“
So, to you, the man on the sidewalk, I’m quite sure you will never read this essay. You will never watch Ever Mainard’s comedy, or download Jailbreak the Patriarchy, or spend a minute imagining how those women that you harassed on Friday night actually felt. You probably don’t even remember Friday night, and if you do, your memory is the sound of your friends laughing.
But that is not all that happened. You were a harasser, the guy they make subway posters about, the guy who contributes to rape culture. Ask your female friends, if you have any, if they’ve ever walked home late at night with a key pushed through their knuckles, just in case, if they’ve ever crossed the street to avoid a stranger, just in case, if they’ve ever taken the long way home because of the weird guy on the corner, just in case. Ask them if they’ve ever made up a boyfriend to get a guy to leave them alone, if they’ve ever gotten off a train car and moved to the next because you just never know, if they’ve ever shelled out for a cab because men like you were at the bus stop. Do you really want to be that guy?
”
— A Letter To The Guy Who Harassed Me Outside The Bar (via brute-reason)
(via fuckyeahsexpositivity)
6:01 pm • 13 May 2013 • 101 notes
“First you’re taught to fear a phantom, a man in black, a man with a knife, a man who’ll pounce in dark alleys. Well-intentioned women—mothers, aunts, teachers—will train you to protect yourself: Don’t wear your hair in a ponytail; it’s easier to grab. Hold your keys in one hand; hold your pepper spray in the other. Avoid dark alleys. When you reach young adulthood, the lessons change. They acquire an undertone of disgust: Don’t drink so much. Don’t wear such short skirts. You’re sending mixed signals; you’re putting yourself at risk. If you follow the advice and it never happens—if you end up one of the three out of four—you can convince yourself that safety is a product of your own making, a reflection of inherent goodness. But if you’re paying attention, you realize something doesn’t add up. Because it keeps happening: to your sisters; to your friends; to little girls and grown women you’ll never meet, in places like Cleveland, Texas; Steubenville, Ohio; New Delhi. Good people, bad people, neutral. It keeps happening in TV shows and novels and movies—they open on the missing girl, the dead girl, the raped girl. If you’re paying attention, you begin to realize that it isn’t happening. It is being done. And you are not safe. You have never been safe. You were born with a bulls-eye on your back. All you have ever been is lucky.”
— The Female Gaze: SO MUCH PRETTY by Cara Hoffman - review Cara Hoffman’s really amazing, really important novel So Much Pretty at The Female Gaze this month. (via cocothinkshefancy)
(via little-lionman)
5:30 pm • 6 May 2013 • 19,607 notes
“If owning a gun and knowing how to use it worked, the military would be the safest place for a woman. It’s not.
If women covering up their bodies worked, Afghanistan would have a lower rate of sexual assault than Polynesia. It doesn’t.
If not drinking alcohol worked, children would not be raped. They are.
If your advice to a woman to avoid rape is to be the most modestly dressed, soberest and first to go home, you may as well add “so the rapist will choose someone else”.
If your response to hearing a woman has been raped is “she didn’t have to go to that bar/nightclub/party” you are saying that you want bars, nightclubs and parties to have no women in them. Unless you want the women to show up, but wear kaftans and drink orange juice. Good luck selling either of those options to your friends.
Or you could just be honest and say that you don’t want less rape, you want (even) less prosecution of rapists.”
— A Short Post on Rape Prevention (via brute-reason)
(via loveyourrebellion)
12:27 pm • 30 April 2013 • 47,193 notes
home-of-amazons:
nymeses:
This is what feminists mean when we talk about rape culture: these cards are considered socially acceptable and men buy them. Women are socialized into believing they are nothing more than fucktoys and men are raised to believe that rape is a joke.
Stores sell merchandise encouraging men to beat and rape women, and men are complaining about misandry hats? Fucking hell.
(via eat-my-fuck)
5:47 pm • 21 April 2013 • 24,811 notes
“(TW:RAPE)
”Boys are told from a young age that whatever they do will be excused under the “boys will be boys” mantra, and that “boys will be boys” mentality leads to what I call the “BOILING FROG” problem of women’s sexual boundaries. I call it that because if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump right out, but if you put a frog into a pot of room-temperature water and slowly heat it to a boil, the frog will acclimate as it heats and never jump out, eventually boiling to death. Similarly, when we learn as young girls to tolerate “low-level” boundary violations like the ones we often are forced to suffer in silence at school, at home and on the street – bra-snapping, boob-grabbing, ass pinching, catcalling, dick flashing “all in good fun” relentless violations that adults and authorities routinely ignore – it makes it harder for us to notice when even greater boundaries are being violated, eventually leading to the reality that many women who are raped just freeze and fall silent, because that’s what they’ve been taught to do over and over since day one. You tell me what’s more infantilizing: repeatedly letting boys (and grown men) off the hook for their behavior because “boys will be boys” and we can’t ever expect any differently, or creating a consent standard in which all partners take active responsibility for their partner’s safety, and which acknowledges the truly diseased sexual culture we’re soaking in every day.”
—
The (nonexistent) terrible, horrible, no good, very bad consequences of enthusiastic consent - Jaclyn Friedman (via queerintersectional)
The absence of no equaling a yes suggests that all women exist in a constant state of yes to absolutely everything, unless they say no ahead of time. Which suggests that consent isn’t required, just a lack of clear objection. So unconscious, gagged, or even unable to speak the language of the rapist would all be considered consent (aka lack of objection). This is idiotic, and just highlights that culturally speaking rape is not considered a crime at all. In no other crime are you considered complicit if you didn’t object to being victimized ahead of time. You really should not have to point out to someone that it is not okay to stick things in you while you’re sleeping. Seriously, from now on I’ll just picture what the court would say if the positions were reversed, and a woman assaulted a man in the exact same circumstances with a strap-on dildo. Somehow, I don’t think the response will be “Girls will be girls”.
(via marjchaos)
this is literally one of my favorite posts about rape culture because jesus christs yes it is so true.
(via redefiningbodyimage)
6:30 pm • 15 April 2013 • 18,290 notes
“In the U.S., where ninety-six percent of the reported perpetrators of rape are white, eighty percent of the men in prison for rape are black.”
— Joseph Weinberg & Michael Biernbaum, Conversations of Consent: Sexual Intimacy without Sexual Assault (via cocknbull)
(via smut101)
1:43 pm • 26 March 2013 • 24,245 notes
little-lionman:
pasylree:
#safetytipsforladies: A hashtag about how tired women are of being told to do stupid, ineffective, unrealistic things to avoid being raped.
OMG!!!!!! TW!
All of the awards.
1:01 pm • 25 March 2013 • 97,816 notes
![loveyourrebellion:
Don’t. Fucking. Rape. People. [X]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/b56dcb83941aab8a71b5b6fff519b457/tumblr_miaivnYb4A1qbtc50o1_500.jpg)
