thenewwomensmovement:

So powerful.

feministmedia:

stfuconservatives:

(trigger warning for rape, sexual abuse, rape culture)

14kgoldnyc:

safercampus:

Yesterday, prosecutors decided that they won’t press charges against Greg Kelly, son of police commissioner Ray Kelly. He was accused of raping a woman—I wrote about it here. I sounded pretty sure I believed he was guilty. As far as the courts are concerned, there wasn’t enough evidence to indict him. Am I sorry? No.

And I’m not sorry about calling Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was found not guilty of rape in a court of law, a rapist. And the next time someone comes forward saying he or she was raped by another someone, whether that person is a powerful government official or a friend, I will always, ALWAYS believe the accuser. I will always support him or her even before I know all of the “facts” of the situation, or, more likely, have heard the two sides, and probably after. Why? Because we live in a culture so permissive to rapists and so punishing to rape survivors that to do anything else would be monstrous.

 

The Post published a picture of Kelly’s accuser yesterday, identifying her by name. They did the same to the woman who accused two cops of raping her. They called Nafi Diallo, or, as you may know her “the maid,” of being a liar, a sex worker, a gold digger, a drug dealer. They have, in the words of Intel’s Joe Coscarelli, engaged in “a bullying tactic that could prevent women from reporting sexual abuse crimes.” This is not the exception. This is the norm.

Greg Kelly, by the way, was deemed unchargable not because he didn’t rape his accuser, but because it would be impossible to prove that she was, as she claimed, too intoxicated to consent. This is what rape culture is. And what it means to the women who live in it is that they live with the very real possibility—a one in five chance—that they too will face the same impossible choice: stay quiet, live with what happened, watch your rapist walk around free, or accuse him or her, and have your entire life dragged through the mud. Have every single choice you’ve ever made examined publicly to see if maybe it’s your “fault” that this happened. Be put on trial—publicly—in a way your rapist will never, ever will be.

Let me tell you about two of my friends who had terrible things happen to them. The first is a man. He was falsely accused of rape by a woman he was friends with. He had never slept with her. She later recanted and told everyone the truth of what (hadn’t) happened. He is still living with the consequences of that action today: it made it very hard for him to trust women, to be sexually open. It really fucked him up. He did nothing wrong.

The second friend is a woman. In college, she was raped by a man she was on a date with. The man’s older brother was very important in the ROTC of that college. On this campus, the ROTC was very powerful, and had a strong reputation for honor and excellence. When she came forward about what happened to her, she was called a liar and a slut. The ROTC members embarked on a campaign of harassment that forced her to drop out of college. Nothing happened to the man. The administration of the college refused to get involved. She also did nothing wrong.

I am truly, deeply sad for both of these friends. I really do understand the harm a false rape accusation can do to a person. It can ruin someone’s life. But it still does not compare to the damage that rape can do. And unfortunately, rape is more common by a factor of hundreds. If you think you don’t know someone who was raped, you are probably wrong. Many rape victims are never able to come forward about what happened to them.

When the Post goes out of its way to punish women who speak up about rape, women everywhere hear and understand the message: stay in line. Be quiet. It’ll be easier for you if you just lie back and take it. Here is another story that I happened to come across yesterday, just in the normal course of reading the internet.

I was, as a teenager, locked in a room with my rapist by school administrators and told, “Don’t come out until you’ve worked out your differences.” He spent the entire time threatening to kill me, my family, and my dogs, if I ever reported anything he ever did to me again. When the head counselor eventually came back to that room, I was asked if we’d managed to work things out, and I confirmed that we had.

Because I would have said anything to get the fuck out of that room.

He raped me again and again over the next three years.

Again, this is not the exception. It is the rule. If you go looking, you can find hundreds, thousands of variations on this story. I understand why people don’t want to accept this truth: it’s horrible. Nobody wants to think it is their mom, their sister, their friend who things like this happen to. Better and easier to think that she’s lying or that she somehow deserved what she got. For women, it’s a way of warding off evil. Maybe if I can figure out what she did “wrong” I can avoid her fate. Did she dress slutty? Get drunk? Go home with a stranger? Wear headphones? It is tempting to think that if you are a good girl and do everything “right,” you’ll be safe. The truth is that in this culture, nobody is safe.

Even so, we look for reasons to excuse the rapist, to mitigate the horror. Even in the most cut-and-dried “honest rape” cases, and even in the New York Times, the blame is shifted.

