Tag: rape

(TW: Discussion of Rape) I don’t doubt that standards of sexual consent are necessarily higher than those for other activities

(for example whining when your friend doesn’t want to go out to Karaoke a little bit is usually not going to result in trauma) but what I want to understand is what the mechanism of this difference is?  Is it a social thing about the value/intimacy/etc of sex?  Is it hardwired human nature? Is it not actually and we’re just excessively blasé about violations of consent in other areas?  Why is having sex you’re not particularly into so much more harmful than going for burgers to keep the peace when you really wanted pizza?

I’m not trying to be flip.  As most of you know, I’m a survivor myself, I’m just trying to understand what makes it different?

Thinking about the whole “Consent Is Sexy” Thing

And how people were like “No, consent is mandatory” and also like “but like we shouldn’t say that because it pressures people to consent because we’re telling them that otherwise, they’re not sexy” (whereas no one read “Consent is Mandatory” as “giving consent is mandatory”)

And like how there’s a cultural idea (protestant in origin I’d say) that what has the potential to be pleasurable must by nature be frivolous/unnecessary and it’s really interesting to me.

Also like the way things are phrased seems to come in for a whole lot of attack a lot of the time, and the thing with people reading things in “off” ways that seems almost intentional a lot of the time.

(Just a note: I am a survivor, I’m allowed to talk about this shit)

IDK I feel like the way discourse around sexual assault currently stands is pretty fucked because it’s so performative and unhelpful and like weirdly witch-hunty and there’s a sort of weird focus on “right” phrasing and “right” thought in a way that feels very much like a sort of magical formula but also the terms are often really ill-defined and in flux (like radical definitions of rape and sexual assault are very vague and weird) and like you can’t even discuss what they might be for fear of being branded a rape apologist (even if you’re a survivor and you’re talking about ways stuff has been handled around your own experience and how various radical communities have failed you or failed to handle things in a sensible way) and like IDK sometimes it feels like the current culture in terms of dealing with rape (which fails routinely to deal with the systemic problem of sexual violence) exists in this like “Satanic Panic” space where you can’t ever question it or its efficacy in dealing with the problem it purports to be about without being branded “One of THEM” and like what makes it worse is sexual violence is a real thing, and a genuinely systemic issue but we’re coping with it with strategies that belong to witch trials which don’t actually solve the problem and in fact in many cases allow and perpetuate abusive behaviors and harm survivors.

But you can’t reduce nuance and complexity to a slogan that fits on a sticker so y’ know… fuck that, right?

Whorephobia in Harlots and Harlots Fandom

Honestly, a lot of the fandom is whorephobic and terrible and a lot of the writing is whorephobic and terrible (and lazy and unrealistic) 

Like Haxby is a little shit, your ship is gross.  He’s been blatantly, unforgivably HORRIBLE to Charlotte. 

The ship with Marney is honestly amazing because it’s two sex workers who get the biz, who get each other being together HOWEVER it’s being handled in the shittiest fucking “Let me take you away from all this” way and I hate it.

Sex work is being treated as ultimately demeaning and degrading REPEATEDLY

All the misery porn, all the suffering, the fact that Lord Scumbag turned on Charlotte just to make it so that no one could be good at this and be okay with their work, all sex workers have to suffer.  They should have let him continue to be the kind of client he is, an impotent pouty man-child who wants the glamorous status symbol and is vexed by her, but like… doesn’t turn massively spiteful and over the top vengeful because he’s not even that determined.

The type of suffering, in my experience as a sex worker, is unrealistic.  It should be the moral crusader as the main antagonist, not the rival madame.

The fact that they’ve made pretty much all of the notable clients sadistic fucking monsters says a lot about their view of sex work and sex workers, most clients are just… dudes who want to get off and be told they’re real good at it.  You don’t have to make them the antagonists but the writers CHOSE to.  They chose to make another madam and the clients their main antagonists when there are SO many other options.

We’re not helpless victims, our clients are largely not monsters.

Can our work never be portrayed as just work?

This should be a lot more slice of life and a lot less over the top and I’m honestly just SO fucking angry with so many of you.

In My Experience

Very very few people lie about having been rape/sexually assaulted, however third parties are perfectly content to start rumors about other people’s sexual experiences and define them in ways the supposed victim insists are not the case, to the detriment of the person the rumors insist is a survivor… and I really don’t like that.

TW: Rape, domestic violence I want to talk about solutions

I want to discuss options for dealing with gendered violence in Leftist societies and organizations. If we don’t believe in prisons, what are the possibilities for dealing with people who commit acts like these? I know a lot of people support a very “guilt on accusation” model of dealing with these thing and straight up killing people accused of this stuff or banishing them immediately and completely, and as a survivor I have some sympathy for that outlook, but I also know that as a survivor my abuser/rapist used allegations of abuse against me to isolate me and further his control over me and so I honestly think that in order to protect victims due process and having some sort of burden of proof is a necessity.

Additionally, banishing someone from one community without followup work allows them to move on to another community where no one is aware of their behavior and even if we do our best to keep people informed it doesn’t seem to me to address the root of the problem (meaning why it happened in the first place). I’m not sure if every perpetrator is irredeemable… and I mean if we believe in prison abolition and the like, don’t we sort of have to believe in the possibility of redemption for people who’ve done truly terrible things?

I also see accusations of rape and rape apologism getting thrown around a lot in radical spaces and people dealing with them in a variety of ways that don’t seem to do much to actually fix the problem. I also see people who have no experience dealing with situations of sexual violence being called rape apologists for being unsure in dealing with said situations. I’ve also seen COINTELPRO people use allegations like these to destroy and discredit organizations and people (it’s funny the only place an allegation like that is likely to destroy someone’s life is in leftism, everyone else is peachy)

Also I think sometimes people get all torches and pitchforks while ignoring the survivors actual wishes and that seems fucked up to me, and I also think that there are issues when notions of radical consent bump up against ideas about how everyone whoever violates consent is undoubtedly and unquestionably a monster. I mean like, I know that when I was younger I got drunk and had sex with a lot of other people who were also drunk… and like that was fucked up, but I don’t think I’m a monster. I think because we live in a society where people aren’t taught about getting good consent and in fact are taught the exact opposite a lot of the time, a lot of people who aren’t monsters have failed to practice good consent.

I’m not in a good place, I’m very triggered right now and am disassociating a bit because I’m dealing with a good friend being accused of rape by their rapist and having their entire life destroyed because of it and it reminds me of what happened to me and how toxic and unnuanced the left can often be about stuff.

IDK what to do about any of this because obviously sexual and domestic violence and ignoring survivors is a huge issue.

I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what the right solution is.

I am a survivor of rape and domestic abuse.

And I just want to point out that my abuser used allegations of abuse to cement his control over me and to isolate me from people who had been my friends.

I believe very very deeply in listening to and believing survivors, but abusers will use any tool available to isolate and discredit their victims and this means that allowing rumour-mongering to cut people off from others allows abusers even greater power, and I cannot condone that.  Due process is the only way to prevent practices intended to protect victims from being used as a weapon against them.

As A Rape Survivor

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.