because it is important. and because, in these last days of polishing talassio‘s first draft, i am definitely suffering from trees-not-forest-itis.
One of the more underreported stories recently, has been about Notre Dame players suspected of rape. Of course this is frustrating. But. The Notre Dame story is underreported but the reason it’s getting ANY attention at all is because Notre Dame just played in the BCS championship. Also being ignored are the stories of suspected rapists and their victims connected to most athletic teams from high school through professional teams. Let’s be outraged about this but let’s not act like the Notre Dame story is the only story that isn’t receiving the attention it deserves.Do you ever feel like you are just drowning in the terribleness of rape? I do, in ways I can’t even explain without getting into my internal landscape at length but sometimes, I have to say nothing about the new set of stories we hear every day about how women and men, throughout the world, are violated, sexually, against their will.Somedays, all I can carry is my own shit.
yes. this. drowning. the latter sentiment is something i have been laboring under since the summer of gran torino / watching twelve year old boys watching shooter / dragon tattoo books, and kind of, um, losing my mind. it was sensory overload; i saw what i too had been skimming over until then, i saw it everywhere and i saw that i had accepted it being everywhere.
and then plucking the 18th century out of the air, because i wanted to set the novel(s) back a ways, and i needed a period that was decadent and would tolerate weird creatures doing weird things on its back porch so to speak. i chose the 18th century, starting in the regency in france, and i found that it all feels exactly the freakin’ same. all of it. no means yes. if she parties without a chaperone she’s asking for it. she loved it in the end. she should just lie back and enjoy it.
respected figures of our western political history, buying twelve year olds for mistresses and forcing themselves on women because they’re simply there.
though really, if i am honest, i have been laboring under this since i was a kid and the central park jogger case happened, because i was living in new york and it was almost hyperreal, how quickly the world went from reasonably safe to perpetually threatening. i felt blasted from all sides. i feel blasted now. somewhere in between i stopped feeling blasted, from apathy and the bubble of my little bay area life . . . part of the work, now, feels like atonement.