(Young, twenty and thirty
something women won’t read this, they will reject it immediately. It is my prayer that mothers and fathers of
young girls and boys will read this. It is
my hope that parents of young girls and boys will grasp my intent and teach
their children about the consent and rape from a more enlightened perspective.)
As a car owner, you have a right
to leave your car running with the keys in the ignition, the doors unlocked and
wide open, in the middle of a huge mall parking lot while you run in to grab a
few items. It’s your right. It’s your car. You bought it and paid for it and it’s yours
to do with what you want. You worked
hard for that car and if you feel like you don’t want to have to turn the
ignition off and on, and if you feel like you should be able to leave the keys
in the ignition and unlocked simply because your name is on the title and it
belongs to you, yes, you have that right.
If you did that, you would be clowned as the biggest, most delusional
idiot to walk the face of the earth though.
The story of your stupidity would go viral around the world and you
would break the internet. Twitter would create a hashtag just for
you.
When you go on vacation, you have
a right to leave the door of your house or apartment wide open, with all the
lights on, with the mail and the newspapers piling up letting everyone know
that you are out of town. You certainly have
that right to leave your TV, furniture, electronics, jewelry, and clothes in
plain view of everyone to see while you enjoy yourself without a care in the
world. It’s your right. You own that home. You shouldn’t have to have a security system,
you shouldn’t have to lock your doors if you don’t want to. Everyone should know that it’s your home,
your sanctuary, and that they should respect your rights and not violate them. The police might even be able to muster up
the pretense that you aren’t the biggest moron on the planet . . . for a few
minutes when they arrive at the scene when you return home to find that every
single thing that you own has been moved out and there is nothing left in your
house but the nails in the wall where your once beautiful artwork used to
hang.
There can be no question or
debate about whether or not you have the right to go to a coffee shop and do
your personal banking on an open, unsecure WIFI account and leave your screen
open, with your financial information in plain sight while you decide to go buy
a double vanilla soy latte half caff with an extra espresso shot and foam,
without having your identity stolen and every penny you own being embezzled. Forget the designer drink and obscene stupidity of that scenario. If you are in a free WIFI hotspot, you have
the right to ask a total stranger to watch your laptop while you go to the
bathroom. I’ve done it. You’ve done it. We’ll all done it at one point. If we’re lucky, the person will be honest and
when we return from the rest room our things will still be there and we will
not have been violated.
You have a right to have
unprotected sex, you have a right to get drunk every night of the week, and you
have a right to leave a loaded gun with the safety off in your home with
children. You have the right to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, don’t you? You can do whatever floats your little boat
as long as it doesn’t violate another person’s rights. There shouldn’t be any consequences to your
actions, right? You should be able to do
anything you want and people have to respect that you have a right to do
it. It’s in the Constitution, isn’t
it? And while we would like to think
that the person sitting next to us in Starbucks is honest and will not steal our
stuff, that’s just wishful thinking because we know that in our society, people
steal. They lie. They cheat.
They often times take what doesn’t belong to them.
Just as all these examples of
legitimate rights that people have are valid, they have committed no crimes,
they have not broken any laws, there is NOTHING in the world that prevents
anyone from doing each and every one of these things, there are foreseeable
outcomes to each and every situation where a criminal will disregard a person’s
right to be stupid and will violate them.
It’s like, for example, a young lady has a right to go to a fraternity
party, dressed in what amounts to denim panties and a tube top, get drunk off
her ass, and play strip poker while drinking out of strange cups. She has a right to expect not to be raped,
right? But is that a smart thing to do? Oh dear Goddess in heaven, if I suggest that
it’s misguided for a young woman to do that, I’m slut shaming. It’s respectability politics. “How dare you! Take two seats. Shut the fuck up you ankh nigga bitch!”
We as a society would make an
artform of clowning, degrading, humiliating, and ridiculing anyone who could
think that they had a right to leave their personal property readily available
to criminals to steal but if I suggest that women should apply common sense
measures to protect their bodies from being raped, I’m oppressing women’s
rights. Check it. A gazelle has a right to wander freely
throughout the savannah, enjoying the sun and the birds and all the pretty
flowers. That does not mean that a lion
is not going to make dinner out of it, though.
There is this pervasive,
widespread, and delusional notion that women do not have to use common sense in
order to protect themselves from being raped.
Is your need to get drunk and pass out so great that you cannot
comprehend that you are putting yourself in harm’s way if you do it around men
who will not respect your rights? No one
deserves to be raped. Let me say that
again. NO ONE DESERVES TO BE RAPED. But that is not to suggest that there aren’t
some basic, common sense measures that young women can take to prevent being
raped. No one should be shamed for their
sexuality. But that’s not at all the
same thing as suggesting that you should go out and play chicken at high speeds
on a curvy road at midnight when you are under the influence of alcohol and
that you can’t expect there to be fatal consequences either.
