what do we do tho? like, honestly? what happens if he’s elected? what do we honest to god do?
Coming from the UK after our own catastrophe: you make his life hell. You make his government’s life hell. Anything and everything shitty that they want to do, you protest, you campaign, you petition, you lobby. You tie the whole thing up in so much red tape that Mr I’ve-Never-Had-Anyone-Say-No-To-Me starts loathing his job.
You create private safe zones, you look out for one another, you let your now validated racist, homophobic, transphobic neighbours know that their bigotry will not be tolerated through any means you feel it’s safe to do so. You join forces. Despite everything, you thrive out of spite, out of survival, out of a need to protect your own.
All of these communities have faced untold amounts of hell before and we’re all still here. It’s in our history to survive – in our genetic makeup. There will be losses and there will be casualties but in four years you’ll still be here and you’ll vote him out and the time to grieve will be then. For now, fight. In any way you can, even if all you can do is get through each day at a time. Fight him every step of the way.
you can throw all the blame on thirty party voters, or you can also factor in that this is the first election in FIFTY YEARS without the voting rights act protections making sure people of color and other marginalized groups can get to the polls
Racism is not in your intent. Your intent is immaterial in how racist your actions are. This isn’t about you BEING a racist. It’s about you DOING A THING that is racist. Your intent doesn’t change it. Your ignorance of its meaning doesn’t change it. It’s got nothing to do with you as a person and everything to do with the meaning of your action in the context of sociocultural history.
I’ve been a reading machine in the past eighteen days. In fact, I’ve read five novels, across five different genres. One was young adult literary, one was young adult genre, one was an adult literary, and two were adult contemporary fantasies.*
All five featured the main female character getting raped.
By the time I got to book number five, I was so weary, so emotionally drained, so angry. It took me quite awhile to calm down (even if the main character isn’t written as scarred by her experience, I sure as heck am) and parse the source of my rage.
I galloped over to Facebook and told the world how angry I was. I added that none of the male characters in these books had to undergo a sexually degrading experience in order to come of age or bulk up their character development or move the plot. Facebook replied with a host of suggestions for books with boys being raped in them, but that wasn’t really what I was after. I wasn’t really looking for equal-opportunity violation.
What I want is for there to be less gratuitous literary rape.
I’m not talking about books like Speak. I’m talking about novels where the rape scene could just as easily be any other sort of violent scene and it only becomes about sex because there’s a woman involved. If the genders were swapped, a rape scene wouldn’t have happened. The author would’ve come up with a different sort of scenario/ backstory/ defining moment for a male character. Really, this sort of rape is such a medieval, classical way to tell a story. Need to establish some stakes? Grab a secondary character and rape her. Possibly with a god or a mythological object if you have one handy.
And that starts to feel a lot less like realism and more like a malingering culture of women as victims. And it starts, especially when the author is male and the rape scene is graphic, to feel suspiciously like the goal is titillation. It starts to feel like the author believes the only interesting sort of GirlAngst is sexual abuse.
Yes. Having someone force themselves on us is pretty damn traumatic, folks. But guess what? Our personalities are formed by a whole host of experiences. Pretty much the same host of experiences that any man might encounter.
Now, on Facebook and Twitter, people said “but then you’d complain about rape and violence against women being under-represented in fiction.” First of all, no. I wouldn’t complain if there were no more gratuitous rape scenes. And second of all, the rape scenes I’m referring to are not scenes that are going to start dialog about rape. They’re scenes that enforce the woman’s role as Sidekick and Victim and Rescue Me! and I-Am-Only-The-Sum-Of-The-Places-On-My-Body-You-Can-Violate-Me.**
I want to know why this is an easy fall-back, rape. Some folks on Facebook said, “Because it’s the worst thing that can happen to a woman.”
Is it? Is rape then also the worst thing that can happen to a man? No? It’s different for women, you say? Why is it, then, that we as women should find having our sexual integrity robbed from us worse than torture and death? Is it because … I-Am-Only-The-Sum-Of-The-Places-On-My-Body-You-Can-Violate-Me?***
So what I’m saying is: yes, write about rape. I don’t believe in censoring fiction. But I do believe in writers knowing why they’re writing what they write. And if authors are writing a scene because they subconsciously believe that a woman’s sexual purity is the most important thing about her, they need to reconsider.
I can’t decide if a gratuitous rape scene offends me worse when it’s written by a man or a woman. One makes me angry because it feels like it’s selling rape culture. And the other makes me angry because I feel like women are buying it.
World, we need to talk.
*No, I’m not going to tell you what they were. A book that turns me off might be someone else’s favorite, so I try not to UNrecommend books. I prefer to just recommend the ones that I enjoy.
reblogging this ‘13 post because in ‘16 fiction looks the same
Only gonna say that at least during the Medieval era rapists were generally violently punished for raping, should they be convicted. That isn’t to say that the acquittal rate was any lower than it is today in such cases, particularly when juries were all male and the punishment for rape was hanging or being locked in a hanging cage so people could watch you slowly die. (1, 2)
I had this conversation with a friend last night after watching the first episode of new BBC crime drama The Missing.
There’s a moment where the girl who was kidnapped as a child and has returned as a young woman, reveals she was raped. The camera focuses on her father as he trembles with rage and grief and immediately leaves the room to go and punch a room in a bathroom. Because he’s the real victim, right.*
Crime drama is particularly bad for this (alongside ‘serious’ fantasy), but I’m so sick generally of rape being THE female narrative. It’s difficult to talk about the issue without sounding like I’m trying to downplay how traumatic rape is for its victims (who are of course, of both sexes and all ages). But the thing about considering it ‘the worst thing that can happen to a woman’ is that it’s saying it’s ‘the most important thing that can happen to a woman’.
