lucky*

this is my "sarah's upset about rape" post. if you think i'm being whiny, you are probably male, and no matter your gender identity, you are kindly invited to fuck off.

rape is everywhere right now: on the boards, in the book i'm reading, in my mind. i'm preoccupied.

having sarah here has reminded me. we have that whole aaron/adam history. (i liked aaron, he and i had a relationship of sorts, he sexually assaulted sarah. sarah had a relationship, a serious one, with adam, he sexually assaulted me. i hated adam but didn't feel free to make that known because he and sarah were still dating at the time. sarah had no qualms about hating aaron right out loud and subsequently i removed him from my life with a jolt. maybe it's not as resolved as i thought it was. i never dealt with the adam thing; i think it wasn't that big of a deal. i don't know. tangled webs and all that.)

sometimes i feel like i'm living on borrowed time. rape is a reality that haunts me. i put so much energy into being safe, into paying attention. how can i not? it happens here. it happens everywhere. it happens to women i know. i don't want to be among their number and i'm not sure i can keep myself from it.

i'm reading alice sebold's Lucky* right now, which is a memoir of a rape survivor, and i can't not take it into myself. this is a quality i have. i cannot process information without taking it into my brain, inside myself. i cannot stay distant from most situations about which i learn, i cannot stay distant from the emotional states of my friends. it's really hard for me to draw those lines. and with rape, it's even blurrier.

i don't feel like i can walk into the hall and say, hey guys can you keep it down in here, i'm steeped in sadness over the fact that the world is not a safe place for any of the females in my life. that sounds crazy. it is crazy.

my mother insists this "sensitivity" is a good thing. i'm not convinced. i was telling her, i'm scared, mom, that it's not a matter of if but when. and she started lecturing me on fighting back, on protecting myself, and i said, OF COURSE that's what i focus on usually and that's what i think about and that's what i want, but alice sebold fought back, she fought and it didn't work. i have no guarantee. i have no assurance. every day is sorta a roll of the dice. all i have is the hope that i AM "lucky." but i know better than to count on that.

i just wrote a really long post elsewhere about "if ____ ended tomorrow" - the ways my life would be different if rape ended tomorrow, or had never existed, and homophobia, etc. the list that came out was really long, especially considering i'm not a survivor. but then i got even more pissed, realizing that if i have this much to say and i'm not even a survivor - rape isn't even my lived reality, "just" a threat - how pervasive it must be. how common. how unimportant and unnoticed. it's just an expected part of our culture.

this is something men can never understand, and they need to own up to it - you will never know what it is like to walk around in a woman's skin in this culture, in this country. and don't you dare blather to me about how common rape is, or how it has always existed. that does not change a simple fact: you do not have the skin of a woman. therefore, you do not know what it is to simply wear your skin and have that mark you as a potential victim to everyone who sees you. this is so common, in fact, that we don't even see it. we don't consciously think "that woman could be a victim" because we know it already, the same way we already know she has red hair. men cannot imagine this reality. i can barely grasp it, and it's been there my whole life, and certainly ever since you could tell i had breasts.



*the book is called lucky as an ironic comment: the police later tell her, in the same tunnel where she was raped, a girl was killed and dismembered. alice, by comparison, was "lucky."