#but being a woman/girl and KNOWING how many attempted rapes almost occurred?

[hadesoftheladies]

you feel like going insane once you realize how constant coercive rape is in relationships with men. every single girl and woman i know has had an experience with an attempting rapist. every. single. one. and some folks want to cry "hetphobia" when rape culture is 90% of heterosexual culture.

men are genuinely dangerous to women. i don't think you can be a feminist and dispute this. whatever your personal reasons. holy shit.

[midnight-in-town]

Hi so I came across your Femto punishing both Guts and Casca meta and even tho I kinda like it I found myself at odds with a part of it.

I think punishing Casca and feeling mad she picked Guts over him and considered leaving him wasn't really a consideration at all. In the thoughts he has after the weird trippy hallucination thing they put him through during the eclipse his only thoughts are about Guts. How he was the only one who made Griffith forget his dream. And when he forgot this torture happened and his body was broken.

Guts was the one he risked life for by going to save him from Zod. Guts was the one who managed to get close to him despite his attempts to keep his distance from his men. Griffith was at that point after all only human. Humans need close relationships which he was denying himself and that led to his overattachment to the one he had which caused him to end up in the situation he got tortured in. He had to blow off steam he was so upset by Guts leaving and the concept alone made his fight with Guts more erratic.

But Casca leaving isn't reflected on at all during the Eclipse. Griffith said once that a true equal was what he considered a friend and while he was talking to a royal at the time that might still be true. Griffith who was human, and despite being in denial about it, craved friendship.

An equal who didn't leave him might be something he wanted. But Femto who has thrown away his humanity doesn't want a friend he doesn't want a equal. A power play is required to prove that Guts is beneath him. He needs to disempower Guts to feel empowered. To feel that Guts isn't a equal that Guts is beneath him.

The scene where he pushes down Casca is a parallel because it is also about power but in a different way. The sequence of events is Griffith asks Guts to put on his armor he wants to be able to put it on fight again. Guts obliges excited to see Griffith recover.

Elsewhere Casca is told he will never recover enough to hold a sword again. A demon attacks them rips off Griffiths armor and mocks him and his group over how he's already broken. Afterwards Griffith hears his group come apart as they come to terms about his condition. Casca berates Guts for expecting that recovery when it not possible which Griffith also hears.

Griffith then pushes Casca down I think because Casca used to be someone he was stronger than her. It's just a desperation to show he has even a bit of the strength he used to possess.

He manages to stay in the position she doesn't try to push him off he doesn't try to do anything and just puts his effort in maintaining position. Flopping on her and groping would probably be less physical effort but I don't think that what he trying to do . His mouth is open like he's trying to say something but no words come out. She hugs him pulling him close and as he's no longer holding up his own body weight his trembling stops.

I think its supposed to contrast with Femto later and his mentality in this moment vs that one.

The first scene with Casca is desperation to show he has even a bit of the strength he used to possess. That it'd not over for him.

The second one where he attacks Casca in front of Guts is to show no one is equal to him everyone is beneath him. Guts is beneath him. In this world where Griffith reigns Guts has no power to stop anything to do anything and he wants to mock and hurt Guts. That it's his time to rule.

When Griffith is rescued his immediate reaction is to lash out attack Guts. He is mad at Guts for leaving because in his mind Guts leaving led to this. But it only led to this because Griffith cared enough about him that he would be upset at not having Guts around. Its because they were friends. So when he sees Guts crying over him that anger dissappears and he puts his hands on Guts hand in a almost comforting gesture. He can't go as far with his anger or hatred because he loves and cares too.

Which is why that first scene with Casca is only her being pinned. He wouldn't go that far because even if he doesn't see her as a equal he still gives a shit. Its why he attempts to move to her when she attacked by demons after they escape with him. Maybe he wouldn't even consider doing something like what Femto does to her.

But that caring and giving a shit is the humanity he gives up. Femto still has emotions he had feelings Griffith used to have. If he didn't making Guts feel disempowered wouldn't matter. The idea of Guts as a equal in anyway wouldn't occur. Femto is just that anger and rage he felt when he tried to strangle Guts without the caring he felt when he put his hand on Guts hand.

Casca only mattered when Griffith cared about people who he thought he was stronger than. When he sacrificed that Casca ceased to matter. She was never a target of his anger or frustration. But Guts continued to matter. Because Guts was a target of that. He wants the target of his frustration to suffer, and he knows this will make him suffer.

Just my opinion thought I'd share. Still love your meta tho!

Well, damn, that’s a long ask. xDD Next time, just reblog and add your thoughts, I also answer that way, hahaha!

Also, not sure which post of mine you’re referring to, by the way. I’m thinking this one, but I honestly can’t be sure because I also reblogged posts on the subject?

Anyway, if I sum up your take: Griffith was out to punish Guts only and not Casca, because Guts >>> Casca in terms of significance as far as Griffith is concerned? 

Thank you for your input :) but see, I disagree, because this is exactly why I once said that...

I don’t understand why some fans somehow reduce Berserk’s plot to being about Guts vs Griffith, Casca often becoming some random secondary character. For me, no matter how you look at the series ever since the Golden Age, it just ain’t the case. :))

However, all I ever wrote was that Griffith punished both of them; I never implied that their “betrayal” amounted to the same significance for Griffith, because it’s indeed not the case.

After all, as you said, we know Guts always had a bigger impact on Griffith since the day they met...

...but, while we will never know for sure, I for one am quite convinced that if Casca (who was Griffith’s right-hand woman) was the one who had left in the same fashion as Guts, it would have triggered Griffith in a similar way. 

Because Griffith is a man of influence: he knows that and how to use such charisma on others. That’s why he totally means the words he said to Charlotte about what kind of people he would see as a friend. So he uses people’s feelings for him in a way that would serve the path to achieving his dreams. Casca herself said that, as a leader after he was gone, all she did was "try to protect the dream of someone who might not even be alive”. 

The Band of the Falcon lived and worked to help Griffith achieve his dream, because they saw him as special, since they had no achievable big dream of their own (kinda why Griffith said they’re not “friends”). 

So yeah sure, Guts’ actions would always leave a bigger impact on Griffith, as you showed he said it himself, but Casca falling in love with Guts and envisioning a future far away from Griffith’s schemes still clearly stung. 

After all, everyone in the group knew of Casca’s unrequited feelings for Griffith, meaning that Griffith obviously knew too and, instead of telling her it would never happen, he entertained the possibility so that Casca would entirely devote herself to him.

Take Judeau, as a counterexample: he too had some feelings for Casca, but he urged Guts several times to take her with him and away from the group, because he couldn’t stand her unhappiness. Griffith said nothing about her feelings, because he knew that’s how Casca would do everything for his sake. 

Still, Casca was not any random member of his Band so, when she emancipated from Griffith by falling in love with Guts, in my opinion it’s why...

...she also was on the receiving end of his jealousy. 

It’s distasteful but, otherwise, why did Femto rape Casca instead of killing her? Again, we will never know, but if Guts had left Griffith behind for a future with any other random girl, I think Femto would have just killed her in front of Guts. Raping Casca, when she used to long for Griffith’s affection, was revenge against both of them for choosing each other instead of him and his dream. 

You can see it in the way he stared at both of them so many times, coming to the realization that he was not at the center of their little trio anymore. So yeah, Guts > Casca in terms of significance since day 1 as far as Griffith is concerned, I never discussed that, but Casca was not such a random member of Griffith’s band either that her actions of emancipation would not taste bitter to him. That’s my opinion. :)

Additional points: I never said he was trying to grope her in that scene when he fell on top of her as she was changing his bandages, just that “he was trying to gauge or reenact Casca’s old devotion to him by showing some affection”.

And finally, Femto who was entirely reborn as a Godhand has no emotion left about Guts or Casca, he said it himself. Thinking he’s only anger and revenge would be confusing Femto with the Skull Knight or Guts as the Black Swordsman.

Friendly reminder that Femto is not human anymore so, while Griffith thrived on thinking that he didn’t bother with overwhelming bonds to anyone and that only his dream ever mattered, it is actually the case for Femto. 

I hope I answered your points. Thanks for reading and have a nice day Anon! :))

[rapeculturerealities]

MARTY GODDARD’S FIRST FLASH OF INSIGHT CAME IN 1972. It all started when she marched into a shabby townhouse on Halsted Street in Chicago to volunteer at a crisis hotline for teenagers.

Most of the other volunteers were hippies with scraggly manes and love beads. But not Marty Goddard. She tended to wear business clothes: a jacket with a modest skirt, pantyhose, low heels. She hid her eyes behind owlish glasses and kept her blond hair short. Not much makeup; maybe a plum lip. She was 31, divorced, with a mordant sense of humor. Her name was Martha, but everyone called her Marty. She liked hiding behind a man’s name. It was useful.

As a volunteer, Ms. Goddard lent a sympathetic ear to the troubled kids then called “runaway teenagers.” They were pregnant, homeless, suicidal, strung out. She was surprised to discover that many weren’t rebels who’d left home seeking adventure; they were victims who had fled sexual abuse. The phones were ringing with the news that kids didn’t feel safe around their own families. “I was just beside myself when I found the extent of the problem,” she later said.

She began to formulate questions that almost no one was asking back in the early ’70s: Why were so many predators getting away with it? And what would it take to stop them?

Ms. Goddard would go on to lead a campaign to treat sexual assault as a crime that could be investigated, rather than as a feminine delusion. She began a revolution in forensics by envisioning the first standardized rape kit, containing items like swabs and combs to gather evidence, and envelopes to seal it in. The kit is one of the most powerful tools ever invented to bring criminals to justice. And yet, you’ve never heard of Marty Goddard. In many ways she and her invention shared the same fate. They were enormously important and consistently overlooked.

I was infuriated when I read a few years ago about the hundreds of thousands of unexamined rape kits piled up in warehouses around the country. I had the same question that many did: How many rapists were walking free because this evidence had gone ignored?

Take for example, the case of Nathan Ford, who sexually assaulted a woman in 1995. Although a rape kit was submitted to the police, it went untested for 17 years.

During that time, he went on to assault 21 other people, before being convicted in 2006.

And I had another question: How could a tool as potentially powerful as the rape kit have come into existence in the first place? For nearly two decades, I’d been reporting on inventors, breakthroughs and the ways that new technologies can bring about social change. It seemed to me that the rape-kit system was an invention like no other. Can you think of any other technology designed to hold men accountable for brutalizing women?

As soon as I began to investigate the rape kit’s origins, however, I stumbled across a mystery. Most sources credited a Chicago police sergeant, Louis Vitullo, with developing the kit in the 1970s. But a few described the invention as a collaboration between Mr. Vitullo and an activist, Martha Goddard. Where was the truth? As so often happens in stories about rape, I found myself wondering whom to believe.

Mr. Vitullo died in 2006. Ms. Goddard, as far as I could tell, must still be alive — I couldn’t find any obituaries or gravestones that matched her name. An interview in 2003 placed her in Phoenix, and so I collected phone listings for Martha Goddard in Arizona and called them one after another. All those numbers had been disconnected.

Little did I know that I would have to hunt for six months before I finally solved the mystery. I would learn she had transformed the criminal-justice system, though her role has never been fully acknowledged. And I would also discover that Louis Vitullo — far from being the inventor of the rape kit — may have taken credit for Ms. Goddard’s genius and insisted that his name be put on the equipment.

I pieced together dozens of obscure marriage and death notices to try to find her family members; read through hundreds of newspaper articles to establish the timeline of events; and even hired a researcher to dig through an archive of Chicago police department files from the ’70s. Finally, I managed to speak to eight people who knew or worked with her. From these sources, and two oral-history tapes in which she told her life story, I cobbled together what happened.

Back in that Chicago crisis center, Marty Goddard encouraged teenagers to confide in her, and she began to realize just how many of them had been molested.

At the time, most people believed that sexual abuse of children was rare. One psychiatric textbook from the 1970s estimated that incest occurred in only about one in every million families, and claimed that it was often the fault of girls who initiated sex with their fathers. Meantime, it was still legal in every state in America for a husband to rape his wife. Sexual violence that happened within a family was not considered rape at all. A real rape was a “street rape.” It happened to women stupid enough to be in the wrong places at the wrong times.

In Chicago, rape seemed like some sort of natural disaster, no different from the arctic winds that could kill you if you wandered out in the winter without a coat. “Chicago was not a city you wanted to venture out into after dark,” wrote the activist Naomi Weisstein. “Rape was epidemic.” In 1973, an estimated 16,000 people were sexually assaulted in and around Chicago. Only a tenth of those attacks were reported to the police and fewer than a tenth of those cases went to trial; an infinitesimal fraction of perpetrators ended up in prison.

It was a time — much like our own — when millions of people felt that the police had failed them. Chicago was still reeling from the 1969 killing by the cops of Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, while he’d been sleeping in his own bed. The Chicago Police Department was notorious as a brutal, occupying force in black neighborhoods. Citizens’ groups were demanding review boards to reform officers’ behavior.

Amid all that, Ms. Goddard began asking questions that might seem so obvious to us today, but were radical in her own time: What if sexual assault could be investigated? What if you could prove it? What if, instead of a “she said” story, you could persuade a jury with scientific evidence?

A lot of men didn’t like her style. But Ray Wieboldt Jr., heir to a Chicago department-store fortune, did, and in 1972 she was hired as an executive at the Wieboldt Foundation, a charitable family fund that rained down money on progressive causes.

The Wieboldt name became her secret weapon. “I could say, ‘I’m Marty Goddard from the Wieboldt Foundation’ and people would just let me in their doors,” she recounted. And so she Wieboldt-ed her way in to meet with hospital managers and victims’ groups and began asking her relentless questions about rape.

Crime labs did not yet have the ability to test DNA; the first use of DNA forensics would not come until 1986, when British investigators used the technology to hunt down a murderer who raped his victims. But they could analyze pieces of glass, fingerprints, splatter patterns, firearms and fibers. Police investigators could find biological clues to help establish the identity of a suspect by, for instance, comparing blood types.

Ms. Goddard wanted to figure out why — even with all this evidence — no one seemed able to prove that a sexual assault had occurred. She learned that victims usually ended up in a hospital after an assault. The cops might dump a shivering, weeping woman in the emergency room and yell out, “We got a rape for you.” As they cared for the victim, the nurses might wash her off or throw away her bloody dress, inadvertently destroying evidence.

The cops didn’t seem to care. Instead, they would isolate the victim in a room and lob questions at her to try to determine whether she was lying. A Chicago police training manual from 1973 declared, “Many rape complaints are not legitimate,” and added, “It is unfortunate that many women will claim they have been raped in order to get revenge against an unfaithful lover or boyfriend with a roving eye.” Officers would routinely ask women what they’d been wearing, whether they’d provoked the attack by acting in a seductive manner, and whether they had enjoyed the sex. “An actual rape victim will generally give the impression of a person who has been dishonored,” according to the manual.

In the early days of forensic science, the 19th century, rape exams sought primarily to test the virtue of women. A doctor would be called in to examine a woman’s vagina and then report on her motives. Was she a trollop, a harlot, or a pure-hearted innocent who spoke the truth?

In 1868, a British publication, Reynolds’s Newspaper, reported on one such exam. The surgeon “gave such evidence as left no doubt that the prosecutrix could not have been so innocent as she had represented herself to be.” The magistrate “said no jury would convict on such evidence, and he should discharge the prisoner.”

In other words, sexual-assault forensics began as a system for men to decide what they felt about the victim — whether she deserved to be considered a “victim” at all. It had little to do with identifying a perpetrator or establishing what had actually happened.

Even in the 1970s, the forensic examination remained a formality, a kind of kabuki theater of scientific justice. The police officers wielded absolute power in the situation; they told the story; they assigned blame. And they didn’t want to give up that power.

Ms. Goddard’s insight was that the only fix for this dysfunctional system would be incontrovertible scientific proof, the same kind used in a robbery or attempted murder. The victim’s story should be supported with evidence from the crime lab to build a case that would convince juries. To get that evidence, she needed a device that would encourage the hospital staff members, the detectives and the lab technicians to collaborate with the victim. On the most basic level, Ms. Goddard realized, she had to find a mechanism that would protect the evidence from a system that was designed to destroy it.

EVEN AFTER MONTHS of searching for Marty Goddard, I hadn’t been able to find her, or even figure out the names of her family members. But I did manage to track down Cynthia Gehrie, an activist who’d been swept up in Ms. Goddard’s crusade.

The two women met at a gathering for anti-rape activists in 1973 and soon they were strategizing over lunches and dinners, notebooks by their plates. At the time, Ms. Gehrie worked a day job at the A.C.L.U.; she was so impressed by Ms. Goddard that she volunteered to be her sidekick as they figured out how to force men in power to reckon with the rape epidemic.

Their timing was excellent, because 1974 was the year that everything flipped in Chicago. Women who had once been ashamed were now speaking out.

In October, a delegation of suburban women gathered before the members of the Illinois General Assembly. One described how she’d tried to fend off a sexual attacker with a fireplace poker. After the assault, she had carefully saved the bent poker and handed this piece of evidence to police detectives. Then, she recounted through tears, the police returned the poker to her straightened out. The idiots thought she had wanted them to fix it.

A mother stood before the committee and said that her little girl had been molested on her way to kindergarten. The police were already familiar with the attacker, a pedophile who had infected at least one child with venereal disease. And yet he was roaming free.

A nurse at the meeting explained how medical staff handled rape cases — and in the middle of her testimony, announced, “I am a rape victim myself.”

A few days later, about 70 women from a group called Chicago Legal Action for Women, CLAW for short, flooded into the office of State’s Attorney Bernard Carey, and plastered the walls with messages like “Wanted: Bernard Carey for Aiding and Abetting Rapists.”

The rape problem had suddenly become Mr. Carey’s problem, and he desperately needed to look as if he had an answer.

A movement was beginning — an awakening, like #MeToo. The fact that many of these activists were well-off white women forced politicians to pay attention. Black women in Chicago's poorest neighborhoods were most at risk of sexual violence, but their stories rarely made it into the newspapers, and rape was all too often portrayed as an affliction of the suburbs. Throughout her career, Ms. Goddard would wrestle with this disparity and try to overcome it. In 1982 she told an Illinois state legislative committee that “the lack of services on the South and West Sides of Chicago where a majority of our black victims reside” was “totally disgraceful.”

Now, though, in the early 1970s, she had just one obsession. She was determined to convince Bernard Carey that the problem could be solved, if he only had the will to do it. One day she showed up unannounced at his office and to her surprise, he welcomed her in. “I don’t know what the answer is,” he told her. But he had a new plan: He was going to let women like Ms. Goddard help figure out the rape problem for themselves. He appointed her and Ms. Gehrie to a citizens’ advisory panel on rape. Their mission: to investigate the failures in policing and suggest sweeping reforms.

Marty Goddard finally had what she wanted: permission to get inside the police departments.

With her new investigative powers, she headed to the Chicago crime lab building to ask police officers what was going wrong. Years later, she described what she had learned there in the oral history tapes. The cops blamed hospital workers, saying: “We don’t get hair. We don’t get fingernail scrapings.” The slides weren’t labeled, and they’d been “rubber-banded” together so that they contaminated one another. “So there goes that. It’s worthless,” the detectives told her.

The problem, she realized, was that no one had bothered to tell the nurses and doctors how to collect evidence properly.

