Rape me.
7th April 2011[I wrote this for WWAATD but then Thought Cat wholeheartedly apologized for the shitstorm and so I didn’t finish editing this but it’s still a lot of personal words and feelings and shit so I am posting it here.]
I like playing the victim, I like pretending I’m prey. I like being chased and I like men to slap me in the face, I like to be spanked and choked, I give consent for it. If you can spell I will most likely fuck you on the first date. If you are honest and kind, I will entertain ‘fantasies’. I will not have children. I think weddings are irrelevant. I make my own living. I do what I want unless what I want is for someone to tell me what to do. I want a boyfriend who can tell me what to do, not because he’s a man, but because he’s a smart man who loves me.
I feel good that I can favor what I naturally favor in relative harmony with the world around me, the western world. I know that a lot of women in the rest of the world will never be able to say something like ‘I will not have children’ without major repercussions.
***
Last Friday a friend and I had drinks with people from work and then we went to her house and ate chicken nuggets and smoked weed and watched Miranda. It was too late for me to go home so I stayed on her couch and in the morning (I mean early afternoon) I had to go to a BBQ for a guy’s birthday because a lot of guys like steak and it was slated to be the first ‘warm’ day of spring (and by warm I mean ‘chilly-ish but you can stand outside’). Instead of trekking all the way back home I decided to just shower, borrow a clean shirt and go straight to the party. My friend suggested a white t-shirt with a high neckline. I thought about the handsome young men who’d be in attendance and then I thought about my assets (not many, not in my own eyes).
People have sometimes complimented my skin, particularly my décolletage. My friend said, just raid my closet, wear what you like. I chose a soft cotton tee with a subtle plunge. It draped smooth over the mounds on my chest making them appear like large spongy grapefruits or something, and it shifted over them carelessly, giving me that devil-may-care-if-you-get-more-of-a-peek-than-I-rightly-intended look.
It’s a game sure, and it is fun. The young party men I was thinking of all enjoyed the game too. Multiplayer is always exciting. None of them made me feel uncomfortable at any point. We were all fucked the fuck up on various substances. It was a small house party and there were about three girls and six guys. The other girls were wearing more revealing clothes than I was, one featuring a body stocking, the other a very short skirt — unlike me they’d been home and had had time to doll up.
***
Today I read this article on Thought Catalog by Chelsea Fagan and it made me sad. Its assumptions are as offensive to men as they are to women as they are to all humans who try their best every day not to create, or at least not to exacerbate, our suffering. This article assumes that:
- Men are stupid beasts
- Women are stupid prey
- Things are the way things are and the way things are cannot be changed (and I get this last point, a lot of times I feel that)
***
At the party, we slutty girls weren’t raped probably because most of our guy friends are normal, sensitive, intelligent, caring humans.
My friends are all fairly nuts. I could tell stories that would seem like bragging. But one reason they are my friends is that we respect each other. We joke about the tired old stereotypes assigned to each of us: Asians girls are always ‘up for it’, English men have ‘small dicks’, American girls are ‘easy’. We appreciate how these things hurt us, as individuals and as a group. We kiss and hug and grope each other. We couple off and slink away and the others smile and accept that we are youngish humans and we want to just fucking touch each other, always yearning to approximate the love we’ve lacked.
***
I was fifteen and Nirvana was at the apex of their popularity and In Utero had just come out containing a tuneful little track called Rape Me and Kurt Cobain was still alive and I felt like an invincible little punk because I was obstinate and fashion was another form of expression, the expression denied me by parents and school. So I took rocks and brick to an old pair of jeans and smashed artfully disheveled holes into the thighs and buttocks and then black-magic-markered RAPE ME just above the knee. Pretty near no one found it funny.
***
We live in a world of incessant bullshit, Chelsea. You can roll over in your PJs and take it up the ass, this way more subtle and insidious form of non-physical rape that society has in store for you, or you can take a silly mini-skirt risk while you’re young and say to the world: fuck you, I don’t accept your bullshit. This has nothing to do with ‘feminism’. You don’t have to go on a protest march. You can be what you want even when it sometimes turns out wrong. That is not being a victim, that is just being a person full of brain chemicals and emotion and weakness and heart. And sometimes a person gets hurt. Just because that’s reality doesn’t make it okay it just makes it reality. But reality is in large part made up of imagination.