EUREKA!
I finally figured out why women fear rape.
There is one thing I’m as scared of, and scared of in precisely the same ways, as most women are scared of rape.
Pregnancy. NOT pregnancy as in motherhood, but pregnancy as in pregnancy. Physical pregnancy. The actual 9 months of gestation.
- I view surrogate motherhood the way most women view prostitution (you’re sacrificing your dignity for money, and also it’s physically repulsive)
- and prostitution the way most women view surrogate motherhood (why not? you need the money, no big deal).
women - “my body is not to be used for sex. procreation is okay.” (thus you can be violated by other people)
me - “my body is not to be used for procreation. sex is okay.” (thus you can be violated only by your own body)
This is a phobia far beyond the reluctance most women have toward motherhood when they’re young and single. Even the ones who fear pregnancy the most have second thoughts about abortion when confronted with an actual pregnancy. They wouldn’t if they thought of it the way I do.
Pregnancy is innately linked to womanhood, and I despise womanhood. Sex is not innately linked to womanhood. (Shut up, I know sex is linked pregnancy. But for human women it hasn’t been for as long as there have been abortion and birth control methods. Birth control and abortion make the connection obsolete, and in a way breaks it completely by changing it from “sex necessarily leads to pregnancy” to “sex may lead to pregnancy depending on the decisions you make”.) So it all goes back to gender identity, like it always does with me.
Rape is psychological. On a most primal, psychological level, I’ve never been female. I always talk about gender identity as existing along a continuum but on this basic level, there is no continuum, only male and female.
Rape to women is like puberty is to transgender individuals: it’s like something has been stolen from you — AND at the same time like something unexpected has been forced on you. (It IS unexpected, let me tell you. Trans children commonly think they’ll grow up to be a member of the other sex. But then they hit their real puberty and shit hits the fan. I speak from experience.) It’s completely devastating. It may make you suicidal.
Fear of rape is not socialized — I was wrong. Women hate the thought of rape as deeply and innately as I hate the thought of pregnancy. However, the fear is amplified tenfold by socialization. It’s constantly perpetuated by the notion of female sexuality being “sacred”. You cannot believe in rape unless you believe, on some level, in the alleged sacredness of the female body.
Add to this the fact that women don’t deal very well with any type of physical conflict. Sex is the most physical ANYTHING that a typical woman engages in (I say “typical”, so we’re excluding boxers, wrestlers and other such participants of combat sports). So when you add the component of malicious intent, it becomes “VIOLENCE” to them in a way that it doesn’t for me. I’m more afraid of being jumped.
This was the main reason I only fought with boys in childhood — girls never fought me back. Most of them would just cry I hit them; it was like they were from a different planet. When someone hit me, I hit them back instinctually. But girls cried instinctually. Or if not, they ran away to the teacher — they never returned aggression.
Fear of pregnancy: that was always the key. I’d never thought to connect it like that.
