Scattering Joy

“She deserves to be punished too.”

“I’m not saying I support rape, but-”

“Sorry to say - she deserved it.”

“She put herself in harm’s way”

“But if she was fingered, then that’s not rape.”

“She ruined their lives.”

“Yea, but did you see what she was wearing?”

“Boys will be boys!”

“She should know better than to drink at a party…”

  “He should’ve enjoyed it.”

“She must’ve lead him on.”

“But she orgasmed. That means she liked it - “

“Women can’t rape because…”

“Be grateful it wasn’t a man!”

“I’m sorry she hurt you but don’t call what happened to you rape, it’s an insult to the REAL victims…”

“You weren’t raped, you’re just lesbophobic.”

“She’s his wife, it’s her job to please him.”

“Oral isn’t rape.”

“Well he wasn’t armed, she could have walked away.”

“Guys can’t be raped, they love sex!”

“She didn’t fight back; it wasn’t rape.”

“It’s the victim’s fault if they got raped”

“No offense, but your harassment story sounds fake”

Two years ago, my friend @sctheatrical got this voicemail from a girl he has no memory of meeting. It’s rambling, contradictory, and heartbreakingly hilarious. He’s listened to it so many times, he’s memorized it. And, plot twist, he’s had a sudden, epic realization: THIS IS HIS SOULMATE.

Food extract is the flavoring of something cooked down into a carrier oil or alcohol that is safe for human ingestion.

Essential oil is the pure extract of the plant refined down and distilled for concentrated medicinal purposes to a significantly higher strength than simply adding ground up mint leaves to your water. The two are not comparable in any way.

Cinnamon extract and cinnamon essential oil are not the same thing.

One is about 100 times the strength of the other and can also cause acute organ failure. I’ll give you a hint, it’s not the food extract.

“Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman told the crowd at Saturday’s Women’s March in downtown Los Angeles that she experienced what she calls “sexual terrorism” as a 13-year-old after the release of the film The Professional.

Portman described her pride and excitement in releasing the film, only to encounter sexually explicit messages both directed toward her and made about her.

”I excitedly opened my first fan mail to read a rape fantasy that a man had written me,” she recalled. “A countdown was started on my local radio show to my 18th birthday, euphemistically the date that I would be legal to sleep with. Movie reviewers talked about my budding breasts in reviews.”

The experience, she said, changed the way she expressed herself publicly, in order to limit the ways she could be objectified by others.

”I understood very quickly, even as a 13-year-old, that if I were to express myself sexually, I would feel unsafe,” she said. “And that men would feel entitled to discuss and objectify my body to my great discomfort. So I quickly adjusted my behavior. I rejected any role that even had a kissing scene and talked about that choice deliberately in interviews. I emphasized how bookish I was and how serious I was. And I cultivated an elegant way of dressing. I built a reputation for basically being prudish, conservative, nerdy, serious, in an attempt to feel that my body was safe and that my voice would be listened to.”