Roxane Gay, in her amazing essay The Careless Language of Sexual Violence, examines the case of an eleven-year-old girl gang raped by 18 men:

The Times article was entitled, “Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town,” as if the victim in question was the town itself. James McKinley Jr., the article’s author, focused on how the men’s lives would be changed forever, how the town was being ripped apart, how those poor boys might never be able to return to school. There was discussion of how the eleven-year-old girl, the child, dressed like a twenty-year-old, implying that there is a realm of possibility where a woman can “ask for it” and that it’s somehow understandable that eighteen men would rape a child. There were even questions about the whereabouts of the mother, given, as we all know, that a mother must be with her child at all times or whatever ill may befall the child is clearly the mother’s fault. Strangely, there were no questions about the whereabouts of the father while this rape was taking place.

The overall tone of the article was what a shame it all was, how so many lives were affected by this one terrible event. Little addressed the girl, the child. It was an eleven-year-old girl whose body was ripped apart, not a town. It was an eleven-year-old girl whose life was ripped apart, not the lives of the men who raped her. It is difficult for me to make sense of how anyone could lose sight of that and yet it isn’t.

These little things, these seemingly unimportant things like tone and word choice, like hate rags publishing pictures of rape victims, like all of the tiny ways that we, every day, as culture, signal to potential rapists to go ahead, it’s not so bad, she probably wants it anyway, wink wink. That is rape culture. There’s no neutral ground. You are either fighting hard against it—speaking up to defend rape victims, not laughing at rape jokes, refusing to accept the excuses people make for rapists—or you are part of it. Silence abets rapists. And THAT is why I will always take the side of the person making a rape accusation, and why you should too. When the playing field is level, I will wait to be vocal. I’ll listen to both sides, or just stay out of it altogether. But in a world where trying to bring your rapist to justice puts you in line for something that might be more difficult to endure than the rape itself, victims need all the support they can get.

All of this, always, always, always. I will always assume guilty until proven innocent with a rapist, because that’s the only way to counteract the game of putting the accuser on trial instead of the accused… and, of course, because it’s generally true. Minor detail.

reblogging because what the fuck, world? 

n-dimensionalhypervolume:

Ok.  I’m never the most eloquent person to begin with (especially on the internet), but this has me even more incoherent than usual.

I’m not sure where to begin, because really, there is SO MUCH WRONG WITH THIS that it’s pretty fucking overwhelming.

For one, they’re forcing doctors to act against their medical code of ethics as agents of the government against what is fundamentally rape.  (According to Virginia’s own laws too) And to inflict this on any uterus-having person seeking an abortion, including those who were victims of rape or sexual assault is beyond fucked up.  But I’ve seen this before, though it’s sad to think it’s almost numbing.

But the new fucked up thing was this quote by one of the lawmakers who said that ”women had already made the decision to be ‘vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant.’”  Seriously.  So by that insane not-logic, a uterus-having person relinquishes their right to control their own body when they first have penetrative sex.

I’m done.  Feel free to post your own thoughts on this shit.

I have nothing to add except why on earth are GOP people supporting this with the highly inaccurate reasoning of “it gives more information?” These are the same people who tend to believe that climate change and evolution are hoaxes. Why is medical science given a free pass? Oh right, because it can be used to control the bodies of people capable of pregnancy.

stfuconservatives:

(tw for mention of rape, general misogyny)

art-l0ve-and-war:

These are responses to an article about a campaign to prevent rape and sexual harassment on college campuses. 

I feel like there’s a need to break stuff down, not for these douchebags, but more like a rant for my own future reference.

“Y U TALKING ABOUT PREVENTING RAPE, PREVENTING FALSE RAPE ACCUSATIONS IS WAY MORE IMPORTANT AND WOMEN GET FREE DRINKS AT BARS AND CAN FUCK ANYONE AND NEVER GET FRIENDZONED AND MEN ARE RAPED TOO AND I WANT MY MOMMY”

no, Mike Hunter, alleged rapists are not zealously prosecuted by law enforcement. Actually the scenario looks a bit more like this:

And here’s the thing about the “False rape accusations” that you care about so much (and why wouldn’t you, it’s the only part of this lame feminist bullshit that applies directly to you). Do you know what’s the feminist stance on false rape accusations? Do you know what is the women’s stance on false rape accusations? We fucking hate them. 

Yeah, we hate them. Because being falsely accused of raping someone, like  false accusations of stealing, murdering or molesting, can destroy a person’s reputation. And they are usually done with the purpose of destroying someone’s reputation and/or get money. And also, false accusations of rape are one of the things that make it so much harder for women who were actually raped to get justice, and more importantly, to put these rapists in jail, where they can’t rape any more innocent people. 

Meanwhile, a lot of people get the death penalty for things that they didn’t do, and I don’t see you getting all worked up about that. 