We live in a society of rape
culture. Men see women as objects. Men see women as things to be used, slapped,
choked, beaten, ejaculated on, and thrown away like trash. We don’t teach our boys to understand that no
means no, we don’t teach them about consent.
Males are socialized to view sex as power and that taking it, stabbing
it, killing it, and that every other violent metaphor for sex makes them “real
men”. So, the solution can’t be to tell
women that they have a right to wear clothing that has no other objective than
to arouse lust in men, and then feign outrage and disgust when a man wants to
violate them. You lock your car. You lock your house. You don’t give your laptop to the homeless
person on the street to watch while you go to the bathroom. But you’ll scream at the top of your lungs
that you have a right to be naked and walk down the street and no one should
say anything to you. It’s deluded
logic.
I get that the right to party and
get drunk is an inalienable right. If
men do it, women should be able to also.
I get that if you wear more than a bikini, you are going to suffer the
consequences of spontaneous combustion and be consumed with flames because anything
that covers more than you labia and areola is simply too uncomfortable to
wear. I get that you can’t possibly wear
modest clothing because that is somehow infringing on your sexuality and you
have a right to be sexual without being shamed.
I get it! You have a right to
cover your naked body in honey and chain yourself to a tree in the woods too,
but you better expect to be eaten up by insects or worse.
It’s tragic that we aren’t
teaching our sons not to rape. It’s
reprehensible. But it’s equally as
tragic, no more or less so, that we aren’t teaching our daughters to pair up,
protect one another, to have a safety net when they meet with a man for the
first time, or the second or third time for that matter. We should be teaching our girls that they
shouldn’t be alone with a guy until they know him well enough to know that he
is not going to violate them. Of course,
some men will earn a woman’s trust and violate her any way. It’s going to happen for sure because we live
in a society where sociopaths and sexual predators abound. But let’s not give an engraved invitation for
men to violate us and then call it empowering or our right either. Young girls should be saying to men, “I have
texted my whereabouts to my network of girlfriends. They know where I am and who I’m with and you
should know that I’m committed to protecting my safety at all costs.”
Just as we should be teaching our
boys from before the onset of puberty that they should not be violating girls,
in school, at home, and in the media, we should be teaching young girls that if
they are going to a party, that the D.C.B., the designated cock blocker has to
stay sober, someone has to make sure that in a drunken state that the other
girls won’t go off and make unsafe choices, or to call the police immediately
if they see some creep trying to violate a woman, and they should have a
rotation so that everyone has to be said cock blocker when it is their turn. We need to start teaching our girls that
they don’t have to be hot and sexy all the time, that they have more value than
showing off every possible inch of skin, that conforming to sexist definitions
of womanhood is NOT empowering. In my
dream world, we teach young women that their intellect, their integrity, and
their activism are their most attractive traits and that they can be as sexual
as they want to be with individuals who have EARNED the right to their intimacy
and that their value is not in the size of their ass.
Young girls are convinced beyond
a shadow of a doubt that if they aren’t being sexy and attractive 24 hours a
day, 7 days a week, that they are somehow being confined in an oppressive
prison that tells that they have to be asexual and virgin in order to have
value as women. I’m not saying
that. I’m saying that your sexuality
shouldn’t be defined by how much skin you expose to men who aren’t going to
value you as a person any god damn way.
The women who have responded in
outrage to this posting, the ones who are sending messages to their friends to
read this and unfollow me, didn’t read past the word “raped.” This youthful arrogance that has been
promoted, this denial of logic, reason, and common sense, has been perpetuated
for so long and is so wide spread that it passes as sanity. But I’m telling you from what I know because
I have been raped. I’ve been raped more
than once. Once, by a friend in
college. Once, by an acquaintance because
I rejected his romantic advances and he thought he would pay me back by raping
me. The first two instances were
completely beyond my control. I could
have done nothing to stop them. The
third time, I was raped by a young man
who saw me as sexual prey and stalked me until he could get the opportunity to
be alone with me. I let him into my
apartment. I felt uncomfortable with him
being there because I wasn’t attracted to him and I knew he had a crush on me. I shouldn’t have let him in my home. I should have trusted my gut that his intentions
weren’t pure. What I did or didn’t do does
not mean that I deserved to be raped. It
means my judgement was off. It means I
didn’t value myself enough, that being polite to him should not have been as
important as my personal safety. I’m not
saying that any of my rapes were more valid or that my victimization was better
or worse than the young woman who gets drunk at a party. I can’t say it enough, no person, woman or
man, deserves to be raped. I am
suggesting that as long as we hold on to this delusional notion that young
women can do and wear anything they want, and that they can willfully put
themselves in harm’s way and that there aren’t “supposed” to be consequences
because in Utopialand, women can do and wear what they want, we are teaching young
women to play Russian roulette with their safety and possibly their lives.
Copyright 2016 AfroerotiK All
Rights Reserved