What if hospitals could be stocked with easy-to-use forensic tools that would encourage medics, detectives and lab technicians to collaborate instead of pointing fingers? Gradually, these concepts solidified into an object: a kit stocked with swabs, vials and instructions.

Somewhere along the way, Ms. Goddard had befriended Rudy Nimocks, an African-American police officer who had handled incest cases and been horrified by what he’d seen. Ms. Goddard and Ms. Gehrie described Mr. Nimocks as a mentor. (He would be in his 90s now; I made multiple attempts to reach him without success.) According to several sources, Mr. Nimocks warned Ms. Goddard to proceed carefully. He told her that she should take care not to challenge the men in the crime lab directly. And he said that she’d need Sgt. Louis Vitullo, the head of the microscope unit, on her side.

Sergeant Vitullo was a scruffy cop-scientist, with a lab coat pulled hastily over his rumpled shirt and the pale, haunted look of a man who spent hours peering at murder weapons.

One day, Ms. Goddard found Sergeant Vitullo at his desk, introduced herself, and presented him with a written description of the rape-kit system. She must have been blindsided by what happened next.

“He screamed at her,” according to Ms. Gehrie. “He told her she had no business getting involved with this and that what she was talking about was crazy. She was wasting his time. He didn’t want to hear about this anymore.” Ms. Gerhie said Ms. Goddard called her minutes later to vent about being thrown out of Sergeant Vitullo’s office.

“Well, that didn’t go so well!” Ms. Goddard said wryly.

As far as Ms. Goddard knew at that moment, the rape-kit idea had just been killed off.

INVENTION, ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN — these are not just technical feats. They are political acts. The inventor offers us a magical new ability that can be wonderful or terrifying: to halt disease, to map the ocean floor, to replace a human worker with a machine, or to kill enemies more efficiently. And those magical abilities create winners and losers. The Harvard professor Sheila Jasanoff has observed that technology “rules us much as laws do.”

When it comes to sexual assault, there are many inventions I can think of that help men get away with it — from the date-rape drug to “stalkerware” software. More striking is how few inventions, how little technology and design, has been devoted to keeping women safe.

Think about our public spaces, and how much they reinforce the power of men. If you grew up as a girl, you were taught to map out potential sexual attacks when you walked through any city. A hidden doorway, an empty subway platform, a pedestrian bridge with high walls — such places pulse with threat.

In my high-school driving class, the instructor lectured us about the dangers that lurked in empty parking lots. “Ladies, you don’t want to be fumbling in your purse if someone jumps out of the bushes,” he said, and suggested that we hold the car keys in one hand as we hurried to the car. Even as a teenager, I remember thinking how crazy this sounded. If there were rapists lurking everywhere, couldn’t the grownups do something about that?

I learned that the streets did not belong to me. Nor did the stairwells or the empty laundry rooms at midnight. I still remember the sense of defeat my first week as a college student on a pastoral Connecticut campus in the 1980s. I’d been aching to explore its tantalizing forests and hidden ponds. But then the freshman girls were herded into a lecture hall, and the head of public safety told us that if we wanted to walk from one building to another at night, we should first call the escort service that squired females around and protected them from rape.

“No way!” I thought.

And yet, at that time I was struggling to understand — and forgive myself for — having been molested as a small child. And though I never did use the campus escort service, I also never felt that the campus was mine.

But this is not how it has to be. It’s entirely possible to create public spaces and tools for everyone. Our environment and technology can foster a sense of equality and pluralism.

At the same time that Marty Goddard was trying to reinvent forensic technology, the disabled community was radically transforming the design of cities by pushing to make streets and buildings wheelchair-accessible. A wheelchair ramp does more than just allow someone to roll into a building; it also sends out a message that the people in those wheelchairs are important and worthy of dignity. This is the power of invention.

You can see why the idea of a rape kit might have been offensive to Sergeant Vitullo and other police officers. Like many of the great technological ideas, this one blasted through the assumptions of the day: that nurses were too stupid to collect forensic evidence; that women who “cried rape” were usually lying; and that evidence didn’t really matter when it came to rape, because rape was impossible to prove.

Now here was this proposal for a cardboard box packed with tools that would allow anyone to perform police work.

Despite his original reaction, Sergeant Vitullo mulled over Ms. Goddard’s idea. He must have found it intriguing. He studied the plans she’d shown him. And he began to see the sense in it all.

One day, Ms. Gehrie told me, Sergeant Vitullo called up Ms. Goddard and said, “I’ve got something to show you.” When Ms. Goddard arrived in his office, Ms. Gehrie recalled, “he handed her a full model of the kit with all the items enclosed.” Sergeant Vitullo had assembled a prototype for the rape kit and added a few flourishes of his own. And now, apparently, he regarded himself as its inventor.

Another friend of Ms. Goddard’s confirmed this story. Mary Sladek Dreiser, who met Ms. Goddard in 1980, told me that Ms. Goddard always praised Sergeant Vitullo in public. But in private, she described him as a petty tyrant who would “only go along with the kit if it were named after him.”

The rape-kit idea was presented to the public as a collaboration between the state attorney’s office and the police department, with men running both sides...

..and little credit given to the women who had pushed for reform. Ms. Goddard agreed to this, Ms. Gehrie said, because she saw that it was the only way to make the rape kit happen

In the mid-1970s, while still at the Wieboldt Foundation, Ms. Goddard began working nights and weekends to found a nonprofit group called the Citizens Committee for Victim Assistance. The group filed a trademark for the Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit in 1978, ensuring that her creation would be branded with a man’s name. For years afterward, the newspapers called the rape kit the “Vitullo kit.” When he died in 2006, an obituary headline celebrated him as the “Man Who Invented the Rape Kit.” His wife, Betty, quoted in the obituary, said that her husband was “proud” of the rape kit “but he didn’t get any royalties for it.” The obituary hailed Mr. Vitullo as a pioneer in a new form of evidence collection that transformed the criminal-justice system. There was no mention of Ms. Goddard.

Even if her name wasn’t on it, Ms. Goddard finally had permission to start a citywide rape-kit system. What she didn’t have was any money to create the kits, distribute them, or train nurses to use them. She had to raise all those funds through her nonprofit group, which represented survivors of sex crimes.

This seems strange. After all, state governments covered the cost of running homicide evidence through the crime lab, so why should sexual assault be any different?

And yet it was. And it still is.

Money problems have always haunted the rape-kit system. Testing a rape kit is expensive; today it costs $1,000 to $1,500. Except in the highest-profile cases, police departments have often pleaded underfunding, and let the kits pile up. That’s why victims themselves have had to bankroll crime labs. In the past decade, groups like the Joyful Heart Foundation have helped raise millions of dollars to test rape kits. The money sometimes comes from bake sales, Etsy crafts and feminist comedy nights.

Fundraising was even harder in the 1970s, however, when most foundations wouldn’t give money to a project with “rape” or “sex” in its title. And so Ms. Goddard had to resort to finding money wherever she could. This is where Hugh Hefner enters the story.

Chicago was built on soft-core porn, and Mr. Hefner was one of the city’s most prominent moguls. Men in suits sidled into his clubhouses for three-martini lunches, celebrities swanned into his mansion for glittering fund-raisers, and a blazing “Playboy” sign scalded the downtown skyline.

Mr. Hefner regarded the women’s liberation movement as a sister cause to his own effort to free men from shame and guilt. And so his philanthropic Playboy Foundation showered money on feminist causes. In the early 1970s, for example, the Playboy fortune provided the seed money for the A.C.L.U. Women’s Rights Project, which was co-founded by a little-known lawyer named Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In the mid-1970s, Ms. Goddard applied to Playboy for a $10,000 grant (the equivalent of about $50,000 today) to start a rape-kit system. And she got it.

Her collaboration with the Playboy Foundation turned out to be a surprisingly ideal one, in large part because Ms. Goddard had a friend on the inside: Margaret Pokorny (then known as Margaret Standish). Ms. Pokorny brainstormed all kinds of ways to support the project that went beyond the big check. For instance, she recruited Playboy’s graphics designers to create the packaging for the kit. And when Ms. Goddard needed volunteers to assemble the kits, Ms. Pokorny came up with a creative solution: old ladies.

“I’ve got this great idea, Marty,” Ms. Goddard recalled Ms. Pokorny saying. “Everybody just loves the Playboy bunny and these older women, they want something to do.” So one day a horde of them showed up in the Playboy offices, swilling free coffee as they assembled sexual-assault evidence kits.

In 1978, Marty Goddard delivered the first standardized rape kit to around 25 hospitals in the Chicago area for use in a pilot program she had designed — “the first program of its type in the nation,” according to a newspaper article.

The kits cost $2.50 each and contained test tubes, slides and packaging materials to protect the specimens from mixing; a comb for collecting hair and fiber; sterile nail clippers; and a bag for the victim’s clothing. There was a card for the victim, giving her information about where to seek counseling and further medical services.

The New York Times, which described the initiative as a collaboration between Mr. Vitullo and Ms. Goddard, said that the “innocuous looking” box “could be a powerful new weapon in the conviction of rapists.” The Times noted that one of the most important features of the system was deceptively low-tech: “Forms for the doctor and the police officers involved are included, as are sealing tape and a pencil for writing on the slides. Anyone who handles the box must put his or her signature on printed spaces on the kit’s cover.” There would be a paper trail that showed how the evidence had traveled from the victim’s body to the crime lab.

By the end of 1979, nearly 3,000 kits had been turned over to crime labs. One of them had been submitted by a bus driver who’d been abducted and raped by 28-year-old William Johnson. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison, and the Vitullo Evidence Kit was credited with winning the day in court.

By now, Ms. Goddard’s friend Rudy Nimocks had been promoted to head the sex homicide department. He told The Chicago Tribune that the new system had improved evidence collection. But perhaps more important, the kit worked magic in the courtroom. “In addition to the kits being very practical,” he said, “we find that it impresses the jurors when you have a uniform set of criteria in the collection of evidence.”

In other words, the rape kit, with its official blue-and-white packaging and its stamps and seals, functioned as a theatrical prop as well as a scientific tool. The woman in the witness box, weeping as she recounted how her husband tried to kill her, could sound to a judge and jury like a greedy little opportunist. But then a crime-lab technician would take the stand and show them the ripped dress, the semen stains, the blood. When a scientist in a lab coat affirmed the story, it seemed true.

Ms. Goddard had invented not just the kit, but a new way of thinking about prosecuting rape. Now, when a victim testified, she no longer did so alone. Doctors, nurses and forensic scientists backed up her version of the events — and the kit itself became a character in the trials. It, too, became a witness.

That’s another reason Ms. Goddard may have been willing to trademark her idea under Sergeant Vitullo’s name. It was as if in order to invent, she also had to disappear. The rape kit simply never would have had traction if a woman with no scientific credentials had been known as its sole inventor. It had to come from a man.

The word “technology” is part of the problem. It’s a synonym for “stuff that men do.” As the historian Autumn Stanley pointed out, a revised history of technology taking into account women’s contributions would include all sorts of “unimportant” inventions like baby cribs, menstrual pads and food preservation techniques. Sometimes the only way that women could navigate this world was to let a white man in a lab coat become the face of their radical ideas, while they themselves shrank into the background.

During World War II, for instance, a team of six “girls” figured out how to operate the world’s first all-purpose electronic digital computer, called the ENIAC. In 1946, one of them, Betty Holberton, stayed up half the night to ensure that the computer would ace its debut in front of the newspaper cameras. And yet she and the others were treated like switchboard operators, mere helpers to the male engineers. Ms. Holberton went on to invent and design many of the essential tools of computing during the 1950s and ’60s almost invisibly, while her male colleagues were celebrated as geniuses of the age.

Ms. Goddard, certainly, had mastered the art of vanishing. Her friends and collaborators from the 1970s had lost touch with her, and were just as flummoxed by her disappearance as I was. But they remembered her in vivid, disconnected flashes. I often felt that I was spying on her through keyholes into other people’s minds.

“She made miniature rooms,” Margaret Pokorny said, describing how Ms. Goddard spent hours with tweezers and tiny brushes constructing fairy-tale interiors inside of boxes. The rooms were scattered all around Ms. Goddard’s apartment, as if a dollhouse had been dissected.

From Cynthia Gehrie, I learned why Ms. Goddard might have been so driven to escape into Lilliputian fantasies. Ms. Gehrie told me that in the late 1970s, her friend had flown to a resort in Hawaii for a vacation and returned to Chicago a different, and broken, person. “I was raped,” Ms. Goddard had told Ms. Gehrie, pouring out a harrowing account of how a man had abducted her.

“He drove her to a remote location,” Ms. Gehrie said. “He taunted her with the knife. She told him she would do whatever he wanted. Finally, he drove her back to the resort. She was astonished when he let her go.” Ms. Gehrie can’t remember whether Ms. Goddard reported the rape to the police, but she’s always wondered if her friend’s prominence as a victims-rights advocate had made her a target. The attacker had won her trust, Ms. Goddard said, by pretending to be a supporter of her cause.

In one obscure interview I found, Ms. Goddard herself mentioned that rape and the scars it left on her body. And, she said, the attacker had infected her with herpes.

I was heartbroken for her, and more determined to find her than ever. By now she had become “Marty” to me — I could think of her only as a friend. I surmised, from the string of addresses she’d left behind, that she had been spiraling into poverty. She would have been 79. Was anyone caring for her? I felt less and less like a journalist chasing down a story. What I really wanted was to save Marty Goddard before it was too late.

Through the 1980s, Ms. Goddard kept fighting for the rape-kit system despite her growing exhaustion. It was “one incident by one incident by one incident,” she said later. “Imagine how many years it took us to go from state’s attorney to state’s attorney to cop to detective to deputy to doctor to pediatrician to nurse to nurse practitioner” and train each person who interacted with the victim and the rape kit. “I felt I had to save the world, and I was going to start with Chicago and move to Cook County and move to the rest of the state. And there was something in the back of my mind that said, ‘Gee, maybe the circumstances will be such that at some time I can go beyond the borders of Illinois.’”

She was right. In 1982, New York City adopted Ms. Goddard’s system because “its effectiveness was demonstrated in Chicago,” according to The New York Times. Within a few years, the city had amassed thousands of sealed kits containing evidence, and the system was putting rapists in prison.

Ms. Goddard had envisioned a kind of internet of forensics at a time when the internet itself was in its infancy. The idea was to standardize practices in crime labs everywhere and encourage police departments to share data to catch perpetrators who might cross county and state lines. And she had personal reasons for grinding away at the problem, for making it her obsessive mission. The man who had brutalized her in Hawaii still walked free. She knew this because she’d seen him, she told a friend at the time.

She had been walking to the attorney general’s office in downtown Chicago when her attacker materialized out of the crowd and locked eyes with her. It must have been a waking nightmare. Had he been stalking her? Had it been a chance encounter?

I don’t know. She was under an extraordinary amount of stress; maybe she was mistaken. I am working from fragments — from bits and pieces of her friends’ memories. What I do know is that Ms. Goddard began to drink; that she depended now on cheap sherry to dull the pain. She was dragging herself from city to city, evangelizing for the rape kit, sleeping in dive motels, giving everything she had until there was nothing left.

In 1984, the F.B.I. held a conference at its training center in Quantico, Va. Expert criminologists flew in to discuss a new system that would detect the serial killers and rapists operating across state lines. But to the dismay of Ms. Goddard, who attended the conference, the country’s top lawmen demonstrated little empathy for victims.

“So, this one man gets up,” a professor known as an expert in sex crimes, Ms. Goddard remembered later. The professor flashed slides on the screen, a twisted parade of naked female corpses. He made little effort to protect the identities of the dead women. Ms. Goddard was horrified at the way he “couldn’t wait to show the bite marks on the breasts” of one victim, as if to share his titillation with the audience.

That kind of attitude might have gone unremarked at a police convention, but there were lawyers, victims’ advocates and nurses at this conference and they “didn’t appreciate it.” Just as dismaying, this so-called expert described “interrogating” women who’d been raped, as if they were the criminals.

“I went nuts,” Ms. Goddard said. She gripped the arms of her chair, “saying to myself: ‘Calm down. Don’t say anything.’”

AFTER THE PRESENTATION, Ms. Goddard approached one of the organizers and said, “Something’s wrong here, and I really object.” Working on the fly, Ms. Goddard gave a presentation about her pilot project in Chicago, explaining how the rape-kit system worked. Afterward, “two guys from the Department of Justice” approached her and asked her to replicate her program all around the country. She was finally given enough funding to travel to more than a dozen different states and help start up pilot programs.

“I don’t know how my cat survived,” she said of those years. “I was gone all the time.”

She was tired out. And “so many people were downright insulting.” They’d ask her why she was an authority on forensics: “Are you a cop? An attorney?” Ms. Goddard was drinking heavily. She began to step away from her prominent role in criminal justice. She moved to Texas, and then Arizona. And finally she faded from public view so thoroughly that I believe she must have decided to disappear.

Her friend and former colleague Mary Dreiser kept in touch. But one day in about 2006 or 2007, Ms. Dreiser was distressed to dial Ms. Goddard’s number and discover it had been disconnected. Ms. Dreiser’s husband, a lawyer, asked a detective to find Ms. Goddard. She turned up in a mobile-home park in Arizona. “She was happy I had tracked her down,” Ms. Dreiser said.

By the time I started searching for Ms. Goddard a decade later, she had moved out of that trailer and her most recent listing suggested she lived in a dumpy apartment building alongside a Phoenix highway. That phone, too, had been disconnected, so I’d assumed that she had moved on once again, perhaps to a nursing home. But just in case, I called up the building’s management office and asked if the people there could tell me anything about Marty Goddard.

“Unfortunately, I can’t,” said the woman who answered the phone. There were rules about protecting the privacy of residents.

But rules are meant to be broken. So I called back. “Listen,” I said, “just hear me out.”

I then plied the woman in the management office with a brief — and, I hoped, heart-melting — tribute to Ms. Goddard’s genius and her sacrifices.

It worked. “OK,” she said, “let me check into it.” Hours later, she called me back. Marty Goddard had indeed lived in their apartment building, she said, then paused.

“And I’m very sorry to tell you that she passed away.”

The news walloped me. Ms. Goddard had died in 2015, at the age of 74, but there had been no obituary. No announcement. I’d searched for pictures of headstones, remembrances, funeral announcements, and I’d found nothing. This woman who had done so much for the rest of us. How could this be?

Paradoxically, at the same time as Ms. Goddard was fading from sight, her name no longer in the papers, the advent of DNA forensics was giving the rape kit a new kind of superpower.

In 1988, a court ordered Victor Lopez, a 42-year-old repeat felon accused of violent attacks, to submit to a blood draw. He would be the first defendant in New York State to be linked to a crime through DNA analysis — and the case would prove the dazzling effectiveness of this new tool. The DNA test showed a strong match between Mr. Lopez’s blood and the semen collected from one of his victims. Mr. Lopez was convicted of three sexual assaults and sentenced to 100 years in prison. One juror, John Bischoff, told The New York Times that “the DNA was kind of a sealer on the thing. You can’t really argue with science.”

When Ms. Goddard began her work, crime labs could establish only a fuzzy connection between a suspect’s blood and the swabs inside the kit — for instance, by showing that the blood type was a match. But now, DNA markers could reveal the path of a perpetrator as he left his semen or blood at multiple crime scenes.