What’s wrong with the process of accusing people of rape, rape trials and whatnot is how they’re conducted. When a woman is raped, they ask what she was wearing, how she was dancing, if she was drinking. The victim is attacked as much as the alleged rapist is, some times even more. And the victim is also attacked by her peers, whom many times are quick to judge her as an attention seeking whore. Mix that with the rape and post traumatic disorder and you have a real life ruiner right there.

What people judge in rape trials: If the woman actually wanted to have sex and is just a lying slut - usually confirmed by the fact that she has many sexual partners, drinks, has fun, dresses provocatively. 

What people should be judging in rape trials: The rapist’s past sexual conduct, and general attitude towards women. Showing signs of misogyny, past accusations, past relationships, his character. And the victim’s past in LYING. 

Because if a woman had many sexual partners before accusing this man of raping her, this should not make her case weaker. If anything, it should make her case stronger, because duh, look at how many men she had consensual sex with, and never tried accusing them of anything.

Another interesting point that clueless people usually add to conversations, is the fact that women get free drinks in bars, often get in for free in places that charge entrance for men, and, as a friend dearly pointed out to me: “If you stand up at this bar right now and say - who wants to fuck me? - i bet at least 10 guys would raise their hands”.

But here’s the thing. From a privileged white male perspective, getting free drinks and being able to have sex whenever you want are just the cherry on the top of your beautiful cake. It would be literally the last thing you’ll need to make your life perfect. And to women, it makes for a shitty consolation prize for being born and raised as a second class citizen, and it actually increases her chances of getting sexually assaulted or raped. Oh and by the way, the “free drinks” and “10 men raising hands” only count for women who are considered suitably fuckable by strange men and bartenders. You may guess that this is not exactly a fair game for women who don’t resemble the current beauty standard. 

And men are raped, too. And their rapes are even less reported, because men feel so much shame in admitting that they suffered this, when they’re supposed to be raised to be strong and invincible. And the fact that men don’t get the same paternity leave as a mother does is unfair. And the fact that children almost automatically are in custody of the mother in cases of divorce is also unfair as fuck. Guess what’s the cause of all of these 3 things being an issue? Your dear patriarchy. The same one that grants you the respect and rights that are denied to women. Because that’s what defines gender roles that make men so afraid to report their rapes and sexual assaults. That’s what defines that the moms are the ones who should care for children and kick you out of your child’s life. 

So guess what? We’re on the same side. And if you could only stop whining, you’d realize that. 

kateordie:

Sometimes I have the time and patience to get from an idea to a fully fleshed-out, penciled, inked and coloured comic.

Sometimes I don’t.

girlebony:

I believe I’ve seen a comprehensive description of consent once before. Figured I’d contribute as it’s a subject that bears repeating.

Consent is:

• Non-coercive: If you’re cojoling, threatening or otherwise trying to “convince” someone to engage in a sexual act with you, you are breaking consent. If you asked 16 times and got 15 No’s and 1 Yes, you still did not adequately obtain consent. Also, you’re a weak individual.
• Not fixed: What I mean by this is you shouldn’t take for granted that after asking once for consent that you now have consent forever. It’s not like landing a gig as a Supreme Court judge. You don’t have consent for life. It should be continuously negotiated.
• Dynamic: Related to the above note, consent for one act does not necessitate consent for all acts. Consent is not an EZ Pass. It should be re-addressed constantly for different acts.
• Conscious: Yeah, I want to believe I don’t have to explain this one. Bad enough I had to list it. But ok, yes, an inebriated/asleep/passed out or otherwise not fully coherent person cannot consent. There, you can’t say no one ever told you.
• Unambiguous/Explicit: Assume all of the following to mean “no.” — “Maybe,” “I’m not sure,” “Not yet,” “Kinda,” “Wait a minute,” …I could go on.
• Not contingent upon sexual interest nor sexual arousal: We know. Blue balls are a motherfucker. Still no excuse. Neither your NOR the expressed/implied interest of any potential partners is an invitation to any act. Also, neither your nor the (assumed) arousal of anyone you might want to have sex with is an invitation. Yes, someone might be aroused and still not want to fuck. Crazy times. I know.
• Not compensatory: Yeah, that dinner and a movie were nice. Still not an invitation to fuck. And if you thought it was, you’re a world class asshole.
• Not something that requires a qualifier: No one needs to explain why they are not granting you consent. No is enough.

jalwhite:

paradiscacorbasi:

blacksentai:

