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thatsonemorbidcorvid · 5 months

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A few weeks after #MeToo exploded on the internet, an old friend and I did what so many women did during that time: We got on the phone and finally began to acknowledge what had happened to us. My friend shared a story of hers from college. Back then, we’d all just considered it a “bad date,” but she now recognized it as sexual assault. She also shared that at nearly every single job she’s had since college, a boss or co-worker has sexually harassed her.

The month before our conversation, I had published an essay sharing my own experience of sexual assault while traveling abroad. Like my friend, it was not my only experience—it was one of many. But I’d only included the one, because in the early stages of #MeToo, the idea of sharing one assault story still felt risky. The idea of sharing more than one felt culturally impossible. My friend agreed.

“As a woman, you’re only allowed one #MeToo moment,” she told me. “After that, people begin assuming the problem must be you.”

Out of the many celebrity #MeToo stories told in the past five years, only a handful have acknowledged the experience of multiple assaults. In an HBO documentary, Alanis Morisette spoke about repeated incidents of statuatory rape that happened when she first entered the music industry, all of which “fell on deaf ears” when she tried seeking accountability. In her memoir, Selma Blair wrote about a teacher who sexually assaulted her, as well as the many men who raped her in her 20s. In an interview with Dazed, Amber Rose said, “I cannot even count how many times a famous guy touched me inappropriately.” On a social media post during the Kavanaugh hearings, Tatum O’Neal wrote about her multiple assaults: “It was not my fault when I was 5, 6, 12, 13, 15.”

Stories that emphasize the ubiquitous nature of assault are vital in a world that so often focuses on one dramatic episode, with visceral details of the violation and an easily identifiable villain. This amplifies the false idea that assault is just a singular, horrifying incident—when in reality, many of us experience it as part of a larger, more insidious culture.

Once a person is assaulted, research shows they’re more likely to be assaulted again, a phenomenon called “revictimization.” Around 50 percent of children who survive sexual assault reexperience it later in life, and even a single incident of sexual assault in adulthood can increase the risk for it to happen again. As psychologist A.E. Jaffe and her colleagues wrote in a 2019 paper on revictimization: “Perhaps the most consistent predictor of future trauma exposure is a history of prior trauma exposure.”

Why would this be? In lieu of a good answer for it (more on that in a moment), we often blame victims themselves. We easily justify these statistics by suggesting that anyone who has survived multiple incidents of violence must be asking for it—either by acting promiscuously, hanging around too many shady men, or getting themselves into precarious situations. One survivor I interviewed told me that though she received some form of victim-blaming in response to all three sexual assaults she experienced, she noticed a stark decrease in support each time it happened again.

“After the second and third, some people began saying, ‘What’s happening in your life to attract that?’ or ‘Do you have enough awareness to know when men want to harm you?’ ” she told me. “One person even asked why I was ‘trusting men so much.’ ” Another friend who experienced multiple assaults went through a similar line of questioning, only with herself. “After so many times, I began asking myself, ‘What is it about me that brings on these experiences?’ ” she said. I told her I ask myself that question all the time.

In his essay “Spectator” for Roxane Gay’s anthology on sexual assault stories, Not That Bad, Brandon Taylor wrote about his best friend telling him she was beginning to think she was “just the kind of person this stuff happens to.” For a long time, that’s what I believed, too. As a travel writer and a single bisexual woman, I figured that at some point, I’d pay the price. Eventually, I’d have to face some element of physical harm—wasn’t that the obvious trade-off for attempting a liberated life? To me, survivorship—more than resilience, bravery, or strength—often felt like resignation.

But in some cases, it’s exactly that resignation that influences repeat assaults. While there’s no conclusive evidence as to why revictimization happens, we do know that normalizing assault can contribute to future harm. If a survivor has not internalized their experience as exceptionally traumatic, they are less likely to advocate for themselves, or demand accountability if it happens again. If they, like me, accept violence as an obvious fact of their lives, then when it repeats, they don’t seek the support they need to process and heal from each experience.