Starting in 2003, several women across the country accused a man named Nathan Loebe of sexual assault, but those accusations had never stuck.

After the Tucson police received a grant to test a backlog of rape kits, they discovered that DNA from several of the kits matched Mr. Loebe. Rape-kit evidence revealed the pattern of his attacks, and last year he was sentenced to 274 years in prison, including for 12 counts of sexual assault.

But DNA testing was expensive. Compounding that problem was the sheer success of the rape kit system: Victims now felt encouraged to report their assaults and submit to exams, which meant that police departments were flooded with evidence.

And so, just as the rape-kit system began to succeed, police departments strangled it. They began hiding away thousands of untested rape kits deemed too expensive to process.

New York was among the first cities to set up a rape-kit system, and almost immediately it fell behind in processing. It amassed a huge backlog — 16,000 untested kits by the year 2000. The women (and some men) who submitted to rubber-gloved exams did so because they hoped against hope that the police might actually catch a perpetrator. Little did they know that their evidence could be thrown in a warehouse — or even in a trash can.

In 2000, Paul Ferrara, the director of Virginia’s crime lab, said that backlogs were growing all around the country and “cost lives.” The year before, the Virginia Beach police had had to release a rape suspect because potentially incriminating DNA couldn’t be processed quickly enough, and the suspect went on to murder a woman.

It is striking how much Ms. Goddard’s trajectory mirrored that of her invention. In the early 1990s, just when she might have risen to national prominence, she drifted south. She retired, though she was only in her early 50s, and eked out a living with some help from friends. By the 2000s, she had sobered up and spent her days clipping newspapers, tracking the issues that she most cared about. And then — this part hurts my heart — she pursued a degree in forensics at a local community college.

Ms. Goddard had founded sexual-assault forensics, and yet she now lacked any of the bona fides required to be recognized as an expert. Nothing came of her studies, and she never really worked again. Ms. Goddard herself had been warehoused.

I know all of this because just a few months ago, I finally cracked the case of why and how she disappeared, thanks to some clues I found in the announcement of her brief 1966 marriage in a Michigan newspaper. Working through a chain of obituaries and phone records and small newspaper items, I tracked down a number for Scott Goddard, who I thought must be Marty Goddard’s nephew.

One day I cold-called him and left a message. It turned out that he was the right Scott Goddard. His father had died in a freak accident in 1980, and after that, his aunt became like a second mother to him. “When I was 9 or 10 years old, she took me to the Grand Canyon. And I remained close with her for her entire life,” Mr. Goddard said.

He told me that his aunt — who’d always been so busy, so engaged — had turned into a hermit in the 2000s. She withdrew into her trailer in the mobile-home park, with her newspaper clippings fluttering everywhere, surrounded by the miniature model rooms she still loved to build. She was vanishing, shrinking down to nothing.

“When she passed, I inherited about 50 boxes of stuff,” he said, including a tiny toy chest filled with dolls for the doll children to play with.

He told me that when he was a boy, his aunt had taken him through the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago — a place she visited many times. Here they had lost themselves in those perfect shadow boxes, peering into, say, a Georgian dining room with crystal wine glasses, like fragments of diamonds, arranged on a silver tray. Beyond the chandelier and the French windows, a painted garden beckoned, with a lily pond and trees wilting in the summer heat, and paths you could follow into even stranger dreamscapes. You could imagine opening up one of the postage-stamp-sized books to hear the crack of its gold-leaf spine and read the secrets contained in its mouse-print text.

I can’t tell you what drove Marty Goddard into her dioramas. People around her tended to believe she wanted to escape into her imagination. But I think maybe she was exploring the dark magic of ordinary things, the way the most forgettable object can be converted into evidence. Some underwear, a pack of cigarettes, the note scrawled on the scrap of paper — how strange it is that any of these furnishings of your life could one day be used to reconstruct your own assault or murder. I wonder if she was building tiny crime scenes peppered with clues, if somehow she was leaving a message about what had happened to her.

Mr. Goddard told me that about 2010, “depression started to set in,” and his aunt became a furious alcoholic. Her once steel-trap mind wandered. Worse, she raged and accused, believed friends plotted to kill her. “In the last few years, she alienated most of her family and friends,” he said.

THE RAPE KIT WASN’T DOING SO WELL EITHER. In 2009, investigators toured an abandoned parking garage that the Detroit police had appropriated for storage and where officers had been dumping evidence for decades. In the dank building, with pigeons fluttering over their head, the investigators wandered past a blood-stained sofa and a bucket full of bullets and shells. In one of the parking bays, they found the rape kits — what would turn out to be a trove of 11,000, most of which had never been tested. Some of the kits had been collected as far back as 1980. The victims ranged in age from 90 to one month old.

It wasn’t just Detroit. Investigators in cities around the country had begun to open up their own warehouses, and they too discovered towers of untested rape kits.

By 2015, the backlog of untested rape kits in the United States had grown to an estimated 400,000.

In 2016, the Justice Department announced a new sexual assault kit initiative and $45 million to tackle the backlog. More than 25 states have committed to testing warehoused evidence. Despite the government funding, the cost of these initiatives still largely fell on women’s groups and the victims themselves, who organized dinner parties, Facebook charity drives and comedy shows.

So far, the efforts have paid off. Five states and the District of Columbia have cleared their backlogs. Testing thousands of kits has led to a bonanza of DNA identifications and hundreds of convictions. Scientists are also using rape-kit data to show that there are more serial rapists than we ever suspected. In one study of rape kits in the Cleveland area, researchers found that more than half of them were connected to other cases.

In other words, when a victim decides to go to all the trouble of driving to an emergency room and submitting to a rape-kit exam, it’s because she believes that her attacker will rape someone else. And quite often, she’s right.

When Ms. Goddard died, she asked that her ashes be thrown to the winds in Sedona, Ariz., along the red cliffs. Old friends like Cynthia Gehrie and Margaret Pokorny didn’t even know she was gone. She left behind those boxes of tiny furniture. And, also, a nationwide forensics system that might never have existed but for her.

Writing this, I dreamed of one day seeing one of the original kits displayed in the Smithsonian, among the parade of great American inventions. Mary Dreiser told me she might have saved one of the kits distributed in 1980. I asked her to hunt for it, and there it was, in the back of a closet, yellowed after decades in storage. The kit was emblazoned with the logo of a female face, as if to declare that this — among all the man-made objects in the world — had been created by and for women.

Today, a new generation of inventors are figuring out how to speed up the testing of rape-kit DNA, to improve the design of the kits, and to draw new insights from sexual-assault analytics. This story of feminist technology is still unfolding. Half a century after Marty Goddard answered the calls of teenage rape victims, survivors and their advocates are assembling a vast net of evidence, and it is tightening, ever so slowly, around the perpetrators.

[elmidol]

Three Small Words (NSFW)

Three Blind Tooke Part Two Precarious Harmony

Read on AO3

Warnings: sex, angst/complicated feelings; oral; face sitting; slight emotional manipulation

Three Blind Tooke

Part Two: Precarious Harmony 

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Three Small Words 

The man who slept next to you was not the creature who had impaled you with the plasma blade; he was not the monster that had dragged you away from the flames that would have promised death. While the body did indeed belong to the one who had stolen your virginity and tortured you, there was something different about him as well. Rather than shying away from the name of Ben Solo, he was seeking to embrace it. Not as his current self either. A portion. Kylo Ren was adamant that the past should die. Even should he have begun to use the name Ben Solo throughout the rest of his days, that would never be the Ben Solo from the days prior to turning to the Dark. He would not be the person Rey would be made to believe she could save. Kylo Ren would be manipulating her, maneuvering her into a position where she could be used. Only then, when she proved herself ready to fight alongside with him, would the Force user offer her a place at his side as ruling body over the galaxy.

 Like the Sith, you had whispered. Kylo Ren had paused, his brown orbs searching your face as his expression softened. He had not needed to say anything further at that point. This was beyond the Sith. No Jedi either. You were unaware as to what Kylo Ren intended to call the new order that would arise from the joining of their powers. This was not a question you had posed.

 Ren had not redressed when he had finished toying with you. His nakedness was concealed by the blankets, one of which possessed a loose thread you were tugging at. You sometimes loathed when plans were made for the future. They were emotionally exhausting. This perhaps best explained why you had been frantic and desperate to kill him originally. He had robbed your future. You pushed your right hand underneath the covers to touch your scar. The finger with the name Ben Solo tattooed on it twitched. The next moment you curled your hand into a fist, which remained on your belly. There would forever be a hole in you. All choices had been stripped away. Not quite all; you had options that revolved around Kylo Ren. Killing him, strengthening him… You squeezed your eyes closed as the unbidden addition of loving him entered your thoughts.

 It was not quite love so much as caring; you told yourself this, and knew that it was a half-truth. You doubted that you could ever love him completely and romantically. That would have entailed not only forgiving, but putting all the times he had raped you completely in the past.

 Let it die.

 A hand of ice seized your heart as Kylo Ren’s voice wormed its way into your thoughts. History helped to create the present, offered up a means of shaping the future. You gagged at that final word. Future. Turning over onto your side with your back to the man, you curled your knees towards your midsection. The second sob broke through your attempts to swallow it down. After but a single gag, the horrid, pathetic noise erupted from your mouth. The mattress shifted, which is what you had feared would occur. The man behind you turned, his chest pressing against your spine.

 His mouth was at your ear then. Hot breath blew aside strands of your hair as he spoke to you. “Are you afraid, tooke?” A spasm caused your body to undulate along with his. Kylo Ren set three fingers on the back of your hand, rubbing up and down. “You have become aware, haven’t you? Once I am Supreme Leader, Rey will be the new Master of the Knights of Ren. We will destroy the Resistance. The Sith. The Jedi. All of it—gone. And you… You will have to let the past die.” His fingers stretched further, his entire hand eclipsing yours. “I could have loved you…and I can still, tooke. I told you. I marked you as mine.” Ren’s voice had dropped to a whisper now, intimate, for your ears only.

 You shuddered at the thought of it. Kylo Ren in the place of Supreme Leader Snoke. This girl Rey where Ren now was. As for General Hux—you toyed with the idea that the Force user was planning to use him in a similar manner that Snoke was. The redhead was, after all, a great tactician. It would be foolish on Kylo Ren’s part to dispose of such a tool. You grit your teeth at that thought. Snoke would no longer be the puppet master. That would fall to Kylo Ren. It would not be Kylo, Hux, and you being moved around the board. It would be Rey, Hux and you. All the wile Kylo Ren would be holding your strings.

 He was far worse than the creature that had taken your virginity. Kylo Ren was now the one who wanted you by his side.

 “You don’t love me,” you croaked, your words sounding almost hollow as the desperation from the past returned. There was no utterance of I do nor Not yet nor anything at all. His tongue, hot and wet, was on your ear. The underside drew a line downwards, and you jerked away from him, curling up further.

 “Soon you won’t need to live in the past.” His words slipped out like a promise, and it was one you did not wish to believe. The sort of love he was insinuating was one of blind devotion. Adoration and worship—this was the monster you had sworn to kill, and it had sprouted more heads while sharpening its fangs. “I saw it in your eyes, tooke. You have never met her—is she the first woman you have ever craved?”

 His filthy words had you shuddering. You swatted at him, shaking your head and whispering for him to stop. You wanted nothing more than for that silver tongue to become still.

 “She has feelings for the traitor.” Ren traced your hip with two of his fingers. The bare flesh on your naked skin, his ghost touches encouraged your body to respond. Somehow you had become an instrument, and he was the only player who knew how to stroke your strings in the ways that caused sounds to be produced. The soft gasp followed by a staccato of breaths. The fingers had traveled from your hip to your lower belly, on which he traced patterns. His name. The girl’s. Kylo-Rey-Ben-Kylo. Between each, a pause, his hand cupping you, rubbing you. “You used to imagine your allies fucking you when I was inside your body. Do you think her tongue would feel like mine?”

 “I…” You gulped, your mouth too filled with saliva. It was difficult to know what to say to him when you were confused about your own feelings. Your attraction to this woman—and, stars, how obsessed with you did he have to be to have noticed?—confused you most of all. You had never met her. Yet you loved her. It was not lust. You had no idea what she looked like. What color eyes did she have? What shape was her face? The picture that was being painted in your head with every word that slipped from those lips, however, complicated you. But… He had always been skilled at that, hadn’t he?

 “Would you like to call me Rey while I taste you?” Kylo Ren purred, his finger slipped past your lips and inside of you. He stroked you from within, small, quick rubs that had your toes curling. The hand that had been on your scar now caught his wrist. “Just a Jakku scavenger, tooke. How starved she must be. How thirsty. Imagine how greedily she would drink you up.”

 Kylo removed his finger, bringing it to his lips and greedily slurping at the sticky substance that had gathered. That taste of your juices made him groan. His hands were again on your hips, this time to push you until your ass hit the pillow. Kylo jerked your legs open. His thumbs started to dig into the flesh of your inner thighs. His mouth remained inches away from you. You could hear him blowing as much as feel it. That thin line of air from his pursed lips. It hit against your clitoris. Your body felt as though it were pulsing, heat spreading through you. You shielded your eyes with one hand.

 “Do you prefer Ben to Rey?” that husky voice asked you. The moisture in your eyes had not disappeared, however there was nothing new gathering. His teasing irritated you. It aroused you. It distracted you, blissfully so, from the feelings of desperation that had earlier plagued you.

 The truth was that you preferred whichever of them—Ben or Rey—that would be able to put a stop to Kylo Ren’s plans. If he became the Supreme Leader, you feared that the Resistance would be destroyed. Supreme Leader Snoke had been teaching his pupil that sentiment was a weakness. Kylo Ren was using that against Rey. Against you. All the while somehow displaying moments of sentiment and compassion. That cold, unfeeling creature that was Snoke… You had somehow led yourself to believe that it would be far more terrifying than Kylo Ren. How mistaken you had been.

 If you could orchestrate a means of Kylo and Rey assassinating Snoke while either Rey or even General Hux killed the Force user who was now kissing your knee then it would be a risk worth taking. Rey would be able to defeat Hux so long as she received proper training from Luke Skywalker.

 There were far too many factors, too many pieces. How had Snoke become such an effective puppeteer?

 Kylo Ren distracted you from this question by tugging at your strings. He nibbled at the side of your knee, up your thigh. Sucking your flesh, his tongue laving at the skin between his teeth. Your hand moved away from your face. You gripped the bed sheets, the leg that was not occupying his mouth now outstretched. His fingers dug further into your thigh. It hurt. It amplified the sensations of pleasure. Ren pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, shifting towards the side and tugging you along with him. Your feet touched on the ground directly after his.

 His hands on your wrists, Kylo yanked your arms up above your head and pinned you to the wall. You stared at him with wide eyes, your chest rising and falling as you attempted to control your breathing. You recognized the fire in his eyes as animosity. Not against you, but instead directed at your attraction to Rey. The familiarity of this stemmed from your interactions with General Hux, all of Ren’s reactions to them. The zealous nature of his obsession with owning you had you jerking your eyes off of his face and staring at the wall. In his passion, he said things that you wished could be taken back. You were granted glimpses of the monster that had hunted down your allies; the creature that continued to slaughter your comrades on the battlefield. This was not the man who housed the memory of Ben Solo, not in these moments.

 The pressure on your wrists waned. As though realizing his mistake, Kylo Ren stepped nearer to you. His lips were feather-touches on the heels of your hands. Did he, you wondered, expect you to put aside the memories of these moments with him if he succeeded in his plans? Let the past die. As though he could control what clung to your mind, what shaped you into who you were to become, and what you would guard yourself against. The time he had spent with Snoke had the exact outcome you had dreaded.

 “You’re so cruel,” you said, sniffing then parting your lips to inhale more deeply. Ren’s mouth was now on your left wrist. A kiss. Not an apology. This was simply him changing tactics. “I thought things had changed with you after Starkiller was destroyed. They haven’t.”

 Rather than respond to your words, to the accusation, Kylo Ren muttered out for you to remain still. His hands left you, and you obeyed simply to see what it was he wanted from you. This was not solely about sex. Had that been the case, he would not have sobered when you responded to him with apprehension. You allowed your head to loll, rolling your shoulders and considering the scars he had obtained during his battle with Rey on Starkiller base.

 He, meanwhile, was staring at your scar. Kylo Ren reached forward to trace around its edges. “You’re terrified to watch the Resistance fall. There is no Resistance for you, tooke.” You were aware that he was not being literal so much as underlining the fact that the Resistance would never allow you to join in the fight again if you somehow, miraculously, managed to escape the First Order. The best place you could be, ironically, was still at Kylo Ren’s side. “You don’t want her. You don’t want Rey—you want me.”

 Your lips pressed tightly together as you frowned at him. Admitting that you did not know what you wanted would give him too much power, and so you chose to instead remain silent. Your mind wandered to how General Hux had been treating you. Passively. As though you were side entertainment for when he was not busy; and he was busy…which meant that the Resistance was suffering countless losses. It was much the same as when he had ordered the Starkiller weapon to be fired, when he had caused your mother’s death. General Hux never backtracked as a means of appeasing you so much as changing tactics to better manipulate you. With Kylo Ren, though the majority of his actions were similar, there was the key difference that he did, on some warped level, care for you.

 “I do want Rey.” His mouth twitched, the man beginning to scrunch his nose as though ready to bare his teeth. “I want her to defeat you after you kill him.” Kylo moved ever closer. He set his forehead against your shoulder, shifted nearer, and had his face buried in the crook of your neck. You could feel his eyelashes brush against you as he closed his eyes. “The Ben Solo from the past is dead. I’m not stupid, Ren.”

 “She won’t believe that,” the dark-haired man rumbled. You hummed in acceptance of his words. “Perhaps your feelings for her will help put her at my side. I will have to teach her the ways of the Force. She hardly knows how to control her powers. To the Knights, she will be a stranger, an amateur. But, tooke, her potential is great.”

 The way he spoke, you imagined he had managed to convince himself that the only way Rey could fulfill her potential was to join him, to study under him. It was much the same as how he treated you when it came to the differences between the First Order’s views and those of the Resistance. It was always his way that was best, or so he deluded himself into believing. This was not a man who could be saved, you thought for the umpteenth time. He did not want to be saved. He craved power. The son of your beloved General Organa was self-entitled and dark. He was dark.

 You lowered your arms to your sides, the strain having started to make itself known. You were allowing your mind to drift to how things would proceed if Kylo Ren did succeed in all his plans. Not only would he be Supreme Leader. Rey would be the Master of the Knights of Ren, and they would assist in claiming the galaxy. The New Republic was destroyed, the shambles housing the remnants of the Resistance. Kylo Ren had taken you from the Resistance. What was to stop him from doing the same with the entire galaxy? Rey. The girl Rey, and Skywalker if the legendary man did indeed return.

 You covered the scar from your lightsaber wound with both hands, one atop the other. “You don’t like it when I think of anyone but you.”

