Personal Experiences with Rape Culture

I started this blog because I know I have many personal experiences with rape culture and I know many other people do too. I think those experiences should be shared. If you have an experience I would love for you to share it, the submission button is always open. Anything I've written myself is tagged "rcr" if you're interested in tracking it.
theartundermymattress: bonnienoire: kateordie: This comic is about how there are two sides to every story. guys who say their ex-gf went crazy get the extreme sideeye from me Yep, there’s a whole article about this. Relevant.

theartundermymattress:

bonnienoire:

kateordie:

This comic is about how there are two sides to every story.

guys who say their ex-gf went crazy get the extreme sideeye from me

Yep, there’s a whole article about this. Relevant.

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projectunbreakable: Photographed in Boston, MA on April 25th. — Not sure what Project Unbreakable is? Click here. Want to be a part of Project Unbreakable? Email us at projectunbreakable@gmail.com — Find us on Facebook & Twitter View submissions here

projectunbreakable:

Photographed in Boston, MA on April 25th.

—

Not sure what Project Unbreakable is? Click here.

Want to be a part of Project Unbreakable? Email us at projectunbreakable@gmail.com

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Find us on Facebook & Twitter

View submissions here

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[T]he fact that we’re still talking about the overemphasis on looks means that too many people still believe that they can pull the “you’re ugly” trump card when they don’t agree with a woman. You may not agree with a woman, but to criticize her appearance — as opposed to her ideas or actions — isn’t doing anyone any favors, least of all you. Insulting a woman’s looks when they have nothing to do with the issue at hand implies a lack of comprehension on your part, an inability to engage in high-level thinking. You may think she’s ugly, but everyone else thinks you’re an idiot.
“What We’re Really Talking about When We Talk about Hillary Clinton Without Makeup” - Erin Gloria Ryan (via makingfists)

(via thebitterhour)

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A third of women have considered quitting work over sexism →

40% have been touched in a way that makes them feel uncomfortable, such as a slap on the bottom or hand on the thigh

(via fuckyeahsexeducation)

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bad-dominicana:

theskepticalwhale:

bad-dominicana:

and it makes me think on the whole “youre making me suffer by not reciprocating my love”

its a big ol guilt trip. how am i making you suffer by simply goin on w my life however i please, independent of you?  by simply living and not caring what you want me to be doing for you? i am not here for you.

i dont deny you may be suffering but i didnt make it so. that is all you. you cant push that on other people and pretend they owed you something, when no one does.

and thats how all these crimes of so-called passion are brushed off in my country….men killing women at cold blood because *love makes you crazy*. maybe she made him jealous. maybe she cheated. “you never know”. when the ONLY thing you need to know is HE’S A FUCKING MURDERER AND HAD NO RIGHT TO TAKE SOMEONES LIFE JUST BECAUSE HIS MALE EGO WAS HURT.

folks act like its “understandable” because you know the fragile, weak male egos! so of course it keeps happening over and over. like we’re disposable.

yeah. no. thats the opposite of love thats making you machete a woman to pieces. and theres nothing to understand.

please stop attributing that to love and passion when its hatred of women, cruelty, abuse and HOMICIDE.

thank you thank you thank you so much for this.

thinking back after reading this post every.  single.  one.  of my exes blamed me for destroying their happiness by my not reciprocating their “love” for me, and acted in violent ways to themselves, to me, to those otherwise uninvolved in our relationship, using that as an excuse.

and i always bought it.

fuck them.

thank you.

*sending love*

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whoneedsfeminism:

I need feminism because there are too many men who react with anger and behave as though they are being personally victimised when women express that they somtimes feel unsafe around some men, or feel frustrated that some men expect sex in return for kindness or free drinks.  Everyone knows that ‘not every man is like that’, but personal experience and society as a whole force us to be cautious, and their unjust anger over this fact simply makes many of us feel even more unsafe. 

I need feminism because there are far too many people (of any gender) who, rather than even considering trying to understand why we feel the way we do, respond to our caution and frustration with aggression and insults to our intelligence.  More often than not, these are people who have never been and never will be in the kinds of situations that have given us personal reason to feel they way we do. 

I don’t doubt that you - general you - are a fantastic guy who wouldn’t expect me to put out because you bought me dinner, but you don’t negate the countless other men who came before you who felt disturbingly entitled to my body and my friends’ bodies in one circumstance or another, and you and your winning personality don’t make my caution and frustration over this invalid.

I need feminism because I am made to feel objectified, unsafe and uncomfortable, often on a daily basis and all because of my gender, and I am still accused of being stupid, presumptious and a man-hater when I voice and explain my discomfort.

