Okay, so I was in the lunch room today, minding my own beeswax, listening in to a conversation between two of my guy friends about 'Heros'~ that new show with all those people with super powers. Well, mondays episode, the cheerleader who was invincible, she almost got raped by her male friend, and she 'died' until the coroner pulled the stick out of her spinal column.
Anyway, this kid who I don't even know the name too, he was telling to my friend Sam about that episode, and described the girls almost-rape as "kind of hot."
-this is where i turn around with a look of disgust-
Me: Remind me to never be in the same room as you alone
Kid: Huh?
Me: You thought that was hot; You are sick
Kid: What? It's only a show
Me: It's a dipiction of rape and you are fucking demented.
I turned around and for a while I went from digusted, to angry, to afraid. I don't know how Sam thought of the idea, but I was sooo scared. Statistically speaking, males who find depictions of violent sex as 'hot' are pretty much 10x more likely to rape than males who don't.
I got up and left the table with all my stuff. I was sooo scared. And sick to my stomach. I was mean to my guy friends in my next class, but oh my god, I was so scared.
Shaking, unable to speak, sick to my stomach, please don't touch me scared. I think I almost cried a couple times.
I see this kid every day! I can't feel safe around him anymore.
*deep breath*
I don't feel safe anymore...
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THANK YOU MELODY!!!!!
ReplyDeleteThis is exactly the kind of straightforward, easy-to-understand, assertive talk that people with sick ideas need to hear.
Most of them got their sick ideas from somewhere...
...and most of them can have their sick ideas pushed right back out of them.
That is, with the right messages.
One or a few instances of direct words said just right can undo the message absorbed from thousands of indirect sources. Believe me.
Just think of all the men who belong to "Men Can Stop Rape," men who are pro-feminist, pro-anythingotherthanthem (maybe race, etc?) and think about how often they talk about a turning point.
Oh, sure, some came to enlightenment about how to rate what one sees in the world with baby steps...
...but I think most of them just got one or a few shockers that only needed to be refined with a few "baby steps" of theoretical/blog reading.
For example, the guy who created IMPACT/Model Mugging/Padded Assailant training, Matt Thomas, was shocked in a dojo when his teacher shamed a woman who'd been attacked and raped by calling her not good enough at fighting. Matt instantly felt like it was that the teacher hadn't taught her well enough. And did he run out to comfort her? No--because he felt like he'd never be allowed back if he made that statement that the teacher might've been wrong. So if that'd been all you'd seen, you wouldn't think that Matt Thomas was affected by this shocker. But give him a few weeks/months, and not only had he made his own decision not to go back and keep supporting the dojo, but he'd started an intensive research project on crime reports, etc. to find out if & how women are attacked differently than men and reform martial arts training so that it'd reflect the way a person is likely to be attacked! So...was he acting like a pro-feminist right away? No. He might have been a "scary" or "unsympathetic" person to any observer who decided to see if men in the class left when the teacher insulted the female victim. But hey, even the best and most effective of shocking revelations don't create enough change to feel like they were "revelations" at the time. For many people, they just feel like "shockers" for a while.
Keep safe around him, of course, but don't give up on him. He's only human, and he's as susceptible to messages, both positive and negative, as anybody else you know! Be the force that he's suceptible to! (And, if you really want to do it well, be that force in a way that won't make him shut down to you. Not like you need me to remind you of that. The threat of social exclusion communicated by a glare and the ease of understanding created by packing as much into a few words as possible were PERFECT examples of that principle in practice. I wish I were so good at it.)