 Lips curled into a smile, his eyes shining with that hint you knew to be his streak of possessiveness, Kylo Ren straightened and stared you in the face. “If Rey from Jakku would thirst for you, tooke… If she would drink you up so greedily…” The man was lowering himself onto his knees in front of you, his hands on your thighs, nudging them, albeit less forcefully than he had been not long before. “Tooke…” His tongue traced his lips. Slowly. With purpose. You swallowed thickly, your body clenching, legs trembling. Kylo whispered your name as though it were a prayer. Softly. With something that would have been described as love if not for the fact that, at this moment, the two of you did not love one another. Your lips parted at that. There was something impossibly thick in your throat. Emotion. “I’m parched, tooke.”

 You removed the hand that possessed the tattoo of Kylo Ren from your belly, using it to trail your fingertips up his face. Mere hours before he had encouraged you to call him Ben Solo. He had wanted to play make-believe with you. All practice to lure Rey to him. To ensure that he would be able to eliminate Snoke when the opportunity presented itself, when the apprentice was ready to surpass the master. Though Rey would be beneath Kylo Ren in terms of position—Master of the Knights of Ren serving the Supreme Leader—you knew that he would treat her as more of an equal than Snoke now treated him. But for now… Now he was begging for your approval.

 Deciding to play along again with the knowledge that it would be best to appease him for now—the two of you constantly finding and exploiting openings in the other’s defenses—you shifted your fingers down to his mouth. Kylo Ren parted his lips, wrapping them around two of your digits and sucking at them. You thrust them forward, began to draw them back, and offered them to him anew when his growl threatened to turn into a whimper. His tongue waggled its way between your fingers. You added a third into his mouth, again rocking them back and forth, fucking his mouth with them. Ren moaned, bobbing his head and staring up at you with those eyes. Desperation. Desperate for approval, your approval.

 You pinched his tongue, catching it between your middle and ring finger. It was an awkward hold, though one he allowed to keep him. “Beg for it, Ren.” His eyes began to narrow. He was not exactly pleased by the level of boldness that you were displaying. Given how much he had teased you, however, you had no sympathy. You snatched your hand up, your fingers leaving his mouth with a wet pop. You raised your hand to your face and observed the way they glistened. “You don’t have to. Unlike before, I am willing to touch myself now. I don’t need you.”

 “Let me taste you,” Ren said, his voice breathless. You could hear the slight rumbling afterwards. His growl. His hands on your thighs allowed you to feel the way he was trembling. Kylo Ren held himself back from taking what he wanted from you. He had, when telling you of the Rule of Two that well described your relationship with him, placed you as his equal in certain respects. When you did not grant him permission, his fingers dug into your thighs. There would be bruises there. You lifted your hand to your mouth and kissed the tattoo of Kylo Ren. “Let me show you how parched I am.” His shoulders rose and fell with his heavy breaths. He was rocking a little, swaying. You watched his tongue flick out for a second time.

 “You want something wet?” Kylo Ren was looking up at you with his eyes alone. There was a hesitancy to his actions now. His eyes dropped to your pussy then raised back to your face. You parted your thighs, spread your legs enough to where his face would be able to fit, and stroked his hair. “Who are you right now? Ben? Rey? Kylo Ren?” You snickered. When he bowed his head, you took pity on this man who had been your enemy for so long. You used your foot, rubbing its side along his hip. “What am I supposed to moan if you’re any good?”

 “Ren,” he said, all traces of shyness and indecisiveness gone.

 You hummed, replaced your foot on the ground, and placed a hand on the back of his head to urge him forward. His nose brushed against your pubic hair. You felt his tongue against your outer lips, slipping through, parting your folds. Your mouth formed a small o as Kylo Ren licked from your entrance to your clitoris, where he paused to suck at you. Tilting back his head while keeping his mouth on you, Kylo Ren stared up at you. You met his gaze, rocking your hips forward. With a moan, he opened his mouth wider, his tongue again finding your entrance. You could feel him working that organ against you, gathering your juices and drawing them into his mouth.

 There was the sensation that something was swimming inside of you, going around and around in your lower belly, threatening to shift down to your cunt. Ren groaned against you when he opened his mouth again. The vibrations had the sensation growing. Your free hand slammed flat against the wall. The sound of the slap echoed in the room. Those brown orbs were peering up at your face. Your eyelashes fluttered. Kylo Ren’s teeth grazed your clitoris.

 “Mm…Ren…g… Go… Bed…”

 You were left against the wall, breathing hard and legs wobbly. Kylo Ren climbed onto the bed without any further prompting. He laid on his back. His hand was on his cock, thumb tracing his length as he turned his head to stare at you. You kept your hand on the wall as a guide. Lifting one leg then the other, you moved climbed onto the bed as well, crawling then swinging a leg over. You straddled his face. Ren greedily opened his mouth. His hand was pumping his cock now, quick flicks of his wrist matching the pace at which you were rolling your hips. Your hands were in his hair.

 “Ah! R-Ren! Uhh….mm…” You leaned forward, feeling his nose nudging your clit as his tongue thrust up inside of you.

 Earlier you had pretended Kylo Ren was the man from his past. That he was Ben Solo, someone who could in actuality not be saved. Now you allowed yourself to play make-believe anew. This time, however, it was you toying with the future he had painted. You somehow killing all history that was preventing a loving relationship from forming. The rapes. The times you tried to kill one another. The way he had used you to hurt your mother. You pretended that none of those things existed. You pretended that Snoke was dead.

 You ground against his face, bowing your head and looking past your shoulder at the way he was pleasuring himself. Your jaw dropped as you came. His tongue was working more vigorously against you now, lapping at your cum. His hand was moving faster too.

 “Don’t cum,” you groaned, earning a moan of approval.

 Kylo Ren helped you off of him, holding your shaking body and laying you down so that your head was on the pillow. You kept your legs spread. He climbed between them, gripping himself and rubbing your wet cunt with the head of his erection. He rocked forward thrice, fucking your outer lips until you demanded, breathlessly, that he fuck you. You arched your back as he entered you. Your hands were on your breasts, toying with them. You pinched your nipples, tugged at them. You cupped your breasts from the side, thumbs and forefingers clasping your nipples.

 When he moaned, it was not the nickname he had chosen for you. It was your name. You whispered out a desperate yes.

 “I’m going to kill him one day, tooke,” he said. “And you’ll see. You will choose me.”

 You gripped his hair at the back of his head, tugging him down to kiss you. Your other hand left your chest as well to instead splay across his. You ran the sides of your fingers against his nipple. With a grunt, Ren grabbed onto your hips with both hands, the man picking up his pace. You broke the kiss, nipping at his jawline. When he said your name once more, you threw back your head. Swearing, you grabbed onto his shoulders and looked down at where your bodies were joined. His cock slipped in and out of you.

 You bit down on your bottom lip, swerving your hips so that he hit your g-spot. Kylo rested his forehead against yours. He was watching as well. One hand trailed from your hip to your lower back. He drew circles on your spine. Next, his name. Your entire body was trembling. It felt good, now that he was not teasing you out of jealousy but instead out of—you did not know what to call this. This was not love. He could not love you, not yet. That would interfere with his plans to defeat Snoke. That was something both of you desired.

 “Oh, fuck, Ren!” Your second orgasm crashed over you, and you could feel that the way your inner walls tugged at his cock made him cum too.

 The two of you laid down on the bed together, you in his arm. You closed your eyes and decided to play make-believe for a little while longer. Would this be your life with him if you did renounce the Resistance once he killed the Supreme Leader? Laying in his arms, satisfied on a sexual level…yet missing something. You clenched your jaw. Your right hand was on your abdomen. The scar. The hole in your life. The future that you could never have; a decision that should have been yours stolen away. The arm that was wrapped around you shifted. His hand found yours and rested atop it.

 He had killed that part of your future. Now he was asking you to kill your past.

 Rey was the one thing—person—you could cling to. The idea of her. You did not know what decision she would make when it came time. If she did choose to side with Kylo Ren, you doubted that you would be able to stop them. You had vowed to kill Kylo Ren or die trying. Perhaps you did need to stop living in the past. You would toy with the different possibilities of the future while also taking a day at a time. Relearn your body, as you had been doing, and sharpen your mind so that you would be able to stay ahead of Kylo Ren.

 “You’re mine, tooke,” he whispered. It was not the first time, and you doubted that it would be the last time he said those words. The sound you made was dismissive, and so the man tried again. This time it was not tooke. He said your name. Using your name, he claimed that you were his. He rubbed the back of your hand. “You admitted it before. You are mine as much as I am yours.”

 “That was not out of love,” you countered. Then, seeing an opening, you said with a sigh, “Besides, I thought we were going to let the past die. Those word were in the past.”

 “Then say them again.” He was infatuated with you. This man you had trained to kill. This man who had promised you not long ago that the two of you would work together. You being allowed to find chances to kill him. He using that as a means of growing stronger. Now he wanted you to reciprocate his other feelings for you. The ones he was masking during most of his waking hours. The ones General Hux would use as a weapon against the both of you.

 Would it be prudent to kill General Hux first? Or did you need to keep him as a failsafe to eliminate both Rey and Ren if the woman from Jakku joined the man who was in bed with you?

 “Do you want to be mine, Ren?” Here his hand curled around yours, his fingers wiggling until he was able to entwine them with yours. “You are volatile. Erratic. I can’t have that right now. My own body doesn’t even work like I’m used to.”

 “And…General Hux?”

 “He killed my mother, Ren.” There was venom in your voice. His thumb began to rub you again. Back and forth along the side of your hand. As though he did wish for you to be calmed.

 You wanted to tell him that you would not betray the Resistance; yet you had already agreed with him that there was no Resistance. There was you. There was him. Hux. Snoke. Rey. People who were pieces.

 “Right now I can’t kill the past. My past is filled with the dead. What you’re asking me to do—you’re wanting me to forgive you for breaking me. Repeatedly breaking me. Now you’re telling me that you can love me in the future. Isn’t sentiment a weakness? I thought you didn’t have compassion for enemies of the First Order.”

 Kylo Ren shifted onto his side. His hand did not leave yours. You kept your body as it was on your belly. This time when he said your name, you looked over at him. The two of you remained there, lying together, and watched one another. Now that the conversation had died away, the game of make-believe began anew. This was what it would be like to allow the past to die a thousand deaths. To accept the offer of his future affection. You would be in his arms.

 “Do you want to play a game of make-believe, Ren?” you asked. He blinked, his nod something you nearly missed. “Pretend.”

 With how long the two of you had been together—back when he had been your only form of social interaction, he had learned the language of your body so well—you did not need to elaborate.

 “You will call me Supreme Leader,” he said. Your eyes dropped to his lips. Biting down on yours, you weighed your options. Play, your mind said. You’ll get hurt, your heart whispered. Your mouth formed around the words that he had spoken, you uttering the title. “You don’t think I can do it.”

 “You’re doubting yourself.” For once, you did not want his uncertainty. You needed him to believe he could complete this task. “So: pretend… Supreme Leader.”

 “I love you.”

 The truth was in-between the lines. The silent will always present. This time you believed him. If he succeeded in his plans, he would love you.

 That hurt most of all.

[thechanelmuse]

A new investigation finds that police officers across the country destroyed rape kits, in what is estimated to be over 400 cases, and all before the statute of limitations ran out for the kits.

CNN reports in a lengthy, devastating deep-dive using department records that since 2010 rape kits have been shelved and destroyed by many police officers, sometimes just weeks or months after they obtained evidence.

We already know that rape kits across the country are constantly being mishandled, whether they’re left to grow mold, go untested, or simply aren’t offered at all to women in certain areas. What is most startling but not surprising about CNN’s investigation is how it reveals just how little some police offers do to even investigate rape claims. For one woman who reported being gang-raped, the officer assigned to her case did absolutely nothing to move it forward:

Instead, CNN found, the detective assigned to her case did nothing more than interview her. The officer never tried to talk to the men she named as her attackers, misinterpreted the law and concluded that no rape occurred. About a month after speaking with the woman, the detective authorized destruction of the untested rape kit — in a state where there was no time limit to prosecute rape.

An incident like that is horrifying when you consider just how departments defend the destruction of these rape kits. CNN found that 25 agencies in 14 states destroyed kits when they still could have been prosecuted, but police say that’s because they were apparently cases “they believed had no chance of moving forward.”

But the judgment of officers regarding the likelihood of cases to move forward appears to be deeply misinformed. For example, an officer might throw out a rape kit just because a victim didn’t want to continue participating in the investigation:

Destroying kits in those circumstances is misguided, experts said; police are failing to recognize that the passage of time can work on behalf of an investigation. A victim can decide to engage with police after a few years, and new evidence can emerge, making a prosecution possible.

“Even if a victim doesn’t want to be involved now doesn’t mean they won’t change their mind,” said David LaBahn, president of the national Association of Prosecuting Attorneys and a career California prosecutor. “If you have a statute of limitations that is still open, and a victim does change their mind but you’ve destroyed the kit — that’s a problem.”

Reading the piece, you honestly have to wonder if these officers ever do their job!

In North Charleston, South Carolina, a woman reported being raped at knifepoint by a man who had once been a sexual partner. Police noted she’d been arrested for prostitution two years earlier and quizzed her about whether he was a client. She told them no...

...But when she failed to return a detective’s call in a week’s time, he wrote that she was uncooperative and ended the investigation 17 days after she reported being raped. Her kit — never tested — was destroyed less than a year later, even though testing might have identified the man. There was no statute of limitations on the crime, meaning the woman should have had as much time as she needed to help police pursue her assailant.

Read more

The CNN article: 

How the trashing of rape kits failed victims and jeopardizes public safety

Hours after you are raped, you sit in a hospital room, under fluorescent lights, and consent to a forensic exam.

Your body is the crime scene.

When did it happen, a nurse asks. Where did it happen? Can you tell me who did this to you?

The nurse is trained to interview you and search your body for evidence left behind by your attacker. Knowing the details of your assault guides the examination.

Did he ejaculate inside of you, on you? Where did he touch you? Did he use any objects? Did he kiss you, lick you? Have you had anything to drink? Did you shower?

You’re asked to undress slowly while you stand on a special sheet meant to collect any trace evidence that shakes loose.

For three to five hours, the nurse swabs your mouth, your breasts, a bite mark on your neck. She scrapes under your fingernails, combs your pubic hair. She inserts a speculum inside you and drops blue dye on the tissue there to illuminate any places that are torn.

The nurse cuts a hair from your head. She takes photographs of your face and shoulders to pair with your chart, of you in the clothes you wore when you were attacked. Every injury is photographed, too — far away, close-up, with a ruler to show size.

When the exam is over, the nurse puts hair, fibers, swabs, vials of blood and urine in a container smaller than a shoebox. She seals it — your rape kit — and entrusts it to a police officer.

This is the way DNA evidence is collected. This is what you endure so police can identify your assailant, make him pay for what he did.

No one tells you that the exam may be pointless — that police might treat your kit like trash.

A CNN investigation into the destruction of rape kits in dozens of agencies across the country found that police trashed evidence in 400 cases before the statutes of limitations expired or when there was no time limit to prosecute.

The number is likely higher and was arrived at through an analysis of the departments’ own records.

The destruction occurred since 2010 and followed flawed and incomplete investigations that relegated rape kits to shelves in police evidence rooms until they were destroyed. Dozens were trashed mere weeks or months after police took custody of the evidence, records showed.

Almost 80% were never tested for DNA evidence, a process that can identify a suspect or link that person to other crimes.

For the past several years, public attention has focused on the hundreds of thousands of kits that have languished untested. The Justice Department has awarded more than $150 million to test that backlog.

But destruction of rape kits is a lesser-known and more fundamental problem: The evidence is gone. It can never be used to lock up a rapist or set free the wrongfully convicted.

[...]

Marci Hamilton, a professor and attorney who analyzed juvenile cases, and CNN identified 47 children’s and teenagers’ rape kits that were destroyed before the statutes of limitations expired or where there was no time limit to prosecute. At least 39 were untested.

CNN’s analysis did not include “unfounded” cases, those in which police determined that no crime was attempted or occurred. But Hamilton, whose non-profit CHILD USA advocates for sexual abuse victims, argued that given the complexity of child sex abuse, juvenile reports should rarely be labeled unfounded.

In Fallon, Nevada, a detective dismissed a 7-year-old’s case as unfounded, partly because the child looked away from him as he questioned her in 2013. The girl described how a man had assaulted her anally, orally and vaginally the previous night, and then methodically cleansed her body.

Even though the child was consistent in describing the incident to others, the detective said her body language — looking away — indicated she was being deceptive.

The detective suggested to her parents that they get her psychological help.

Read more

Ummmm...Soooo....Was this a big viral story I just so happened to miss or...? ... The fact that this article came out November 2018 and I’m just now coming across it. 

[layla256]

Key to Her Heart Chapter 1/52: Halloween

So, some context first. My friends and I decided to do a 52 fanfic challenge this year, one prompt each week. The only rule is that you must adhere to the prompt, one post a week, and they all must be in the same universe. So, for example, if you have been writing marvel fanfic all year, but you think a prompt would be GREAT for Supernatural, you have to somehow fit the Supernatural universe into the MCU. 

Now, because I hate myself, I decided I was going to write an entire series consecutively with only a basic outline of my AU and no knowledge about the future prompts.

KILL ME.

But, either way, I think this’ll be a fun adventure into writing for me. So behold the first in my Spuffy AU Key to Her Heart. I’ll probably post this on AO3 and EF as well.

The prompt this time was:  Our hero (or heroine) loses his memory.   Who will help him find his way back?

And doesn’t that just scream “Halloween episode”?

WARNING: At one point at the end of this chapter, Spike makes the assumption that Buffy was raped in the episode Reptile Boy. While no detail is given and Buffy reveals that there wasn’t any rape, it’s still an issue mentioned and I don’t want to blind side anyone with it.

Spike wasn’t a traditionalist. He never pretended to be one either. No matter how much Dru had wanted him to be, that just wasn’t something he cared about. All that chanting and ritual? It just wasn’t him. However, if there was one rule he was willing to take seriously, it was the one about Halloween. You don’t start shit on Halloween. It’s everyone’s fucking vacation day. Sure, if a tasty snack wanders by he isn’t going to say, “No thanks, I’m dieting today!” But he also understood that, at a certain point, causing problems on Halloween was just being a dick.

Spike can respect an asshole (he is often one), but being a dick is an entirely different story.

So, you can imagine the conflict he felt when Dru told him that someone was, as his mother would have said, “making shenanigans” that were going to deliver the Slayer into his lap. On the one hand, he had his principles dammit! He had said he would respect the Halloween rule when he first learned of it. However, on the other hand, he was an ancient, evil vampire and he did whatever he wanted! Not to mention the fact that the slayer was a royal bitch who had it coming.

Eventually, Spike made a compromise with himself. He’d go out and enjoy whatever chaos occurred because of this newcomer. If he saw the slayer? Great. Dinner and his Dark Princess back at her best again. If he saw the person responsible? A beating and lecture that would make his father weep with jealousy.

He hadn’t been planning on what he would do if he ran into her however.

She looked beautiful, although he knew from experience at this point that she always did. Her normally well-kept hair was completely falling out of whatever adorable braid she’d managed to coax it into that night. The crown of what looked like Daffodils was almost falling completely off her head. Her make up was relatively un-smudged, but that probably had more to do with the fact that she wasn’t wearing much, just a light dusting of gold across her eyelids and a similar color on her lips.

