雲散霧消

A catcall is entirely about reminding you that you are not yours. The purity myth is entirely about reminding you that you are not yours. The fetishization of female purity in a world where catcalls are an acceptable form of communication telegraphs one thing very clearly:

“Women, stop sexualizing yourselves—that’s our job, and you’re taking all the fun out of it.”

The sexualization of women is only appealing if it’s nonconsensual. Otherwise it’s “sluttiness,” and sluttiness is agency and agency is threatening.

(Source: fictional-clue, via ceedling)

Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richardson are not the “stars” of the Steubenville rape trial. They aren’t the only characters in a drama playing out in eastern Ohio. And yet a CNN viewer learning about the Steubenville rape verdict is presented with dynamic, sympathetic, complicated male figures, and a nonentity of an anonymous victim, the “lasting effects” of whose graphic, public sexual assault are ignored. Small wonder, then, that anyone would find themselves on the side of these men—these poor young men, who were very good at taking tests and playing sports when they were not raping their classmates.

(Source: christinefriar, via ceedling)

I’d like you to remember the last time you found it difficult to give an explicit “no” to somebody in a non-sexual context. Maybe they asked you to do them a favour, or to join them for a drink. Did you speak up and say, outright, “No?” Did you apologise for your “no?” Did you qualify it and say, “Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t make it today?” If you gave an outright “no,” what privileged positions do you occupy in society, and how does your answer differ from the answers of people occupying more marginalised positions?

This form of refusal was analysed in 1999 by Kitzinger and Frith (K&F) in Just Say No? The Use of Conversation Analysis in Developing a Feminist Perspective on Sexual Refusal. Despite the seeming ambiguity in question/refusal acts like, “We were wondering if you wanted to come over Saturday for dinner,” “Well, uhh, it’d be great but we promised Carol already,” they are widely understood by the participants as straightforward refusals.

K&F conclude by saying that, “For men to claim [in a sexual context] that they do not ‘understand’ such refusals to be refusals (because, for example, they do not include the word ‘no’) is to lay claim to an astounding and implausible ignorance of normative conversational patterns.”

(Source: home-of-amazons, via ceedling)

Young men need to be socialized in such a way that rape is as unthinkable to them as cannibalism.

(Source: sunshine-machine, via calloway)

[TW: rape] Boys who allegedly drug a girl and then rape her, kidnap her, rape her again, photograph her, photograph her rape, urinate on her then create videos boasting about it, do it because they are fearless and entitled. (I wrote that sentence out deliberately because I’m sick of seeing “she was raped” — like she was an agent in her assault or that there was no real perpetrator.) These boys were not taught, by fully culpable adults, that these actions are morally repugnant crimes against humanity. Because we laugh about rape and mock people who object. Girls who witnessed these events don’t speak up because they have no faith they won’t be next, they have no confidence they will be believed, they’ve learned to internalize the contempt our culture has for them. After all, we teach our children that it’s acceptable for boys to be protected from shaming and punishment after they’ve sexually assaulted, and to attend schools where there are ‘rape factories’ and where frat boys play games like ‘who would you rape.’

(Source: The Huffington Post, via snakeoil)

So here’s the real reason that rape jokes are troubled territory -

Because rape victims say so.

They get to say that. They get to feel that way. On this, they get to set the cultural rules.

It’s not about right or wrong, or logic versus emotion, or arguments of over sensitivity or hypocrisy - you have the free speech to make whatever jokes you want or talk about rape in whatever way you feel is illuminating. But they get to be upset about it. And call you on it. And be hurt by it.

But consider this:

You get to not be a rape victim.

They, however, are not afforded that luxury. Ever again.

Chuck Wendig (via vickiexz)

#some real talk

(via austinimus)

(via kaitmpayne)

Men should be offended when someone claims that women should prevent rape by not wearing certain things or not going certain places or not acting in a certain way. That line of thinking presumes that you are incapable of control. That you are so base and uncivilized that it takes extraordinary effort for you to walk down the street without raping someone. That you require certain dress code be maintained, that certain behaviors be employed so that maybe today, just maybe, you won’t rape someone. It presumes that your natural state is rapist.

(Source: mehreenkasana, via uglygirlsclub)

In the U.S., where ninety-six percent of the reported perpetrators of rape are white, eighty percent of the men in prison for rape are black.

(via loveyourchaos)