[Untitled Feminist Project]

False rape accusations are an anomaly.

(669) 221-6251

If a female student got drunk and had her car stolen the university would call the police. If she got drunk and had her computer stolen, they would call the police. If she got drunk and had her phone stolen, they would call the police. The fact that she was drunk would not even be factored in when assessing if a crime had been committed. But if she gets drunk and has her body invaded and her humanity stolen, school administrations are perplexed about what to do.

My favorite pony is Fluttershy and I still taste the blood in my mouth from where a boy’s elbow met my cheek. He hit me hard enough that I hit the floor. His shirt had her shy face on it. I kissed the concrete and he kept walking. I am five feet and two inches and I’ve been shoved to the side so many times that if you are going to look for me, always scan the edges of a crowd for a small girl with wide eyes and bruises on her knees. I like Fluttershy because she’s like me, she likes animals more than people and when things get too loud, she shuts down. I like her because I’m scared of most things even though I know I shouldn’t be. I am filled to the brim of moments where My Little Pony started turning into ashes where once had been a harmless little girl’s show. Boys with Rainbow Dash on their hoodies have sexually harassed my underage sister. They have touched my hair and made comments to my brother about whether or not he and I were fucking. They have made me scared for the little girls in my second grade class who are old enough to search for pictures of their favorite show. A boy with a pony bag threatened to rape me because I said I was a feminist. I wasn’t even talking to him at the moment. I have grown to fear the title “brony.” I use to love the idea that a show could teach everyone who watched it friendship and compassion. I loved the idea of an all-inclusive community. My favorite video game is anything I can shoot things in. I have been playing since before the PS was a thing. Yet with more geek cred than my boyfriend, I have been stripped down by worse words than I care to repeat. I have been asked to do anything from make a sandwich to suck a dick to kill myself. The whole nerd culture rails against the idea that I can dress in flower print and still have played both Portal games more times than I can count. I’m not supposed to be a girl and be in their space. This is for boys, get away. This is my petition for every girl who has been spat on for liking comics. This is my petition for every person who loved something hard and watched a group of angry men ruin it. This is for every man who flinches because they’ve taken his fandom from him and made it disgusting. Step on them by giving them the exact shit they’ve been shoving down your throat since you were fifteen and admitted that you liked Bioshock. Ask them if they only like My Little Pony because their girlfriend does. Ask them if they know every word to every episode. Sneer at them when they dress up, ask them to get back behind the grill, catcall them. Let them know you’re done letting them walk all over what you love. Take it back. Take back everything they wrenched from your fingers. Make the spaces they poisoned become unsafe for them. Stop rolling your eyes and letting it happen. Stand up. Destroy them. I am sick of privileged babies making every community cater to them. I am sick of their pickup lines and reddit threads and antifeminism. I’m sick of their memes and fedoras and resistance to women. I am sick of them. Take it back. This is my petition. I’m calling it reappropriation.