However, the thing that caught his attention wasn’t just the confused look on her face, but the dress she was wearing. Unlike the tight black number that had been haunting his dreams since that God-awful frat party the week before, this dress matched Buffy far better. The creamy silk of the one-shoulder dress looked gorgeous folded and wrapped around her body, accentuating every curve while hiding the important parts from his gaze. The golden rope around her waist synched it all in, drawing his attention to her hips and that luscious ass that—

And he was going to stop that train of thought right now.

She looked at him with no recognition and a hint of fear, making him want to cast himself on the nearest cross. Worried that she was upset with him for the party, he shrunk his shoulders, held his hands up, and tried to seem as non-threatening as possible.

“Pet I—I would never hurt you. You know that, right? Please tell me you know I would never hurt you.”

While the confusion didn’t leave her hazel green eyes, the fear definitely did. “D-Do you know me?” She asked hesitantly, looking around them with wide eyes. “Do you know who I am?”

Spike’s brow furrowed. “Of course I do, luv. You’re—”

He was cut off as one of her friends came running towards them looking a bit odd while followed by the other one, who wasn’t moving normally. Too stiff.

“Buffy!” Red called, waving her arms wildly at the girl in front of him. “Buffy, thank goodness you’re ok!”

 Spike was stuck on baby-sitting duty, and he wasn’t sure how upset he wanted to be about it. Red, who was a very hot ghost for some reason, had run off to find Buffy’s pseudo Watcher, leaving him to look after the Whelp and Buffy, both of whom had turned into their costumes, leaving confused shells behind.

“So I dressed as a goddess and now I am one?” Buffy asked again, still trying to grasp everything after the short run-through Willow had given Spike. “That does sound rather . . . disconcerting.”

What’s disconcerting is you using that kind of language Spike thought, but he kept it to himself. He knew there was a bright mind under all that blonde, and he wasn’t going to be one of the many people discouraging her about it.

“So, fill us in,” Whelp ordered, showing more initiative that Spike had ever seen in the teen. “What is the situation like?”

Spike sighed heavily, not wanting to really get into it. “Look, I wasn’t here for the mess that was last year, alright? So you lot are getting the cliff-notes version and nothing more. Got it?”

The goddess and soldier before him nodded, though Whelp looked like he wanted to argue the point more.

“Now, I don’t know about you Whelp, but I know that little miss amnesia over there moved here about a year and a half ago after her parents split. She met you and Red and you little Happy Meals have been friends ever since.” He noticed Buffy scrunch her nose at the term “Happy Meals” and couldn’t help but smile knowing there was still some of her in that costume after all. She always did get on his case about it.

“Why would my parents split apart? Surely if they loved one another enough to marry—”

“Cliff notes version luv,” Spike reminded her gently. In all honesty, he didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth. That when Hank and Joyce Summers had been confronted with the very real issue of the supernatural Joyce had dealt with it through mild panic, heavy drinking for two days, and silence while Hank had simply attempted to ship Buffy off to the funny farm. Thankfully, the idea of her daughter being sent somewhere like that for something Joyce knew was real had snapped her back to herself pretty quickly. However, Buffy had blamed herself for the divorce ever since, and Spike, evil though he may be, didn’t have it in him to hurt her like that.

“So you lot wound up getting involved in most of the nasty business here on the Hellmouth since good ol’ Watcher thought you might be a Potential.”

Once again, Buffy’s brow furrowed in the most adorable way. “Potential what?”

Spike shook his head. “Potential Slayer, luv, like that Faith bi-bint Willow mentioned she was getting. One girl in every soddin‘ generation to cause vamps like me all kinds of headaches. They thought you were one for a bit, but turns out you’ve just got major magic going on.”

Whelp shot up. “‘Vamps like me’? You’re a vampire? Then why are you helping us?” Spike saw him reach for his weapon, but waved him off.

“Easy there Rambo. My issue’s with the Slayer and her lot. I got no quarrel with you all.” He looked at Buffy with a single smirk. “Told you that the first night we met actually. You and Red threatened to light my highly flammable ass on fire if I tried to take a bite out of you. Been nothing but banter ever since.”

Buffy smiled, “So we’re compatriots then?” she asked cautiously. “Through humor and fear?”

Spike barked out a laugh. “‘Compatriots’, sure. I gave you my word that, long as you and your lot stayed out of my business, you’d be safe as houses. Yer Mum’s got permanent protection too, in case you’re worried.” No need to mention how pointless he thought it was, seeing as how the woman bashed him over the head with an ax right after thinking he was attacking Buffy.

Buffy nodded her head gratefully, more of her hair spilling out of her braid. “Thank you very much Spike. That puts my mind at an ease.”

Bloody hell, Red needed to hurry up with whatever plan it was she had for fixing this mess.

After that, things eventually quieted down a bit. Soldier Whelp went into the kitchen hunting for “provisions”, leaving Spike with a curious Buffy.

“Spike,” she said cautiously, tilting her head as she looked at him. “Spike, why were you concerned that I was afraid of you when we met? If we are friends and you have upheld your end of our bargain, then surely I would have no reason to fear you.”

Spike sighed heavily for what felt like the thousandth time that night, running his fingers over his gelled hair in frustration. He’d honestly been hoping she wouldn’t ask about that.

He could lie to her, tell her some made-up story to keep in the goddess’s good graces for a while longer, but he immediately shook the thought off. He might not mind it, but Buffy would be offended. She’d see it as a manipulation. While she won’t come out and reprimand him for it, he’ll still be subject to those disappointed eyes. Like last time.

“You, well, pet, that is—” he cut himself off with an angry growl. Rip the bandage off. “You’re upset with me. I went and killed some blighters who absolutely deserved it, but you didn’t appreciate it. Haven’t spoken to me in a week for it.”

Buffy’s head tilted once again for a moment, considering. He hated when she did that. For one thing, she looked bloody adorable. For another, he could never tell what she was about to say. “What was their crime?” She asked finally.

Spike blinked at her twice. “What?”

“Their crime.” She repeated simply. “You ascertained that they deserved their fate, but what crime did they commit to deserve such a thing?”

Spike couldn’t tell her. He couldn’t explain the pain on Buffy’s face when she’d told him of the drugs they’d put in her drink, they way they’d dragged her about as they saw fit.

She hadn’t come out and said it, but he knew that you only drugged a girl for one reason and one alone. That in and of itself would have earned them a solid beating session with him (he’d never much liked rape, even after being turned), but the fact that they’d done it to Buffy, kind, innocent Buffy who went so far out of her way for her friends and family, even an undead monster like himself, was unforgivable. There was only one appropriate punishment, and he certainly didn’t regret being the one to give it out.

Thankfully, he was saved from explaining as the crown completely fell off of her head, and Buffy, blinking as if to clear a fog, looked at him with recognition for the first time. “Spike?” she asked her nose once again being too freaking cute for words as it scrunched. “Ugh, what happened? I feel all magic-y.”

“Thank Eric Cantona, she lives to butcher the mother tongue once more!” Spike grinned and swept her into a hug, swinging her around once before dropping her onto the ground.

“Spike, what’s got you all ramped up? You’ve been all with the brooding worse than Angel lately.” Despite her words, a bright smile took over her face. “Ever since Willow, Cordy, and I almost got sacrificed to that snake demon thingy last week—”

Spike gripped her shoulders tightly, eyes tinted yellow. “Wait, what? What sacrifice?”

Buffy rolled her eyes. “Remember? The frat party? I was all with the crying and the depresso girl and you went on a completely unnecessary warpath through the whole freaking frat?”

Spike felt the distinct need to lay down. A sacrifice. The boys hadn’t raped her. Just a failed sacrifice. That he hadn’t even known about.

Yes. A kip was definitely a requirement right now.

So that’s the first chapter! In this AU Buffy is the key as opposed to Dawn, and Faith is the Slayer. This is actually a thought I had back in high school when I first watched the series and couldn’t get my hands on anything past the first third of the fifth season and none of the Angel series, so recognize that a lot of my characterization won’t stray from my feelings about characters past around the Dracula episode. While I’ll be referencing and maybe even writing about things in later seasons (maybe even the comics, I’m not sure yet), my main influence are going to be those first few years. For example, I am perfectly aware of the fact that Faith gets a redemption and becomes a great Slayer and a good friend to Buffy. However, I had seven years to sit and stew on how much I hated her before I could get my hands on the later seasons, so . . . yeah.

[stretchjournalemerson]

Experience Examined In Between Lines of Poetry

By Jacqueline Thom

Experience is a difficult concept to bring to life on paper. It requires the act of being able to sit with oneself and consider all the elements that make an encounter so vivid that it stays in the mind, transforming an event into memory into experience, that which is so powerful, it alters how one feels, in the moment and afterwards. Bringing that emotion to life in an authentic way was important for Tarfia Faizullah in writing her poetry collection, Seam. She chose not to go the same route many of her contemporaries might follow — heavily researching an experience before attempting to conjure the mindset that can accurately replicate it; instead, she traveled to Bangladesh where she spoke with birangona, female survivors of the 1971 Liberation War, which saw many women and girls raped, tortured, and traumatized by the Pakistani Army that captured them. Faizullah adds a valuable addition to the New Historicism school with her attention to truth and validating the ordeals of women long shunned by their own communities, and changes how experience is renewed and reexamined on paper in her book.

Faizullah’s ties to her culture is evident in how devoted to its exploration she is in her work. As a Bangladeshi American, she is privy to two cultures, but strives to stay away from the western narrative, instead choosing to come to terms with the duality of being a person of color in America, and then just another Bangladeshi in her ancestral country. Her poem, Self-Portrait as Mango, angrily retorts to “How long have you been in our country?” with “Suck on a mango, bitch, that’s all you think I eat anyway…This mango was cut down by a scythe that beheads soldiers, mango / that taunts and suns itself into a hard-palmed fist only a few months / per year, fattens while blood stains green ponds.” (Faizullah 23). Faizullah ironically calls herself a mango and articulates that what is a simple object to one person holds generations of history for another. While the mango ripens, it is witness to war and violence, but still grows until the day it is properly eaten (sucked open with teeth), or analogously, truly appreciated for the history it holds. Self-Portrait as Mango represents Faizullah’s tone as a poet; she is confused at her status as an other in America, she is angry when her validity is questioned, and yet she is indignant with the knowledge that her heritage has a rich history that rises far above any of these challenges to her identity.

This style is evident in Faizullah’s notes to herself in Seam. While she takes on an appropriately modest tone when addressing the birangona and emulating them, there is still that reverence for a past yet undiscovered by her. Such is true of Interview with a Birangona as she takes time to self-reflect in third person on her findings of the women’s experiences: “You listen to the percussion / of monsoon season’s wet / wail, write in your notebook / bhalo-me, karap-me / chotto-sundori— / badgirl, goodgirl, littlebeauty—in Bangla / there are words / for every kind of woman / but a raped one” (29). Not only is Faizullah questioning her culture’s inability to accommodate raped women, but she does so in a melancholic rather than accusing tone. She asks readers to consider why there is no infrastructure in place to support the birangona, or at least educate the communities about the long-term damage sexual assault has on victims. Her thoughts are expanded further in other poems where Faizullah suddenly becomes mournful and almost separated from what she is talking about as she emulates the birangona’s distanced retellings of their own traumatized encounters in the camps they were brought to. She tells readers, “my body became an eddy, / a blackblue swirl. Don’t cry, he says. How when the time / came for his choosing, we all gave in for tea, a mango, / overripe. Another chance to hear the river’s gray lull.” (34) Faizullah becomes much more metaphorical and perhaps even more poetic when she takes on the birangona perspective, a way of speaking that is common for victims of trauma to distance themselves from what happened. In turn, Faizullah’s dialogue and that of the birangona is distinguished from the much harsher, violent language of the rapists. All this works to create an eerie conglomeration of memories retold into an experience that shocks readers into the women’s awful realities as slaves to a traumatic past and their scapegoated present. What is presented in Seam becomes another experience on its own, for readers who have not had to witness the same kind of violence that is described, for Faizullah, as the child of parents scarred by the liberation war, and for the women who had to put their trauma into words for us to understand even an inkling of what they felt. Seam then reconfigures how we think about the representation of experience for all involved in its depiction, for without the multiplicity of historical perspectives, and then Faizullah’s own influences as a person of color in two very distinct worlds that perceive her identity differently, we would not have the same ability to experience so deeply as we did with this book, where no aspect of the memories and thoughts we read about feels unexamined and unfelt.

The way in which Faizullah truthfully pursues the telling of experiences in her poetry is a valuable contribution to the New Historicism literary theory. She does not merely try to grasp on her own what it is like to be a birangona, but seeks inspiration from the very women who know what it is like. Writer Kristina Marie Darling of Tupelo Quarterly puts Faizullah’s writing as “tragedy turn[ed] to narrative and set[ting] other pains into motion, be it grief or a desire for some form of justice. Faizullah also documents the stories in compact ways, choosing the most potent images and details to render heartbreaking devastation, and then moves to a larger, almost prophetic, question that forces readers to confront the senselessness of such a death” (2015). In other words, Faizullah’s cultural connection to the events she speaks about, and her willingness to strengthen that connection, is what allows her to translate words said by women likely desensitized to their own trauma if only to be able to bear it, in a way that resonates with readers and forces them to consider the needless violence of the war. New Historicism itself is a cultural study that strives to reconnect a work with the time period it is produced in or influenced by. It is not just a matter of what happened, but a matter of interpretation of the historical events themselves. With this examination of historical literacy in mind, Faizullah casts a telling light on how exactly birangona have been treated since they survived the war. She laments on their being shunned by communities for their ‘dirtiness,’ despite the total lack of control these women had in their circumstances. She asks readers to consider the women’s self-inflicted guilt over the futility of their situation and the guilt added on by their families and neighbors, and how that increases birangonas’ trauma. There are words for every kind of woman but a raped one. By asking these questions, Faizullah attempts to further enhance the contextual analytical methods of New Historicism by juxtaposing the circumstantial with the emotional.

In showing readers the lack of respect for these survivors, Faizullah ultimately addresses how we need to interpret events — as experiences that affect our own and should be treated as such. Seam does not just ask what happened, but it confronts violent experiences with a forwardness that shocks readers into sympathizing with victims and considering what can be done to right the wrongs of history and prevent another mass traumatic event from occurring. We are stirred into thought and action by the poetry’s historic validity, and Faizullah’s own willingness to be meta. While traveling to Bangladesh to interview the birangona, she notes, “I take my place among / this damp, dark horde of men / and women who look like me— / because I look like them— / because I am ashamed / of their bodies that reek so unabashedly of body— / because I am / an American, a star / of the blood on the surface of muscle” (12). She is different, a misdiagnosed ‘other’ in America, but as soon as she is in her country of origin, Faizullah emphasizes feeling strangely more American than before despite mingling with those who look like her…startlingly too much like her. That familiarity and lack of it at the same time is another influence in the way she is able to convey her sincerity and truthfulness as a narrator for the birangona in her poems. There is an acknowledgement of disconnect, but a drive to bridge that gap by finding the truth buried underneath cultural stigma and old historicism’s failure to interpret experience according to person and place in time.

Through Seam, Tarfia Faizullah contributes an entirely new way of recording the human experience for those who witnessed it in the past and alternately those who learn about it in the future. What is produced is a vivid re-narration of experience that is able to explore both the feelings felt by those involved in such encounters, while also questioning the supposed objectivity of previous historical interpretation methods. Faizullah posits that it is impossible to approach history without a subjective lens, and we are all the better for it, for only then can we truly understand the emotions that drive human action. Faizullah takes New Historicism head on with Seam, and fearlessly confronts the context from which her subjects’ stories were violently created so that readers may understand how their own experiences are subconsciously affected by the past.

Works Cited

Darling, Kristina Marie. “Seam by Tarfia Faizullah.” Tupelo Quarterly, 2015, https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/seam-by-tarfia-faizullah/.

Edwards, Trista. Review of Seam, written by Tarfia Faizullah. American Literary Review. University of North Texas. 2014.

Faizullah, Tarfia. Registers of Illuminated Villages: Poems. Graywolf Press, 2018.

Faizullah, Tarfia. Seam. Crab Orchard Review & Southern Illinois University Press, 2014.

“New Historicism, Cultural Studies (1980s-Present).” Purdue Online Writing Lab, Purdue University,

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/writing_in_literature/literary_theory_and_schools_of_criticism/new_historicism_cultural_studies.html.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Caitlin McGill for her profound patience and support when I wrote this during a time of much personal unrest and dissatisfaction. I learned so much in the few short weeks we had together.

[thekillerblogofkillers]

Andrei Chikatilo (1936-1994) PART ONE

Andrei Chikatilo, also known as the Butcher of Rostov, the Forest Strip Killer, the Red Ripper, and the Rostov Ripper, was a Soviet serial killer who sexually assaulted, murdered and mutilated at least 52 women and children in the Russian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR and the Uzbek SSR in a 12 year period between 1978 and 1990. He confessed to 56 murders and was tried for 53 in April 1992 and was sentenced to death for 52 murders in October 1992. Chikatilo was executed in February 1994. The majority of his murders occurred in the Rostov Oblast of the Russian SFSR.

Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was born in Yabluchne, Ukrainian SSR, on 16 October 1936. At this time, Ukraine was in the middle of a massive famine which was the result of Joseph Stalin’s forced collectivisation of agriculture. Both of Chikatilo’s parents were collective farm labourers and the family lived in a single room hut. They received no wages for their hard work but were given the right to cultivate a plot of land behind the hut. The Chikatilo family starved often, Chikatilo later claiming not to have eaten bread until he was 12, also stating that he and his family would sometimes resort to eating grass and leaves in order to stave off hunger. Through his childhood years, Chikatilo was told more than once by his mother Anna that before he was born, his older brother Stepan, 4 at the time, had been kidnapped and eaten by starving neighbours, but this story was never confirmed, nor was it confirmed whether a Stepan Chikatilo ever existed. Despite this, Chikatilo often spoke of his childhood being plagued with poverty, ridicule, hunger and war. When the Soviet Union entered WWII, Chikatilo’s father was drafted into the Red Army and ended up becoming a Prisoner of War after he was wounded in combat. Between the ages of 5 and 9, Chikatilo witnessed the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, describing the horrors he had seen, including bombs, fires, and shootings that he and his mother would hide from in cellars and ditches. Once, Andrei and his mother were forced to watch their own hut burn to the ground. When his father was away at war, Chikatilo and his mother had to sleep together in a single bed – but Chikatilo was a chronic bed wetter who was berated and beaten by his mother for it. In 1943, when Chikatilo was 7 years old, his mother gave birth to Tatyana, a little girl. However, because his father had been at war since 1941, he couldn’t be Tatyana’s father. Many Ukrainian women were raped and sexually assaulted by German soldiers in WWII so it was possible that one of these soldiers raped Anna Chikatilo. As Chikatilo was sharing a bed with his mother at the time, it’s possible he witnessed this rape.

