Today, I read an article about a woman with HIV who was raped. The man that attacked her is now HIV positive. All of the commentary surround this was about how she should have told him she was HIV+ and that women with HIV should have a badge or special underwear so that this doesn’t happen to another man. It is 12:12am and I am already done with the world.
That is rape culture
Have you ever heard the phrase cockblocking? You know, you’re at a bar, talking to a girl, and what happens? Her less attractive friend comes over and ruins everything. Cockblock. Well I have to tell you something guys: I have been the less attractive friend, and you were NOT cockblocked. I was following orders from my better-looking friend that she did not wanna fuck you. …Girls have two signals for their friends: ‘I’m gonna fuck him’ and ‘HELP.’
The number of “get me out of here” tactics women have developed and shared to help each other escape from overly-insistent-to-borderline-predatory dudes in public places should probably be enough evidence of the existence of rape culture all on its own.
(via madgastronomer)
Bolded commentary.
(via bidyke)
“I hope all rapists go to jail for the rest of their lives!”
“and then when they get to jail they get raped everyday so they have a taste of their own medicine!”
Why shouldn’t they feel what their victims felt? Why are you defending a man who sexually forced himself on someone weaker than him wtf is wrong with you people
SURPRISINGLY BECAUSE I DONT FUCKIGN WISH RAPE ON PEOPLE
and not all rapists are men
funny that men mock women going everywhere in groups
but we’re not supposed to go out alone otherwise we might be blamed for our own rape, our own murder.
-mic drop-
I’ve encountered people constantly assuming sex is good and that having sex is just something you do in healthy relationships. This creates a situation where, hating sex is a character flaw caused by those terrible sex-negative tropes society presses on you, and obviously only Bad People don’t consent to sex.
That’s rape culture. This is what environments that assume sex is unambiguously a good thing do. Saying, “It’s consensual sex that’s good” doesn’t actually fix the problem. It just creates a situation where you must be consenting to sex, because if you aren’t, you’re not having enough sex and then you’re “sex-negative”.
See, it only fixes a problem where you’re like, “Well I don’t really want to do this right now”. It does not do anything at all to help people who find sex painful. It does nothing at all to help a person who doesn’t want sex, but thinks they do because it’s been so heavily normativized they have to have sex, and have to have it in this specific way. All the, “But make sure it’s consensual!” thing does is tells the person, “Well maybe if you don’t want sex this time it’s okay, but remember you still must be having it some of the time!”
See, to actually fight rape culture you need to say “Sex is always optional. You are never obligated to have sex.” You must always be concerned with consent, and that means you must accept that the answer may very well always be no, despite the fact there’s this belief sex is the greatest thing ever.
And if someone never wants sex, then sex can’t really be a good thing to them, because it’s always unwanted.
Sex Positivity is Rape Culture in Disguise (via youlittlearsonist)
Really like this. We need to find ways of transforming real sex positivity to promote choice in sex, not uncritically promote sex itself.
(via swankivy)
Sex offenders minimize their number of victims. Speaking with 99 male sex offenders, court records showed 136 victims between them, but later during treatment, they eventually confessed to 959 victims between them.
huh weird so rapists are, like, lying about the number of people they’ve raped but all we can focus on are those damn hypothetical lying women who lied about being assaulted? lying liars lying all the time damn women lying. there’s a bigger lie in our midst, it would seem
(source)
Media Coverage Attacks 16-Year-Old African American Rape and Murder Victim For ‘Troubled Past’
Strangely enough, in the Dayton, Ohio area, we haven’t heard a lot about the case of two Franklin men who recently beat an African American teen to death. Don’t get me wrong, they’ve talked about it on the news, but it has received disproportionately little coverage compared to many other issues. To make matters worse, when the local news has covered this story, they have tended to implicitly blame the victim – 16-year-old Dione Payne – who was raped, and beaten to death by Michael A. Geldrich, 36, and Michael J. Watson, 39.