In an article for Psychology Today, psychotherapist and clinical social worker Keith Fadelici called this a “cognitive accommodation to ongoing violence.” The trauma continuously gets downplayed as victims attempt to normalize their assaults, which helps them feel more in control. “This dissociative process is a common symptom of PTSD,” Fadelici told me. “And can also later make survivors less capable of detecting risk by numbing the fear that is supposed to trigger alertness to danger.”

Oppression also plays a significant role. Those with marginalized identities are more at risk for experiencing assault in general, and thus more likely to experience it again. LGBTQ+ people are four times more likely to be assaulted than the general population (bisexual women and trangender people also are far more likely to experience assault than gay men and lesbian women). Rates of sexual assault for Indigenous women are three times higher than non-Indigenous women, and Black women are much more likely to experience assault than white women. Neurodivergent people are 11 times more likely than neurotypical people to be victims of violent crimes.

“If this is coming up repeatedly with one individual, it might be because that person is within systems and structures that facilitate assault more often,” said Jaffe. For those of us living with any of these identities, we normalize violence because living under oppression is consistently violent. In order to survive, a “cognitive accommodation to ongoing violence” is necessary. We train ourselves to get used to it, and move on.

After #MeToo, I began reading and rereading the legal definitions for rape and sexual assault to make sense of what had happened to me. Any sexual contact that occurred without consent constitutes assault? Any sexual contact that included penetration without the other person’s consent constitutes rape? The criteria felt almost too easy. Under these standards, I had been raped twice, and assaulted several other times—all stories I had not yet fully internalized, and was not yet ready to tell. Dozens of legal crimes had been committed against my body, but that idea felt so unfathomable I hardly knew what to do next.

In the three years after publishing that first story, I experienced more incidents, and I still don’t know what to call them. I don’t feel comfortable firmly declaring them as “assault.” I don’t like how it connects so deeply with an oppressive legal system, and how it automatically connotes some excessive form of violence. Even today, it seems too strong and rough a word for how these episodes played out: often with little physicality, with only brief conflict and polite turns toward quick forgiveness, until weeks later when I’d unpack the severity of what had happened. As I began sharing more of these stories with close friends, I would catch myself saying “technically” before saying “I was assaulted,” acknowledging the semantic disconnect I still felt. This hesitation is common among many survivors: As one 2019 meta-analysis showed, rates of victimization increase when participants are asked “behaviorally descriptive questions” about what happened to them, rather than questions that use terms like “rape” and “assault.”

Sometimes, people ask “How many times all together?” I say “six-ish,” a number that captures the amount of experiences that have dramatically changed the way I relate to my body—how it experiences intimacy, how it engages with the world: The one that happened at work, just weeks into my first job out of college. The one at a festival in India. The one while getting a deep-tissue massage. The one at a New York play party. The one so common I learned it has its own name (“stealthing“). The one with a lover I had loved and trusted deeply. The one with another lover, a violation that was not sexual but physical and thus, as yet another nonconsensual act done against my body, still felt so connected to all the rest.

And this still does not take into account every time I was nonconsensually touched in public—the men who pulled and grabbed my arms, my back, my butt, my shoulders to try to get my attention on the street—nor the times I’ve been followed, harassed, physically threatened by strangers on the street.

The accumulation of more and more of these events creates a compounding impact, one where each additional incident begins to amplify the ones before. For me and most survivors I spoke to, we are not healing from trauma—we are learning how to exist in a world where trauma continues to accumulate.

Every survivor I interviewed for this piece told me they fully accept the potential that they’ll experience assault in the future. Still, most of them admitted to me that it’s still easier to only share just one story with the world—never the full range of what has happened to them. “When you only have one story, the enemy is the rapist,” one survivor told me. “But when you have several people with a lifetime of these experiences, the enemy is all of us.”

This is what we mean when we talk about rape culture. The first thing we can do to start to dismantle it is to recognize what we’re up against.

