As A Rape Survivor

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

One Of My Male Friends

Is being accused of assaulting the woman who assaulted him.

And seeing him breaking down because no one will believe him sucks. Her behavior has been consistently predatory. She habitually pursues men who are too intoxicated to consent and there are other victims who can confirm this.

And people still won’t fucking believe him.

I’m so sick of the idea that drunk women are incapable of consent but it’s just fine to take advantage of drunk guys.

Fuck that.

Real life is complex. Predators will accuse victims to cover their tracks. My abuser did that to me.

The whole “castrate all rapists” meme, is extremely extremely racist. Do you not have ANY clue about how systemically that was used against innocent black men accused of raping white women? Like rape is a heinous crime. I am a survivor myself. I understand having rage, I understand having bitterness, but have an ounce of empathy for other people’s trauma.

Also I Think That Drunk People’s and Adolescents’ ability to consent to sex is a lot like their ability to consent to get a tattoo

It won’t turn out as an awful traumatic thing you regret for the rest of your life in every single case, sometimes you actually did want to get a full face tattoo of spiderman’s mask and you’ll be incredibly glad you did it, but we don’t let drunk people and teenagers get tattoos because there’s a great enough risk that their decision making is compromised (by alcohol or the power an adult has over a kid or whatever) that we make them wait until they’ve slept it off, or until they’re a little older to do the thing, because we just can’t tell if it’s the booze/awe/desire for adult approval talking or them, and it would be unethical to take the money and do the tattoo. This is the same reason an adult who has sex with an adolescent, or a person who has sex with someone intoxicated is at best extremely irresponsible and unscrupulous, and at worst actively malicious and taking advantage of someone in a vulnerable position.

And so like even if Lori Maddox is completely psychologically unscathed and really enjoyed losing her virginity to Bowie, it was still utterly wrong and fucked up of him to have sex with her, similarly, no matter how much you still love the ink your cousin’s shady friend gave you when you were 14, he was still a bad dude. She doesn’t have to be damaged for him to have done something really really bad by putting her wellbeing at risk like that.

I had sexual experiences as an adolescent with people older than me that I regard as consensual even now, like they didn’t damage me, I had fun, but it was still wrong for the people older than me to agree to do that with me.

Like sometimes drunk people and adolescents do give genuine consent, but the problem is there’s literally no way to tell the difference between legit consent and not-actually-consent, so you just shouldn’t go there. You see what I mean? And even if it turns out fine, and the person turns out fine, you were still putting them in danger and that’s still very fucked up.

Basically my point is: A: If consent is blurry, then it doesn’t count, even if it turns out later it was real consent and B: Even if a victim comes out unscathed the perpetrator still did something very wrong, like it doesn’t matter that she says she had fun, even if that’s true, even if she’s not covering up some damage done by the incident, it doesn’t make what happened ok

(Yes I also do know that alcohol is a blood thinner which result in problems with tattooing, but you see my point)

You Know, It Makes Me Really Uncomfortable

When people kick people out of organizations for admitting to wrongdoing, when people don’t believe in the possibility of redemption because that means you’re going to leave the ones who lie about it, the ones who will deny to the grave that they did something wrong.

People screw up, people do sexist shit, people screw up consent because we live in a society that doesn’t teach people to get consent properly, and that doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who are irredeemable, my rapist and abuser will deny that he did anything wrong till the end of his days, he will deny that it happened. He is the person who needs to be expelled, not the person who didn’t ask consent explicitly enough and stopped when they were told no, and went through the accountability process and admits to all of this and would never do it again, but so many people will expel the person who admits to doing something wrong and keep the unrepentant monster, because the latter doesn’t admit to being wrong.

Kicking out working class QPOC who used fucked up language once, and did the accountability process and admits it freely and keeping the guy who covers up his emotional and physical abuse of his partner is vile.

I believe in transformative justice. I believe deeply in the possibility of redemption and people who don’t scare the daylights out of me.

Believing Survivors is not the same thing as believing accusers.

By which I mean, if someone is telling you someone did x, y, or z to someone else, but the person who was supposedly the victim denies the allegation.

Believe the victim, don’t turn shit into a shitstorm against the victim’s will. Check with survivors and people said to be survivors before spreading shit around.

I’ve seen abusers start witch hunts against other people to conceal their own behavior, do not let them do it.

A Little Scenario

Let’s say you live in a society where driving is hugely important, until you do, you’re a nobody, a total loser, so of course combine with how nice it would be to get to go places you want to go, you’re desperate to drive.

However, in this society driving is also a fraught and somewhat taboo activity. Driver’s ed is just an explanation of the working of an internal combustion engine, and a series of photos of injuries from car accidents. Your parents maybe explain how the suspension works, and tell you not to do it till you’re 30 and married.

In movies and tv the driving scenes are often obscured in weird ways, and give either no advice or directly terrible advice, like saying the best thing to do on icy roads is go as fast as you can, and that red means go, and yellow means hurry up on traffic lights, and that the break is located under the middle of the back seat and that headlights should only be used during midday.

Let’s also say in this society, you’re considered an absolute MONSTER if you hit somebody with your car… unless it was an accident, or they had a reputation for maybe not paying a ton of attention to traffic lights, or were out after dark, or were wearing insufficient reflective tape and foam padding, or didn’t look each way before crossing the road long enough, or were too close to the edge of the sidewalk, or had maybe irritated you at some point in your life, then it wasn’t really hitting a person with your car.

Now, this is a society that makes it easy for people who want to murder someone with their car to get away with it, and get forgiven, but also a society where a lot of people will unintentionally hit pedestrians without meaning to because there’s no cultural mechanism for teaching safe driving. It doesn’t mean they’re monsters, but they did immensely harm another human being, and that cannot be downplayed.

Now consider consent? Do decent people fuck it up? Yes. Does that mean they didn’t do something horrible and destructive? Nope. What do we do about it? Teach people how consent works.

If law enforcement listened to sex workers

We’d have a lot fewer serial killers and child molesters running around. Just had a caller admit to statutory rape