I'd Like A Nice Bouquet for a Gang-Rape, Please.
I - two days ago i picked up an activist friend from the airport. She was at a conference. No sooner did I meet her than she burst out crying over something she'd learned about four or five days previously - apparently she'd Skype'd with a friend and neighbour here, - well, the long and short of it is, her next-door neighbour in the apartment house where she lives, I'll call her L, she's an actress, and an acquaintance of mine, was walking home with four or five of her friends and pulled out of the group and raped. For three hours. By multiple men. And all this time her friends were trying to break into the group and get her out, actually did pull them off her multiple times, and she'd be spirited away right under their noses. The word "gang-rape" is somehow insulting, reductive. She was in jeans and a t-shirt and a sweater and a shawl and a jacket - they left her completely naked in the street, the field hospital wrapped her in a sheet. To cover her up. And what she went through was mild compared to another girl she knew, who was raped for six hours and left in a coma on the street. they dragged her on the asphalt for a - probably a mile and a half, you'd call it, raping her all the while. The organization that gave her med and psych care afterwards said, road-burn, everywhere, I... fuck. So anyway, I was comforting this friend who was having a nervous breakdown because she, too, was sexually abused as a kid and it traumatized her all over again, and telling me how L swears that there were regular guys in there, not just security types...
So anyway, I didn't know what to do, so I went and bought her a tasteful bouquet of white carnations.
Later, another, savvy activist pal of mine told me that this is actually a technique used by the security men, they enlist the help of hooligans and they divvy up the duties, 5 people have the job of preventing help from reaching the woman, it's scheduled in advance who gets to actually rape the woman and who isn't, and so on...
Anyway, it just drives me crazy that they - Someone I respect once theorized that this kind of men are scared of women because they're afraid of female sexuality, of women's ability to withhold sex. I disagree with this for any number of reasons, paramount among which is that it assumes that men don't have the same ability to withhold sex, that men don't hold the same power over women through pleasure as women hold over men, thereby making women the repository of sexuality, and men somehow asexual. I'm sure that someone else could say it more sophisticatedly than I can, but this is what I've got. And I've got this to say to the rapists: Guess what? Women aren't the repository of sex, you security-men rapist assholes. You want to reduce us to that, and - if you'll pardon the phrase - screw you. We're not round holes, we're people. You're square pegs, but that's your business. You choose to be.
...yeah, I'm taking refuge in theorizing because I'm mad as fucking hell. Terrified out of my tiny little mind, but mad as hell. So I went and bought a tent and a pal helped me pitch it in Tahrir Square, ("Ovoid" in the words of leviathan0999), and spent part of a night there yesternight. Only from 2 AM to about 5 AM, at which point there was tear gas and explosions and I decided that getting the hell out was the better part of valor, and THEN I went home and overslept and missed my 8 AM class that I'd specifically told my students I wasn't missing. I'm told I got out in time because apparently the security idiots stormed the square at 6 AM, by which time I was already on my way home. It doesn't help that I'm getting over a cold, bit of a chest cold... I'm fucking exhausted, and fucking mad as hell, and - idek...
I'm going back, although I'm not qualified and not strong enough and I really don't want to get shot. But I know enough to get out when the shooting starts. Scared and tired, but so mad. SO MAD.
(PS. For those of you not knowing why we're out there, the President just issued a decree in the form of a binding Constitutional amendment that in the interests of the revolution, any further Presidential decrees or decisions were legally final and not subject to contest or appeal by the judiciary or anyone else. Oh, and he filled the constitutional drafting committee with his cronies and made so much of a mess that the Copts, the liberals, and pretty much anyone but the Brotherhood walked out of the committee, but he says he's going on. Well, screw you, Mr. President.)
All this means I've had NO time to work on my beta-ing duties or Yuletide fics. I really need to get back to that serious work and quit doing this silly revolutionary gig. I mean, the revolution is a long haul, but Yuletide's due in less than a month!