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emrosedeleon · 1 year

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The best way I've ever heard transmisogyny delineated is functionally along the lines of:

"Transfems are not women who get mistaken for men - we are women, who you can hit - if you pretend to believe that we're actually men."

I know a lot of people appreciate the other classic "transmisogyny is being arrested for revealing your nipples, and then being incarcerated among men," and that one's good too.

Another way to expound first one, though just struck me, and felt revealing:

"Transfems are women who are denied the social technology of feminism."

Which is to say we are made the victims of misogyny in everything that implies, our whole lives - and rather than see us as victims, society is entrained to revictimize us. To disbelieve our victimhood, to recriminate it, to debate in front of us the value of our our abuse, to be cast as having deserved it, for being dangerous, for being loud, for being undesirable by hegemonic standards.

Does this sound like a list of ways that victims are treated, damn, funny that, that's so fucking weird, y'all.

This is all about a fuck times worse while you're an egg, as well, because at that point, even you lack the social technology of feminism as applied to oneself. You can't even understand what's happening to be misogyny - or like I'm sure some people figured it out in real time and still remained eggs, but I could never ever even think of applying feminist analysis to myself and my own life until I thought of my life as being a woman's.

In short: fuck you. Fuck you all. Except y'all who are transfem yourself, holy shit it is not easy.

#trans #transgender #transfem #lgbtqia #lgbtq #lgbt #queer #transmisogyny #fuck transmisogyny #fucking hell #ouch

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bonefall · 29 days

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as someone who has not read DOTC (and treasures my sanity too much to read it) i cannot fathom how people read clear sky as a hero, hes even written with the descriptions the erins love to give their villains! prowling, sneaking up behind people to say ominous lines, standing partially in darkness, having an utterly pathetic lackey kissing his ass at all times, even the territory expansion thing was like, explicitly bad when tigerstar did it in arc 1. i'm convinced these people havent actually read this arc??

It's because, I CANNOT make this up, he says sorry after he kills 3 people and causes the death of like a dozen at this big Murder Party he throws. A bunch of ghosts say he was just scared, Gray Wing swoons that he simply needs to learn how to delegate, and then Clear Sky says "haha woops :P"

After that, everyone who ever says, "Hey, I don't trust the physically abusive dictator or his intentions" is treated like an unreasonable idiot, a simple personality conflict, or an active villain. Thunder literally gets revictimized and undergoes emotional abuse a SECOND time and Gray Wing gets a scene screaming at him to get the fuck over it.

These WOULD be interesting characters if this was intentional, if the writers had gotten their heads out of Gray Wing's brother-loving ass to realize that Clear Sky is not redeemable. Gray is denying reality and letting people get hurt so he can cling to a beloved memory, and it doesn't matter if it was accurate then, because he's KILLING PEOPLE NOW.

But the arc is bullheaded in its simplicity: Clear Sky was not born bad, so he is not fundamentally bad. Unlike Slash and One Eye, evil through and through.

It's painful. Incredibly painful arc.

#Thunder's story hits me the most personally though #You can't save your abuser. You shouldn't be expected to defend them or go back to prove that you loved them #Im strongly against the message the arc lays out that good intentions make actions meaningfully different.#Clear has a higher body count than his contrasts COMBINED #If anything it makes him worse imo #So many phrases get shortened over time to obscure their meaning #Because good intentions... PAVE THE ROAD TO HELL.

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homosexuhauls · 1 year

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MEXICO CITY (AP) — A Mexican woman who killed a man defending herself when he attacked and raped her in 2021 was sentenced to more than six years in prison, a decision her legal defense called “discriminatory” and vowed to appeal Tuesday.

The ruling against Roxana Ruiz spurred anger from experts and feminist groups who said it speaks to the depth of gender-based violence and Mexico’s poor record of bringing perpetrators of sexual violence to justice.

“It would be a bad precedent if this sentence were to hold. It’s sending the message to women that, you know what, the law says you can defend yourself, but only to a point,” said Ángel Carrera, her defense lawyer. “He raped you, but you don’t have the right to do anything.”

