wednesday january 30th
raw deal
i watched a harrowing documentary called 'raw deal' which was an account of a night at a fraternity house in florida. lisa gier king stripped at some party they were having, and then all through the night was raped by one of the boys there. other boys were filming this happen and helping to pin her down.
the rapist strangles her, saying, "what do you want? your circulation back?" and the boys titled
their tape "the raping of a white-trash, crackhead bitch." and when he's doing it she asks him, "does this make you feel like a man?" he hits her hard across the face and says, "no, that does."
so the dumbfuck police decided to just release the videotape to the public, so they could make up their own minds as to whether or not she was raped. yeah, i'm serious. so not only was this woman humiliated and raped, people all over the world have seen it happen to her. what. the fuck.
the underlying message that i got from the film was that it's very difficult to make anyone believe you if you are sexually assaulted. and, there is an archetypal rape victim in the public's eyes. this victim is white, rich and virginal. she is chased by a strange man into a darkened alleyway or room or woods and raped. a stripper can't be raped. a drunk woman can't be raped.
and that, to me, is an incredibly frightening and fucked up concept. people seem to have an expressly black and white mindset when it comes to rape.
and it's not fair because right now, and especially in the us, people just do not have a fucking clue what they're doing. on the one hand, girls gotta be virtuous and chaste like it's the 1950s all over again; and at the same time a girl's gotta be sexually attractive to men. just looking at any commercials on the television and in magazines, you'll see that the most important thing a woman can do is be alluring to men. it's a ridiculous concept, but it's real and that is what's happening right now.
after the film, i thought about what had happened to lisa. i thought about what has happened to my friends and to me. i thought that i didn't stop anything, i didn't change anyone's opinions even. i don't have a problem with girls who drink alcohol at parties, but i myself would never. not after. i won't drink alcohol now. but do i explain to people why i don't? not all that often. i decided that i am a total wuss.
i thought about the power structure of colleges in the us and how if yr rich and a white-boy, yr probably going to end up in a fraternity house where you can get away with getting girls drunk and doing whatever to them and the college are probably going to turn a blind eye to it. i thought about how this power structure is not fair on boys and it certainly is not fair on girls.
and i thought that the only way we can stop this kind of thing from ever, ever happening again is by educating people, both women and men, about what rape actually is.
plus
the full report about the movie is here
a helpful site can be found here
suds at