Eve's Daughter has taken my favorite part of Dworkin's "I Want a 24 Hours Truce During Which there is No Rape" speech and expanded it to a stunning 2.4 minute reminder that women are not as helpless as men think, we're just better people.
Women’s Lives Need a Trigger Warning
Posted on October 7, 2010 by Eve's Daughter
http://evebitfirst.wordpress.com/2010/10/07/a-rant/
Today is one of Those Days – an angry day.
As if walking down the street, or being alone in an elevator with a man, or seeing Cosmo in the checkout line of the supermarket, or looking at the clothes marketed to women in stores wasn’t enough to remind me that I’m supposed to be a delicious little cookie waiting to be gobbled up by the Big Bad Wolf. No, I go to work (or read the newspaper) and get to read this shit over and over and over and over again.
“The victim… The victims… The young woman… Two thirteen year old girls… The respondent’s wife… The defendant’s daughter… Jane Doe…”
“…was held down and forcibly penetrated with several foreign objects, beaten, whipped, and electrocuted…was raped at gunpoint by six men…was attacked with acid and later placed into the local jail, where she was repeatedly raped by guards…was found strangled to death, the defendant’s semen in her vagina and on other locations on her body…was repeatedly raped in the back of the van by the other gang members while the defendant drove them to a remote location…”
“…she later testified…she later died…she was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder…she required multiple surgeries…she miscarried…she later committed suicide….”
Dear men:
Die.
No, seriously. This is a rant, and it’s about you, personally. You, personally, are a shit, because statistics indicate there is an almost 100% certainty that you have either committed a rape, or wanted to commit a rape, or knowingly assisted or defended someone who committed a rape, or mocked a woman who was raped. And no, I’m not dropping links to tell you what you should damn well already know.
Here is what you know: that you are a vile and depraved chunk of flesh that doesn’t matter to the world. You exist in a reality you perpetuate in which value is all relative, in which everything is placed into a hierarchy, which in the end means that nothing has inherent value. You are literally worthless.
And you are willing to do it so long as someone is worth less. So part of the way you deal with that is to try to make women worth less. You whine and whinge and cry about the Big Brother Corporations or Big Brother Government or Big Brother China-taking-all-our-jobs or Big Brother asshole-who-beat-you-up-in-seventh-grade or Big Brother who-raped-you, but in the end you lap it up and pass the buck so that you can have someone underneath your own thumb. You only care about your rank in the pecking order, so spare me the crocodile tears.
I used to pity you. I used to feel sorry for you. I used to think most of you got a bad rap and were probably misunderstood.
But women are raped every day and we don’t go on murdering sprees. We don’t hunt men down and torture them to death. Little girls aren’t known for picking the wings off flies or frying ants to death on the sidewalk. Women in war zones are raped en masse and then cry for peace, and I’m expected to swallow your sob story about having a troubled childhood because you never knew your father and that’s why you and your friends drugged and gang-raped a sixteen year old girl.
On a daily basis you, individually and in concert with other men, actively attempt to destroy the lives of a class of people who have, for the most part, never done anything to you. Who have been enslaved and raped and brutalized and forced to raise children you claim or starve or beat or sell, and have for the most part still managed to find it in their hearts to love. Who rarely hurt you back. Who almost never rape or murder you. Who usually only harm you or their children when suffering from deep trauma-related psychoses. We suffer, daily, and you laugh at us, and tell us it’s our fault.
Then you tell us you can’t help it. It’s your nature. It’s how you love. It’s how you desire. It’s how you prove yourselves.
All of which leads me to believe that either you’re deluding yourselves about the reality of your choices OR that you really and truly are fundamentally flawed beings. It’s amazing how many of your academic fields and governance – from evolutionary biology, to psychology, to criminal law – are constantly trying to convince me of the latter. Females are human beings, but I’m not sure what you are.
If the world was the tiniest bit just, or fair, or merciful, or righteous, I would be out there with a knife or a gun hunting you down. I would offer you blowjobs for forty dollars behind the building and then dispatch you quickly in quiet solitude. I would be kinder than you, because I would only go after adults. I would be kinder than you, because I would do it quickly and not torture you first. I would be kinder than you, because I wouldn’t call you names or demean you or psychologically terrorize you while I was doing it. You would be released from the psychotic prison of your mind, and there would be one less man out there threatening my mother, my sisters, my daughters, and my self.
You wouldn’t know who I was. I smile at you in that elevator. I dress inconspicuously. I call you “sir” if you’re older. I’m the one who serves you coffee at the drive-thru window, and you crack jokes to try to get me to smile. I’m the one who cleans your office, who you greet by first name and a smile with that little half-wave. I’m the one who tells you to turn your head to the side and cough. I could poison you, I could go through your desk drawer and destroy your finances, I could kill you on the operating table. I could do things to you. You don’t know. I’m your next door neighbor, your secretary, your sister, your wife. I’m the “loud” “fat” woman in your office you dismiss out of hand. I’m the young Asiann girl from downstairs you eroticize because of my presumed submissiveness.
It’s ironic, really – you try to subvert, and corrupt, and infect, and distort, and mangle, and destroy our lives because you aren’t even sure you have one. It’s obvious that you don’t deserve one.
You aren’t scared of me, but maybe you should be. Because I know what you are. And I know how this will end.
You think this sounds violent? Don’t even start; I know what you look at when you masturbate.