The Associated Press does not normally identify sexual assault victims, but Ruiz has given her permission to be identified and participates in public demonstrations led by activists who support her.

While the Mexico State court found Monday that Ruiz had been raped, it said the 23-year-old was guilty of homicide with “excessive use of legitimate defense,” adding that hitting the man in the head would have been enough to defend herself. Ruiz was also ordered to pay more than $16,000 in reparations to the family of the man who raped her.

In May 2021, Ruiz was working selling french fries in Nezahualcoyotl, one of the 11 municipalities in the Mexico State with an ongoing gender alert for femicides and another one for forced disappearances of women.

While having a beer with a friend, Ruiz, a Indigenous Mixteca woman and a single mother from the state of Oaxaca, met a man she had seen around the neighborhood. After hanging out, he offered to walk her home and later asked to stay the night because it was late and he was far from home.

Ruiz agreed to let him sleep on a mattress on the floor. But while she slept he climbed onto her bed, hit her, tore off her clothes and raped her, according to Carrera, Ruiz’s legal defense. Ruiz fought back and hitting him in the nose, and he threatened to kill her. In the struggle to free herself she killed him in self defense, Carrera said.

In a panic, Ruiz put the man’s body in a bag and dragged it out to the street where passing police arrested her.

Despite telling police she had been raped, Carrera said a forensic exam was never taken, a crucial step in prosecuting sexual violence cases. Instead, an officer responded that she probably wanted to have sex with the man at first and then changed her mind, he said.

“I regret what I did, but if I hadn’t done it I would be dead today,” Ruiz told the AP in an interview last year, adding, “It’s evident that the state wants to shut us up, wants us to be submissive, wants us closed up inside, wants us dead.”

Women’s rights groups have repeatedly accused Mexican authorities of revictimizing survivors and failing to judge cases with a gender perspective.

Ruiz spent nine months in jail on charges of homicide with excess of legitimate self-defense, and was finally released to await trial.

The court responded to public outcry of the sentencing Wednesday, saying the judge did examine the case with a gender perspective. It also noted that a blow to the head during the struggle left the man unconscious at one point, saying the court found that was “enough to contain the physical aggression.”

The woman’s lawyer said the court’s defense “is totally false.” Carrera said that while there was some evidence the attacker received a blow to the head, it was never proven the man lost consciousness. He said the defense hopes to challenge the court’s statement in its appeal.

Despite the sentencing, Ruiz still remains free pending further judicial steps.

Nearly half of Mexican women have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime, government data shows.

In 2022, the Mexican government registered a total of 3,754 women – an average of 10 a day – who were intentionally killed, a significant jump from the year before. Only a third were investigated as femicides.

That number is likely just a fraction of the real number due to rising disappearances and lack of reporting of violence in the country.

Angelica Ospina, gender fellow for International Crisis Group in Mexico, said she worries that the sentencing may empower victimizers while discouraging women from reporting gender-based violence or defend themselves.

The case points to just how “normalized” gender-based violence is in Mexico and other parts of Latin America, Ospina said.

“When a woman defends herself, the system is particularly efficient in processing and sentencing her without taking into consideration the conditions in which she killed the man,” Ospina said.

Meanwhile, outside the courtroom, women carried signs and chanted “justice!” A tearful Ruiz stood before the crowd, thanking feminist groups and the women who had supported her through the years-long judicial process.

Speaking to the crowd, she thought of her 4-year-old son.

“My son, I hope to see him again. I hope to stay with him, to be the one who watches him grow up,” Ruiz said.

#radfem safe #Mexico #roxana ruiz #radblr #radical feminism #i was just flabbergasted by those numbers

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ozmatippetarius · 11 months

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I am once again asking you to put some respect on Charles's name. He's bewilderingly under-appreciated as a character despite being really complex and well-developed. I see a crazy number of people say they hate him completely without nuance, for a novel where reading deeply and questioning everything is the entire point. Anyway, here's something you might have missed if you shotgunned the book and then have lived off of fanon ever since until you forgot what was actually in the text.

