adult simply no longer existed. I spent nearly a decade working hard at recovery—recovering lost years, memories, selves—before I knew that I’d never be cured.
Slowly, slowly the bowl reveals itself—
shattered and pieced back together.
My relationship to that violence is different now—my sense of self less fractured; my ability to stay in my body-mind and in the present, stronger. Yet I am nowhere near finished with its aftermath. Not long ago, paper skeletons hanging in the window of a local restaurant triggered an old memory of torture, catapulting me into a week-long dissociative fugue. Three summers ago, suicide gripped me hard, voices filling my head, seductive and terrifying. I didn’t leave the house for a month.
Those intricate patterns—a spider web of fractures, cracks, seams.
I’m grateful that triggers and hallucinations don’t grab me in their vice grip nearly as often as they used to. Even so, I know the past will again pound through my body-mind. The voices will again scream in my head, owning me, commanding me to kill myself, self-loathing carved into my synapses. I’ve come to know that there will be no cure. I claim brokenness to make this irrevocable shattering visible.
Splashes of sunlight filter through the cracks.
There will be no return to the moment before my father first grabbed my body-mind.
Cure dismisses resilience, survival, the spider web of fractures, cracks, and seams. Its promise holds power precisely because none of us want to be broken. But I’m curious: what might happen if we were to accept, claim, embrace our brokenness?
[Source: Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfections: Grappling With Cure]
Broken.
I am broken.
These words pulse in my mind like the beating of my heart.
Broken body. Broken mind.
Broken sense of safety.
Violation.
I have been shattered like a bowl slipped through loose fingers crashing to the ground.
Six years ago, I was a pile of broken shards scattered at the feet of the men who had harmed me.
Slowly, through the help of other broken people, I have began to piece the shards back together.
My pieces no longer lay scattered.
I have pieced myself back together.
But the cracks still show.
I have not been made whole but rather am a jigsaw puzzle pieced together. Clear lines showing between the pieces.
The traumas of my past live on in me. The damage is still visible.
Broken.
I am broken.
Words that once carried shame and agony.
Now these words pulse with a different energy.
I am broken, yes. This is undeniable. Yet, in my brokenness, I have grown stronger. In my brokenness, I have found new purpose and meaning.
When the pieces of my shattered self came back together, they formed not what I was before, but something new.
There is no going back to who I was before, nor do I wish to do so.
I am better than I was, cracks and brokenness and all.
It is from that brokenness that I have crafted a self that I can be proud of.
With all the heat Anita Sarkeesian gets for her Tropes series, you’d think it was a new topic, but Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert had a discussion on a similar theme when they were talking about the influx of slasher movies on their show in 1980.
James Madison University joined the ever-growing list of U.S. colleges that have grossly mishandled sexual assault and rape cases last week when a young woman claimed that the school punished the three men who assaulted her by expelling them — after graduation.
Jon Stewart echoed the perplexed outrage of many on The Daily Show last night when he asked, “Wait a minute, ‘expelled upon graduation?’ Isn’t that… graduation? … What the fuck? … Clearly, universities are not making their campuses safe for women.”
knitting in the dark 