A few months back, I was asked to participate in a debate on the topic of whether men should have to pay on dates. (I was “the feminist.”) It turned out that the male debater and I didn’t really disagree much on that topic. I said that, generally, whoever asks the other person out pays for that date, and then at some point couples generally transition into sharing costs in whatever way works for them. He was actually pretty happy to pay for first dates; he just wanted women to say thank you and to not use him. I had no problem with that. I think he said that women should offer to pay half, knowing they’ll probably be turned down. I said, well, sometimes — but what if the other person invited you someplace really expensive? What if you agreed to a date with the guy and he spent an hour saying crazy racist shit to you and you felt like you couldn’t escape? This is what led to our real disagreement. The male debater felt strongly that if a woman wasn’t interested in a second date, she should say so on the spot. If the man says, “Let’s do this again sometime,” the woman shouldn’t say, “Sure, great,” and then back out later. I said that that was a nice ideal, but that he should keep in mind that most women spent most of their lives living in low-level fear of physical aggression from men. I think about avoiding rape (or other violence) every time I walk home from the subway, every time there’s an unexpected knock at the door, and certainly every time I piss off an unhinged man. So, if I were on a date with a man who I felt was unbalanced, creepy, overly aggressive, or possibly violent, and he asked if I wanted to “do this again sometime,” I would say whatever I felt would avoid conflict. And then I would leave, wait awhile, and hope that letting him down politely a few days later would avoid his finding me and turning my skin into an overcoat. The male debater was furious that I had even brought this up. He felt that the threat of violence against women was irrelevant, and that I was playing some kind of “rape card” as a debate trick. He got angrier and angrier as we argued. I also got angrier and angrier, although I worked hard to keep speaking in a calm and considered way. He was shouting and cutting me off when I tried to speak. I pointed out that the debater himself was displaying exactly the sort of behavior that would make me very uncomfortable on a date. THAT made him livid. He then called me “passive-aggressive.” I was genuinely taken aback. “Actually,” I said, “I call this ‘behaving myself.’” It’s a lot of work to stay calm when you’re just as furious as the other person, and that other person is shouting at you. I felt that I was acting like a grownup — at some emotional cost to myself — and I wanted credit, not insults, for being able to speak in a normal tone of voice when I was having to explain things like, “We can’t tell who the rapists are before they turn violent, so sometimes we have to be cautious with men who do not intend to harm us.”

In the U.S. every year, 207,754 people are raped, so there are also a whole bunch of people committing those rapes. What that means is that any comic who regularly performs in front of an audience is likely to spend at least some time telling jokes to someone who’s raped someone. And when he hears a joke like Tosh’s, that starts with “How can a rape joke not be funny?!” and goes on to say that a woman who interrupts him deserves to be raped –- or a joke like Morril’s (“My ex-girlfriend never made me wear a condom… She was on the pill: Ambien!”) –- he’s probably going to feel pretty comfortable in that room. When he hears the laughs in response to Morril’s joke, he’s not liable to feel shame about the night the girl from the bar passed out when he got her upstairs; he’s probably going to feel like he’s surrounded by a bunch of people who agree that what he did wasn’t really a big deal. He’s going to be reassured that he’s not in a society that takes it seriously.

Keep speaking up!!!!!

This is the rape joke: My best friend was four years old the first time his father came into his room at midnight and tore out his throat. He still has days when I cannot hold him because the memory of a bleeding trachea haunts his doorway. He has not been home for the holidays in many years, but – even now – hands are seen as weapons. This is the rape joke: I have been told by more than twenty people that they have been raped. To all of them, I asked where the rapist was. From none of them, I heard ‘jail.’ This is the rape joke: Once my brother told me that I was so ugly, I would be a virgin forever. Unless someone raped me. But even they wouldn’t come back for seconds. This is the rape joke: I believed him. This is the rape joke: I now look at every woman on the street and wonder if the space between her legs is a crime scene, surrounded by ripped caution tape. The statistics tell me that this is so common that I will never be in a room that does not contain a survivor. Not even if I am in that room alone. This is the rape joke: I was thirteen years old, and he was supposed to be just a friend. This is the rape joke: When his older brother came home, the boy pulled away. He wiped the tears from my face and said ‘we should do this again some time.’ This is the rape joke: When I finally told my parents, they asked what I had been wearing. This is the rape joke: I had been wearing my innocence. My trust. I had worn the love I held for humanity and expected to be treated well. I had never been taught that I would be that girl, the one who keeps a mine of secrets between her legs – that girl was the slut. I wasn’t supposed to be breakable. What had I been wearing? I wore the rape joke, then I became it.

I hear stories like this mostly from big women or women who used to be a lot bigger than they are now. A woman told me she was once straight up punched in the face, after the guy told her she was disgusting and fat, and he just walked on and laughed. And the saddest part is that she told me, a lot of women harrassed her as well :(

And some people get both.