Charles is almost certainly a CSA victim

A major motif of The Secret History is the extent to which childhood trauma has shaped these characters' current actions. Henry was neglected by his father, so he latches onto Julian now. Francis has a codependent relationship with his addict mother that has obviously shaped his actions with Charles. Richard grew up in an abusive family and finds himself forced into a mediator role now; he grew up in poverty and latches onto the first wealthy group that will accept him.

For some reason a lot of readers seem to think that the twins' issues instead developed totally in a vacuum? That they just spontaneously developed an incestuous relationship in adulthood, for the drama of it?

You all know that would be bad writing, would be awful. But you refuse to examine it any closer. You say "the incest is gross" and decide you're just not going to think any more about it, because it makes you uncomfortable.

So let's see if we can ferret out a better explanation. What are some of the risk behaviors we see from Charles?

Substance Abuse - shouldn't need much of an explanation, I think pretty much everybody picked up on this.

Eating Disorder - seems to have been missed by a lot more people, but a major part of why Charles ended up in the hospital is that he simply stopped eating. When Richard and Francis take him to lunch after getting out, he refuses to eat even when they are begging him. Afterwards, we're told he's subsisting entirely off of peanuts for the rest of the novel.

Sexual Risk Behavior - his relationship with Camilla, clearly.

Trust Issues - his relationship with Richard is dripping with this. He spends the entire second half of the novel begging Richard not to betray him ("You're my friend, aren't you?" "You wouldn't go behind my back, would you?") and at the final showdown, Richard is the person he is most angry with, for breaking that trust.

Revictimization - y'all aren't going to like this, but his relationship with Francis is absolutely this.

What do all these bullets have in common? They're all common long term effects of childhood sexual assault.

Hey, remember that sequence shortly before Bunny is killed where he's antagonizing every member of the group individually by taunting them about their secrets he could expose? For Henry, obviously he's threatening to expose the farmer's death. For Richard, his lies about his wealthy background. For Camilla, her incestuous relationship. For Francis, his homosexuality. So what about Charles- what's he threatening to expose here? He wouldn't randomly leave out one of the group, right? Well, let's roll the clip.

If he treated Henry with deference, it was the rest of us who were forced to bear the wearing, day-to-day brunt of his anger. Most of the time he was simply irritating: for example, in his ill-informed and frequent tirades against the Catholic Church. Bunny’s family was Episcopalian, and my parents, as far as I knew, had no religious affiliation at all; but Henry and Francis and the twins had been reared as Catholics; and though none of them went to church much, Bunny’s ignorant, tireless stream of blasphemies enraged them. With leers and winks he told stories about lapsed nuns, sluttish Catholic girls, pederastic priests (“So then, this Father What’s-His-Name, he said to the altar boy—this kid is nine years old, mind you, he’s in my Cub Scout troop—he says to Tim Mulrooney, ‘Son, would you like to see where me and all the other fathers sleep at night?’ ”). He invented outrageous stories of the perversions of various Popes; informed them of little-known points of Catholic doctrine; raved about Vatican conspiracies, ignoring Henry’s bald refutations and Francis’s muttered asides about social-climbing Protestants. What was worse was when he chose to zero in on one person in particular. With some preternatural craftiness he always knew the right nerve to touch, at exactly the right moment, to wound and outrage most. Charles was good-natured, and slow to anger, but he was sometimes so disturbed by these anti-Catholic diatribes that his very teacup would clatter upon its saucer.

His Catholicism? Charles, the group member most morally affronted by the idea of killing and also the most affectionate towards Bunny, comes around to the idea of murder because Bunny is making fun of his Catholicism, something that hasn't been mentioned before and never will be again? Something that has been consistently shown to bother Francis and Henry more?

