(TW: rape)
Rape follows me. The threat of rape is a deep bass refrain in my life, I do not fear mugging or theft or homelessness or beating the way I fear rape. Every room I move through, every door I open conceals the possibility of rape, before we got the big dog I used to lie awake alone in my house at night worrying about men breaking in and raping me.
I live in a world with no safety, no psychic silence from the noise the threat of rape makes
Men are not safe people in my world, they are half cocked weapons, potentially full of selfishness and violence. I have very few men in my life because the negotiations that are needed to go through between myself and a man, before I can even think about starting to trust him are so exhausting that usually one or other of us give up on the process before we get to a point we can have any meaningful friendship anyway.
Often in my interactions with men is a surface layer of boredom, irritation and apathy and all of those feelings are real but they are a shield for my terror that they will take me, invade me, annihilate me
And you know what, I know that this isn’t a particularly healthy way to live, or maybe even particularly sensible, and certainly not practical given that half the world population is male.
But the thing is I am the way I am because men have hurt me. I’ve done a lot of healing, years of it and I’ve worked really hard at it but some things don’t heal because some things are true, my body knows that its at risk of invasion by men because it was invaded so many times.
But men get angry with me about it, because I refuse to trust them, and I just feel, why are you angry with me? I didn’t give myself ptsd why aren’t you angry with the men that hurt me?
And women get angry with me when I’m not immediately and obviously accepting and open with their partners, friends, sons, when I shield my body or show no interest in connecting with the men in their lives, and I don’t understand this, I wouldn’t automatically expect anyone to trust either of the men in my life, why would I? a lot of the time I don’t trust them, (this is not the same as thinking that they are not trustworthy) but also just because i like someone, just because I connect with someone why should every other woman?
And then theres the old tired refrain “not all men rape” I know that if I thought that this wasn’t the case I would be a separatist, but you cant tell by looking and in my experience you can’t take anyone else’s word for it either, all the men that hurt me were loved by somebody. and really i dont have the energy to find out.
There is no conclusion to this piece of writing because there cant be really.
“Some things don’t heal because some things are true.” Yes.
Your attitudes toward men sound perfectly sensible, perfectly rational to me. It’s a woman’s right to draw conclusions about men from her experiential evidence — it’s healthy and necessary.
