From:    Donna.
To:      Teddy Winstead

>  JC>Not entirely.  Some of the men who hate women are violent.

TW> Just because there are rapists and men that kill women does not mean
TW> that they are women-haters.

You mean to say that rapists and woman-killers LIKE women?  (If so, I'd say
those folks got's a weird way of showin' their appreciation for our
existence!)

> Western society has some very, very strange ways of dealing with women.

Yes, it does.

> This "Liberation" that you speak of has CAUSED alot of these problems.

(groan) Teddy, what happened to your education in history?  There is this
cycle, you see, in Western history, when it comes to women's liberation and
empowerment...... roughly put, it goes kinda like this: women get no
rights, no recognition as human beings, and sometimes downright shat upon;
there's a liberation movement afoot; some anti-women folks then use the
liberation movement as an excuse to take away most of the few rights the
movement has won for women; years pass; another liberation movement starts
up; some rights are won; and the woman-haters use the liberation movement
as an excuse to go club some women again; ad nauseum.

Check it out.  It's true.  Frankly, I'm tired of being blamed for my rape
because some man hides behind some fictious inability to control his
gonads; I'm tired of being blamed for being "anti-family" when I work to
help make existing families somewhat more functional than they currently
are; I'm tired of being blamed for being "unfeminine" just because "me"
doesn't fit some man's definition of what "feminine" means.  YOU WILL MAKE
ME YOUR VICTIM NO MORE.

What some folks don't seem to understand is that, by saying that "women's
liberation MAKES US MEN have weird ideas about how to treat women" (which
is, in essence, what you said up there), you're saying that men are so
helpless, so powerless, so stupid, that they cannot act like responsible,
caring human beings without some WOMAN guiding them.  Frankly, I have much
more faith in my fellow man than that.  I wish you could, too.

(The really sad part about this is that you manage to harm your own
brothers in another way as well, for there have always been men who
believed in the humanity and personhood of women; your broad brush hits
THOSE men in the face as well.)

> That's the western way, and that's human.

Now that's pretty ethnocentric!  Like, aren't Eastern peoples human, too?

> Excuse my thinking out loud, but I wasn't meaning that rapists and
> women-slayers are normal in any way, there SICK! But they are normal to a
> society in change, like ours.

They are "normal" in a society that treats women like chattel, yes.  But
let's not blame the wrong people here, okay?  Yes, we set up a lot of
culturally-peculiar ideas that sets us up for having men-who-rape; the
question is this: who was it who made the laws, interpreted the laws,
argued the laws, which started this whole shebang, eh?  Who was it that
first declared, so many moons ago, that rape was a crime against the man
who owned the woman who was raped -- completely ignoring the possibility
that maybe, just maybe, the woman who was raped DIDN'T LIKE IT?  Women
didn't do that, Teddy.  Women's liberation didn't do that, either.

Women's liberation came around BECAUSE of silly rules like that.  If that
makes you uncomfortable, well, I'm sorry for the discomfort, but I'm not
sorry for speaking the truth.  Go ahead, read your history.

From:    Donna.
To:      Claudia Slate

>  TC> it's my idea, I should go first.  The only reason I ain't done
>  TC> it yet is that, every time I work on the piece, I start crying
>  TC> again, and my body shakes so hard that I can't write/type any
>
> I understand.  I didn't tell anyone about mine for over 15 years.  Talking
> about it began some of the healing, but I know that when I do talk - it is
> still fast and kindof "glossed over."  Going into the whole of the
>  situation - all the surrounding factors that made it even more painful -
> well those are sometimes just too much.

You know, Claudia, as I read this post of yours to me, a thought occurred
to me that I'm frankly embarrassed I didn't think of it before.  That is,
we often hear how men who have been raped are reluctant to go anywhere for
help because of the embarrassment factor.  But, until we started talking
about being Silent No More, how many of us have said, "I CAN'T TALK ABOUT
MY RAPE (for any number of reasons)"?  For you, 15 years; for me, 8 years,
for others around here, similar numbers of years.

It's true that the different socializations in re: enjoyment of sex gives
men who have been raped an additional disadvantage, because they're
supposed to like it whenever they "get some".  But, how many of us know
that many women don't talk about our rapes in part because others are
convinced that we wanted it to happen to us?  And of those who know this,
how many of us take that fact off its shelf in our minds, dust it off and
really consider it?

Our culture is very big on blaming the victim for whatever happens, and I'm
starting to get just a mite tired of it.  "You shouldn't have left your
door unlocked" instead of "that burglar shouldn't have stolen your stereo".
"You shouldn't have been wearing those provocative clothes" instead of
"that rapist shouldn't have raped you".  We're always supposed to "know
better", as though we're capable of reading the mind of everyone within
twenty miles of us -- or AS THOUGH CRIME IS NORMAL, and expecting not to
have a criminal act done to us is abnormal.

What kind of people have we become, anyway?