Connect the dots, here - Charles isn't triggered to the point of physically shaking because Bunny is making fun of Catholics, something we know that he's been doing for years. He's triggered because Bunny is taunting him with stories about adult men molesting young boys, in front of everybody.

Anyway, this isn't a defense of Charles's treatment of Camilla. Obviously "hurt people hurt people" isn't meant as an excuse or a hand-wave. But it is an explanation. Charles is, like every other character in this novel, a flawed person who does some terrible things with complex motivations, and he deserves the same amount of respect you give the other flawed characters who do terrible things with complex motivations.

#the secret history #charles macaulay #francis abernathy

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bullet-prooflove · 2 months

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I have an ask for OA Zidan 🪻 The prompt is 15. A little bit tired of tryin' to care when I don’t. Thank you so much.

References to upcoming series 'All That Glitters'

Tagging: @trublu2u @greenies-green @rosaliedepp @whateversomethingbruh @anime-weeb-4-life @daydreaming-belle @burningpeachpuppy @upsteadlogic @malindacath @skyesthebomb @redpool @district447 @yousigned-upforthis @stelacole @abby-splace @delightfulheroshoeflap @alice30martini

OA tries to give a shit about Scott Forrester’s feelings, really he does. It’s clear you meant a lot to each other in the past, that Scott still bears the weight of the attack. OA can’t blame him, he would too. He tries to take all of that into consideration when he deals with the other man because it’s hard for him being around you, it’s hard for you too. You’ve started having nightmares again.

It’s when Scott suggests using you as the delivery girl for international sex trafficker Colin Kent that OA finally snaps.

“Hanna fits their target demographic, she looks young, vulnerable…” Scott’s face remains stoic as he says the next part, his arms folded over his chest as he leans back against the desk. “You need to channel what happened to you, use it make yourself as non-threatening as possible.”

OA sees the effect it has on you. It’s subtle shift but OA can read you like a book. He sees the tension in your shoulders, the clenching of your jaw. The fingers of your left hand curl into a fist and he can see the light tremble there when you flex them. It makes him want to punch Scott Forrester right in the mouth.

“He likes beautiful women.” Scott reminds them as he meets OA’s eyes, as if he can forget everything Kent orchestrated back in New York. He still dreams about Julia’s blood smeared all over his hands, he still hears her last breath. “He’ll step out to get a look at Hanna, she’s just his type.”

OA fucking hates him in that moment.

He waits until you leave the building before he storms into the other man’s office, slamming the door so hard behind him that the glass shakes in the frame. He can tell from the expression Scott’s face that he half expected this reaction.

“You don’t get to do this to her again.” He finds himself snarling as he jabs his finger at Scott. “You don’t get to revictimize her…”

“This is our best chance…” Scott begins but OA’s already cutting him off.

“But it’s not the best thing for Hanna.”

“Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I don’t see the look in her eyes?” Scott snaps, vivid blue eyes boring into OA’s. “I’m asking her to do the exact same thing as I did back then and it makes me sick to my stomach.”

It’s the emotion in Scott’s voice that catches him off guard, the haunted look in his eyes. That devastation OA feels in his chest, Scott has it tenfold because he’s re-living what happened six years ago, the last time he asked you to go undercover.

“If there was any other way I’d do it.” Scott tells him, his palms resting flat on his desk. “But Vo’s too green and Natalia’s not the right fit… It has to be Hanna.”

Every single part of OA rallies against it despite the fact he knows that Scott’s right. He hates it, he hates this whole damn case.

“I am trusting you.” OA tells Scott, his voice raw as he speaks. “I am trusting you with the most precious thing in my life, if anything happens to her…”

Scott reads the undertone.

If you let something happen to her again…

“That’s why you’re coming with us.” Scott tells him, removing his Glock from the desk drawer and slipping it into his holster. “You’re going to make sure I don’t fail her again.”

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#oa zidan #oa zidan x reader #oa zidan x you #omar zidan #omar zidan x reader #omar zidan x you #scott forrester #fbi international #fbi cbs #fbi

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