I read a lot of stories written by rape victims, mostly on sites like these. I followed the whole “mattress girl” thing and the Rolling Stone rape debacle and I keep reading comics and stories and personal confessions… At this point, it’s hard to escape the idea that being “raped” is a card that can be traded for cultural currency. It’s desirable – and not just for pure, sick, primal reasons but for social ones. Survivor stories get clicks, so as long as people want clicks, they’ll either fabricate their victimization or reinterpret their own experience so tenuously so as to assume the desired identity.
I was raped by my mother, over and over, for over a decade. She continued to molest me (but fell short of penetration) long into adulthood. My reaction the prestige of the victim narrative and the current “rape crisis” is, thus, colored by my own experience.
I’m writing this anonymously, and would never dream of doing otherwise. To me, what happened isn’t a badge of honor – but neither is it a wound, precisely. My experience growing up helped me to see the truth of things and, like many eye-opening experiences, it occasioned moments of intense pain. I survived. I got over it. When people ask, I tell them I’m from far away from where I actually grew up. I haven’t spoken to my mother in almost a decade. (This alienation, of course, produces problems of its own – but mostly practical ones).
My mother’s appetites were not extraordinary, I’ve found. Some essence of her character may be detected in any woman.
Women, in my experience, want to be loved but do not have the capacity to truly love themselves. Their approximation of love is covetous – it demands fealty, total devotion and unwavering support, with the precondition that all three be provided without precondition. There’s a line from a song I like: “I gave her my heart, but she wanted my soul.” That’s about the size of it: women want to be worshipped, and they will only submit themselves with the expectation of submission in return.
I have seen women (some of whom I count among my closest friends) throw their lives away for the chance to ring devotion out of a “challenging” guy. I have also seen marriages busted by a woman’s restless feeling that she just isn’t “appreciated” enough. And I’ve seen mothers so contemptuous of their children ‘s having left the womb that they suffocate them with affection. All missteps driven by the same compulsion – that sick, universal desire to be loved.
For my mother, the fact that I had an independent existence never registered. She wanted HER pleasure first, she wanted me in HER corner. She made me into a little stormtrooper, the first line of attack against my dad. And the whole time, she made me feel that I wanted it, that all this was my choice – as the majority of the actual sex happened before I was twelve years old (I ran away from home not long after puberty) this was clearly not the case. But the feeling of being responsible still haunts me.
Which brings me to my next point – rape is a crime of interpretation. Chiefly, the act occurs (among participants who are already engaged in some kind of relationship) during periods of high stress and altered perceptions. For me, that time was childhood in general – I was dumb as shit, and I didn’t know that fucking your mother was anything more than an unusual quirk. I didn’t even know the word “fucking” – she taught me a whole baby-talk vocabulary of sex-acts. Now, looking back, I can say that what she told me was the “nackernoo” was, in fact, a form of titty fucking adapted to deal with my not-yet full grown penis. I also learned that the action had a second name – it was rape.
I know how ridiculous it looks when someone like that Columbia girl cries rape on a boy she apparently had an obsession with. But sometimes people can be too harsh about assuming that retroactively recognizing a rape is a “lie.” There are plenty of lies out there – lies like UVA. But there are cases where, legitimately, a rape may go unnamed for weeks or months or years. As I said, it is a crime of interpretation.
Which also means that, while the psychological effects of rape are serious, it cannot be treated like a murder or a large-scale theft in the court of public opinion. The delicacy of this matter requires discretion above all – even for the suspected rapist. But that’s a different matter.
My mother raped me because she wanted me to love her. That I loved her already, as any child loves their mother, never occurred to her. When I did finally talk to her about it, she told me that she never thought of what she was doing as harmful. It never crossed her mind. “I just thought we were having fun,” she said. “Playing.” Which is what she was doing. The idea of me having an emotional life inside my head was, to her, impossible.
This is what it comes down to, I think: rape is thoughtlessness. It’s turning somebody into a sexual prop, using them like a dildo (or a fleshlight). So it’s a hard, miserable thing but as long as people have sex it’ll exist. There will never be a revolution of mindfulness.
Women are not like men. I wish I could say they were. But I’ve known a lot of them. And each one, from the disasters to the perfect tens, has had that hunger for possession – for total love. They’d all be rapists if they weren’t also weak and, at some level, cowardly. Social disapproval goes a long way with women, and the idea that they should “compete” to control the most uncontrollable men saves the world a lot of heartache. Men have had this figured out forever – the worst way to impress a woman is to love her. She craves the submission of that moment, but afterwards? She starts to move on.
Pretty much the only long-term affection women are capable of is for their children, and that can go wrong too.
I don’t want to tie my name to this story. I also don’t think something can be done in the courts to prevent it from happening again. This is not a good world, and nothing can fix that.
My advice: be men. Move on from the baubles women try to offer you. Shut them out of your life, emotionally and intellectually. Treat them as what they are – barely domesticated animals. And when it comes to sex, be careful. The feminists are kind of right – no real man “makes love” to a woman. The most desirable sex, for the fairer sex at least, is rape already – because they want what they can’t have and getting their face shoved in their own failure is the closest thing these brutes experience to pleasure.
These days, one must be careful. If I were in college right now, I wouldn’t have sex with anybody. It’s too dangerous! Instead, I’d be reading, making art, pursuing my own interests… and leaving women the hell alone.
Don’t wallow in self pity. Don’t let women determine your sense of self worth. They’re not even worth hating, really. If men were to cut women out of their society women would soon discover that they have no society at all.
That got to be a little bit of a rant. Just my two cents.
![shittywebcomics:
siryouarebeingmocked:The problem is [Feminists] don’t fight for equality as much as they used to. Ones
who are genuinely pro-equality get called MRA Barbie Slut Scum these
days.The remainder of the movement doesn’t even care about uplifting women
at this point. It just cares about dragging men down by calling
everything Male Privilege and Toxic Masculinity.To put it simply, Feminism was a great ride, but now a bunch of
monkeys are on board punching holes in the boat and nobody who was on
the boat wants to plug the holes for fear of having poop thrown at them.Original poster asked to remain anonymous.
This doesn’t get mentioned much, but even the original feminists didn’t fight much for equality. People forgot how much they were burning down bars and bombing stores, because it was about a hundred years ago.](http://41.media.tumblr.com/e1a9d53471e0689e932e1dd71ce36592/tumblr_nkm08b24S91rluoaco1_400.png)
