monsterbeard:

The [New York] Times article was entitled, “Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town,” as if the victim in question was the town itself. James McKinley Jr., the article’s author, focused on how the men’s lives would be changed forever, how the town was being ripped apart, how those poor boys might never be able to return to school. There was discussion of how the eleven-year-old girl, the child, dressed like a twenty-year-old, implying that there is a realm of possibility where a woman can “ask for it” and that it’s somehow understandable that eighteen men would rape a child.

Roxane Gay, The Careless Language of Sexual Violence

(via jjae:copyeditor)

This article is about much more than the New York Times piece.  It’s an essential read on how we react and respond to sexual violence, whether real or fictional.  This is by far the most important thing I have read this year.

This seriously broke my heart. What scares me most is not that things like this are capable of occurring, rape in every form is as old as humanity, but that we treat it as a reverent guest in our society and not a bane on our existence. As a man, I have to honestly admit it’s hard for me to quite relate or comprehend because of the nature of dominance in the gender, we are typically the aggressors. It’s not easy to understand the true destruction of a person subjected to such merciless ravaging. I consider it a form of murder. And until we men who write laws, articles, and tv scripts really seek to get it; really strive to understand the depth of this dark well, we will continue to fall down it’s jagged recess until we hit the bottom.