In September of 1944 Chikatilo began school. He was shy and studious but was physically weak and often went to school in homemade clothes, his stomach distended from the hunger he suffered due to the post-war famine that plagued the Soviet Union. More than once Chikatilo fainted at home and school, and was often a target for bullying, being mocked for his stature and timidity. When he was at home, he and his sister were “bullied” by their mother. Tatyana later recalled that despite their family’s hardships, their father, Roman, was a kind man, and their mother, Anna, was harsh and unforgiving, especially toward her children. Chikatilo had a passion for reading and memorising data, often studying at home, which both increased his sense of self-worth and compensated for his myopia, which would prevent him for reading the blackboard in the classroom. Chikatilo’s teachers saw him as an excellent student that regularly received praise and commendation. By the time he was a teenager Chikatilo was a model student and a committed Communist. He was made editor of his school newspaper at 14 and was chairman of the pupils’ Communist committee. He read a lot of Communist literature and was given the task of organising street marches. Chikatilo later claimed that learning wasn’t easy for him, but he was the only student from his collective farm to complete his final year of studying – he graduated with impressive grades in 1954.

As Chikatilo hit puberty, he discovered that he was chronically impotent, which only served to make his social awkwardness and self-loathing more intense. Chikatilo was shy with women – his first crush at 17 was classmate Lilya Barysheva, who worked on the newspaper with him, but became extremely nervous in her company and could never ask her out. The same year Chikatilo pounced on an 11-year-old girl, a friend of Tatyana’s, and wrestled her to the floor – he ejaculated as the girl struggled underneath him. After graduating from school Chikatilo applied for a scholarship at Moscow State University, but although he passed the entrance exam with very good scores, his grades weren’t considered high enough to be accepted. Chikatilo, however, believed that his scholarship application was denied because of his father’s tainted war record (his father was considered a traitor due to being taken prison in 1943) – the truth was that other students had completed the exam with better scores. Chikatilo decided not to try and join another university, but travelled to Kursk, where he worked in manual labour for 3 months before enrolling in a vocational school in 1955, where he studied to become a communications technician. Whilst studying there, Chikatilo began his first serious relationship with a girl 2 years younger than him. On 3 different occasions, the couple tried to have sex, but each time Chikatilo was unable to maintain an erection. 18 months in, the girl broke off the relationship.

After finishing his vocational training, Chikatilo moved to Nizhny Tagil, a city in the Urals, where he began to work on a long-term construction project. Whilst there, he began correspondence courses in engineering with the Moscow Electrotechnical Institute of Communication. Chikatilo worked in the Urals for 2 years before being drafted into the Soviet Army in 1957, performing compulsory military service until 1960. He was first assigned to serve with border guards in Central Asia, and then worked with a KGB communications unit in Berlin. Chikatilo’s work record during this period was perfect, and he joined the Communist Party in 1960, just before his military service came to an end. After being discharged from the Soviet Army, Chikatilo returned to his native city to live with his parents, soon meeting a young divorcee. The pair began a 3 month relationship, which ended after the woman asked her friends how Chikatilo might overcome his impotence – leading to most of Chikatilo’s peers knowing his problem. He said, regarding this incident, in an interview in 1993: “Girls were going behind my back, whispering that I was impotent. I was so ashamed. I tried to hang myself. My mother and some young neighbours pulled me out of the noose. Well, I thought no one would want such a shamed man. So I had to run away from there, away from my homeland.”

Chikatilo found a job as a communications engineer in a town near Rostov-on-Don and relocated to Russia in 1961, where he lived in a small rented apartment near his place of work. That year his sister, Tatyana, finished school and moved into Andrei’s apartment, with his parents moving to the region soon after. Tatyana lived there for 6 months before she married a local boy and moved into the home he shared with his parents. Tatyana later said she saw nothing untoward about her brother’s lifestyle, except how shy he was around women, and decided it was her job to help her brother find a wife and start a family. In 1963, Chikatilo married Feodosia Odnacheva, to whom he was introduced by Tatyana. Chikatilo later said that although he was attracted to Feodosia, the marriage was basically arranged and was mainly orchestrated by his sister and her husband. He said that his marital sex life was minimal and that after Feodosia understood he couldn’t maintain an erection, they agreed to conceive a child by him ejaculating into his hand and pushing his semen inside her vagina with his fingers. In 1965, Feodosia gave birth to a daughter named Lyudmila and 4 years later, son Yuri was born.

In 1970 Chikatilo came to the end of a 5 year correspondence course in Russian literature and got his degree from Rostov University in the same subject. Shortly before getting his degree Chikatilo began working as a manager for regional sports activities, keeping this job for almost a year before starting his career as a Russian language and literature teacher in Novoshakhtinsk. He was a pretty ineffective teacher – he knew a lot about the subjects he taught, but couldn’t control or discipline his class and was regularly mocked by his students, later claiming they took advantage of his modest nature. In May 1973 Chikatilo committed his first known sexual assault. The victim was a 15-year-old pupil whom Chikatilo swam towards and groped her breasts and genitals, ejaculating as the girl struggled. Months later, Chikatilo sexually assaulted another girl, one he had locked in his classroom. He wasn’t disciplined for either incident, or the incidents where fellow teachers actually witnessed Chikatilo fondling himself in front of students. One of Chikatilo’s duties at the school was ensuring that the boarding students were safely in the dorms in the evenings – more than once he was known to enter the girls’ dorm in an attempt to view them undressing. Because of the growing number of complaints against him by students, the director of the school informed Chikatilo that he should resign or he would be fired – he discreetly left the school and found a job teaching at a different school in Novoshakhtinsk in January 1974. He lost this job due to staff cutbacks 4 years later before finding a 3rd teaching position in Shakhty. Chikatilo’s teaching career ended in March 1981 after several complaints of child molestation against both male and female pupils. That same month he began working as a supply clerk for a Rostov-based factory that produced construction materials. This job meant that Chikatilo could travel across most of the Soviet Union to either physically buy the materials needed to fulfil production quotes, or to negotiate supply contracts.

In September 1978 Chikatilo moved to Shakhty, where he committed his first known murder. On December 22 Chikatilo lured 9-year-old Yelena Zakotnova to an old house he had recently bought. Chikatilo attempted to rape Zakotnova but could not achieve an erection. When the girl began to struggle, he choked her and stabbed her 3 times in the chest, ejaculating while stabbing her. In a later interview, Chikatilo recalled that after he had stabbed Yelena, she had “said something very hoarsely” – he then strangled her before throwing her unconscious body into the Grushevka River, where it was discovered 2 days later. There was plenty of evidence linking Chikatilo to Zakotnova’s murder – spots of blood were found in the snow near the house Chikatilo had bought; neighbours saw Chikatilo there on the evening of the December 22; Zakotnova’s schoolbag was found on the opposite bank of the river and the end of the street; and a witness had been able to provide police with a detailed description of a man that resembled Chikatilo, that she had seen talking with Zakotnova at the bus stop where the victim was last seen alive. Despite all of this, 25-year-old labourer Aleksandr Kravchenko (who had previously served time for the rape and murder of a teenage girl) was arrested for the murder. A search of Kravchenko’s home found blood spots on his wife’s jumper – the blood type matched both Zakotnova and Kravchenko’s wife. Kravchenko had a strong alibi for the afternoon of December 22 – he was at home with his wife and a friend all afternoon and neighbours confirmed this – but the police threatened Kravchenko’s wife with being an accomplice to murder and her friend with perjury, so the women gave new statements claiming Kravchenko didn’t come home until late on the day of the murder. After being confronted with these new statements Kravchenko confessed and was tried for the killing in 1979. At trial, Kravchenko retracted his confession and claimed he was innocent, saying his confession was obtained under duress. Despite this, he was convicted of the murder and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to 15 years’ imprisonment (the maximum possible at the time) by the Supreme Court in December, 1980. Under pressure from Zakotnova’s family, Kravchenko was retried and executed for her murder in July 1983. Following the murder of Yelena Zakotnova, Andrei Chikatilo could only achieve sexual arousal and orgasm through stabbing and slashing women and children to death, later claiming that the urge to relive the experience had overwhelmed him, but he said he had initially struggled to resist these urges. He just couldn’t...

[woodsens]

The Most Influential People in the fire inside music Industry and Their Celebrity Dopplegangers

Correction Appended

On an album of bittersweet childrens music that she wrote greater than a decade ago, the woman who came to get recognised only as being the piano Instructor provided what, in hindsight, seems like an eerie glimpse of her have long term.

Im going absent today to an area so distant, the place nobody understands my identify, she wrote while in the lyrics of a track identified as Relocating.

When she wrote that song, she was younger and vivacious, a piano Trainer and freelance audio writer who liked Beethoven and jazz, sunsets and river Appears, extended walks and almost everything about Big apple.

On one of those beloved walks, by way of Central Park in the bright Sunshine of the June day in 1996, a homeless drifter conquer her and attempted to rape her, leaving her clinging to everyday living. Following the attack, the phrases to her track came real. She moved away, out of Ny city, from her previous life, and all but her closest close friends didn't know her name. To the remainder of the planet, she was — similar to the additional well known jogger attacked in Central Park seven many years previously — an anonymous symbol of the city nightmare. She was the piano Instructor.

Now, about the 10th anniversary on the assault, she's celebrating what appears to be her complete recovery from Mind trauma. She's forty two, married, with a small boy or girl. She's Kyle Kevorkian McCann, the piano teacher, and she or he wants to convey to her Tale, her way.

Her doctor told her it could just take ten years to recover, and Sunday was that talismanic anniversary. I sense my everyday living continues to be redefined by Central Park, she said a number of times in the past, her voice smooth and hopeful. In advance of park; immediately after park. Will there ever certainly be a time Once i dont Feel, Oh, Here is the 10th anniversary, the 11th anniversary?

She spoke in her modest ranch house in the wooded subdivision in a The big apple suburb. She sat in a very eating room strewn with toys, surrounded by pictures of her cherubic, dim-haired 2-calendar year-outdated daughter. A Steinway grand stuffed 50 percent the place, and at one place she sat down and performed. Her actively playing was forceful, but she appeared humiliated to Engage in more than a few bars, and shrugged, rather then answering, when requested the name of your piece. She questioned that her daughter and her town not be named.

She phone calls that working day, June four, 1996, the working day when I was damage.

Hers was the main within a string of attacks by the same guy on four Gals above eight times. The final target, Evelyn Alvarez, sixty five, was crushed to Dying as she opened her Park Avenue dry-cleansing shop, and in the end, the assailant, John J. Royster, was convicted of murder and sentenced to existence in prison.

Nevertheless the attack around the piano teacher would be the just one individuals appear to recollect one of the most. Part of the fascination has got to do with echoes in the 1989 attack to the Central Park jogger. But Furthermore, it frightened folks in a method the attack to the jogger did not because its instances were so mundane.

It did not occur inside of a remote A part of the park late in the evening, but near a preferred playground at 3 during the afternoon. It could have took place to anybody. The tension was heightened with the secret of the piano lecturers identity.

For 3 times, as law enforcement and Medical practitioners tried using to see who she was, she lay inside a coma in her medical center mattress, nameless. Her dad and mom were being on getaway and her boyfriend, also a musician, was in Europe, on tour. Lastly, one of her learners regarded a law enforcement sketch and was ready to identify her from the clinic by her fingers, due to the fact her experience was swollen over and above recognition. The law enforcement did not release her name.

The last thing she remembers about June four, 1996, is offering a lesson in her studio condominium on West 57th Avenue, then putting her prolonged hair within a ponytail and likely out for just a stroll. She would not remember the attack, Despite the fact that she has read the accounts of the police and prosecutors.

To me its just like a reality I discovered and memorized, she claimed. Just as if I were a pupil in school learning history.

She will not think of The person who did it. I may have been offended to get a second, but not a lot longer than that, she said. How could I be indignant at John Royster? He was declared not insane, but I suppose by our specifications he was.

Dr. Jamshid Ghajar, her health care provider at Big apple Medical center-Cornell Medical Heart, as it absolutely was recognised in 1996, instructed reporters that she had a 10 per cent possibility of survival. Doctors experienced to eliminate her forehead bone, which was later on replaced, to generate home for her swelling Mind. When her mother produced a public attract pray for my daughter, thousands did.

Immediately after eight days, she arrived out of a coma, to start with inside a vegetative point out, then in a very childlike point out. As she recovered, she slept little and talked consistently, occasionally in gibberish. I used to be obtaining mad at people whenever they didnt respond to these terms, she said.

Like an Alzheimers individual, she had very little quick-phrase memory and would fail to remember readers as soon as they remaining the space.

About various months, she needed to relearn ways to wander, costume, go through and produce. Her boyfriend, Tony Scherr, visited every single day to Perform guitar for her. He inspired her to Perform the piano, from the recommendation of her physical therapists, who believed she could well be disappointed by her lack of ability to Engage in the way she after experienced. Mr. Scherr performed Beatles duets together with her, taking part in the left-hand portion although she performed the right.

Which was my ideal therapy, she said.

In August, she moved back household to New Jersey, with her father, an engineer, and mom, a schoolteacher. She visited outdated haunts and identified as friends, seeking to revive her shattered memory. I was pretty obsessed with remembering, she claimed. Any memory loss was to me a sign of abnormality or deficit.

Her therapists assumed her development was great, but her two sisters protested that she wasn't the deep thinker she were.

What bothered her most was that she had misplaced the chance to cry, as though a faucet within her brain had been turned off. Just one evening, nine months immediately after she was damage, she stayed up late to observe the John Grisham Film A Time for you to Get rid of. Just following her father had long gone to mattress, she watched a courtroom scene of Samuel Jacksons character on demo for killing two Adult males who experienced raped his youthful daughter.

The faucet opened, and also the tears trickled down her cheeks. I considered my mother and father, my father, and what they went as a result of, she explained. Small by very little, my experience returned, my depth of mind returned.

Urged by her sisters, she went back again to highschool and acquired a masters diploma in music education and learning.

Not every thing went nicely. She and Mr. Scherr break up up five years after the assault, although they continue to be pals. She dated other Adult men, but she usually instructed them with regard to the assault instantly — she could not enable it, she explained — and so they never identified as for the next day.

We've got to uncover you someone, her Pal David Phelps, a guitar participant, reported 4 a long time back, before introducing her to Liam McCann, a pc technician and novice drummer. For when, she did not say anything at all with regards to the attack right up until she obtained to understand Mr. McCann, after which when she did, he admired her energy.

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who experienced normally visited her at her bedside while she was within the healthcare facility, married them in his Moments Square Business. She wore a blue costume and pearls. Even though she was Expecting, inside of a burst of creativeness, she and her pals recorded Though Were being Younger, an album of childrens music that she experienced penned ahead of the assault, including the song Relocating. Her ex-boyfriend, Mr. Scherr, produced the CD. On it, her spouse plays drums and she performs electrical piano.

Is her lifestyle as it absolutely was? Not exactly, although she's unwilling to attribute the discrepancies to her accidents. Her very last two piano pupils left her, without contacting to clarify why, she mentioned. She has resumed playing classical songs, but simple parts, simply because her daughter doesn't give her time for you to follow. As for jazz, I dont even try, she reported.

She want to drive additional, emotion stranded in the suburbs, but she is well rattled. She attempts to be written content with staying household and caring for her daughter.

Dr. Ghajar, a scientific professor of neurological surgical procedure at what's now called Big apple-Presbyterian Medical center/Weill Cornell Healthcare Middle, who operated on Ms. Kevorkian McCann following the assault, reported final 7 days that her level of Restoration was rare. Shes mainly typical, he explained.

Other specialists, who will be not personally familiar with Ms. Kevorkian McCanns situation, tend to be more careful.

Regaining a chance to Participate in the piano may possibly require an Virtually mechanical process, a semiautomatic remember of just what the fingers must do, claimed Dr. Yehuda Ben-Yishay, a professor of clinical rehabilitation medicine at The big apple College School of Medicine. As soon as brain-injured, you are often Mind-wounded, for the rest of your life, Dr. Ben-Yishay mentioned. There isn't any overcome, You can find only intense compensation.

The greater telling Portion of a recovery, in his watch, is psychological, and on that score he counts Ms. Kevorkian McCanns relationship and little one as a significant victory.

For her aspect, the piano Instructor appreciates she has transformed, but she has made her peace with it. I was form of a hyper —— I dont know if I used to be a sort A, but I was bold, she says. Why was I so formidable? I was a piano Instructor. I dont understand what the ambition was about. I really did come back to the individual Im designed to be.

[hazelcmist]

A Trusted Heart

Wrote this for @timepetalsprompts “Frustrated” prompt but my muse has a mind of its own and it quickly went back to Broadchurch and Hardy x Miller.

“Weird.” She smiles.

“But not… totally weird.” She laughs. He feels the tug of the current - her fingers curling in the front of his shirt, her breathy laughter caught somewhere between their mouths - and he dives in willingly. She kisses him in a way that’s so new, but achingly familiar. And the only thing that’s weird is that it doesn’t feel weird at all. * She lets herself out before he wakes. But he doesn’t drown in paperwork or rivers and she doesn’t dream of waterfalls. They catch the bastard but they come back to each other again and again and again. Until eventually, the sound of the rushing waters of their nightmares fades into the familiar thrum of a trusted heartbeat beneath their ear and their soft breaths mingling in the dark. A/N: I shamelessly overuse this trope but I miss these two so much. S3 and Chibnall broke my stupid heart but there were definitely some things in there worth thinking about. I also binge-read A LOT of fics, so if I inadvertently overlapped with anyone I apologize.

