sofiaviolet | ramble

I came down with a cold on Thursday, and the worst of it has cleared out - just in time for the uterine gremlins to awaken. On the bright side, my period should be over before my sex life picks up again. (The cramps seem to be less severe in terms of actual muscle pain, but they're sharper and more symmetrical and more clearly focused on my uterus.)

A few weeks ago, we installed some new shelves in my room (there will be so. many. holes to patch when we move out, but it is worth it in the meantime), and as a result, I rearranged all the books - well, all my books and the shared-custody books; I do not mess with the order of the engineering/woodworking/etc things because they are definitely Not Mine. And I discovered that I had space for MOAR BOOKS!!!!11!1! even with some of the shelf space being reserved for display of tchotchkes. This is very exciting and I am using it as an excuse to buy things off my wishlist. (But I have to save space for books that are still in New Orleans. I only plan to retrieve a fraction of them, the rest being novels I don't want to read again and things left over from my Stereotypical Teenage Wiccan Phase, but a fraction of 400 is still a significant number.)

Two links that both come with trigger warnings (and lengthy blockquotes):

PurrVersatility: I wish I could use a safeword on rape culture.

(Note: This post may be triggering, and contains victim blaming references, as well as a lot of Fetlife posts. Sorry to those without a Fetlife account! I have a screencap of the blog post referenced I can send your way if you want to check it for yourself).

...

There's a difference between blaming the community and not the attacker, and holding the community accountable for enabling the attacker to be there. That's what I'm talking about here. By accusing survivors of being dramatic, by community leaders not stepping up in any active way when multiple accounts of problems with one person come their way, by saying "if you didn't fight back you let it happen"... THAT'S what I'm holding the community accountable for. The comments on the Fetlife post that I received were seriously sickening.

The Pervocracy: "Why does she stay with that jerk?"

[trigger warning]

For a long time, I just couldn't understand this. We'd get the victim in a private room locked away from the abuser, and they'd sit there with bruises or wounds or even broken bones, in a safe place surrounded by people who wanted to help them, and they'd tell us, often through tears... "I fell down the stairs." It drove me nuts. It made me furious at the victims. Why did they do this? Did they like pain? Did they want to get murdered? Were they just unbelievably stupid? Why the HOLY LIVING FUCK would someone choose to protect and return to a partner who just broke their arm?

Well, then I worked in the ER a little longer, talked to a lot more abuse victims and survivors, thought back upon my own reasons for not getting out of certain situations, and it turns out there's a lot of reasons. I'm sure this isn't comprehensive, but I'm going to make a long list here--and often many of these reasons are working together. Some of them are deeply wrapped up in the psychology of abuse; some of them are just depressingly sensible. Each of these is based on a real person, or several of them are based on one real person--most of them are based on many real people.