A curious and upsetting insight occurred to me a week or more ago and I haven’t been able to go very long without thinking about it every few days ever since.
Here it is: There is not a single soul on earth today whose female forebears all escaped being raped. In fact, I presume the vast majorty of women forebears were raped at some time (often many times) in their lives.
We are, all of us, the result of past rapes that were perpetrated by men who felt they could do whatever they wanted to girls and women. Females were literally owned property and, like enslaved peoples, their owners could do with them whatever they felt like, almost whenever they felt like it.
And it seems that a great many men would be happy with the same parameters today.
PROOF
The Violence Against Women Act was not unanimously approved by all legislators. It never has been.
Women have only had the right to vote since 1920, and the right to own a credit card in their own name since 1974.
Women have been under men’s thumbs and other body parts for most of human history.
So IF the women in your life ever come across as anti-male, or hesitant to befriend or to marry men, now you have some idea why so many of them feel that way. Their DNA remembers, their grandmothers and mothers remember, and some of the new crop of women receive similar treatment from present day Neanderthals who won’t take no for an answer.
And that’s why bodily autonomy is so precious to women — and why it feels as precarious as it does right now following the Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe V. Wade. Are you aware that in 31 GOP-controlled states, convicted rapists can legally win visitation rights to visit and take home the children that their assaults produced? What does that say to the actual victim of the sexual assault? It tells her that her concern for her children and herself must take a back seat to her rapist’s predilections.
I am absolutely, resolutely pro-choice for several reasons, but this reason alone would be enough.
We would not be overpopulating the earth right now, were it not for rapists, past and present. To sit here and realize that I exist right now because women on both sides of my family were raped sickens me beyond my ability to express it. And believe me, my being here is NOT “reason enough” to overlook it or to forgive it or to thank MY lucky stars that I have never been raped (although I came close to it at least twice — the first time from a hired ranch hand in Cle Elum and the second time while I was serving tables in a bar in the Deep South for a few days, after which I left the phone off the hook and “quiet quit,” scared spitless about being called back to work and being stalked again).
Most men, thankfully, have very little, if any, idea what most of the women in their lives have seen, heard, and been through. It isn’t something we mention, because wanting to forget it is our fondest goal. I slept with my sister for three months following her encounter with a rapist that she and a friend managed to survive when they stopped to use the restroom located along an interstate highway and were ordered into the woods by a gun-toting, wild-eyed maniac. I presume every friend or family member has a female friend with a similar story, spoken or unspoken.
So, there it is, out in the open. Your own mothers, grandmothers, great grandmothers and earlier female forebears endured rape and/or the ever-present threat of it. It has been a silent stalker in the back of every girl’s and woman’s mind.
Until men are held accountable for their predatory behavior toward disinterested girls and ladies, it will ever be this way between the sexes. One wanting (maybe both wanting), the other wondering if the encounter will steal their spirit and send them spiraling into the depths of despair.
No one has escaped unscathed. Most men don’t know this. Those reading this now do.
Not all men are guilty, but all men should be aware that they’re dealing with traumatized souls whose only enticement has been their physical anatomy.
