Trigger Warning: This article contains mentions of rape, sexual harassment, abuse, assault, and generalized violence.
Okay, folks. Here's the issue, and I cannot believe that I have to write an article stating this, but it appears to be such an issue that hundreds if not thousands and millions of voices are speaking out about it and yet nothing is happening.
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Rapists, abusers, and offenders need to be put behind bars. So why aren't they?
The Truth about Sex Crimes
Sexual harassment, assault, and abuse are evil and illegal.
In fact, these acts are insulting to the dignity of the human race. Those who commit these acts seem to be cut from the same cloth as artists such as DaVinci and Kahlo and geniuses like Curie, Tesola, and more. Yet the minute they succumb to such evil, they admit two things: they are no longer human and they do not believe their victim is human either.
This isn't true, though. The victim is very human and the victim deserves justice. Not an interrogation or shaming or seeing his or her rapist/abuser earn a slap on the wrist and a restful night's sleep.
I truly believe that there is grace and mercy for anyone who asks for it, but you must repair what you've broken, and sometimes the least someone can do (simply apologize) seems to be just too much to ask for these offenders.
Rape Culture & Victim Shaming
This issue begins with the f-word (psst, it's "feminism" but don't tell the patriarchy) and ends with a socially constructed violence.
Rebecca Solnit in her article, "Men Explain Things To Me," she discusses the issue with assumptions surrounding women not being trustworthy.
During the essay, Solnit's ex-boyfriend's uncle presented the following story:
"One Christmas, he was telling -- as though it were a light and amusing subject -- how a neighbor's wife in his suburban bomb-making community had come running out of her house naked in the middle of the night screaming that her husband was trying to kill her. How, I asked, did you know that he wasn't trying to kill her? He explained, patiently, that they were respectable middle-class people. Therefore, her-husband-trying-to-kill-her was simply not a credible explanation for her fleeing the house yelling that her husband was trying to kill her. That she was crazy, on the other hand..."
The article begins with some men feeling like they must explain things to women (assuming a certain level of intelligence) and expands as far as society assuming a woman is hysterical and a pathological liar when she say her husband is trying to kill her (a claim that has a 33 percent chance of being correct, which is a sobering number compared to the assumed 0-10 percent).
This isn't okay, and it blows my mind that we have to reiterate this. Solnit goes on to note, gravely that:
"At the heart of the struggle of feminism to give rap, date rape, marital rape, domestic violence, and workplace sexual harassment legal standing as crimes has been the necessity of making women credible and audible."
We Need to Re-Evaluate What Sex Means
Sex is not like food, so stealing a loaf of bread because you just had to keep one jump ahead isn't going to mean the same as stealing someone's entire sense of personhood and humanity for a night.
Rape is not a theft of property because people are not property.
If you don't want to be objectified, stop objectifying others. Stop using those phrases like "who doesn't want to test drive a car before buying" for a pro-cohabitation argument -- people are not cars. Stop lumping women into these crying monsters that "cry rape when they have bad sex," because it's insulting and incorrect (a truly horrid combination). Stop comparing people to food and stop acting like sex is simply another way to work out, like stepping on a machine, because you don't talk to a machine first. You just use it. People are not machines.
Here's the crux of it: sex is an agreement every second of its duration.
Whatever you believe sex means within that agreement is fine (fun, love, passion, or eternal unity, etc.), but it still must be an agreement for it to function. It is an agreement that one may back out of whenever they want, no matter how much that "hurts your feelings" or how far you've already gone.
The minute someone says, "Hey I want out of the agreement," they are out of the agreement. It is now a disagreement, but if you continue without caring what they say, it becomes much more. It's rude, it's selfish, it's violent, it's illegal.
It's rape.
