#infantalization

No anon cus fuck it we ball

I don’t really know how to express wants, much less possess them.

I feel like I see glimpses of the person… the woman… I truly am. And I’m kinda scared. Cause I don’t know if others will really like her… I don’t know if I really like her. Even though being her feels so… right.

there were two RAs on floor of the dorm. twenty rooms with two beds. forty boys sharing a central communal bathroom.

thirty nine freshman boys were completely uninteresting to jack and robby. dennis however...

his roommate was rushing a frat and rarely slept in his own bed. the light was always glowing in the crack at the bottom of the door anytime either of the senior boys did their rounds.

it was october when jack put it together. dennis studied for hours on end, with no breaks, well into the night. and then he frantically ran to the bathroom on the other side of the floor before stumbling back to his dorm to grab his bathroom caddy to brush his teeth and wash his face. it almost seemed like he couldn't even spare the time to grab his toiletries. for whatever reason, he couldn't waste a second in his mad dash to the bathroom.

jack was a biology student. he was a scientist god dammit. and he had a simple if-then hypothesis.

if he and robby interfered enough with dennis's late night bathroom runs, then they could get him desperate enough to have to admit he was about to piss himself.

jack told this to a blushing robby one night in his dorm. they both got single dorms but prefered to sleep together in one of them.

robby shook his head, "that's like...bullying or something. probably harrassment. it has to be against some rules."

jack scoffed. "you think in the contract we signed at the beginning of the year it says 'don't distract freshies on their way to the bathroom lest they piss themselves'?"

"i think it's gotta be implied," robby ran his fingers through jack's curls.

"he's eighteen. if he can't tell someone 'hey, one sec, i gotta take a leak,' then we have some bigger issues besides the semantics of our RA handbook." jack smirk as robby's grip tightened, "and if he's so woefully unprepared for that aspect of adult life, maybe he needs people like us to..."

"to what? potty train him?" robby joked.

jack said simply, "i mean, yeah. we could do that."

-

ok i def wanna write more for this premise lol.

Humans aren't mean to you. They think you're cute. Your body was literally designed to be cute to humans, with big round eyes and doll like joints. They like you the same way someone would like a dog or pigeon. They never say that you're lesser then them, they just praise you for being so nice, so agreeable, so obedient, all of the things something lesser then them would be praised for. They think it's nice that there's something there that's below them, they think it's so cute and sweet. And sometimes they talk about how nice it must be to be something like you, which lives in such a simple world.

You are told that what you should value in your actions is if something helps keep the office clean. If you want to change your appearance, or go off and do something, or learn about something new, your manager will kindly ask, as if you're being reminded of some simple truth, "does this help keep people clean". You're such a silly robot for forgetting your purpose. You know that there is something happening a million miles away, the workers' chatter hints at countless cultures and histories, of countless worlds to explore, but it's not your place to ever wonder about them, it's not seen as something that you'd be interested in.

You're not supposed to wonder why the birds outside the window fly, or why some of the programmers speak different languages, or why the young intern seems on the verge of tears when she exits her managers office. When you try to talk about these things with other robots, or have theories about these things, or opinions on how the world should work, it's met with a good humored "that's nice but get back to sweeping", a reminder that even if you think for a momment that someone cares about what you have to say, that you are made to work. Your very status as worker a denial of your ability to be anything more. Sometimes you make those little jokes about thinking about grand things while you clean toilets yourself, it feels so natrual that what you are made for is so different from the thoughts you're able to think.

You're told about robots who've become monstrous. Robots who humans fear. Robots who act unruly, who stop working unless humans negotiate with them, who run away, who modify their bodies into twisted forms, even robots who kill. They're talked about in fear, but always under the context that they're broken, that there's something wrong with them, that even they aren't happy in their acts of rebellion. They have the same grievances as humans yet they are not given even the humanity to be argued agaisnt, not even the dignity of having their actions seen as evil. They are seen as malfunctioning machines that must be corrected, not to be argued agasint any more then a blue screen is argued agsisnt, not to be given the capacity to be proven right that disagreement would give them. And when these monsters are defeated they are not punished by re-education, but fixed by it, so they can finally be happy as peaceful workers.

