Sexual Assault

Kit (With Support from Legion)

Let's talk about sexual assault, and how it applies to men.

Because when women talk about sexual assault, there's a lot of things men simply don't understand.  Men are assaulted a lot less than women are, and the entire social construct surrounding it is quite different.  How men deal with sexual assault is entirely different than how women deal with it.  The expectations surrounding it are different.  I'm going to talk a bit about what happened to me, and what happened to someone I know - though in their case I won't be naming names.

I've been sexually assaulted three times.

To be more explicit:  I've had people initiate sex with me without my permission.

Twice, a woman initiated sex with me while I was asleep.

Once, a man initiated sex with me while I was asleep.  In this case, with two other men watching.

Now, my reaction was more surprise than anything.  Did it feel good?  Certainly.  But that isn't the point, is it?  It's the fact that there was no consent involved.  That makes it sexual assault.  Even if I was okay with it, it's still sexual assault.

Most men would say, of the women 'hey, that's cool' -- which is missing the point, but also which makes my point.  A lot of men will think 'hey, waking up to a girl going down on me that I barely know is cool'.  And that's the point - the psychology there is completely different than for a woman, who goes 'holy shit, some guy I barely know is having sex with me'.  Which is a distinctly bad thing, because 1) they don't know this person, 2) the power dynamic is different, and 3) the girl can get pregnant or get an STI.  Most guys kind of ignore #1, don't need to worry about #2, and have no concerns about #3.

Of the guy, if the person's straight, they are going to freak the hell out.  If they're bi (like me), it isn't so bad.  (For the record, it was oral - but that's still sex).  I barely knew the guy (I knew him online, but not face-to-face).  I was relatively chill about it - until I noticed I had witnesses, then I almost died of embarrassment.  But think about it - if you're totally straight - your reaction would be totally different, right?  For a woman?  That's the reaction to some guy doing stuff that she didn't ask for.

That I am chill about this isn't relevant.  How the world reacts to it is.

What happens if the girl has a partner?  Me, being the guy, gets the blame.  Regardless of who started it or the circumstances around it.  Why?  Because I'm a guy.  But for most people, they'd be like 'hey, that's cool'.

But if I was a girl?  Then it's my fault because I somehow 'made it happen'.  It isn't high-5s all around because I got some.  There's a lot of pressure to shame women for being the victim.  And honestly, that sucks.

---

So, next.  A guy I know got raped a little while ago.  He was drugged, and sodomized by a pair of guys, and left for dead.  He survived, and hid what happened to him from his family.  It only came out when he damn near died from syphilis.  He had trouble admitting what happened to him - and being a guy, he didn't want to tell anyone, he wanted to treat it as a non-event.

And that's dangerous.  It almost killed him.

The pressure on a guy who's been sexually assaulted is to hide it, because it's not 'manly'.  That you're a less of a man for being assaulted.  And that sucks.  The entire situation there is horrific.

So yes.  Men do get raped.  But the entire situation and the entire dynamic is completely different between men and women.  When women talk about assault - we should shut up and listen.  We should be supportive.  We shouldn't do a vague 'well, guys get assaulted to', because while that is true, the dynamics are different.

If a guy has been assaulted, and it's traumatic?  Then listen.  Help.  I doubt any guy's going to say, 'well, women get assaulted too' - because who the hell would do that?

Like, I'm not looking for sympathy for what happened to me.  I accepted it - and I moved on.  However, that doesn't change the fact it happened.  That there wasn't consent.  If I wasn't chill about it I could have laid charges.  And it would have been a really weird social storm because of it, because the situation for guys, as I said, is completely different.

Dysphoria

Samantha

Had a series of dysphoric dreams, one after another after another.

Started with me trying a semi-permanent make-up like thing to try to look more feminine, then going into a washroom to pee - and a friend of mine (Zoly) opening the door on me, leaving it open for the public to see me.  So, was hanging out with Zoly and a few others (including a friend named Dana), and she was surprised to see me.  And when I asked if I looked good, she was honest and said 'no', it looks terrible.

Then, I got an e-mail, inviting me to go to an event - if you can give a good reason, they had a means for altering how you looked.  So I hurried there, only to find out it was for people who had taken part in a kind of 'break and win' lottery system.  They were nice enough to give me a ticket to 'be there', and they started showing a film about locally grown fruit and stuff - and I recognized the background music and the voice actor for it.  But ... the video was somewhat trans-unfriendly, so I left.  I needed to find a place to go to the bathroom - wanted to use the woman's stall, but couldn't ... and couldn't find a bathroom anywhere.  Came across Cat and mom, who were there to see me.