The men have been arrested, arraigned and charged with aggravated robbery and murder. They are currently in the Warren County Jail.In a sworn affidavit signed Monday by Franklin Detective Jeff Stewart we are told that “During the robbery Geldrich struck the male victim (later identified as Payne) with a table leg, fists, stomped the male with his boots and repeatedly struck the male victim’s head against the floor.”The two rapists then dumped Payne’s nearly dead body off around 10:30 a.m. in the emergency room at Atrium Medical Center in Middletown, not far from where they lived. The two seemed worried that they had “over done it” and knew that they would likely face an investigation if Payne were to die. They were right.The hospital reported that upon arrival he was in critical condition and had “heavy damage to his head and was bleeding from his ears,” according to the police. Payne also had “heavy damage done to his chest from what appeared to be someone striking him repeatedly.”The injuries were too severe for the small Middletown hospital to handle, so he was promptly transferred to Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton. Upon further examination, the MVH workers discovered that Payne had been sexually assaulted. Hospital personnel there contacted Middletown police and stated the teen appeared to have been sexually assaulted, according to the police report.Payne’s mother Tamiko Payne told a family friend Donna Parson that the family considers this a premeditated act, and thus want both men to receive the death penalty.“This is what they deserve. Death. This was a 16-year-old boy (beaten) by two full-grown men,” she explained.Meanwhile, Local Dayton Daily News seemed most interested in emphasizing two things throughout their reporting, in the article, ‘Dayton teen beaten to death had troubled past’:1. That the 16-year-old rape and murder victim had a “troubled past”, bringing up narcotics possession and sales on the youth’s juvenile record. They emphasize that he was just released October 22 from the custody of the Ohio Department of Youth Services. They even note that he was arrested for littering recently. Why such a hyper-fixation on his juvenile record? Isn’t this a case, a story and a tragedy about assault, rape and murder? Why should the local media focus so much on what thevictim has done in his past?2. That Franklin Police Chief Russ Whitman emphasized that “there is no evidence whatsoever” the rape, beating and murder of Payne was racially motivated. Perhaps they suspect that this was the first time the two men had ever purchased drugs, or maybe that they had raped, beaten and murdered other people they had bought drugs for.According to Dayton Police reports, that incident involved him firing five shots at his mother’s boyfriend after an argument at the family’s home in October of 2012. Payne was arrested on a warrant several weeks later when he was stopped for littering in the DeSoto Bass neighborhood several blocks from his house. He was transported to juvenile detention where a small amount of cocaine was found in his pocket, according to the report.The police offer no evidence nor even propose a motive for this attack and murder. Why? And more importantly, why is the local Dayton media trying to highlight statements that would exonerate the rapists and murderers from hate crime charges, while simultaneously focusing on the low points in the youth’s life that in no way justify nor caused his physical and sexual assault, as well as murder?Throughout the Dayton area, the African American community is saying they are not surprised. Dayton has a long history of slanted, anti-African American reporting such as this, where the victim is first and foremost blamed for whatever happens to them.“All evidence points to the crime being drug-related,” Dayton Daily News emphasized Chief Whitman’s statement. “Any suggestion that this is a ‘hate crime’ or racially motivated is not based upon actual evidence.”Strange, since so incidences like this are relatively unheard of in the area, regardless of whether drug sales are involved or not. Why are the police so quick to dismiss a motive of racism, and perhaps just as importantly, why is the local media asleep at the wheel?(Article by Micah Naziri; image via PBSpot)This is deplorable.
For many of these women, the reading experience begins from a place of seething rage. Take Sara Marcus’ initial impression of Jack Kerouac: “I remember putting On the Road down the first time a woman was mentioned. I was just like: ‘Fuck. You.’ I was probably 15 or 16. And over the coming years I realized that it was this canonical work, so I tried to return to it, but every time I was just like, ‘Fuck you.’” Tortorici had a similarly visceral reaction to Charles Bukowski: “I will never forget reading Bukowski’s Post Office and feeling so horrible, the way that the narrator describes the thickness of ugly women’s legs. I think it was the first time I felt like a book that I was trying to identify with rejected me. Though I did absorb it, and of course it made me hate my body or whatever.” Emily Witt turned to masculine texts to access a sexual language that was absent from books about women, but found herself turned off by their take: “many of the great classic coming-of-age novels about the female experience don’t openly discuss sex,” she says in No Regrets. “I read the ones by men instead, until I was like, ‘I cannot read another passage about masturbation. I can’t. It was like a pile of Kleenex.”
This isn’t just about the books. When young women read the hyper-masculine literary canon—what Emily Gould calls the “midcentury misogynists,” staffed with the likes of Roth, Mailer, and Miller—their discomfort is punctuated by the knowledge that their male peers are reading these books, identifying with them, and acting out their perspectives and narratives. These writers are celebrated by the society that we live in, even the one who stabbed his wife. In No Regrets, Elif Bautman talks about reading Henry Miller for the first time because she had a “serious crush” on a guy who said his were “the best books ever,” and that guy’s real-life recommendation exacerbated her distaste for the fictional. When she read Miller, “I felt so alienated by the books, and then thinking about this guy, and it was so hot and summertime … I just wanted to kill myself. … He compared women to soup.”
In No Regrets, women writers talk about what it was like to read literature’s “midcentury misogynists.” (via becauseiamawoman)
haha i threw my copy of 1984 into a wall when i started to read the rape fantasy scene by the main character i was so infuriated….and not a SINGLE classmate remembered that scene had even happened even though the narrator TELLS his love interest and she’s excited by the idea he had a fantasy about raping her. 😐
