It’s 1.45am and I’m on the phone to a girl I’ve met once who is sobbing from a broken heart. We hold hands over the phone. It feels karmic. She is me, 7 months ago. She is beautiful and I love her so much. I tell her she has to love herself. I tell her she has to feel pain, repetitive pain, to eventually find real love. To find raw love. It hurts her terribly. I’m going to drive three hours into the night so I can see her and hold her and tell her everything is going to be okay. She reads me a letter and I cry. I tell her a story and she cries. She reads me a poem and I cry. We cry together. He was going to build her a fence and kiss her at the gate. Maybe he will one day. She thinks the world is too dark to be beautiful. She spoke of vulnerability and I spoke of acceptance. Everything feels new. Someone I’d never met before walked me to my door tonight. He smelled of skin and warmth and sadness. Maybe it’s okay to be sad because we’re all experiencing the dark and maybe that’s okay. And maybe, sometimes, just being okay is beautiful.
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A twenty-something year old living in Sydney, Australia
— forth
Slogans that stipulate warnings such as, “You could be raped” are examples of bullshit victim blaming techniques. By using the personal pronoun YOU at the beginning of the sentence, the blame is immediately shifted on to the victim (as in, you should have stopped this. You should have been aware). The victim becomes the perpetrator. It tells the victim that they should be the one stopping (or preventing) the rape. If the phrase however is altered slightly to “Someone/they could rape you,” the perpetrator of the sentence is the rapist. The blame is shifted back to the perpetrator and the victim remains the victim.
8 . 27 I know this is obvious I was reading an article and it really annoyed me rape culture thoughts rape tw rape trigger warning personal