We are blinded by the word beauty. In reality it has no definition. It has no form, no shape, no meaning. This word is not a noun - it is not an adjective. It is merely an opinion - and should be treated as such. Beautiful is a smile, the sounds you hear while falling asleep, the shaking in your fingers while touching a lover.
If we teach women that there are only certain ways they may acceptably behave, we should not be surprised when they behave in those ways.
And we should not be surprised when they behave these ways during attempted or completed rapes.
Women who are taught not to speak up too loudly or too forcefully or too adamantly or too demandingly are not going to shout “NO” at the top of their goddamn lungs just because some guy is getting uncomfortably close.
Women who are taught not to keep arguing are not going to keep saying “NO.”
Women who are taught that their needs and desires are not to be trusted, are fickle and wrong and are not to be interpreted by the woman herself, are not going to know how to argue with “but you liked kissing, I just thought…”
Women who are taught that physical confrontations make them look crazy will not start hitting, kicking, and screaming until it’s too late, if they do at all.
Women who are taught that a display of their emotional state will have them labeled hysterical and crazy (which is how their perception of events will be discounted) will not be willing to run from a room disheveled and screaming and crying.
Women who are taught that certain established boundaries are frowned upon as too rigid and unnecessary are going to find themselves in situations that move further faster before they realize that their first impression was right, and they are in a dangerous room with a dangerous person.
Women who are taught that refusing to flirt back results in an immediately hostile environment will continue to unwillingly and unhappily flirt with somebody who is invading their space and giving them creep alerts.
People wonder why women don’t “fight back,” but they don’t wonder about it when women back down in arguments, are interrupted, purposefully lower and modulate their voices to express less emotion, make obvious signals that they are uninterested in conversation or being in closer physical proximity and are ignored. They don’t wonder about all those daily social interactions in which women are quieter, ignored, or invisible, because those social interactions seem normal. They seem normal to women, and they seem normal to men, because we were all raised in the same cultural pond, drinking the same Kool-Aid.
And then, all of a sudden, when women are raped, all these natural and invisible social interactions become evidence that the woman wasn’t truly raped. Because she didn’t fight back, or yell loudly, or run, or kick, or punch. She let him into her room when it was obvious what he wanted. She flirted with him, she kissed him. She stopped saying no, after a while.
“
| — |
Harriet J on Another post about rape Shattering truth. (via reconnect-restore-rewild) this post is…giving me life. (via bad-dominicana) |
Was feeling lonely imagining Amy in a world of glitter and romance in Sydney so decided to watch Blade Runner. It was bought up in ‘He died with a felafel in his hand’ which i am reading at the moment (review pending). It is ground breaking and amazing, so ambient, but then comes the rape of Rachel. I kept wondering, why did he do that?? In a disturbed moment I found a brilliant feminist article explaining with great dexterity, insight and intelligence the whole theme of females are consumables/ objects to males. and here we have the article on my tumblr.
read!
read!
“
Finding the cyborg: blade runner
The two resume talking, and Deckard retires to the bedroom. Rachael goes to the piano, removes her jacket with its huge shoulderpads and unravels her lacquered hairdo into a mass of natural waves. Her lipstick and eyeliner somehow disappear as well. Deckard returns and sits beside her, and after some words he tries to kiss her. She regards him coldly, shrinks from his next kiss and abruptly rises and heads for the door. Then comes the angry assault, Deckard’s face tightened and his mouth curling down. The message is definitely not “you’re okay, I care about you” as Haber imagines. It’s closer to “You can’t walk out on me again, not when I was being so charming. I deserve you.” Simon Scott’s reading of the scene is quite accurate. He writes:
she protests that she cannot rely on the false memories she has been given, but Deckard ignores this, and forces her to say that she loves him, until she finally submits. This is perhaps one of the most outwardly misogynist moments in the movie. It outlines again how subservient Rachel [sic] is, especially when compared to the other, more self-aware Replicants.
In the face of Deckard’s violence and with the knowledge that he has agreed not to retire her, Rachael finally, miserably engages in the “love scene,” picking up the script Deckard feeds her with the line “put your hands on me.” Deckard scoops her up into a devouring kiss, and she is at once possessed, consumed and objectified. Anne Balsamo’s insights resonate here. She writes “as the object of Deckard’s visual and sexual desire, Rachael symbolically reasserts the social and political position of woman as object of man’s consumption (p 151).”
While some read the scene as Deckard humanizing Rachael and teaching her to feel and love, in reality his rape, with its humiliating script, dehumanizes her and encases her in the rigid role of the good girl. Neither human nor bad girl cyborg, Rachael is trapped as a manufactured replicant, a business product that has been bought. In the next shot, Pris is airbrushing a black mask over her eyes, a satisfied smile spreading across her face. It must be permanent paint, presumably from Sebastian’s workshop. Her face is painted white, and she resembles a harlequin as much as she echoes Rachael’s glamourous retro makeup and the geisha-in-the-sky. But instead of constructed femininity, Pris’s face, framed by an androgynous mop of fuzzy hair, is ungendered. She has effected a shape change, painting her face and becoming the “poly-chromatic girl” Haraway envisions. Whatever else this new black-eyed entity is, she is no longer a basic pleasure model.
