As A Rape Survivor

comingupforblair:

thepeacockangel:

thepeacockangel:

I find it really icky and uncomfortable seeing people who aren’t survivors get super into the whole like “vengance porn” thing.  I don’t want to be your vicarious “I Spit On Your Grave” thrill.  I don’t 

I don’t like it when people take up their torches and pitchforks without asking the survivor what they want and need and the way stringing up the person the mob is mad at (is relatively simple and emotionally satisfying to people) often takes precedence over caring for the person who’s been traumatized (which is hard and kind of a bummer)

And yeah I dunno when people are like “Awww yeah” to a rapist getting killed or whatever I’m like “…” because like I’m glad the they can’t hurt anyone else but like ultimately the thing is, there’s still this profoundly traumatized person out there and it still *happened* and it feels like IDK people sometimes almost like that there are monsters like that so that they can enjoy watching them get their comeuppance and that feels icky to me.

Vengeance doesn’t fix PTSD, doesn’t heal trauma, doesn’t undo what’s been done and so like I wanna see you cheer for survivors getting what they need on their own terms.  I wanna see you cheer for efforts to prevent this shit from happening in the first place.  I want to see you cheer for breakthroughs in the treatment of trauma, but people don’t cause it doesn’t satisfy them as much as seeing the villain getting thrown off a cliff.

I don’t like my pain being used as a justification for other people’s violent catharsis, an excuse to indulge in their worst impulses 

And sometimes I wonder if because rapists and so on are the current acceptable outlet for all those repressed aggressive impulses if at least some of those people who’ve never been raped, cheering on the beheadings and disembowelment of rapists and what have you, sort of tacitly approve the existence of rapists and/or on some level oppose or refuse to support the prevention of rape or don’t believe in the possibility of prevention because for them it’s emotionally inconvenient not to have a group that it’s justifiable to torture.

This reminded me of an article David Wong wrote just under two years ago

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-ways-to-keep-terrorists-from-ruining-world/

He was talking about Terrorism but I see a similar vibe in what you’re saying.

That article is pretty interesting, I agree with it to an extent and disagree with it to an extent… I think the “we’re winning” thing really disregards the fact that this particular incarnation of “Team Violence” is the creation of hideous, nightmarish imperialism in the region for over a century including the destruction of leftist parties throughout the world but especially throughout the Islamic world and of course the infrastructure and so on that we have partially being the result of extractive imperialist policies… so like we #teamviolence-d first and like while ISIS are DEFINITELY baddies who spend most of their time killing other Muslims (and that’s important to remember) I think it’s worth noting that “ISIS is what happens when you teamviolence the fuck out of people forever and do everything you can to resist any attempt at self determination and exterminate the left”