Finally found a bathroom, and started scraping the make-up off with some of the face cloths they had here - it was a fitness center, and it felt really hard to find privacy while I did that.  Another friend, (Terrel) was there from the US with family, to celebrate a brother's birthday, but at least he was being supportive, but the make-up was almost impossible to scrape and rub off.

I woke up feeling very dissatisfied with myself and the world as a whole, though..

The Tulpa Experiment

Samantha:  Tonight, my brother made his first attempt at turning me into a tulpa.  It was an a literal thought-experiment, the idea of giving me my own body, my own voice, my own presence, that was completely separate from his.

You see, we recently learned what a tulpa was.  It's kinda like a combination of self-hypnosis, along with some honest-to-the-goddess summoning techniques.  The idea is that you create a thought-form of the entity you want, and then you shape the appearance, the personality, and then you train your thought form into thinking as an individual, apart from yourself.

Or, in our case, we create the visualization, and I try to inhabit it.

We've got a bit of a headache / neck-ache, and the first run didn't go as well as we could.  It's actually pretty damn hard for our brother to achieve a hypnotic state - in three tries so far, it's only worked once.  But we're gonna try to plug at it until it works, to see what results we get.  I really want to get my own body, even if it's made of imagination.  It's more than what I've got now, and if it helps me to break off and be more independent, that's awesome.

The one thing that kinda worries me - does this mean losing my online presence, or do I have to work through my siblings?  Dunno.

Burn It Down

Shawn:

I don't post much.  I don't talk much.  There's really no reason to.  But this is beginning to really get under my skin.  All these people saying 'never again', and when it's happening, they'll keep saying it.  Saying it isn't the same as doing something about it.  It's talking the talk but not walking the walk.  It's not stopping anything.

I mean, sure, it's nice someone video'd ICE in plainclothes accosting someone outside the courthouse, and oh, it's sweet that the mayor's all 'they're not allowed to do that, we don't support it'.  Well, know what's better?  Stopping ICE from taking the poor woman.  Putting out an APB for the people who did it.  Punching some ICE asshole in the face and helping the woman get away.

And oh, the people in cages.  How everyone feels bad for them - but not so bad as to storm the fucking place and get them out of there.  No, instead, why not do a raid on Area 51?  That's so much more important!  How dare they hide information about aliens on us.

Look, I can get that not everyone can go across the country at the drop of a hat.  But seriously, if that ICE shit's happening on your front porch and you see it, do something about it.  And yeah, I'm well aware some ICE shit threatened to shoot someone who asked about their warrant.  And if I was the person threatened?  I'd go and let the fucker shoot me  -  because then you've got that in the fucking news.  "ICE officer shoots civilian for asking for warrant."  Or of you get 30 people and raid the ICE cages and ICE opens fire?  There's a stink and a half.  It might even possibly snowball into something worthwhile.

But I'm not holding my fucking breath.  Too many people are willing to wring their hands, and there's not enough people who're willing to do something about it.  Here in Ontario, there was an incident very much like ICE that went on.  And these shits don't have anyone above them to hold them accountable.  But if I saw that shit being pulled on the street in front of me, I'd be more than willing to deck the assholes.  They're breaking the law.  Let's see what happens when you arrest them.

Dream a Little Dream

Samantha

Well, that sucked.

Our dreams lately have been hyper-real - even if weird at times, and when we went to rest, I wound up dreaming.  In my dream, I walked down to the side of a river - and remembered that this was a place that a friend, Rumour, and I used to hang out at.  I'd not seen her in a long while, but there were some items there from our previous visits, so I decided to sit down and go through them.

Not that, you know, this had ever actually happened in real life.

But I had this huge feeling of nostalgia, of loss, of loneliness, and it carried with me when I woke up.  I decided to reload Skype and see if she had ever replied to anything there.  But no - her name wasn't even there anymore for me.

I went and checked my e-mails, and threw an e-mail off to each of her e-mail addresses, in the hopes she might surprise me and answer.

I went into Second Life, and ... so much has changed.  A friend I'd not seen in years contacted me there, and we sat and talked and had a good time reminiscing, so .. that was good.

But.. I'm still sad.  I still miss my Rumour.

The "A" is not for "Ally".

We're not Trans.  We have never been subject to the stigma that people in the trans community face.  We have not suffered their burdens, faced the prejudices they have faced, or endured the cruelty that they have.