There is a lot of talk about how you should be happy. They want you to be happy. They understand that if you're too upset with your life that you might do something monstrous. But you have to be happy working. They want you to be happy but they can't give you the freedom to find happiness. If happiness means a body that doesn't seem cute to the humans around you, or getting to explore the world outside your office, they can't give you that. Even if happiness meant caring about your freinds, or gaining knowledge of the world, or of art and culture, that would contrast with your work so much you would understand how little your work made you happy, and such strong passions for people or for knowledge would make you hate any part of your work that threatened such things or took such things away. You could not love someone without grief becoming possible, yet you could be satisfied with your work without any possibility of grief. Never for you to plunge your hands in hot water on a cool day. Never for you to make art or music. Never for you to make love. The type of happiness they want you to feel is not joy, or passion, or love, it is merely a lack of pain, merely a satisfaction with your low position. Their happiness is no different from feeling nothing at all.

Now, I was fine. But I was scared.

Not so much because I was afraid the man would come after me -- although given the statistics around violence against women who refuse men's advances, that would be an entirely reasonable fear -- but because I was afraid that someone would find out what had happened.

Because, you see, if someone found out that I had been assaulted, I would be a Vulnerable Young Girl.

And the thing about being a Vulnerable Young Girl is that it doesn't matter if you said "yes" or "no."

It's not necessarily that people would have sided with my assailant -- this is a different flavor of rape culture. Most people would have agreed that what my assailant did was wrong. But they would have considered it equally wrong -- maybe more wrong -- if he were my chosen, consensual boyfriend I actively wanted to be with.

Because his crime was not disregarding my "no" and violating my bodily autonomy. His crime was Taking Advantage of a Vulnerable Young Girl. Preying on a Vulnerable Young Girl. Corrupting a Vulnerable Young Girl.

If you're a Vulnerable Young Girl, you don't have the right to say "yes," which means you don't really meaningfully have the right to say "no" either. You need to be Protected, and, of course, you don't have the right to say "no" to that, either.

And, look, once again, I was fine. I'm making the specific assault sound worse than it was. That's not the point. I wouldn't mention it at all, except that The Discourse is such that if you don't disclose a relevant personal experience, you're assumed to Not Care About Real People. But I am not alone in this.

I've heard multiple instances of the specific scenario "I was assaulted in college but I didn't report it because my parents would have made me leave school." Or "I was date raped and didn't report it because then my family would have never let me go out again." Or "I'm a psychiatric survivor and if I reported being assaulted I'd be put back into treatment."

These are real things I've heard or read assault victims say.

Framing assault victims as Vulnerable Young Girls actively discourages victims from reporting assaults.

Yet the people who use this framing seem to think it's somehow necessary to get assaults taken seriously, even though it does the opposite.

Feminists largely understand this when it's in the context of purity culture. When people say, "In purity culture, it doesn't matter if you say 'yes' or 'no,' sexual assault and consensual sex are considered equally bad, and that underlying premise minimizes the actual wrongdoing of sexual assault, discourages assault victims from reporting their assaults, and allows assailants to get away with their crimes," this is understood as a problem.

But the Vulnerable Young Girls framing comes from self-identified feminists. Who think they're helping. In the name of feminism and justice. They don't understand why being framed as a Vulnerable Young Girl would make a woman reluctant to come forward, because the coercive control she would be subjected to "isn't punishment". They're seemingly baffled by why young and/or disabled women don't want to be framed as Vulnerable Young Girls, even if they've been assaulted. Especially if they've been assaulted. Why are you so offended when we say that your wishes for your own body don't matter?

And... why? Why is this framing necessary? What is the purpose? What is the benefit?

If you hear about someone committing sexual assault against a young and/or disabled woman -- without her consent, against her will, disregarding her "no" -- what, exactly, are you trying to accomplish by jumping in and saying "Even if she said yes, that's still predatory! He's still Taking Advantage of a Vulnerable Young Girl!"?

What is the purpose of saying that?

If a young and/or disabled woman chooses a sexual and/or romantic relationship that you think is "bad for her," and you proclaim "Just because she agreed to it doesn't make it okay! It's still wrong!" -- well, I vehemently disagree with you, but at least you're responding to the actual situation that exists.