(no subject)

It's a little before 7am. My mom is in Philadelphia with her sister, who is 75 and just underwent some pretty serious leg surgery on Friday. So of course when the phone rang at 5:30am, I feared the worst, since my mom knows I'm off work today and wouldn't wake me unless it was something important.

I got up, rushed for the phone, and tripped over the rolled-up exercise mat. Dork. So now that I've sat for a while and gotten some of the adrenaline out of my system, I don't know if the pain everywhere is from falling, or just how my body is today. Joy.

(My uncle accidentally dialed my number instead of my mom's cellphone. My aunt is fine, and is able to walk around a little.)

"Ruined"

Saw "Ruined" last week with stonebender. Have spent a whole lot of time thinking about the women of the Congo and elsewhere -- the whole world, in fact -- whose bodies are used as the tools of war, the spoils of war, and too many times the detritus of war.

For a few minutes during the play, this terror overcame me, a recognizable one that underlies all my deepest fears: being in danger with no one to rescue you. It's why I couldn't read Bastard Out of Carolina (first chapter, child in peril; parents don't help, and child knows they won't). It's why "The Shawshank Redemption" was a total horror flick to me.

It's not that women are unsafe that kills me -- we're all unsafe; it's the human condition. It's that so many women are unsafe and NO ONE is even trying to protect them. The impotence and fear and flight impulse I'm feeling right now are just tiny flyspecks -- there are women all over the world who know that the men who rape them, subjugate them, whore them out, and then kill them are not going to be opposed or stopped. That level of hopelessness reduces me to an incoherent, weeping mess.

And then there's this story, where Eman al-Obeidi is treated as a criminal (and may not have remained safe if she hadn't spoken out in front of journalists) for accusing men of rape. So they detain her, interrogate her for three days, force her to be "medically examined" -- basically, sexually assault her again. I am weeping because I know that the next woman who wants to speak out will look at this story and say No. Not worth what they will put me through. I'll just shut up about it. It was probably my fault anyway.

Some days -- most days, I guess -- I feel like it could get better if people (including me, but people more powerful than I am, certainly, too) would just DO SOMETHING (instead of posting to Dreamwidth, yeah, I get that). Other days, I want to curl up in a ball and call the world irredeemable.

(Something I think is important to say, having seen some discussions about this elsenet: I am not ignoring the possibility that she's accusing them wrongfully, though I have little sympathy with that as a first reaction to this story. Nonetheless, the men she's accused are free and suing her. She got punished more harshly for reporting a crime against her than they did for being accused of the crime. Think about that for a minute.)