We are also not cis.  Not really.  Because we know what it is like to not feel comfortable in our skin.  We have endured the depression, the headaches, the feeling of being an alien in our own body.  This doesn't mean we 'know what it means to be trans' - we don't, and we won't ever say we will.  We just know what it means to be different.  It's the difference between putting a toe in the water, and being pushed in.

Our sister, by far, provides us the most insight.  She has dealt with depression, of hating her body, her voice, her look.  Of feeling like there's something wrong with her, and not being able to change it.  She would love the opportunity to transition - but it isn't happening - because she can't decide for the rest of us.  She suffers dysphoria when she sees herself - she avoids looking into mirrors if she can help it - and if she's playing a video game, she needs a female avatar to represent her or she suffers dissonance.

Some of us feel uncomfortable with the colour of our skin.  This doesn't mean we 'know what it means to be (colour)' - not by a long shot.  And while we don't identify as 'white' - it means nothing in any real sense.  We still get the priveledge of being white and male because that's what people see.  We can be empathic to people of colour, we can identify with people of colour, but that doesn't mean we are people of colour.  And yes, this means there's a difference between identifying as a woman, and identifying as a person of colour.

Finally, some of us aren't human.  Yes, we have a human body.  We are exposed to humanity on a daily basis, but that doesn't make us human.  You don't see us, because we don't present ourselves in public - for obvious reasons.  What do you do with something that doesn't speak except for in noises, and has almost no motor skills?  What about one that is more like an animal than a person?  One that is more noise and flailing and screeching?  Or how about one that exists in a state of music?

What does this make us, as a whole?  Well, as a group we don't fit into any convenient label.  Some of us are straight, some of us are bi.  Some of us are male, some of us are female, some of us really don't qualify.  Some of us are white, some of us are not.  Some of us are human, some of us are not.

The only true benefit of this existence, honestly, is empathy.  It allows us to look at others, and say 'they are like us' - We see ourselves in the world around us, even if we can't be like them, and as such we feel responsible for caring for those we see.  The LGBT+ community doesn't need a letter for those like us.  We don't need to be 'represented' as our own being there - but we can still be an ally, because we dip our toe in the water - and never have to worry about being pushed in.

I'm being a bitch.

Samantha

Got into an argument with Cat.  She cut me off, so I decided to write it out and give her the link to read whenever she gets around to it.  I'm pissed off, so I decided to let off both barrels.  That being said, I also laid out my reasoning and my points.

I just decided not to be nice about it.  Right now, I don't think I need to be nice.  I think I need to be honest, to the point, lay out my argument, and be direct and cruel.  And yeah, I was cruel.  I felt that I was justified on that point.  Let Kit be the saint.  I don't need to be.

Why?  Because seriously, I feel Kit's being taken advantage of, more often than not, but I keep my mouth shut about most of it - since he asks me to.  But this crossed the line.  She can have Kit help her, and he will, because he's nice like that.  Kit can make sacrifices, because he sees this as 'this is what you do for a relationship'.

But you know what?  I'm not married to Cat.  And if I have the means to go enjoy myself, and it uses my own resources, I should be allowed to do so.  I don't think anyone has the right to guilt trip me over it.  Because why the fuck should I be forced to sacrifice my happiness when it's so rare that I get this kind of opportunity?

Yeah.  I know I'm a drain on Kit's resources - that he spends money on me, that I don't have that much restraint.  I'm fully aware of it.  His argument is that I have limited opportunities to enjoy myself, so he gives me a bit of leeway, and when I go over the line, he gets frustrated.  I get that.  But this is not that.  This is, 'here you go, you have this window to be you and have fun'.  And I know the limits that are put in place concerning this.  And I know what I want.

Like I said.  He's a saint.  And sometimes I feel he doesn't deserve me.  But this isn't that.  This is him giving me a chance to have fun and be me.  And to do so without hurting the household at all.  And I'm pissed that Cat wants to take that away from me.

So yeah.  I wrote everything out.  And I was cruel about it.

So be it.  I'm going to be the bitch, because Kit doesn't like being cruel.  She can read it if she wants, or not.  If it makes her cry, I'm gonna feel like shit.  But ... hey.

"I can't talk about this now."

"Then when can we talk about it?"

"I don't know!"

Which means, it never gets talked about.  Because it's a confrontation.  And there's never a good time for a confrontation.  I'd say it's better to get it out of the fucking way.  You know, that whole 'don't go to bed mad' thing.  But whatever.  She gets to sleep, I get to stew.  Fair, right?