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By Misty Nuckolls - Lawrence.com & Entropic Doom blog  

It’s funny, really, but it seems that when a woman displays bad judgement and opens herself up to victimization because of it, it’s the men that come to her defense first. We women, having spent our lives trapped in flesh that is vulnerable simply because of its genetic makeup, are the ones to tear her to pieces for being stupid. In rape trials before a jury, it is almost always the female jurors who will take into account the panties she was wearing, the number of drinks she had, whether or not she could be said to have been “leading him on.”

That’s because men don’t know, not really. Not the good ones, the ones we call our friends and lovers. They don’t know about not smelling like prey, because they’ve never been prey or predator.

So I’ve been doing something really stupid, even by my own standards. I’ve been arguing with a bunch of teenage boys on a friend’s blog. Said friend posted an article about a girl in our town who was walking home drunk from a party, through a bad part of town, and decided it would be a good idea to follow a strange man down an alley because he said he would show her a shortcut. Tragically, though not shockingly, she was raped.

Said friend and I are both sympathetic towards this girl, but we are both of the opinion that she could have saved herself a lot of pain by being a bit smarter. The boys are insisting that she can’t be held accountable for her judgment because she was drunk, and wondering why we consider it to have been a bad decision to follow a strange man down an alley in the first place. After all, they say, he could have just been trying to help.

But that’s the thing. If you are a woman, alone, in the dark, you HAVE to assume that any man you do not know means you harm. It is an ugly but unavoidable fact of life. I wish it weren’t so, but you know what they say, you can wish in one hand and shit in the other. . .

If you were born with a womb instead of a cock, and a strange man approaches you when you are alone, isolated, and at night, you MUST assume that he is dangerous, and a threat to your well-being. He may be Mr. Rogers, for all you know, but if you don’t want to end up a victim at some point in your life, you have to assume he’s the next Hillside Strangler. As a woman alone in the dark you cannot afford to trust. You cannot afford to have faith in your fellow man. You cannot afford to believe in charity and goodness and the kindness of strangers. (Remember what happened to Blanche DuBois?) Doing so will eventually land you on your back in the gravel with a stranger’s dick between your thighs, and if you’re lucky, the encounter will end with him walking away wiping your blood off his cock with your panties instead of the blood off his knife with the same.

Yeah, I know that sounds melodramatic as fuck. But women do not have the privilege of assuming otherwise. We are smaller, weaker, and historically the objects of violence. It is only in the past few centuries that we as a society have begun to view rape as anything but commonplace. A hundred years ago a woman who had any other choice would never have dreamed of walking home from a party alone after sunset. We have freedoms our grandmothers never dreamed of, yes, but those freedoms also expose us to dangers our grandmothers only heard whispers of in darkened parlors. If we do not choose to acknowledge that fact, we are blithely skipping along to our own violent degradation.

Rape is never the fault of the raped, no matter her attire, her behavior, or her location. However, we as modern, independent women must take responsibility for our own well-being. That means not putting ourselves in danger. That means not getting blind drunk and passing out on the couch at a frat house. That means, if not making sure there is someone to walk us home at night, not talking to strangers when doing so alone, and most certainly it means not following strangers down dark alleys.

It is an atrocity that this poor student had to learn that lesson the hard way, but maybe, just maybe, if the men in our lives, instead of trying to instill in us the sense that the world belongs to us and that all men are as good as they are, gave us a more realistic view of our own innate vulnerability and their peers’ predatory natures, we would learn that lesson before we end up crying in an emergency room. I’m not saying that we need to raise our daughters to be timid fearful creatures who will not venture out of their yards after the sun goes down, but we certainly DO need to raise them to be strong, and sensible, and smart. Smart isn’t assuming that strange men mean us well. That is idealism, and idealism had never saved a woman from being victimized.

It is sweet that these boys I am arguing with think that this woman should not have done anything BUT assume that this man was truly offering to show her a shortcut. But sweetness offers us no protection, it is not armor. Sweetness is for home with people we trust, it is not for venturing forth into a hostile world. You can, and should, assume that your father, your uncle, your boyfriend is sweet. But that stranger in the alley? No, he’s not sweet, he’s a violent rapist fuckwad and you need to run away from him as fast as you can, or barring that, keep walking, quickly, and do not speak to him. At the worst, you will hurt his feelings. At the best, you will save yourself a world of hurt.

Postscript: This blog is several years old. One of the “boys” I speak of arguing with was later convicted on multiple counts of knowingly exposing women to HIV. Yeah, his thing was to run around and screw them without a condom and then call them the next day to say he’d given them AIDS.

Small world.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 27th, 2007 at 3:00 am and is filed under Womens Issues.
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