"It Doesn't Have to Be This Way: The Infuriating Reality of Womanhood"

"Watching TV today, I felt that it was a fucking miracle that I made it through high school and college without being raped. And how deeply fucked up is that? We're steeped in it. A fellow actress in my acting class had to pretend to be fucked backwards over a table while reading off a list of missed calls to her fictional boss, once. She had to walk into an audition room, and let people see her that way to try to get a job. How deeply dehumanizing. How disgusting that someone even felt entitled to write that role. And don't even get me started on Khaleesi, everyone's favorite princess on Games of Thrones who, just an episode or two after we meet her, is raped on her marital bed by an enormous Dothraki man who has recently purchased her, and proceeds to then fall in love with her (apparently gentle-hearted) rapist? Please. This is so widespread and so sick. And yet is it better to acknowledge these things by writing stories about them, than to keep them secret? Is it better to tell these stories so that we feel this outrage?

I don't know. I don't know if it is. At least, I don't know if it's better to tell them in this way. In this throw up your hands, clean up the mess sort of way. The cops come afterwards. Couldn't save her. Couldn't stop it, but at least someone will be punished. Sort of. Unless they're famous. Or rich, then it's pretty much whatever. Right?

What I'd rather see than sad stories of abuse that someone swoops in to try to half-assedly address, is an absolute refusal to tolerate these crimes in the first place. Rather than TV shows trying to mete out justice in one-hour segments, I'd rather see men on TV becoming empowered to stop each other in the moment. High school boys resisting peer pressure, not succumbing to it. Father figures who even though they're in a half-hour comedy, defend their women, rather than being cowed by them."

http://jezebel.com/it-doesnt-have-to-be-this-way-the-infuriating-reality-1537068838

Um, yes.

I think a lot of women kind of feel like rape is this inevitable thing - like, turn to a woman near you and say the phrase "so this is where it happens..." and I bet that she knows what 'this' is. [Actually, don't do this, she's probably just chilling, she doesn't need that]. Like, I joke about it - I'll tell a story about a super sketchy path that google maps sent me down and, to illustrate the scene, I'll say "and I was looking around and thinking 'so THIS is where I am murdered by the rapist'". And we all laugh and then sigh.

There is a way that rape is considered to be part of every woman's story; either she is a victim, she is protected, or she is lucky. And we make choices everyday to keep ourselves out of the victim category, because if we fail to find protections for ourselves (the appropriate neighborhoods; the appropriate clothes; appropriate levels of sobriety; attaching ourselves to appropriate male figures who society then understands as people who can't rape us; etc...)  then we are also understood to be the perpetrators of our own misfortune.

It's exhausting sometimes when I have a moment of perspective and realize how much responsibility for not-being-raped I have accepted, this precarious balance between expressing myself and my gender identity and the threat of balance, the way I sometimes just want to hold very still forever. This responsibility should be societal and not individual.

And it's kind of all in the title of this piece: It doesn't have to be this way.

Not just the experience of having feminine traits in public (here I want to include women and men) but also masculinity/power shouldn't be like this.

Related: Why I don't watch game of thrones; Women's pain (long one)

FB: "

I've always known that being a woman was complicated. That it comes with a price. That the joy I find in being desirable, is also a liability - I've been taught that. My life has taught me that. But even I was shocked, as I sat in a group therapy session just a few months ago, to hear a friend, an incredibly beautiful 23-year-old girl, a girl I was jealous of, to be totally transparent, tell us with horrifying casualness about a recent sexual assault and wrap up by saying "I know this isn't my fault. I know that when I look this way, these things will happen to me. It's just the way it is." She understood the price of her body. She understood that over and over again, no one fucking helped her."