Like Elizabeth Bear, I’m just fucking tired.
Because a 15yo of my acquaintance doesn’t believe she was raped, since after she said no several times yet he continued to touch her she “got hot” and stopped saying no.
Because I had a dear friend twenty years ago that I couldn’t believe had never been harassed/touched/molested/assaulted. All my friends had been. Hadn’t all women experienced it by the age of 23? How could it be?
Because some people think the #YesAllWomen tag is about man-bashing.
Because someone was using the #YesAllWomen tag to advertise their breast augmentation services.
Because telling a 40yo man that a girl he is ogling is fourteen nets the response “Old enough to bleed…”
Because I am ma’amed when I go to electronics stores. Because I am ma’amed in home improvement stores. Because words like ma’amed and mansplaining are needed, and you don’t have to explain either one to a woman. The first time she hears those words, she knows what they mean.
Because when 14yo boys dress up for 8th grade promotion, they wear formal clothes, and when girls dress up they wear *less* clothes and no one thinks there’s something skewed about that.
Because a girl has little choice in dressing that way if she wants to dress up, and if she gets attacked while wearing the least-revealing party dress she could find in the store, it’s still going to be her fault.
Because trying to find my 11yo a swimsuit that fit her growing curves but wasn’t a bikini was nearly impossible. Now she’s 15 and it’s easy to find her sexy clothes (which she loves, partly because she’s been taught by society that she has no worth if she’s not pretty and everything I have done and said has not drowned that out), but finding things for the days she doesn’t want see-through or skin-tight or too short means we have to go into the boys’ section.
Because “not all men.” Because women can’t have a hashtag without “but what about the men†??”
†Forgetting, of course, that everything you learn outside of women’s studies is from the “masculine perspective.”
Very true, what you wrote. However, a few things were left out – the wife that says no for now and is still forced or coerced. What does this tell children who may witness this, even if it is in a playful banter? The young adult fiction that while, since it is YA, does not consummate the sex act, comes so close to it that as adults we know that a young person would not have the will to stop? Not to mention the crossover fiction and romance books that make saying no just a moment of virtue until the yes word is spoken? I will not even go into the movie industry. But you get the picture.
As authors, either of books or screen, we may have the legal right in the United States to express ourselves freely. Somewhere along the line, we lost sight in the headlong rush to be free, of the responsibility we must shoulder in using the freedom. The pen is still mightier than the sword. At some point, we need to stop just running headlong down the hill of freedom, and find ways to express things without waiting for society will tell us stop. How much more creative can we be if we find our own stop word, and find ways to express things without making every book have to have some kind of sexually explicit, or thinly disguised, charged point? Maybe then childhood, and a less than misogynistic view of society can start to emerge.
Just being the devil’s advocate here
there will always be things left out–I couldn’t possibly cover all the ways women are sexually harassed. Just now I was reading about a high school student who was aiming a laser pointer at a girl’s chest in the lunchroom.
I think that the important part of addressing these things as authors isn’t necessarily to shy away from them, but to call it what it is. Lots of people love the romance in Twilight. I call it an abusive relationship. If one of my characters is attempting to take advantage of someone passed out, you can bet someone else is going to flat out call it rape. I won’t glamorize this sort of thing, and I’ll do my best to present healthy relationships for readers to learn from if they are so inclined.
And I’ll have Eve flatten a rapist every book or so because it’s SO FUN.
All of those, and more, like when I have to explain to a roomful of otherwise reasonably enlightened gamers/men why there is no such thing as a rape “joke”, and why no such “joke” they can come up with will ever be funny, and yet they STILL don’t understand why it poisons the atmosphere when they talk stupid like that.
Yes! When even the good guys just don’t GET IT no matter how you explain…