And here you are, making an assumption about me...........do you think you know more about sexual assault?
Do I think I know more about sexual assault, as compared to whom? In any event, it does not please me to “know (any) more” than the next person; but when and where I'm presented with clear evidence that this is the case, I engage in my commitment to help by sharing what facts and information I have.
The real traumatic ones are the ones you never tell. Not once.
It is unclear whether you are issuing a command here and/or speaking from your own experience. I wouldn't ask you to make such a disclosure anyway, but I would suggest that even those who are survivors may evaluate/audit the experiences of other survivors and declare their own trauma to be comparitively “superior” in regards to its level of severity.
If this kind of comparitive evaluation were the sole metric by which all survivors measured the severity of their own abuse, we would not hear from ANY of them – because, there on the furthest end of the spectrum of sexual assault, are those who did not survive their attacks. Those are the ones who “never tell”. “Not once.”
Thus by your comparative reasoning, there are no survivors of sexual assault who shouldn't simply shut up and be grateful that they're still alive. I am not being hyperbolic here: this is the place to which your own slippery slope ultimately leads.
One of the problems in rape culture society is how individual victims are summarily disbelieved and/or mercilessly excoriated by others for their subjectivity when reporting their experiences. This makes secondary trauma likely, and it is also what makes rape the most underreported of all crimes.
And when you make declarations such as the one above, you sweepingly minimize the impact of rape in all but its most very severe cases/outcomes (death). Who told you that you could do this?
If you do have the guts to talk about it, then it wasn't that terrifying in the first place.
If, as you suggest, it “wasn't that terrifying in the first place”, then why on earth should “talking about it” require any “guts” at all?
Who's really "
terrifying" whom around here? Survivors already have "guts"; it's the rest of society that doesn't even have the courage to actually HEAR survivors and BELIEVE them.
It means you just want to be given sympathy.
A most deserved (and welcome) humane response - and that to which you are suggesting they in particular are the very least entitled.
Well. “Let me just tell you”: You may ration and/or conditionally distribute your own empathy as a finite commodity. But you will not shame people, pre-emptively or otherwise, out of disclosing – nor will you shame those who intend to better-receive them.
But the ones who have really been traumatized....
Your rape apology is in itself traumatizing, and acts to maintain and reinforce rape culture.
let me just tell you...you never tell. It's just between you and the devil and God. You don't tell someone what you've seen in Hell.
As I've already iterated, I'm not here to force a disclosure, but I can tell you that in the event you are in fact a survivor and wish to disclose, there are advocates everywhere who can assist you in doing so.
A woman would never truly understand sexual assault. You talk and talk and talk. But you're meant to give it away.
I'm “meant to give away” my talk? Kidding – but – no kidding – in addition to being designated the sex class, women are exploited as a resource in most every other, non-sexual, context as well, as they are expected to give away their labor (including the emotional labor such as I am performing here) for free.
Edit:
Re: "A woman would never truly understand sexual assault.":
Women not only understand sexual assault, our understanding is also a compulsory component of our socialization process. The threat of sexual assault deeply and profoundly alters the ways in which girls and women move through the world. It is you who is neither able nor willing to understand this fact, nor even for a moment to try and comprehend our experience of the world by looking at it through our eyes.
It's all just natural.
The only persons who perceive rape as “natural” are rape apologists and rapists. Nor are these mutually exclusive, by the way.
You're just pissed that you couldn't give it away to whom you wanted to .
You're damn right I'm pissed. The right of an individual (male or female) to be the one getting to make the sole determination as to whether, when, where, how and with whom they will consent to sharing access to their own body – and those with whom they will not – is a fundamental right.
But I think you're just
pissed when
women are the ones asserting and enforcing it.
**Have an A1 day**
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