vvvexation | No pity. No shame. No silence.

No, I haven't experienced sexual violence myself. Emotional abuse, yes, but that's an entirely different story and best discussed some other time. But do you know what really gets me about all this discussion of sexual assault? It's the fact that every single time I've seen someone I know make their own "I'm a survivor" post, it has not surprised me in the slightest. Not because I always suspected it of those specific people, or anything like that, but for deeper reasons that, when I think about them, scare me.

Let me attempt to explain. Some people, evidently, are afraid their friends will look at them differently if they find out they've been victims of rape or sexual assault; I've never understood, not on a gut level, why anyone would change their opinion of a person based on something that happened to them that they had no control over, but now I'm beginning to see that there's something else I've been missing in this particular case. I'm realizing something I don't think I'd been fully aware of before, namely that even some of those who don't blame rape victims still feel that they are marked in some way, that the experience makes them somehow different. Finding out a friend of theirs has been sexually assaulted is akin, perhaps, to finding out a friend of theirs is gay--it requires a change in their worldview, a readjustment in how they see things.

Or at least, I guess that's how they feel. I have a hard time postulating outlooks different from mine--but I'm starting to vaguely recollect a time when I might in fact have reacted that way myself. There was a time when I thought rape was something that didn't happen to people like myself and my friends, who after all had fairly comfortable and "normal" lives...but somewhere along the way, as I met more and more people who had had it happen to them, I came to accept it as a commonplace thing. Now, it seems, I've swung so far in that direction that I just assume it's happened to half the women I know and probably a number of the men, even if they haven't told me about it.

Let me repeat that, in a nutshell: I am damn near incapable of being surprised to hear any acquaintance's history of sexual assault, because I already figured, unconsciously, from the moment I first met them, that there was a very good chance something like that lurked in their past. I'm still capable of a little surprise if it comes from a male acquaintance, or at least from some male acquaintances, but I probably won't be surprised once I've heard the details. And as for women, I suspect you could point to almost any woman I've ever met and tell me she'd been sexually assaulted, and I would simply nod and sigh.

Now, what the hell does that say about the world I live in?

That's what freaks me out.