October 2011
85 posts
“My husband, however, had this to say about it (and I’m paraphrasing): Men don’t like to consider that women may be viewing them as rapists. Jen’s post made it clear that any man, any time, could be viewed as a rapist, no matter what his intentions actually were.
That totally blew my mind. If you’re a man, not for the reason you think. You see, all men look like rapists to women. All of you, all the damn time. If you go out in public and you are a man, a woman has looked at you as a potential rapist. What blew my mind was the idea that men aren’t aware of this. Really, I thought you would be.
Here’s the thing, all women are always aware of the risk of rape. We all know how prevalent rape is. We’re all aware rape can happen to any woman at virtually any time and that no woman is entirely safe anywhere. Men may pass right over an account of a rape, but women do not. So we’ve heard stories of rapes in church bathrooms during services, in stairwells, elevators and parking garages, in changing rooms at department stores, in movie theaters, in cars, in planes, in parks, in airports, in buses, in our homes. We know that old women are raped, toddlers are raped, nuns are raped, pregnant women are raped, everyone is raped.
So, everywhere we go, we can’t help but think This is a place where rape happens. I am not unusually afraid of rape, by the way. This is a normal level of fear for a woman who has not been raped.
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