STBW thanks people here

kingbeat, I'm so glad you lurked around the other thread, and thank you for coming here too.

I anticipate that my family would also tell me, 'You don't get to call that rape'. I too have Dittany with me in my head, as a symbol of insistent clarity and justice, shouting 'Yes she bloody well does!'. I feel an immense safety in the consistency of the responses that we all got on that thread. No-one blames us for feeling guilty, for example, but at the same time no-one's going to endorse our guilt. No-one asks to know all the circumstances before they'll decide whether we deserve to object to being assaulted.

I know what you mean about vicarious validation. I spent months longing to have MN on my side before I got brave enough to post about this, and even when I did I was weeping and shaking, and dreading being dismissed or ignored or told that I didn't belong and wasn't allowed the strong tenderness that I had seen so fully given to 'real' victims. I watched all the threads about rape that I could find. I did a lot of crying alone.

And lurking did me a lot of good. I learned that I had been raped, for a start. It was news to me! I've spent years knowing in sore detail the many and varied ways I felt responsible. But it's only in the past few months of lurking on MN that I've come to realise not only that I wasn't responsible, but also that I didn't 'take' responsibility so much as have it given to me, by all the myths and oppressions and injurious patterns of thought and action that are this society's currency.

Dredging things up is uncomfortable, there's no doubt, and I'm touched beyond words that you've posted here now. I think you're a brave woman, and if I'd been able to, I would have protected you from being raped. I am able to do more now, and I will.

E&M, you're so right about a new kind of freedom. I put it like this to a friend this evening: he had mentioned that distinguishing between 'us' and 'them' is one of the first categorisations that children make. Well, first I questioned whether children do make that distinction or are taught it, because I'm suspicious about the idea that it's inevitable. But second, I said that because in our society women are 'them', but 'us' is not only maleness but also humanness, women also learn to think of women as 'them', without knowing that that's what's happening.

I've found an 'us', which is a shift in self-perception as much as it's a group of people. And it's an 'us' where I don't feel set up against a 'them', even where there are individuals whose conduct I fiercely oppose. I am a sweet-hearted idealist who really thinks that in the end people whose advantages rest on inhumanity will be relieved that someone stopped them from benefitting at the expense of other human people.

But that's in the end. Until then I'm prepared to get things just, whether other people like it or not

Fist-punching love-ins all good with me

UmYeah, I saw on the AIBU thread that you're coming. Hope to see you too!

E&M, I have sobbed so much this week I have pretty much dissolved my shoes. But I've got another pair for marching in!

I like it!