Frankly, however sternly these dramas treat sexual assault, they are contributing to rape culture. They are reincofrcing the notion that women don’t amount to much more than potential rape victims.
And the idea that it’s aprt of ‘realism’ doesn’t hold water. A lot of things are real that don’t get portrayed much in fiction – going to the toilet, blinking, having a cold. If you think you can’t get through a single narrative without a female character getting raped or threatened with rape, you should check out Terry Pratchett. A man who wrote over 40 books set within a fiction world richly textured with psychological dark and light, and peopled with many and varied female characters without ever going there. Rape in stories is, 99 times out of a hundred, laziness. And thart is a terrible reason to include something so unpleasant in a book.
* This is the second series of The Missing, following an entirely new story. I didn’t watch the first (I won’t be watching any more of the second) but Wikipedia tells me it followed the disappearence of a 5 year old boy. I’d imagine the circumstances of the boy’s kidnap aren’t about sexual assualt. Little boys that go missing in crime fiction don’t suffer that fate with the certitude that litle girls do.
A 36-year-old Scottish tourist wearing traditional Muslim garb had her blouse set on fire in a bizarre incident outside a pricey Fifth Ave. boutique, police sources said Monday.
The incident happened , when she was window shopping on 5th Ave. She suddenly saw a man with a lighter in his hands and felt the heat. Her blouse was set on fire and
the sleeve of her blouse was charred and smoldering. Luckily , she wasn’t hurt and this case is investigated by the police. They are trying to determine if it was a hate crime.
Due to recent events and constant oppression of the minorities it is more likely we will hear soon it was a hate crime. Moreover, we will possibly see the same thing again.Hopefully no one gets hurt. What a time to be alive.
I am the ’70s child of a health nut. I wasn’t vaccinated. I was brought up on an incredibly healthy diet: no sugar till I was 1, breastfed for over a year, organic homegrown vegetables, raw milk, no MSG, no additives, no aspartame. My mother used homeopathy, aromatherapy, osteopathy; we took daily supplements of vitamin C, echinacea, cod liver oil.I had an outdoor lifestyle; I grew up next to a farm in England’s Lake District, walked everywhere, did sports and danced twice a week, drank plenty of water. I wasn’t even allowed pop; even my fresh juice was watered down to protect my teeth, and I would’ve killed for white, shop-bought bread in my lunchbox once in a while and biscuits instead of fruit, like all the other kids.We ate (organic local) meat maybe once or twice a week, and my mother and father cooked everything from scratch—I have yet to taste a Findus crispy pancake, and oven chips (“fries,” to Americans) were reserved for those nights when Mum and Dad had friends over and we got a “treat.”As healthy as my lifestyle seemed, I contracted measles, mumps, rubella, a type of viral meningitis, scarlatina, whooping cough, yearly tonsillitis, and chickenpox. In my 20s I got precancerous HPV and spent six months of my life wondering how I was going to tell my two children under the age of 7 that Mummy might have cancer before it was safely removed.So the anti-vaccine advocates’ fears of having the “natural immunity sterilized out of us” just doesn’t cut it for me. How could I, with my idyllic childhood and my amazing health food, get so freaking ill all the time? … My two vaccinated children, on the other hand, have rarely been ill, have had antibiotics maybe twice in their lives, if that. Not like their mum. I got many illnesses requiring treatment with antibiotics. I developed penicillin-resistant quinsy at age 21—you know, that old-fashioned disease that supposedly killed Queen Elizabeth I and that was almost wiped out through use of antibiotics.*
“If you think your child’s immune system is strong enough to fight off vaccine-preventable diseases, then it’s strong enough to fight off the tiny amounts of dead or weakened pathogens present in any of the vaccines.”
claiming children experience sexual attraction is a pedophile claim
children dont know about sex and dont care
toddlers are literally learning how to speak and walk, they barely know how their body works
teens are still exploring themselves
if you claim children can be ace youre implying other children can be sexual
youre sexualizing children
youre offending csa survivors
This is spectacularly nonsensical, and completely inconsistent with observed reality. Teens who have hit puberty typically experience at least some sexual attraction, pretty much by definition. And in the complete absence of any sexual abuse or any prompting, kids tend to have at least some quasi-sexual play, as part of figuring out how bodies work.
And I assure you, your post is a hell of a lot more offensive to most of the CSA survivors I’ve known than the idea that teenagers can be ace or non-ace. Wow. Just fucking wow.
okay here’s the thing i think a lot of antis are missing: rape is not what happens when sex is forced upon a pure and sexless being. it’s not a violation of a person’s sexlessness. rape is what happens when sex is forced upon anyone, even if that person is already sexual. it is a violation of consent to that sexual encounter.
i started masturbating at probably six and figured out that what i was doing was masturbation when i was fourteen. i had enthusiastic first-time sex at seventeen with a girl who was nineteen and didn’t stop having sex with basically any girl that would have sex with me for like… ever, i still definitely have sex with girls whenever they want to with me, and i often give guys and other-gendered people a shot too and it’s often a good time. then there’s all that porn i’ve read and written, and my forays into sex work, and my non-con kinks…
and the important thing is that given all this, given how much i like sex as a subject and an activity,every time someone has tried to use my body without my consent was a violation. nothing i have ever done or thought or wanted has ever given anyone an excuse to use me against my will.
i am unrepentantly, intrinsically sexual and this in no way sanctions anyone to sexually objectify, harass, abuse, or assault me. it is no more okay for someone to rape me than to rape the little girl down the street who goes to church every sunday and doesn’t know what a penis is. neither of us fucking deserve it.
stop reinforcing the virgin/slut dichotomy and start tearing it down, okay? that’s a lot less insulting to CSA survivors, i promise.
Steel Phoenix Studios 