Scheherazade in Blue Jeans

Administration
Happy birthday to azurelunatic, trouvera, and zeppo!

Medical
Still on the path of doing a little too much, but not a lot.

Places You Haunt
I'm starting to get glimpses of what Doodle's been up to in the intervening years, which can only be a good thing. Today I figure out where to *start* this thing; the previous beginning was Sara-specific. I am committed to getting at least a thousand words down today.

As people have picked up, yes, Martin Telenias is connected to "our" Telenias; he's his mentor. That's the only Shayara crossover you get, though - his bare existence. Instead of living in Shayara (which few Telenias do, for reasons I'll get to), he's living on what's basically this big festering wound of poisoned energy, doing his best to keep it from being any worse than it is.

Reminders00j concert in Waltham Saturday night! Info here. Boston S00j fans, this could be your last chance to see her before Arisia 2010!

Link Soup
* Reconciling feminism with a spanking fetish.
* Oi, Bostonians! Mike Marano's doing a reading on Monday. You should go.
* Oi, Bostonians again! Anyone interested in seeing Jenny Lewis on Wednesday?
* Oi, everybody! Help merovingian turn this post into an oak tree.
* Atlas Obscura: A compendium of this age's wonders, curiosities, and esoterica.

Link Soup: Daily Science Edition
* Stem cells used to restore sight for corneal disease sufferers.
* Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated entanglement—a phenomenon peculiar to the atomic-scale quantum world—in a mechanical system similar to those in the macroscopic everyday world.
* Exoplanet found by measuring star's sideways shift.

Plans
Perhaps I'll go for a walk. After that, same as all week - meditative housework listening to my Places You Haunt playlist, then writing. s00j and omnisti swoop in this afternoon, which means much catching up and laughing, and stuffed grape leaves.

I've picked up a lot of new readers lately, so this is an excellent time for a friending frenzy.

Basically, if you're looking for new readers or you just want to tell me who you are and what you're all about, post something about yourself and your LJ in the comments. And if you're looking for interesting new people to read - well, go through my comments and pick some out!

TRIGGER WARNING.

Four teenage boys in Tampa, Florida, were charged as adults Wednesday on allegations of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy...
Hillsborough County prosecutors allege the four boys raped the 13-year-old victim multiple times over two months with a broomstick and hockey stick....
Prosecutor Kimberly Hindman described to the court how two defendants held down the victim while the other two defendants violently sodomized him with the sticks. "The victim screamed and cried, telling them to stop," Hindman said....
When school officials questioned the defendants, all four admitted in a written statement sexually assaulting the victim....
Several students witnessed the incidents over the two months, said the prosecutor, who added that she could not understand why no one reported the attacks.

Okay,

a) Anyone who tries to dismiss male survivors, to handwave them away so we can have a nice uncomplicated female-only discussion of rape culture? Ummno. Think of this boy. And think of what he's going to have to deal with, growing up with even less support than female sexual assault survivors get.

b) And think about how no one reported it.

c) And think about how his rapists all confessed immediately, in a way that makes me think that they figured it was no big deal, no worse than punching him in the face.

Because, y'know, boys will be boys.

This is why we have to keep talking about this. This is why I do the workshops I do, dismantling ideas about rape culture - this is why I specialize in middle and high school workshops, because we have to catch kids as they're shaping their ideas about the world - we have to show them how this is not boys being boys, and teach them how to safely intervene.

This is why we have to never shut up about this.

I want a world without rape. That won't happen in my lifetime. But first I know we have to get to a world where people know the damn difference between sexual assault and harassment, and where male survivors are treated equally, and where people will step in and say "HEY! Stop it!" or at least report it to the authorities.

And if I had my eye just on The End of Rape, I'd've run out of steam long ago, because that just won't happen in my lifetime.

But I'm working towards the stuff that comes first. And I believe that we can get there.

It's just a harsh slap in the face, reminders like this.

We're opening takebackscifi tomorrow. Tell your friends.

Tomorrow is, only slightly coincidentally, fifteen years to the day after I was raped.

Digression: I forget where we were discussing this, probably at a BARCC peer supervision meeting, but it was noted in a survey or study that when survivors grow up to be rape crisis counselors, we tend to pick one instance that we talk about, even if we've had multiple sexual assaults. So when I talk about The Rape, I'm talking about Vegas fifteen years ago, not the stuff when I was a kid. Why? Consciously, because it's a more discrete event. In a survivor speech, I have five minutes to talk about my experience; I flat-out don't have time to go into the decade that warped me. The childhood/adolescent stuff is diffuse, and the rape when I was twenty is discrete.

Subconsciously? Maybe because what happened to me then is the absolute epitome of what people expect of a rape; it is something that they can undeniably classify as rape. Many people's reactions to rape are along the lines of trying to figure out what the victim did to deserve it - hold up, listen; this is true. It's subconscious for them, too, and it's a defensive mechanism: "If I can figure out why it happened to him/her, I can make it not happen to me; I'll be safe." Most rapists are someone you know, and that's more difficult for a listener to reconcile. Certainly my early experiences were at the hands of people I knew. The rape that happened fifteen years ago, that was a stranger quite literally grabbing me off the street.

Anyway. I wrote about the rape, and about evidence collection, and about going back ten years later. You are welcome to read or not.

In past years, I've called it an anniversary, but that seems too celebratory. Still, I choose to commemorate my survival. Tori Amos has a song about her rape called "Me and a Gun", in that song, she sings "I'm still up and driving - can't go home, obviously/So I'll just change direction/Cause they'll soon know where I live... and I wanna live/Got a full tank and some chips."

And she has a song years later called "Hotel" that trails off into ending "King Solomon's Mines, Exit 75/I'm still alive...I'm still alive...I'm still alive..."

I have that latter quote taped to my desktop computer. Fan theory correlates the two lyrics - that she's still driving.

And I'm still driving. Got a full tank and some chips, and all the love and strength in the world; I'm still alive, and every year is better than the last.

Soon it will be half my life away, and then it will be more than half my life away. And it is gone, and I am still here.

If you have a little cash and you feel so moved, I'd be honored if you'd make a donation to your local rape crisis center.

And tomorrow you get a little fiction - same thing I posted this time last year, the Neon Graveyard piece. Then I shall go take myself to the Museum of Science or the Aquarium or something.

As always, thanks for listening.