Rape is Such a Drag

Rape is Such a Drag

And that is the hardest part of it all. Even still.

Being a walking, talking home for the unspeakable.

Because rape is such a drag.

One of those downer subjects that makes people feel horrified and hopeless.

That's why I hesitated so long to talk to you about it, really. Because I don't want you to look at me that way. The gaze that used to connect eye to eye, now living to do anything but meet my own.

Because we all have our own ideas and notions about it, our own conclusions about the why of it all. Why it remains, why it continues. Virginie Despentes writes that rape is a “civil war.” A position I find too extreme, too ungenerous. If I'm to be honest.

But I understand what she means when the phrase “don't mention the war,” springs to mind.

Other reasons I don't want to tell you:

I don't want rape to become my totalizing public identity.

I don't care much for identity politics as they are expressed and experienced in the vertical field of power. I don't want to be reduced and flattened into an aspect of myself as wholly representative of my being, preferring a more Whitmanesque approach to things myself.¹

1. Song of Myself, 51: “Do I contradict myself, very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”