It really needs to be stated that, while I’m actually all for punching people in the face, all this praise about it is unsettling. Cause, it’s all about white privilege. I do not have the ability to punch someone in the face at a bar. I…

methodistcoloringbook:

aloadai:

oo1. boobs are really, really awesome. like seriously. they’re the most universally appealing body part, and no one’s going to fault you for liking them. i totally get that you’re turned on by them! but let’s get something straight. awesome boobs are not an invitation.

sometimes it’s hot out and i don’t feel like having extra clothing on just so you won’t check me out. or sometimes, maybe i am in the mood to show off! but even then, my boobs aren’t an automatic “yes.” no matter how slutty you think i look, no matter how turned on you might be, an awesome rack is not a substitute for consent.

oo2. like most people around the world, i enjoy having fun! and sometimes, that fun might involve drinking, or the use of other mind-altering substances. rules are a little different when you’re drunk. you can act sillier and tell stupid jokes and maybe even get away with dancing on the table!

but you know what you can’t get away with? not establishing consent! no matter how drunk you are, i am, or we all are, boundaries still exist. you still have to make sure that your potential bedmate is cool with bumping uglies, no matter if you’ve been together three years or known each other’s names for three minutes. and use whatever judgment you have left: if they’re too far under the influence to drive home, they’re probably too far under the influence to give true consent.

oo3. society seems to really have a thing about people who are on the larger side. there’s so much body shaming in today’s world, and a lot of it is just totally accepted. you may think that since i am fat, i’m desperate for any vague sign of affection, so i’ll be okay with you doing whatever you want to me. i really hate to disappoint, but if you think that i’m a loser who should feel lucky to be touched, you’re going to have a bad time.

no one is lucky to get raped. no one is lucky to face unwanted sexual advances. no one is lucky to be harassed. the rules don’t change when someone’s above a size twelve.

oo4. it’s pretty obvious that most people in the world enjoy sex, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. i for one am totally into sex! if i could have sex all day, i totally would. you know how there’s that stupid rumor that men think about sex every seven seconds? well it’s not stupid, because i totally think about sex that often. 

however, that doesn’t mean that i’m down to fuck anyone any time. you may have heard that i’ll sleep with anyone. maybe i slept with your friend. hell, maybe we even slept together once! but no matter what, you’ve still got to get that “yes.” i enjoy sex with respectful partners who understand boundaries. i don’t enjoy being degraded, pressured, or having assumptions made about me. most people don’t, so why press your luck?

oo5. and speaking of assumptions… sexuality is hugely complex. you wouldn’t want your preferences to be generalized, so don’t do it to anyone else! i’ve slept with girls; that does not mean i will sleep with all girls. i’ve been tied up; that does not mean you can tie me up. i’ve had threesomes; that does not mean that i will have a threesome with you and your buddy.

oo6. you are not owed sex. there, i said it. no matter what you do for me, there is no situation i can think of where i owe you sex. if you take me out for dinner, or help me move in to a new apartment, or proofread my angry letter to urban outfitters, i’ll be really grateful! i might make bake you something, or buy you a twelve-pack of steel reserve. and if we’re already close, it might make me fall incredibly in love with you and we could end up fucking on the living room floor, don’t get me wrong!

i just won’t owe that to you. when you do something nice for someone, you’re doing it out of the goodness of your own heart. if you’re doing it expecting something in return, you’re not doing something nice. you’re trying to perform an underhanded deal. if you want to arrange for me to owe you sex, let me know outright, so i can know that you’re not a decent person at all, just a scummy scum scum who gets off on forcing people into uncomfortable situations. 

oo7. and here’s the big one. you’ve probably heard “no means no” a million times, and we all like to think we’re the kind of person who, if our partner said no, we’d stop right away. but consent is more than not being told no. it’s being told yes. enthusiastically. 

if your partner isn’t saying no, but also isn’t saying yes, take a step back and examine the situation. this boils down to being a moral human being. sure, if your partner doesn’t say no, it might be more difficult for you to get convicted of rape. but are you the kind of person that thinks it’s okay to take advantage of someone on a technicality? please don’t be.

it’s up to you to make sure that your partner feels comfortable, safe, and okay, and it’s up to you to take a step back if they don’t. be the responsible person, because the only person who can prevent rape is YOU. 

holy shit, this is the bestest

highway131:

pheeels:

emilie-rainbow:

highmaintenancewhitegirl:

i’ve had this fantasy SO MANY TIMES

A good example of a rape joke that’s funny, in my opinion. Because the victim isn’t the butt of the joke, the ridiculous idea that our society makes it dangerous just to have a vagina is the butt of the joke.

emphasis mine because it’s WHAT I’VE BEEN SAYING ARUGHESIF

but fucking Wanda Sykes. What an awesome lady.

god I love Wanda Sykes. she’s funny as hell.