An open letter

No no, it's from Chainsawsuit. You can tell by the pixels.

you're Scott Kurtz? WOW

I love your work, man!

Is Kris Straub really that handsome in real life?!

I feel like I'm missing some vital piece of information.

EDIT: And then all of y'all posted while I was writing and I think I get it now.

Let me clear it up for you:

If feminists can crawl on ceilings, I'm surprised they haven't already won.

Good on you for standing up. I could tell stories about several friends, but I won't, because everything was told to me in confidence. I understand their not wanting to stand up, not wanting to be judged negatively for what was inflicted on them. So I won't tell any stories. I will say to men who think they don't know any victims, tell your closest woman friend that you think you don't know any victims. But pick a time when you have time and hugs to spare. You know, just in case.

I'd say the same applies to saying it to your close male friends, but sadly, society's pressure on men to not bring up such experiences is disgustingly effective and pervasive. So even if your close male friend has been raped, odds are he's not going to admit it to anyone in a non-anonymous setting, ever.

For bonus points, this is because of patriarchy. Patriarchy everywhere! Because according to society, if you were raped, that's like the unmanliest, most womanly thing ever. It practically turns you into a woman!

Fuck patriarchy.

OHAI

It's asking for it.

((hugs))

(Smishes?)

Son of a...

Glenn Beck goes full...just..I can't even type it out.

http://www.mediaite.com/online/glen...ootball-safety-his-man-card-has-been-revoked/

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Glenn Beck is such a fucking attention whore.

IS THIS NOW THE GLENN BECK HATES WOMEN THREAD?

Let's seriously not even give that shit the traffic.

Plus I think we're being a bit hypocritical, if women deserve respect so do the mentally unstable.

Sorry. Edited to remove DKos references.

What's wrong with Dkos?

Thanks dude. Truth be told, I can't complain. It did fuck me up in some interesting ways, but I guess privilege has its advantages, I never felt as horrible about it as a girl would.

For the record, because a pair of jokey oblique references aren't actually the same as admitting it: yeah, I was raped. By, let's see, 3 different women. I was 6. It fucked up my early sexual development because my retarded undeveloped mind became convinced that was expected, so I started trying to force myself on others as well.

If God was real, I'd be thanking him every single day that I grew out of that shit by the time I was 7 or 8, lingering light side effects notwithstanding.

I'm so, so sorry that you had to endure that, Abilio. For what it's worth, you grew into a man that I am very proud to know, and even more proud to call a friend. I'm not trying to connect one to the other - just to make it clear that who you are now is a pretty damned special individual, and one I'm glad to have in my life.

A sympathy like isn't enough. What Quat said. I don't know you well, but you come across as being a good man. I'm sorry you had to suffer that.

Super-partisan bloggery that makes a mockery of journalism?

I generally try not to link to it, especially since that oftentimes turns the argument into "But it's from DailyKos!" and the substance is totally lost. I don't have many problems with it personally, but I understand why some people do.

DKos can be overblown, but at least they're usually citing reality before they go off and tilt and liberal windmills.

Didn't Daily Kos blow the roof off of that huge 'Trig Palin is actually Bristol's baby!!!!!!!' scandal?

I did say "usually."

My wife and I had been together for over ten years before I finally talked about it. She knew that I had gone through a lot of (non sexual) physical and mental abuse throughout my childhood, but the rape was never mentioned and something I just wasn't willing to talk about.

When I was 12, the neighbourhood we lived in had alleys behind the houses and I cut through one of those on the way to school when a man grabbed me and dragged me into one of the sheds. I was raped and beaten quite badly. For years I believed it was my fault, in part due to being told that if I hadn't cut through the alley it wouldn't have happened. I was able to stop blaming myself, but the shame stayed for a long time.

Since telling my wife, I've spoken to close friends about it, but it's been a slow process that has taken years because it takes me a long time to trust anybody.

Jesus Christ, man. That's horrible.

I have the same problem. Hell, part of me STILL feels it's my fault, even though I intellectually know better. Sorry, man.

Victim-blaming is one of the more horrible aspects of our society. There's a serious need for it to be purged with the cleansing fire of a thousand suns.

Only a thousand?

Gotta avoid collateral damage to the other spiral arms, man. They didn't consent to partaking in our immolation.

This isn't terribly relevant to the latest line of conversation in the thread here, but it's definitely the thread for it, so whatevs.

I'm a white guy. Grew up middle class, in a white middle-class suburb with white middle-class parents and white middle-class to upper-middle schoolmates. Nothing special -- I had a modest college fund that paid for enough of my schooling that I had no debt after ending up with an associate's degree after five years of on-and-off public university and community college, and ended up getting an entry-level job in a field professional enough that it's turned into a career. Pretty boring stuff.

I always thought I was about as middle-of-the-road as it gets; I had more than some kids in my town and less than others, I did well enough easily enough in school that I felt it made up for my lack of athletic gifts, and had a moderate amount of success with girls. I had friends, some close to this day and others I never felt moved to keep in contact with as I moved into the next phase of my life.

Never once did I think of the vast privileges I continue to enjoy. I used to wonder at the vitriol the occasional ladyposter would spew over at the other place when she was fed up, and I never questioned that the problem lay with her and her hysterics or vapors or whatever.