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I’ve seen a lot of posts lately on street harassment and thought I’d add my two cents

saneoldsameold:

I’m not going to address the ‘white girls get it too omg’ bullshit because they do, but it’s always different. I’m writing this as a woman of color who’s experienced street harassment more times than I can count.

First off, I think people need to realize that this isn’t just basic misogyny when it comes to women of color. It’s misogyny and whiteness showing both their ugly faces simultaneously. Because misogyny treats white women completely differently.

But whiteness tells US (WOC) some whole other shit, mainly two things:
1. Black and brown women are sexually undesirable (unless of course, they’re light)
2. Black and brown are always sexually available

and that combination of ideas is what’s really so dangerous about street harassment. Because if you believe both, then you believe that Black and brown women SHOULD BE HAPPY when you harass them on the street. You’re not even desirable, you should be fucking flattered. Men who perpetrate street harassment are under the impression that I owe them my time and that their harassment should be taken as a complement because I have brown skin. And that is what makes street harassment genuinely dangerous- the sense of entitlement to ME.

I had a guy tell me once when he scared the shit out of me by following me into a corner store (I was 15) because I freaked and didn’t give him my name, ‘Man I ain’t finna take this shit from no bitch.’

What he meant was, you’re brown. Be happy I just harassed you. Street harassment isn’t just misogyny at work- it’s whiteness telling men how to treat Black and brown women.

(via lipstick-feminists)

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If we teach women that there are only certain ways they may acceptably behave, we should not be surprised when they behave in those ways.

And we should not be surprised when they behave these ways during attempted or completed rapes.

Women who are taught not to speak up too loudly or too forcefully or too adamantly or too demandingly are not going to shout “NO” at the top of their goddamn lungs just because some guy is getting uncomfortably close.

Women who are taught not to keep arguing are not going to keep saying “NO.”

Women who are taught that their needs and desires are not to be trusted, are fickle and wrong and are not to be interpreted by the woman herself, are not going to know how to argue with “but you liked kissing, I just thought…”

Women who are taught that physical confrontations make them look crazy will not start hitting, kicking, and screaming until it’s too late, if they do at all.

Women who are taught that a display of their emotional state will have them labeled hysterical and crazy (which is how their perception of events will be discounted) will not be willing to run from a room disheveled and screaming and crying.

Women who are taught that certain established boundaries are frowned upon as too rigid and unnecessary are going to find themselves in situations that move further faster before they realize that their first impression was right, and they are in a dangerous room with a dangerous person.

Women who are taught that refusing to flirt back results in an immediately hostile environment will continue to unwillingly and unhappily flirt with somebody who is invading their space and giving them creep alerts.

People wonder why women don’t “fight back,” but they don’t wonder about it when women back down in arguments, are interrupted, purposefully lower and modulate their voices to express less emotion, make obvious signals that they are uninterested in conversation or being in closer physical proximity and are ignored. They don’t wonder about all those daily social interactions in which women are quieter, ignored, or invisible, because those social interactions seem normal. They seem normal to women, and they seem normal to men, because we were all raised in the same cultural pond, drinking the same Kool-Aid.

And then, all of a sudden, when women are raped, all these natural and invisible social interactions become evidence that the woman wasn’t truly raped. Because she didn’t fight back, or yell loudly, or run, or kick, or punch. She let him into her room when it was obvious what he wanted. She flirted with him, she kissed him. She stopped saying no, after a while.

Harriet J on Another post about rape 

Shattering truth. 

(via reconnect-restore-rewild)

this post is…giving me life.

(via bad-dominicana)

(via bad-dominicana)

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“Fat women are treated as utterly undesirable in our culture [and] are often turned into a ‘bizarre’ fetish object. The result is that fat women are told to be grateful for any sexual attention they receive from anyone, whether they themselves find that person sexually appealing or not. In other words, even more than your average women, fat women are only allowed to be occasional objects of desir…e and are regularly denied their right to have and pursue sexual desires of their own.

That way of thinking becomes very dangerous when sexual violence is mixed in. When fat women are raped, they’re often told they should be grateful that anyone wanted them, or, alternatively, disbelieved because it doesn’t seem plausible that anyone would want them ‘enough to rape them.’ These arguments not only rely on the dangerous myth that rape is about uncontrollable sexual desire (it’s not), but also propagate the message that fat women’s bodies aren’t valuable enough to the culture for their violation to be taken seriously.”

- Jaclyn Friedman in: What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl’s Shame-Free Guide to Sex and Safety (via maiidofhorror)

TW: rape, rape culture, sexual assault, rape apologism, fat hate, fat shaming

(via captain-sonic)

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Emotional Abuse Awareness →

fromonesurvivortoanother:

found this today. looks like a good resource.

(via bad-dominicana)

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symphony-of-a-survivor: The voices of rape culture.

symphony-of-a-survivor:

The voices of rape culture.

