as small as a world and as large as alone

10:46pm September 28, 2014

patrickat:

spyderqueen:

misandrwitch:

Hands up if large groups of aggressively loud white boys in your vicinity freak you out

One of the things that bonds women, POC, and LGBTQA+ together: The fear of white men in numbers.

Did you mean: Congress?

Also disabled people.  Large groups of aggressively loud white boys are the ones most likely to retard-bait me in public and get away with it with people watching.  

CW: Sexual assault against developmentally disabled women (and FAAB trans folks presumed women at the time), described in detail, below cut.

And I’ve seen it done to others… the worst was a sexual assault that occurred in a crowded room towards a DD woman standing on a table and I was the only person who did anything about it.  A bunch of white guys stood around looking excited and happy and laughing and almost rubbing their hands together in a cliche sort of way, and then they pushed one of them forward, and he ran up to the woman and kissed her all over her body, and I mean all over.  And then he ran off and laughed while the other white boys laughed and everyone else pretended it hadn’t happened.  I couldn’t intervene directly due to motor initiation problems but I ran to the disability center on campus and reported it immediately.

I will never, ever forget the way that woman stood there.  She was probably in her fifties, very short for her age, had some kind of genetic syndrome, wearing a dress that made her look like a child.  She was standing on the table sweeping it off.  When he attacked her, she froze.  She did nothing. She didn’t tense up.  She didn’t relax.  She just stood there loosely, doing nothing, while he kissed her all over her body.  Until then, I had never seen someone as passive as I am in the face of that kind of sexual assault.  And so many times I’ve been blamed for it, because I don’t fight/flight, I freeze.  And I worry to this day about that woman and whether she got blamed that day for freezing.  Whether she got any appropriate help for dealing with the situation.  

Or whether they treated her as they treated me once, as they treated a friend of mine who got raped in an institution, “But how were they to know you’d understand?  As if the problem was not rape, but rather choice of victim.” (From a poem by Cal Montgomery.)  I had a guy stick his foot up my butt while I was catatonic and was later told about it, as if I hadn’t noticed at the time.  Staff had been watching and did nothing because they thought I wouldn’t feel it or remember it.  As if that made it okay to have a guy’s toes in my anus.  Later my special ed teachers would laugh fondly in remembrance of him “That's so Mark” they said, laughing.  With no idea I was trying to tell them something traumatic, not give them something to fondly reminisce over.  And how they could fondly reminisce over a studetns’ tendency to assault other students sexually, is beyond me, other than to note that my special ed school was very messed up.

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