Read this now

Catching up on blogs after work, and I came across a post on Shapely Prose that links to this absolutely amazing piece by Harriet Jacobs of Fugitivus, a blog which I wasn't familiar with before but will most definitely be checking out now.

I tried pulling out representative quotes, but I was ending up just copying and pasting the whole thing, so I'm not even going to try. In summary, it's a rundown of all the ways in which women are taught to be passive, receptive to male advances and attention, never saying "No" or standing up for themselves. Unless she is raped or assaulted, at which point the expectations are flipped, and suddenly she's at fault because she wasn't active, didn't say "No", didn't fight him off. It sets up the ultimate no-win situation for women: we get the blame not only for being victims, but for behaving exactly the way we were taught to behave. She didn’t fight back because you told her not to. Jacobs lays it all out so clearly, so simply, that I found it breathtaking. Highly, highly recommended, especially as a sort of companion piece to cereta's post about rape culture and victim blaming that I wrote about back in June.

Also, the Shapely Prose post reminded me about Kate Harding's classic post about misogynistic bulling online, which covers some of the same ground (though from a somewhat different angle) and is also very worth reading if you've never seen it.