And then two things happened. First, I mentioned to a female friend of mine that I try to make an effort to walk on the other side of the street from women walking by themselves when we get off the bus at the same stop, just so they don't have to worry about anything. The magnitude of her appreciation -- of an act I thought of as such a tiny courtesy, and which didn't directly affect her -- shocked me. Maybe there were some things here that I hadn't thought about.

Around the same time, I started following politics more closely and reading more widely and the non-white/male community here started getting more vocal and giving fewer fucks. Except that instead of the dialogue being occasional explosions rooted in long-boiling frustration and rage (well, not all of it anyway), it was people I knew as people first and tribal identities second talking from their hearts about the shit they deal with.

"Damn, that's a lot of shit to deal with," I thought to myself. "I've never even had to think about shit like that before."

That being my reaction instead of "Wow, she's really blowing this out of proportion" or "But I've never said something like that to a black guy!" or "I know plenty of gay folks, they get along fine, what's his problem?" is the result of a long-ass process. I'm moderately ashamed of myself for taking until 31 years old to even get to this point, but at the same time I'm glad that I don't have anything outside of a few off-color jokes when I was a dumb kid to feel actively shitty about.

Anyway, this is super long and boring and I don't really know how to bring it home to my original point, which is that the atmosphere here where seeing the rage and frustration put into context that I can understand has done a lot more to help me along this path than the "fuck you white guy you don't know" that I've seen elsewhere.

Bleh. This sounds way too much like I'm patting myself on the back. I don't mean it that way; I just mean to tell the story of how I got from "Man, her ovaries sure are making her crazy" to where I am now. Take it for what it is, and please accept my thanks if you're one of the people who has helped me consider the idea of what walking in someone else's shoes for a mile might be like.*

* By which I mean you talk about that stuff here as a member of a non-privileged class. Because I honestly can't think of a poster here on BF who I hasn't been a positive influence on me in that regard.

I have a question for those of you who feel (or felt) shame about your rape: where did that shame come from? Several people in this thread have already mentioned that they know intellectually that the shame is ridiculous, and I've been lucky enough that I only have an intellectual understanding of rape. I've never been raped, and honestly I've never understood the impulse to commit rape. It all just seems so.... weird.

Do people directly tell you afterwards that it was your fault? If so, why would they fucking do that? And if it's a more subtle accusation, how does it manifest?

One final note: I want to make it clear that I don't think you're weird or deficient in some way for feeling guilt. I'm just saying that I don't understand. Nothing more, nothing less.

Pretty much any woman who's raped is going to get "clearly you must have been wearing slutty clothes / went home with the wrong guy / failed in some respect and therefore were raped". It's pervasive as fuck. And even just "you should be sure to not wear slutty clothes when you go out, or you might get raped" as standard advice means that when a girl does get raped, that's going to echo in her head.

Fuck society.

It's also extra insidious because a lot of the no-rape rules, if you will, are often said by people who mean well, rather than your usual misogynist dickhead. Everyone does it, for different reasons. Because telling a woman to not do <whatever>, because <whatever> might lead to getting raped is a lot easier than tackling the whole rape culture thing. The ones who make me saddest are the women who lay down no-rape rules, though, because for at least some of them, it's a way to assure themselves that they'll never have to go through that, because they follow the rules. Right up until whoops, those rules turn out to be bullshit.

I've never been raped (yay) but I've been sexually assaulted (boo). For whatever reason, my brain decided that it was sort of my fault, because I wasn't insistent enough with the "no." But thankfully I never went full into the "it's TOTALLY my fault" thing, which I like to think helped make the issue ... not much of an issue for me to get past? Like it is now such a non-issue in my memory, I don't even really like bringing it up because it is so not anywhere near what so many other women have had to deal with, and it doesn't even bother me any more, so it feels like scoring cheap victim points or something. Does that make sense?

I hope that made sense!

I'm not sure if that's the motivation. (Or maybe it is... like I said earlier, I'm pretty ignorant on this topic.) But from what I understand, the non-priviledged group (in this case, women) tend to be the harshest enforcers of society's rules that help keep them down. There are all sorts of theories about why this occurs, but as far as I know, the academic community hadn't come to a consensus on the reason why.*

What's the difference?

*But I stopped studying & reading this stuff over 10 years ago, so I have no idea of the current situation of this debate.

Dude what is this I don't even

No, wait. This is the wrong approach to a good faith question. Let me try again.

The shame comes from multiple places. One major source is societal victim blaming - that comes directly in the "she was asking for it" responses and years and years of internalized "she did something to get raped" third person experiences. So when it happens to you, well, you must have done something.

The closest thing is to say to think of something you've told maybe three people, if anyone in your life, and that it's tortured out of you (because let's be honest, rape IS an act of torture). That person knows it. Probably brags about it. You can't take it back, you have no choice in it, but you didn't stop it and people say you must have had it coming, you must have wanted to tell them.


Pretty easy to see where the feeling of shame comes from now, I'd hope.

There was a bunch of DO NOT WANT touching that didn't progress further into Rape Land.