[amandacorliss]

Iris Marion Young’s Throwing Like a Girl and the Extension of the Glass Ceiling

 While the glass ceiling hangs over our heads we must forget the saying that “those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” Women face an invisible barrier between the limited space they inhabit and the space that is actually available to them. The glass ceiling is traditionally defined as “an unofficially acknowledged barrier to advancement in a profession, especially affecting women and members of minorities” (Merriam-Webster). I argue that through Young’s analysis of the modalities specific to feminine spatiality, it becomes clear that the glass ceiling exists not only in professional environments but extends throughout a woman’s life. Women experience space as enclosed or confining, the severance between a “here” and a “yonder” creates a disconnect between the current situation of women, and the possibilities they see for others but not themselves, that the glass ceiling amplifies patriarchal society’s portrayal of women as objects, and finally, that this invisible barrier sometimes acts as the only defense women have against the invasion of their space.   Young begins Throwing Like a Girl by discussing Beauvoir’s account of the situation of women to lay a foundation for her analysis of how women comport themselves and exist in space. Young states that through Beauvoir’s account it seems as if it is “woman’s anatomy and physiology as such that at least in part determine her unfree status” (23). However, it is not the anatomy of a woman that weighs her down, but society’s patriarchal views of women’s bodies, and thus women’s relationship with space. Young clarifies, as should I, that the claims made within both her paper and mine apply to the “feminine” existence and therefore do not apply to all women. The feminine existence is “a set of structures and conditions that delimit the typical situation of being a woman in a particular society, as well as the typical way in which this situation is lived by the women themselves” (24). Young combines Beauvoir’s account of the “feminine” existence, and the situation of women with the theory of the lived body as expressed by Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty theorizes that “phenomenal space arises out of motility and lived relations of space are generated by the capacities of the body’s motion and the intentional relations that motion constitutes” (32). If lived space arises from our relationship with space and the ability to use our bodies, a connection can be drawn from the situation of women to our perception of space as enclosed or confining. Women do not only experience a barrier between them and upwards movement but at all sides. This is reflected in Erik Erikson’s study where he concludes that “females emphasize inner or enclosed space” (32).  Young suggests that this is a “reflection of the way [women] live and move their bodies through space” (32). The space that is available to women is often larger than the space used by women. Therefore, women perceive a limited range of space for themselves to move through, and thus feel trapped, or enclosed. Merleau-Ponty suggests that there is an “immediate link between the body and outlying space” (33). For the feminine existence, however, “the projection of an enclosed space severs the continuity between a “here and a yonder” (33). There is a distinct difference between the space we currently inhabit, the “here,” and the space beyond, the “yonder.” In the feminine existence, the space of “yonder” exists as possible for someone but not for myself. The disconnect between the “here” and the “yonder” is an expression of the “discontinuity between aim and capacity” (33). The severance of the connection between a “here” and a “yonder” is expressed in the discontinuity between where women perceive they belong and the possibilities they see for others. Women realize that others can take up space, offer their own opinions, without having to justify doing so. The “timidity, immobility, and uncertainty” (33) that characterize feminine movement, however, severs a woman’s ability to see that she too is just as worthy and capable as anyone else. Imagine someone looking through a window, they must acknowledge that people are passing by, but they also must recognize that they cannot pass through the glass. “Yonder” exists for the feminine essence as something which she is “looking into rather than moving in” (33). In feminine existence, not only do women face a glass ceiling, we face a glass The glass house women face is built pane by pane as we accept our “feminine status” (35). As children, boys and girls show almost no difference in spatial perception, spatial problem-solving, and motor skills, but as these differences increase with age (36). Girls are more often encouraged to play house or to play with dolls. Whereas boys are encouraged to “tinker,” to get dirty and to play sports. These activities encourage “free and open engagement with the world” (35). The play of girls often reinforces gender roles and often begins to build the barriers females face as they grow older. When a girl is told she cannot “get hurt [or] get dirty,” that “what she desires to do is dangerous for her” (35), she internalizes these commands and it translates to a limited range of choices for what she believes she can and cannot do later in life. When she learns to comport her body in ways that are feminine, she learns to “hamper her movements” (35). As girls grow older, they often take on more and more of these traits and they actively “enact [their] own body inhibition” (35). The socialization of girls ensures that the glass ceiling stays in place through a self-maintained system. Similarly to Young spending hours practicing a “feminine” walk, I can recall my first time walking in heels; both create a limited range of movement. In Merleau-Ponty’s account “the body is the original subject that constitutes space” (33). Without the body, there would be no space, thus the body does not occupy the same position as other objects. However, through Young’s discussion of the socialization of girls and women, we can see that the “feminine bodily existence is self-referred and thus lives itself as an object” (33). Merleau-Ponty argues that “visual perception and motility stand in a relation of reversibility; an impairment in one leads to an impairment of the other” (34). Women’s view of objects as rooted in place and “anchored in their immanence” (34) act as a reflection of the impairment in their motility. The barrier women face in enacting their own agency and being recognized as people, socially and culturally amplifies the objectification they experience.  One of the sources of the “modalities of feminine bodily existence” is that “patriarchal society defines woman as object” (36). As the meaning of art is left to the interpretation of the viewer, women are presented as “the potential object of another subject’s intentions and manipulations in society” (36). Women’s bodies are constantly on display in media, through commercials, and music videos. This constant sexualization of women’s bodies partnered with the dismissal of our bodies as “manifestations of action and intention” (36) often creates uncomfortable, and sometimes even dangerous situations for women.

The glass house acts not only to limit the activities girls can partake in, and the opportunities women have access to, but it also acts as a defense against “the threat of invasion of her bodily space” (36). Young mentions that this invasion of space includes both ends of the spectrum, rape, but also other subtler ways.  Attached to the “window” that women look out of to see the possibilities for others is a wall. Women often try their best to transmit an air of unapproachability, or we at least try to not draw attention to ourselves. We wall ourselves off from the world by walking with our arms to our chest, attempting to take up as little space as possible. There have been many times on the bus where I have barricaded myself in my seat with my bags, sitting against the window, and putting my headphones in an attempt to evade unwanted interaction with others. While all the unwanted interactions I have had on the bus have thankfully only been an inconvenience, it is because of my lack of belief in my ability to use my body’s capacity to protect myself from the threat of violence that could occur if I rejected the advances. The attempt at projecting a closed space for myself, like many other women is the only way I know how to defend myself from such advances. Although significant strides have been made and continue to be made in improving the situation of women since Throwing Like a Girl was first published, society is still built on a patriarchal framework and thus many women still live in the glass house created by the feminine experience. Women experience space as enclosed or confining because of the process of socialization starting when we are young, women often experience a lack of confidence because of the severance between a “here” and a “yonder,” the glass ceiling acts to amplify the objectification of women, while also acting as a defense mechanism against the unwarranted advances women face as a consequence of the objectification. It is time to start throwing stones; the time for the glass house to come down is now.

[sonofhistory]

Hi! Have you done anything on Sally Hemings? If so, could you possibly link me? If not, do you have any information about her? I know so little about her and wish I knew more

Here you go, I wrote you a 2231 word essay on Sally Hemings. All sources come from Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry That Forged a Nation and Thomas Jefferson: Art and Power. 

          1735, a man named Hemings, the white English captain of a trading ship, fathered a daughter with a “full-blooded African” woman. The African woman’s child was named Elizabeth. The mother and daughter ended up as slaves of the Eppes family- the Eppes family from which John Wayles (Thomas Jefferson’s father in law) would marry his first wife, Martha. 1746- the year Wayles married Martha Eppes- Elizabeth Hemings, then about eleven years old, moved to the Wayles property. 1761, Elizabeth was taken by John Wayles into concubine and she bore five children to him, Robert Hemings, James Hemings, Thenia Hemings, Critta Hemings an Peter Hemings. In 1773, she gave birth to a sixth child: Sarah “Sally” Hemings.

             Thomas Jefferson married Martha Wayles Skelton on New Year’s Day 1772. Martha, was a daughter of John Wayles. Through his marriage ,Jefferson acquired more slaves, later receiving Elizabeth Hemings, whose daughter, Sally, who would be born months later- was a half-sister of Martha Jefferson, after Wayles’s death. Martha Jefferson chose to keep the Hemings family together after her father’s death by bringing them onto her land. Jefferson payed a midwife to deliver Elizabeth’s son John. Nearly noon on Friday, September 6, 1782 Martha Jefferson died. Her house servants- including Elizabeth Hemings, were among those with Martha as she lay dying. In her last pledges to her husband, she told him to never marry again- Sally Hemings who was witness to this was not quite ten years old yet. Among one of the last things she did, Martha handed Sally a tiny silver servant bell as a gift.

           1784, when Thomas Jefferson accepted a position as ambassador of France, he brought with him his eldest daughter, Martha “Patsy” Jefferson, and James Hemings- son of Elizabeth Hemings and brother of Sally Hemings. Jefferson had intentions to train James to be a cook of French food. June 26th, 1787, Jefferson was able to get his daughter, Mary “Polly” Jefferson whom he’d left in the company of family along with his now deceased younger daughter Lucy Elizabeth Jefferson over to France to join him and Patsy in attempt to recreate his family. Polly arrived in London and was handed into the care of Abigail Adams, with the youngest Jefferson was Sally Hemings. “The old nurse whom you expected to have attended her was sick and unable to come, Abigail Adams wrote to Jefferson, “She has a girl about about 15 or 16 with her, the sister of the servant you have with you.” Abigail also told she is “quite like a child” and required more care than Polly- who was five year younger. She inquired about sending Sally back to Virginia.

             There are no known images of Sally Hemings. On arrival in Europe, Sally was fourteen years of age, and had very light skin, “almost white” and “very handsome, with long straight hair down her back”. There was some resemblance between Sally Hemings and Jefferson’s late wife Martha Jefferson. Abigail Adams also described Sally as, “…she seems fond of the child and appears good natured.” Polly Jefferson and Sally arrived in Paris on July 15th, 1787. She probably ran errands and served as a chambermaid as well as a seamstress. She accompanied Patsy and Polly to dances and dinners, Jefferson spent a considerable sum in 1789 on clothing for Sally. While in Dusseldorf, Jefferson found himself fascinated by a 1699 painting by the Dutch artist Adriaen van der Werff of Abraham taking the young servant Hagar to his bed. The Virginian described it as, “delicious. I would have agreed to have been Abraham though the consequence would have been that I should have been five or six thousand years.”

         Since her arrival in France, Sally had been paid some small wages- twelve livres a month for ten months. Jefferson had bought clothing for her and had her inoculated against smallpox. Sally’s day routine is less clear, though she may have served the Jefferson daughters as a maid at the convent school during part of her time in Paris. It was during the years of 1788 and 1789 that Thomas Jefferson began his sexual activity with Sally Hemings (then only fifteen or sixteen years old). The emotional content of the Jefferson-Hemings “relationship” is a mystery. Some say he loved her, and vice versa. Others argue it was coercive, institutionalized rape. If someone is your property, it is impossible for you to ask consent before sexual acts because they are “property” to you, property cannot give consent. No consent before sex is rape. All those who were slaves brought into concubine with their masters were raped- property cannot give consent because they are owned by another human being. It was not love, it was rape. Property cannot give consent. Sally Hemings might of been doing what she had to do to survive an evil system, accepting sexual duty as an element of her enslavement and using what leverage she had to improve the lot of her children.

         Hemings, was “light colored and decidedly good-looking. What little evidence of her suggests she was an intelligent, brave woman who did as much as she could with what little the world have given her. A later account, according to Madison Hemings (son of Hemings and Jefferson), Sally was pregnant at the time Jefferson was going to return to the United States. He desired to bring her back to America “but she demurred”. She was just beginning to understand the French language, and in France she was a free woman and refused to return with him. “To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years”, Madison Hemings recalled. Sally agreed and she returned to Virginia. Soon after arrival, she gave birth to a child. It lived a very short time. She would give birth to four other children, her master father to all of them. Beverly Hemings, Harriet Hemings, Madison Hemings and Eston Hemings. Jefferson kept it- “it was one of the most important pacts of Jefferson’s life” wrote Jon Meacham and in September 1789, Thomas Jefferson left Paris with his daughters and the Hemings siblings to return to America.

         As Jefferson came home in 1789 expecting to be in Virginia only briefly, it is possible that Sally wished to visit her relatives, after which she would return with him to Paris. There is a theory that Patsy Jefferson married so soon after her return to America because she was reacting to her father’s liaison with Sally Hemings. The daughter might have felt disassociated to her father’s affections. During Jefferson’s appointment as Secretary of State, Sally stayed at Monticello. Her main work was the care and tending to Jefferson’s private rooms, drawers, papers and wardrobes. The precise location of her living quarters is unknown, she may have lived in one of the new log servants houses on Mulberry Row. Though, during Jefferson’s presidency, she is thought to of slept in the South Terrace wing. Sally Hemings as pregnant early in 1795 and in October gave birth to a daughter, Harriet. ThereJuly 11th, 1797, Sally gave birth to a son. The baby was named William Beverly, called Beverly. In a letter dated January 22, 1798, Patsy announced the death of Harriet Hemings, the two year old daughter of Jefferson and Hemings; Patsy said nothing of the parentage. August 1799, Sally was pregnant with another child, the unnamed daughter did not live long, born in December 1799. There is no doubt that Jefferson was the father of these children, for he was always home eight to nine months prior to the birth of each of these children. It is highly unlikely Jefferson was in love with Sally, he could never surrender his heart to someone who could break it and it was highly unlikely to occur with Sally; she was bound to him.

         Knowledge of Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings was a topic of conversation in Charlottesville and among Virginia’s politicians. Wednesday, September 1st, 1802 in the Richmond Recorder, James Callender who once looked up to Jefferson, turned on his idol after not receiving the position he wished to receive. Callender got his revenge and published an account of the Jefferson-Sally relationship:

“It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years had kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY. The name of her eldest son is TOM. His features are said to bear a striking… resemblance to those of the president himself. The boy is ten or twelve years of age. His mother went to France in the same vessel with Mr. Jefferson and his two daughters. The delicacy of this arrangement must strike every person of common sensibility. What a sublime pattern for an American ambassador to place before the eyes of two young ladies!… By the wench Sally, our president had had several children. There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story; and not a few who know it… Behold the favorite, the first born of republicanism! The pinnacle of all that is good and great!… ‘Tis supposed that, at the time when Mr. Jefferson wrote so smartly concerning negroes, when he endeavored so much to belittle the African race… We give it to the world under the firmest belief that such a refutation never can be made. The AFRICAN VENUS is said to officiate, as housekeeper at Monticello. When Mr. Jefferson had read this article, he will find leisure to estimate how much had been lost or gained by so many unprovoked attacks upon J.T. CALLENDER.”

           Jefferson never directly responded to the charge. Though, in a private letter from 1805- he denies the accusations. His reaction to a poem written about him, shared by Patsy was to laugh it off. “For Jefferson, the code of silence on the issue of sex across the color line appears to have been total” (Meacham 380). Jefferson “coolly” recorded the births of the Hemings children in his farm book along with other details of the lives of his slaves and of his crops. “He was not in the habit of showing partiality of fatherly affection to us children”, said Madison Hemings. According to a grandchild of Thomas Jefferson, “the resemblance was so close, that at some distance or in the dusk the slave, dressed in the same way, might be mistaken for Mr. Jefferson.” Jefferson was the code of denial that defined life in the slave-owning states.

          Many years earlier, February 5, 1796, Jefferson signed a deed of manumission for James Hemings. He was thirty-one years of age. James Hemings was unable to find a purpose for his existence. Although originally headed to Philadelphia, he soon may have traveled to Paris. Jefferson spoke with him more than a year later when James returned to Philadelphia. Jefferson was elected President and few days later reached out to James, who was working as a cook in a Baltimore tavern, if he would like him to come to Washington. James’s was reluctance to leave Baltimore may have been because he had formed an “attachment” there. A few months later, James turned up at Monticello to run the kitchen during Jefferson’s long summer. He was paid twenty dollars a month which was more than double his previous wage. James left Monticello in September, a little over a month later, James Hemings committed suicide.

         Thomas Jefferson died on July 4th, 1826. With him at the time of his death were many members of the Hemings family. His coffin had been made by John Hemings, the fifty year old brother of Sally. Of the four children of Jefferson and Sally’s who survived to adulthood, Beverly and Harriet had been allowed to leave Monticello in early 1820s. Harriet married a white man in Washington city and raised a family of children. Madison was freed in Jefferson’s will and ultimately moved to Ohio, as did Eston, eventually settling in Wisconsin, changing his name to eston jefferson, declaring himself white. In his will, Jefferson also freed three other members of the Hemings family: Burwell Colbert, John Hemings and Joe Fossett. Jefferson freed no other slaves. Sally Hemings soon after his death, moved to Charlottesville and lived without incident as a free woman. She died in 1835, giving a few momentos to her children of Jefferson’s: a pair of his glasses, an inkwell and a shoe buckle. No one knows where Sally Hemings is buried.

             Later years, many have tried to suggest that it was Jefferson’s cousin (who resembled him very much) who was the father of Sally’s children. Those rape sympathizers were finally proven wrong in 1998 with DNA findings and subsequent reevaluation that confirmed the “relationship”. DNA tests confirmed that a male in Jefferson’s line, not one of a suggested nephews, was the father of at least one of Sally Hemings’s children. The room where it is believe Sally Hemings slept was just steps away from Thomas Jefferson’s bedroom. But in 1941, caretakers of Monticello turned it into a restroom. It wasn’t until recently that the floor tiles were taking up and it was turned into a room dedicated to Sally Hemings. It was a liason long denied by “mainstream white historians” and reminds us of who Jefferson really was- a hypocrite.

[wordzeck]

have and eat

I found out, a few days ago, about this scandal that happened at my school. Essentially a girl in my school’s student government was being sent persistent sexual messages from a guy in the student government. I discovered the dilemma from reading an article published by my school newspaper and a blog post written by the affected female. Based off of the publicity of the event it is clear that its effects were not constrained to merely the boy and girl. There has been a fallout at a public level. The violation experienced by the girl is not the only present problem. This boy’s actions have now sprouted incidents of cyber bullying, shaming (to multiple parties), and depression. 

Reading through the details of events was a sobering experience for me. As I read the name of the male accused of sexually badgering the girl, I couldn’t stop seeing my own name. Outside of the publicly held position, this boy and I are no different. I’ve sent far worse messages than those described in the article. I’ve sent unsolicited sexual pictures and texts to more girls than I can count. I’ve been told to stop on multiple occasions, and I’ve ignored the requests. I say all of this to preface my commentary. I’m trying to do my best at offering insight while still recognizing that I am no better than anyone I comment on. I fully understand that I still have a problem with this sexual sin stuff, and I don’t want my opinions to be viewed as just shaming my culture. To continue this train of thought… I’ve seen multiple posts since the event occurred, and it is clear that different individuals all have opinions on the matter (including myself obviously). Everyone is grasping for some kind of resolution through their finger pointing, their encouraging, and their commentaries. One thing is certain—we can all tell that something is wrong. There is something about this kind of story that doesn’t sit well with our stomachs. There is something about all of this that demands reaction and response. These kinds of situations always draw our attention, and for some reason we deem them significant enough to provide commentary. Even if another’s sexual oppression doesn’t keep us up at night, it still causes us to dust off our “moral” compasses and find our bearings. 

I’d like to try and discuss the reality of sex and sexuality in my culture. I believe that we have all tricked ourselves into claiming that we can have our cake and eat it too. I’ve grown up in a culture that pushes for liberty in all aspects of life. The general consensus seems to be that liberty should also be a key feature of sex. We can sleep with who we please in whatever quantities we please. We can consume any sexual content we please (as long as it is legal). And we can publicly present our physical forms in any way see fit. On paper these freedoms not only sound liberating, but they also are completely sound and logical juxtaposed to the rest of our lives. Our sexual activities are now interwoven into the western narrative of freedom of choice and expression. And this all a wonderfully fine concept—if we could actually handle it. It is incredibly natural, and right, to blame and punish a man who commits sexual assault against a woman. Our culture has made tremendous strides in empowering women to become free from the sexual oppression of men. We still have much to accomplish, but I think it can be argued that progress is happening. But if sexual oppression was a dance, then it takes two to tango (sorry about that awfulness I just wrote). What I’m trying to say is we’ve focused on empowering women, but I haven’t heard many people ask the question, “How do we stop our men from committing these acts?”. We, of course, have laws in place that make certain actions illegal, but any rational person knows that they are simply not enough. Human trafficking, prostitution, rape, cat calling, persistent sexual texts, groping, flashing, revenge porn, and everything else under the sun still frequently occurs in our communities. So again, I ask… how do we stop our men from committing these acts? I’ve heard this pat answer from both men and women alike: men just need to control themselves, they need to be better, and they need to not be perverts. Let me just say, I completely agree with that statement, but let’s dive into the experience of the modern man and hopefully get a bit of a reality check. I’m only focusing so heavily on the male experience because I don’t want to even attempt to speak on behalf of women when it comes to sex… that is not my place nor do I have any authority on the subject. 

