picked a handful of violets in my name

I’m still a beaten girlfriend somewhere deep down.

I’m realizing who profoundly affected I really am by it all, to this day. My self-esteem was never great to begin with, but staying in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship for years trained even that scant confidence out of me. And while, believe it or not, I’ve scraped a fair amount back for myself, if we’re making comparisons, I can’t escape the learned worthlessness that was my liturgy for so long.

When I ask a person not to engage in rape apologia in this space, because it is my space and I have not only not consented to host rape apologia here, but have also explicitly and repeatedly deemed it off-limits, and that person continues to engage in rape apologia nonetheless, without regard for my boundaries or personal autonomy, that's not exactly someone who's demonstrating a commitment to the notions of consent, autonomy, and respect.

That's someone who's leveraging the values of a rape culture to violate my boundaries.

That's someone who's acting like a fucking rapist.

Rape is different than other types of violent crime. In my mind, rape is a lot like a hate crime, targeted at a particular group in order to scare and intimidate them. The reason we punish hate crimes differently than other crimes is because they affect the behavior of more than one person. An assault is always bad; we don't, as a society, condone assault (at least I hope we don't). But an assault perpetrated against a member of a particular community, let's say, or against a person of a particular ethnic background and infused with the intent to intimidate and scare everyone else who shares that background causes a lot more ripples than an assault that doesn't have that motivation. I can be scared of crime when I leave my house, but I'm not afraid that someone will specifically target me because of my gender or race. I don't have to worry that someone, seeking to work out their own misogyny or racism will choose to do violence on my body to satisfy their own issues. If I did, you'd better bet that it would change my behavior. I'd be a whole hell of a lot more careful about what I said, where I went, and how I acted.

thingswithwings

Anyway, this is just a rambling list of examples, but I guess I'm listing them just because it frustrates me so much, the way these creators are all huge fucking cowards who aren't brave enough to write a queer character into their children's book, their tv show, their novel; huge fucking cowards who blame the episode running long or the whims of the story itself (the story just never went there! it's like novels are magical creatures with self-determined lives of their own and not texts written by people!) for the fact that queerness is reduced to subtextual or extratextual appearances; huge fucking cowards who will use this not-quite-queer not-quite-not-queer kind of character to simultaneously protect themselves from criticism (if Dumbledore's not gay in the actual book, then his unrequited love for a monster isn't problematic) and protect themselves from the accusation that they fail to include queers. It's a giant pile of bullshit.