(via niaface)

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The Safe Space Network

bustygirlcomics:

stfuconservatives:

safespacenetwork:

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Thank you so much for putting this together!

BGC is on the Safe Space Network!!! An all-embracing list of inclusion and Busty Girl Comics made the grade!! :D

(via blue-jayne)

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thepersonalispolitic: lacigreen: “she’s such a slut” = i fear the way you express yourself so ill degrade your worth until you stop I love this sign because it doesn’t just apply to white women, it applies to Women of Color too!  With white women anyone who breaks the laws of “purity” and has the audacity to control her own decisions about her sexuality is a slut and that’s because people fear the fact that she’s in control, they fear her sexuality existing in a way that isn’t owned and operated by a man (preferably her husband) which is the only way it’s acceptable for a white woman’s sexuality to exist at all.  Meanwhile for Women of Color the fact that they can, will, and do reproduce, creating more and more People of Color forever and ever is what causes racist/white supremacist assholes to fear their sexuality.  This fear is based upon the potential fruit of that sexuality - children - which is why all Women of Color are automatically sluts no matter what they do or how they act.  Every Woman of Color has the potential to reproduce so even if she’s not even sexually active there is an inherent fear of her sexuality which makes her a slut regardless of her personal choices and behaviors.   

thepersonalispolitic:

lacigreen:

“she’s such a slut” = i fear the way you express yourself so ill degrade your worth until you stop

I love this sign because it doesn’t just apply to white women, it applies to Women of Color too!  With white women anyone who breaks the laws of “purity” and has the audacity to control her own decisions about her sexuality is a slut and that’s because people fear the fact that she’s in control, they fear her sexuality existing in a way that isn’t owned and operated by a man (preferably her husband) which is the only way it’s acceptable for a white woman’s sexuality to exist at all.  Meanwhile for Women of Color the fact that they can, will, and do reproduce, creating more and more People of Color forever and ever is what causes racist/white supremacist assholes to fear their sexuality.  This fear is based upon the potential fruit of that sexuality - children - which is why all Women of Color are automatically sluts no matter what they do or how they act.  Every Woman of Color has the potential to reproduce so even if she’s not even sexually active there is an inherent fear of her sexuality which makes her a slut regardless of her personal choices and behaviors.   

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Female toplessness is legal in a lot of places in the US (although not where I live), and I’d be meeting the letter of the law with a couple of Band-aids. But I have a gut feeling that if I go anywhere that there are people—and particularly anywhere there are children—nobody’s going to be too happy about my Band-aids. The enforcement is social; women just don’t go around topless in the US.

It bothers me because it’s unequal, but it also bothers me in its implications: that my body is inherently sexual, and a man’s body isn’t. It feels like men are being viewed through the first-person lens of “it’s nice to feel the sun on my skin, and I don’t mean anything by it” and women are being viewed through the distinctly third-person lens of “it’s inappropriate for me, a heterosexual man, to see her sexy parts.” It ignores the experiences of people who are turned on by male chests and somehow manage to contain themselves when they see one.
The Pervocracy: My boobs want to be free. (via sexisnottheenemy)

(via historicalslut)

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Friend Zone

alimarko:

feminiism:

It’s true, just because a woman is your friend, that does not mean she owes you sex. But if you want more than friendship and she’s not open to more than that, you have every right in the world to express sadness and disappointment all over the fucking internet if that’s what you choose to do. Your feelings are valid no matter how much feminists try to shame you for having them. It is also fine to choose not to be friends with a woman for not giving you sex if sex is more important to you than friendship.

Totally acceptable human behavior: I am kind and friendly to someone both because I have feelings for them and because I value them as a person. I was honest with my hope that we would enter into a romantic and/or sexual relationship. However, this person is satisfied with being my friend and does not want to enter a romantic and/or sexual relationship with me. I am expectedly disappointed and outwardly sad, but I also understand that this is that person’s choice and I will respect that choice. I will also either continue being friends with that person because I value that relationship, or I will explain to them why I find it too painful to be just friends. If I value sex more than the friendship, it is okay because I would have made that very clear from the very beginning of the relationship.

Unacceptable “friend zone” behavior: I am kind and friendly to someone because I want them to enter a sexual and/or romantic relationship with me. I failed to convey those hopes/intentions, and lead this person to believe that I am a friend. However, this person is satisfied with being my friend and does not want to enter a romantic and/or sexual relationship with me. I am disappointed and therefore I will call my love interest demeaning names on the internet or to my friends simply for exercising their right to say no. I will lament the fact that I was so nice to this person and they still didn’t want to have sex with me and also stop being nice to them because they deserve it. If I value sex more than the friendship, I will likely have made this person very hurt because they legitimately thought I wanted to be their friend.

See the difference?

(via pallas-athena)

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