I have a friend on twitter, I’ll call her G. She’s been tweeting about rape every day. Statistics on rape, little ways a woman has to think about rape, and various commentary on rape culture.
Some examples. She retweeted “‘a woman is sexually assaulted in India every 20 minutes; in the United States, it’s every 2 minutes.’ http://t.co/6je6kyer ”
“We live in a country where politicians call rape a “gift from God” and suggest that women regularly lie…” http://t.co/oQ14VqJ3
“Approximately 28% of rape victims are raped by their significant other, 35% by acquaintances”
“The main purpose for me of doing [tweets about rape] is to show how frequently women change their lives due to rape.”
“Regardless of the name you place on a relationship, sex without consent is rape. You should not force, or guilt trip your partner into sex.”
“In 1995, the CDC performed a survey of college campuses. It found that 20% of 5000 women had experienced rape in their lifetime.”
“When you hear a rape joke, remember rape jokes validate the belief that rape is not really wrong. Don’t make rape jokes.”
“If you’re out tonight having a great time and wonder if you have consent to have consensual sex? You don’t. Sex without consent is rape.”
“In the 2 hours since I got out of bed I have made 3 decisions focused on avoiding assault.
That means I have thought about the possibility of being assaulted 3 times since I got out of bed.”
“As a survivor of assault I might be more likely to think about it, but women who have not been assaulted also make choices based on safety.”
She spent several days attempting to educate on rape culture.
In my timeline, I ran across this tweet.
“Police in Canada put up posters to educate men about what constitutes rape, & rape cases fall by 10%. http://bit.ly/WKz9Dd” I didn’t look at who’d retweeted it, just clicked through to the article and read that. The interesting part was that there was a commenter that has a nearly identical name to G. I clicked on the commenter’s name and it’s clear that they’re not the same person, but that reinforced my thought that G had originally retweeted.
It turns out it was another acquaintance, B. Who is also a smart, awesome woman. I found it interesting that two women who have only rather tenuous connections to me, and none at all to each other, would basically unintentionally fake me out that way.
Something else the article reminded me of was an RP session I had the other night where the male character stopped before even so much as kissing my female character because he wasn’t sure she had changed her mind from the general attitude she’d had toward him of late. My character saw him telegraph that he wanted to kiss her, took a moment to consider her attitude and the circumstances behind it and ended up kissing him to so that yes, she gave consent.
It’s a somewhat unfortunate symptom of the rape culture in which we live that that kind of behavior is to be applauded, but I do applaud it nonetheless. I especially applaud the fact that the character did this without expecting anything for being the good guy. The best thing this whole deal told me was that the player behind the guy (that I know is also a guy) is the same type of person his character is, because the way he wrote, it was just a natural thing.
This is the kind of person we need to expect our sons, our brothers, our cousins, our husbands, and our fathers to be. This is the minimum standard to which we need to hold them. And right now, if it means applauding them for holding to it, by all means, I’ll be the one clapping the loudest.
●Musings