When I was seventeen and preparing to leave for university, my mother’s only brother saw fit to give me some advice. “Just don’t be an idiot, kid,” he told me, “and don’t ever forget that boys and girls can never just be friends.” I laughed and answered, “I’m not too worried. And I don’t really think all guys are like that.” When I was eighteen and the third annual advent of the common cold was rolling through residence like a pestilent fog, a friend texted me asking if there was anything he could do to help. I told him that if he could bring me up some vitamin water that would be great, if it wasn’t too much trouble. That semester I learned that human skin cells replace themselves every three to five weeks. I hoped that in a month, maybe I’d stop feeling the echoes of his touch; maybe my new skin would feel cleaner. It didn’t. But I stood by what I said. Not all guys are like that. When I was nineteen and my roommate decided the only way to celebrate the end of midterms was to get wasted at a club, I humoured her. Four drinks, countless leers and five hands up my skirt later, I informed her I was ready to leave. “I get why you’re upset,” she told me on the walk home, “but you have to tolerate that sort of thing if you want to have any fun. And really, not all guys are like that.” (Age nineteen also saw me propositioned for casual sex by no fewer than three different male friends, and while I still believe that guys and girls can indeed be just friends, I was beginning to see my uncle’s point.) When I was twenty and a stranger that started chatting to me in my usual cafe asked if he could walk with me (since we were going the same way and all), I accepted. Before we’d even made it three blocks he was pulling me into an alleyway and trying to put his hands up my shirt. “You were staring,” he laughed when I asked what the fuck he was doing (I wasn’t), “I’m just taking pity.” But not all guys are like that. I am twenty one and a few days ago a friend and I were walking down the street. A car drove by with the windows down, and a young man stuck his head out and whistled as they passed. I ignored it, carrying on with the conversation. My friend did not. “Did you know those people?” He asked. “Not at all,” I answered. Later when we sat down to eat he got this thoughtful look on his face. When I asked what was wrong he said, “You know not all guys do that kind of thing, right? We’re not all like that.” As if he were imparting some great profound truth I’d never realized before. My entire life has been turned around, because now I’ve been enlightened: not all guys are like that. No. Not all guys are. But enough are. Enough that I am uncomfortable when a man sits next to me on the bus. Enough that I will cross to the other side of the street if I see a pack of guys coming my way. Enough that even fleeting eye contact with a male stranger makes my insides crawl with unease. Enough that I cannot feel safe alone in a room with some of my male friends, even ones I’ve known for years. Enough that when I go out past dark for chips or milk or toilet paper, I carry a knife, I wear a coat that obscures my figure, I mimic a man’s gait. Enough that three years later I keep the story of that day to myself, when the only thing that saved me from being raped was a right hook to the jaw and a threat to scream in a crowded dorm, because I know what the response will be. I live my life with the everburning anxiety that someone is going to put their hands on me regardless of my feelings on the matter, and I’m not going to be able to stop them. I live with the knowledge that statistically one in three women have experienced a sexual assault, but even a number like that can’t be trusted when we are harassed into silence. I live with the learned instinct, the ingrained compulsion to keep my mouth shut to jeers and catcalls, to swallow my anger at lewd suggestions and crude gestures, to put up my walls against insults and threats. I live in an environment that necessitates armouring myself against it just to get through a day peacefully, and I now view that as normal. I have adapted to extreme circumstances and am told to treat it as baseline. I carry this fear close to my heart, rooted into my bones, and I do so to keep myself unharmed. So you can tell me that not all guys are like that, and you’d even be right, but that isn’t the issue anymore. My problem is not that I’m unaware of the fact that some guys are perfectly civil, decent, kind—my problem is simply this: In a world where this cynical overcaution is the only thing that ensures my safety, I’m no longer willing to take the risk.

i hate that “LOL SO IF WOMEN ARE EQUAL CAN I PUNCH YOU” shit bc 1 in 3 women are abused