A majority of our boys are subject to the culture I previously described. They are raised to embrace the idea of sexual liberty. Porn is normalized for our youth, and it is even made more of a joke than a serious subject. The young boy consumes countless hours of content with scantily clad women who aim to please the male audiences. Then this same boy goes to college and is further liberated to physically embrace those he deems attractive. He can sleep with who he wants in what quantities he wants, as long as consent is involved (but we all know of countless cases where it is not). We give him snapchat to receive nude photos of girls who he can’t be with physically, and we give him tinder to streamline the process of anonymous sex. And when those mediums don’t produce results, we give him porn to consistently feed his sexual drive. And after his brain has been conditioned, partially due to his fault, we ask him to control himself. I ask in return, control himself with what? These men who commit sexual atrocities haven’t been plucked out of some foreign culture—we’ve raised them up. They’re home grown. I understand that mental health can account for a portion sexual oppression incidents, but it can’t write them all off. If we watch that same boy grow to his middle ages, what do you think will happen? What happens when his youthful attraction leaves him? What happens when the girls don’t double take him or flirt with him? What happens when he inevitably transitions from holding nothing back from himself (complete sexual liberty) to the point where sex with beautiful is unavailable? I would argue that it’s not illogical to conclude that prostitution is a natural next step. Our culture is currently holding men to a standard that we have not created. The reality is that sexual atrocities still happen on an almost hourly basis. We shake our fists and scoff, but then we inevitably champion the ideologies that are partially responsible. 

The inception of this thought process came when I was watching a fb video of Ashton Kutcher. He was speaking to congress on the issue of human trafficking. He went into detail of the horrors of child trafficking in our nation. He spoke on being a father of his own young daughter and displayed his absolute anger he had towards the monsters who would ever think of purchasing her body. He made completely valid, and almost righteous, arguments. He’s even started a wonderful nonprofit that combats child trafficking. But… he’s also on the show Two And a Half Men. I really don’t want to sound like a stout conservative dad, but anyone who has ever watched that show knows what it’s about. The show produces episode after episode of new attractive women who exist to please the male characters and the male audience. We can absolutely have our anger and our desire for justice (it is our right), but can we also knowingly support our current culture? Is it actually possible to have both? Can we have the man who is allowed complete sexual liberty (in his youth), and who also has complete control over that same sexuality? I encourage you to give those questions thought. 

The last thing I can think of to drive home my point is this—Vegas. We all want our fun weekend in Vegas with our friends. Even those of us who aren’t planning on visiting more “adult” attractions still want a weekend of good times. But here’s the thing… Vegas can’t exist as just the fun weekend. If we want Vegas to exist we also have to exist everything that comes with the city—violence, prostitution, gambling addiction, drug addiction, human trafficking, and everything else under the sun. The “good” and the “bad” of Vegas are intertwined. It would be nice if they were independent of one another… but they are not. If you want the city to exist for your fun weekend, then you have to be accept that the city also exists as a prison for the girls who are trafficked there. You may not personally contribute to that trafficking, but our culture knows that is no longer a cop out. I’ve seen too many boycotts of companies because some horrible truth was revealed about them. If you stop buying your shoes due to child labor, would it not be logical to stop giving money to a city due to child trafficking? My point is that you can’t have Vegas without its unpleasant reality, and, just maybe, we can’t have sexual liberty without its unpleasant realty. Many people might say that my claims are outrageous, but I would ask them to really think about it? These sexual atrocities still happen to this day. We would claim that we are the most modern thinkers, and yet we still can’t stop it. Our activism, our justice systems, and our morals themselves seem to be completely powerless against sexual oppression. What actual hope do we have for stopping this? In my opinion—we have the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He is the only entity that pulled me out. Maybe He was just a coping mechanism for my shame, maybe I’m just messed up in the head, or maybe I’ve actually found the truth in Him.

[teachanarchy]

What radical black womanist politics organized around self-defense actually looks like, and why it matters.        

There was no wild rhetoric about "killing whitey" or clandestine plots to ambush and torture cops when I attended a political education class hosted by Dallas's Black Women's Defense League last year. Instead, there were a lot of women of color speaking from the heart, telling one another how they felt when they walk down the street alone, sharing the fears they had for their children growing up in America today. Some of these sisters rocked kente cloth with dreads, while others had weaves and perms and wore skirts and heels. A few of the women were decidedly old school: They were alive when the original Black Panthers stormed the California State Capitol building with shotguns in 1967. But there were millennials on hand, too—ladies with hip-hop songs paused on their iPhones and books like The New Jim Crow tucked into their purses.

The Black Women's Defense League first popped up on my radar thanks in part to its red, black, and green logo, which features a woman with an afro toting a shotgun. After flipping through photos of the founder, Niecee X, brandishing firearms on social media, I couldn't help relating to the group's advocacy of firearms for self-defense. Even though I've never owned a gun, I've certainly thought about it, tempted by the illusion of security it might offer in a country where someone like George Zimmerman, a vigilante who took a young black life like mine on a whim, can walk away scot free. But prior to actually meeting with the group, I failed to grasp the scope of the issues they grapple with.As Ibora Ase, one core member of the Black Women's Defense League, put it to me, black women don't just have to fight "the man—we have to fight our men."

Niecee, the Defense League's leader, defies easy caricature. There is a distinct elegance on display in herperfectly posed Instagram selfies, where she mixes militant-fatigues, African prints, and exuberant hair styles that run the color spectrum from cherry red to Frank Ocean blond. Above all, though, she's stern and fastidious when it comes to her work as an advocate for black women—leading the core members of her group in self-defense training sessions, charity work in the community, and outreach to the at-risk youths of Dallas.

Her grandmother gave Niecee the politics bug when she was still a kid. "I knew all of the senators and who the Republicans were," she said. "I was really drinking the Kool-Aid for a minute." But it was in her early 20s that she found her way activism through local black groups in Dallas like Guerilla Mainframe and the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, which introduced her to radical organizing.

It was only about two years ago that she broke off from those groups after a series of personal and professional incidents that begged for an organization specifically focused on obstacles faced by women of color. "There were issues with an individual that I had been dealing with romantically," she said of a man she met within Dallas's black activist community, "and there was some violence that occurred between him and me."

Niecee said that she was pregnant at the time and the alleged violence led to her losing a child. But what compelled her to start the Defense League wasn't a single act of malice so much as how the Huey P. Newton Gun Club handled her abuse allegations when she brought them to the attention of leadership.

"There has to be a hard line drawn within our communities and for each other that this isn't something that will be tolerated, and even further that when it does happen, if it does happen, that it will be dealt with swiftly and dealt with in a way that will ensure it does not occur again," she told me.

In an email, the co-founder of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, Babu Omowale, said that because the alleged violence took place before Niecee was an official member of HPNGC, it wasn't their problem. He questioned whether it had happened at all and added that his organization offered Niecee a tribunal with a council of elders to resolve the situation, an offer she refused. After her refusal, Niecee was excommunicated from the group. (Niecee told me her refusal was based on her wariness that the tribunal would be run predominantly by men who might not be sensitive to her concerns as a women. This is the same wariness that led her not to report the allegations to the authorities.)

After I reached out toOmowale for comment, he posted an irate note on Facebook that publicly criticized Niecee for talking to "craKKKas media." Referring to the Defense League, he said that it is "unfortunate you have to fight your own before the enemy… you and your gay ass feminist group can burn in hell."

The episode speaks to how, even within the "woke" community of radicalblack activists in 2017, there is still much to be done on gender equality. As Ase put it, there's sometimes a desire to "keep things in house" in the black community. The problem is, if we don't we start talking about these issues—which plague all American communities, but can be particularly threatening to black women—many more people are going to be hurt, and the movement as a whole will be held back.

The problem these women are confronting is an ugly one: According to the Violence Policy Center, which analyzed FBI data from 2014, in cases where there is a single female victim and single male offender, black women are murdered by men at more than twice the rate of white women. And 91 percent of these murders are committed by dudes they know. What's more, CDC's National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey from 2010 found that 22 percent of black women were raped at some point in their lifetime. That's probably lowballing it, too, given there were an estimated 15 black female sexual abuse victims for every one who officially reported an incident, according to a report released by the Department of Justice in 2006.

Some black women don't report abuse because theydon't trust the system, which is understandable.After all, prior to the 13th Amendment, America legally viewed their bodies as property. Systematic sexual abuse, bodily torture, and violent death were a fact of life for black women. The system was not there to serve them—it was there to institutionalize their suffering. Can you really blame black women today who don't trust a government that has failed again and again to protect black bodies?

Dallas police have won some plaudits in recent years for attempts to improve community-police relations, but their sluggish approach to closing sex crime cases—while is hardly unique to the city—seems to have cast a long shadow. Until recently, local cops had a backlog of thousands of untested rape kits that dated all the way back to 1996.

Who would want to go through the pain of reporting a sensitive crime like rape, when the police have a woeful record of not even doing the simplest tasks necessary to protect women on the street? In this light, it makes perfect sense that the fastest growing demographic for the purchase of concealed handguns in the state of Texas is black women. As Niecee told me while we were sitting at the group's headquarters, "At the end of the day, we have a common goal, and that common goal is ultimately liberation, but at the very least the well-being and safety of our sisters."

The diffuse Black Lives Matter movement was created largely by black women, andhas done an incredible job bringing greater awareness to the stories of black folks who die at the hands of police, turning lost brothers into martyrs memorialized in everything from viral hashtags to airbrush T-shirts to picket signs. But the black women who lose their lives, whether it's by the force of the state or their misogynistic men, don't garner the same kind of galvanizing attention.

I had this blindspot myself.When Sunn M'Cheaux, a dreaded male member of the Black Women's Defense League, challenged me to name a black woman who died after garnering unwarranted police attention. Besides Sandra Bland, I couldn't think of one. I might have offered up plenty of facts and opinions about Eric Garner or Michael Brown. But at the time, I hadn't even heard of people like Yvette Smith, an unarmed black woman who was asked to come out of her friend's house by the police and, when she complied, was almost immediately shot and killed. Or Reika Boyd, a woman who was shot in the back of the head by an off-duty officer who mistook her friend's cell phone for a gun.

The facts speak for themselves. Black people are 2.5 times more likely than whites to be shot and killed by police, and women face unique hurdles that can make them vulnerable more vulnerable to the wrath of the state. Although black women only make up 13 percent of America's female population, about 30 percent of all women behind bars are black. This follows a troubling trend of criminalizing black women that starts with childhood. According to the US Department of Education, black girls are suspended six times as often as white girls in school. And once in the justice system, they have an incredibly hard time navigating their way out because of limited financial resources: Black women are five times more likely to live in poverty than white women.

What we have here, then, is a war on both sides, with black women battling both the patriarchy and racial prejudice. And the Black Women's Defense League has responded to that fight by embracing the American way:taking arms and standing their ground.

Of course, there's no guarantee that Niecee's efforts will actually make her and her comrades safer. In fact, if American history is any indication, being an outspoken activist for women and black liberation might bring her even closer to police or extralegal crosshairs. I started to worry about thisas I sat with the Defense League, surrounded by portraits of slain civil rights leaders and books like Robert F. Williams's Negroes with Guns. On the one hand, guns have always played a role in America's Civil Rights struggle—even a pacifist like Martin Luther King Jr. kept guns around, because he understood that standing up to institutionalized oppression is a life-threatening proposition. But thoseguns didn't stop him from getting assassinated.

When you're black and you actually evangelize for self-defense against the violence of state like Niecee does, you can find yourself in an extremely precarious position. White Second Amendment advocates like Cliven Bundy's "We the People" are often framed as patriots, but blacks activists with guns have historically been perceived as insurgents. In fact, modern gun control was spurred in part by the Panther Party for Self-Defense's embrace of firearms in the late 60s, with conservatives like California governor Ronald Reagan signing bills restricting the rights of gun owners. Later, this group was eviscerated by local and federal law enforcement through assassination, surveillance, and covert sabotage.

Niecee got a little taste of that about six months after we hung out, when she was mistaken by Dallas cops for being a cop killer.

On July 7, 2016, she attended a Black Lives Matter protest in response to the police shooting of Philando Castile, a legal gun owner who announced his possession of a firearm to an officer before being killed in front of his girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter. Military veteran Micah Johnson, who had a history of mental health issues, used the protest to ambush the police in what he seemed to believe was retaliation for police violence against blacks. He murdered five and injured nine (plus two civilians) before police were able to kill him with a robot-delivered bomb. According to Niecee, even thoughshe was unarmed at the protest, she was still detained by the police for more than six hours under suspicion of being connected to the killings. She said they confiscated her car and copied all the information on her cellphone, which she'd used to livestream the chaos.

Despite the terrifying ordeal of being perceived as terrorist in the midst of an active shooting, and the vitriol she's incited from men within Dallas's black activist community for advocating for women's issues, Nieceeisn't going anywhere. She was on the ground protesting at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last year, and she led the BWDL to the Women's March in Washington, DC, the day after President Donald Trump's inauguration to stand in solidarity with all women. And although she has her sights on expanding her group nationwide, she continues to support women in her own community, using the BWDL's network to raise funds for women fleeing abusive relationships.

The time I spent with her and the rest of the BWDL certainly helped me begin to reckon with the unique threats faced by black women as a result of institutional racism and entrenched sexism. Until we reach the day when this nation stops brutalizing black women, Niecee and the Black Women's Defense League have vowed to be out there on the front lines, protecting their sisters by any means necessary.

[capitalideachaps]

A Conversation with My “Rapist” - Part 1, A History

Two days ago, I had a very interesting experience. TW: abuse, trauma and rape

I want to share it with you all and process it - brace yourself for a long, very personal, pretty heavy read... in multiple parts 

 I came to uni  3 years ago, at age 19,  with an open heart and open mind, thankful to have escaped from the home town where I suffered a great deal of abuse, neglect, bullying and harassment. I was feeling hopeful - I could use this fresh start and change of environment and pace to change things and myself. I was also very vulnerable - having missed out on so much development and many of the experiences that a normal child growing into an adult would face. 

I knew I was damaged from my past, I was scared of simple things - like being hugged. This held me back in connecting to people  (and still does now in more complex ways) - the thing I wanted most, and I tried to work on this everyday. I attempted to slowly confront my fears and relearn how people are.(As it stands, I can now hug people without being scared so yay me!) 

During this time, I find someone who I really like and am immediately intensely attracted to. They are charming, fun and somewhat mysterious. Truth be told, I could still write a thousand sonnets about the experience of “falling in love” (albeit superficially) with them. This was maybe the 3rd time in my life I’d had a real life (as opposed to online) crush return the interest - the first and only genuinely wholesome time being when I was 14. (side bar: Dear Penguin Boy, you will always hold a special place in my heart, you adorable nerd. I am so sorry I dumped you out of the blue, I wasn’t aware of splitting back then or my shitty disordered attachment style. PS. How’s your egg doing? ) The second was when I was 18, and in retrospect was probably (read: definitely) being manipulated by this older Dutch man who had a thing for taking advantage of inexperienced younger girls. (Which my virgin ass surely was.) The trauma of that experience is a story for another time. 

This was only made better by the fact this time it was a fucking girl. A fellow woman? Showing interest in ME? LORD BE PRAISED - MY GAY DREAMS ARE COMING TRUE. I could barely believe it was even happening. 

We hook up and eventually begin to date. The relationship is incredibly tumultuous - our flaws and unresolved past baggage ravage the other’s. We both like each other, but over the year and a half of stop and starts we hurt each other frequently. 

I know I’ve made mistakes in the relationship - applying pressure for it to be more serious than she wanted (FWB to actually dating) being the main one. And beyond that, pushing for things to go to fast and trying to rush the emotional connection that I was craving. We start on poor footing due to this, but she doesn’t protest strongly or make it clear when things progress further that we’ve gone beyond what she wants. In retrospect, it was still wrong of me to pursue to relationship in the first place.

 I  wish we’d just dated super casually instead - less sex and private hang outs (where if you don’t talk, there’s not much to do but fuck) and more public dates until we knew each other better or didn’t want to pursue it further. I also wish we’d deeply and bluntly discussed our understanding of what was happening, where things were going and relationships in general. Pro-tip: always confirm definitions - people mean totally different things with the same words.  It would have made things a whole lot less confusing. 

As we date, certain things become clear.

She doesn’t understand consent. She knows that if someone says no you stop - but beyond this, she cannot see the grey areas that exist and that it’s most important to get a yes.

I live in the grey areas, unwillingly, which is why I try to communicate so bluntly and be so straight forward. I’m already so complex - I don’t need or want to add any extra grey. Being complicated isn’t something fun I chose to do to be mysterious - it’s something I had forced upon me by circumstance - fighting to survive and get my needs met as a child. How I’ve adapted to cope with that. It’s something I’ve spent and will spend years in therapy trying to rectify. 

When I try to talk to her about this - she wants me to teach her about BDSM, so I try to start with the most important part, the foundation, consent and communication - she gets angry with me. She considers herself the victim and does not take criticism or questioning well - but it takes me years to realise this. 

I try desperately to understand her, but with no communication to go on, I am lost. She hates when I probe and needs to open up in her own time. She doesn’t share much of anything at all  -  from the small details about her day up to how she feels in the moment. I am sometimes given stories from her past, and left to extrapolate the rest. I hate the unknown - I am scared, so I push- for anything.

I have idolised her and refuse to blame her for her flaws. I buy into the victim narrative she believes not realising it. I am unable to explain her behaviour through insight into her past or present emotional state/experiences due to lack of data, but I try desperately anyway. Lacking context, I settle on believing her actions are always my fault, a lie I’ve been fed by abusers in the past. She’ll give me what I want and need when I deserve it by being perfect.

I become increasingly scared, self-loathing and insecure. I berate myself for every small thing I see as being done wrong, and whenever I take issue or am hurt by something she does or doesn’t do (usually communicate with me more), I find a way to make it my fault. I waste hours of my alone time on this, tearing myself down. 

I believe I am abusive and toxic, I am the perpetrator and she believes she is the victim of things in life and I suppose that she rarely does anything wrong. I deny my own reality and accept hers. She doesn’t need to manipulate me, no one would, I do it to myself.

 In my defence, my reality was/is pretty fucking abysmal and you might want to deny it in my place too. Despite the misplaced shame and guilt, it’s easier to be an abusive person than admit you’ve been so chronically abused and continue to relive it. One is a position of power... and the other is a complete lack of it. If I’m being abusive, then I can change. If I’m being mistreated, there’s not much I can do, it’s in the other person’s hands to cut it out or step up. And if there is anything that will trigger a victim of childhood neglect and abuse it's feeling helpless / powerless. 

To others, it looks like she is manipulating me to believe this about myself, but in fact I am filling  the gaps in our relationship with past experiences. I am reliving and recreating the trauma of my past abuse. She shares the victim mentality (and unfortunately enough, the height and build and gender expression of, priming me for this response) with a past online lover of mine who I was emotionally abused by and sexually pressured by for a year at 17.

It is easy to see how rape occurs within this dynamic. And, as a big surprise to no one, it did

 In a way, it was predestined by the circumstance and flaws of each of us. It was almost inevitable, unless either I realised what was happening and dealt with my past trauma or she worked through her issues with the victim mentality and then went on the learn more about consent and communication. We were both 19. This wasn’t going to happen without some outside intervention. 

Here’s the interesting part though - the level of insight, understanding and processing I have now would not have been reached had I not sat down to talk with her multiple times. It wasn’t easy and it definitely wasn’t pleasant for either of us - but I know it was ultimately beneficial. Or, at least... the most recent go at it (only a few days ago) was. And that’s what I would like to explore next.