sorry guys we can't put peter scully and andrei chikatilo in jail because fertilefloor says so. we have to just let them do their thing. onward with revolution comrades. it's time to liberate all these evil liberals from their prudish ways. release your inhibitions, feel the rain in your skin.
i wasn't going to respond to this one because it's annoying and trying to do a stupid gotcha, but i want people to think about why this might not be the gotcha they think it is. also, asks answered aren't so much a dialogue with the asker as they are a dialogue with my friends seeing this and an opportunity to further put my thoughts to words here.
right up front, this is pushback against a post i made about me being raped, and how i relate to me being raped, and how i understand prisons not being a solution to me being raped or even a deterrent to rapes like mine. in this way, "well what about this and that example from halfway across the world in both directions?" as a response to "i was raped, i don't think 'my rapist' belongs in prison, here's why" is... well it's just clearly not in good faith, right? they don't want me feeling liberated. they don't want me thinking about how things could be different.
next point, anon is asking me to draw a line here: when is the rapist bad enough that he should be locked up? i will always answer: never. no one should be put in prison. prisons are not a solution. prisons should not exist. but you don't even have to be that uncompromising. you never have to engage with this. the existence of prisons did not stop these rapes from happening and the existence of prisons will not stop similar rapes from happening. looking only briefly at the peter scully example, there's a whole history of colonialism that made all this possible. prison is at best a very small band aid that keeps this one guy from continuing to exercise his power over these women. prison is not stopping other countless men from doing that. and these same prisons are facilitating rape, control, and violence all the time. policing, prisons, surveillance, the courts, colonialism, occupation all make these rapes possible and all benefit from them. a couple guys getting locked up is a service to their continued legitimacy.
next point. prison abolition is about the horizon. abolition is about changing everything. it's not about tearing down prisons and hoping everything else will sort itself out. it's also about sorting everything else out. it's a process of unknowing the carceral world, alongside a practice of dreaming a new world and building it. in doing this we have to know what to unknow. we have to know what forces are exerted to reconstruct that world we want to change. and i'm talking about rape as one of those forces. when i say rape is necessary, this is what i mean. rape constitutes the world i want to change. i know that rape is not stopped by prisons. i know that rape is stopped by a reallocation of power. that reallocation of power happens by changing everything in the world we live in every day. it happens by unlearning pretend fixes like policing and prisons. it happens right now by talking about it, protecting eachother, and healing eachother. it happens well into the future by getting more people to unlearn and to think and to dream outside of the carceral word.
part of this for me is the recognition that rape and violence will continue to happen, perhaps indefinitely, as we work to change the world or as the world remains unchanged. for me, the healing from rape is as important as its prevention. this is what i am choosing to focus on. i was raped and it hurt for a very long time. i was raped again and i was raped again. it got better when i talked about it. it got easier to escape these situations when i was able to talk about it. i believe if everyone talked about it and talked about it as it was happening, then it would happen less and it would affect us less. i think this is easier when rape is understood as mundane, as common, and as a force underpinning the world we find ourselves in. the more we talk about it, the quicker it ends, the sooner you get the care and the escape you need.
finally, you don't have to have an answer to these kinds of things. you can spend time responding to opponents and you can spend time organizing with and dreaming with likeminded people. if you know that prisons should not exist, and you talk about that, you'll find people to figure this stuff out with.
