A World Without Rape
Short excerpt from a work in progress
Imagine a world without rape.
Picture the difference it would make to human life if it simply never occurred to a man to violate a woman. If women were not afraid of men, the ‘woods’ or the ‘dark’.
Creating a world without this gratuitous cruelty would not be easy, granted. But it would cost us nothing. Nobody loses from the project of ending rape: not one person, not one thing of value. We only stand to gain, and here is what: a world in which men and women can look at each other in the eye, communicate free of agendas, “seek each other … as brother and sister, as neighbours,” as the poet Rilke wrote, and form communities, real communities; we gain a world in which we experience and celebrate genuine sexual freedom and in which it is fun to find compatible partners we genuinely choose and who choose us back; a world in which children are born out of joyous mutuality; in which boys and girls are not exposed to porn or objectification; in which teens don’t learn to hate their bodies but love them.[1] We gain a world in which none of us employs psychological dissociation habitually, to escape our bodies, perpetually hurt, scared, alarmed and flooded with stress hormones because of the threat of other people. We live joyfully inside our bodies. As a result, we gain exquisite sensitivity, and live as many indigenous cultures have – attuned to the world, its intricacies, its subtle shifts and changes.
In ending rape we gain a quality of embodiment, connection, attention and sensitivity that in turn gives rise to a state of awe and gratitude, which so many today acknowledge is our natural state, the state we are wired for, given that we live in an incredible, miraculous living planet, filled with inexplicable wonders. We gain willing participation in this process of life.
Gaining a world of connected and sensitive individuals, we also gain a world in which it is exceedingly difficult to get people to go to war, to kill or exploit other beings with whom they have no personal grievance. A world without rape is the end of domination, and all humanity’s major problems, since rape, commercialised in prostitution and filmed in porn, is a factor in mass killings, militarism, environmental destruction and hunger.
Thank you for following The First Task on Substack. This is the first post, an excerpt from Renée’s current manuscript. In future articles, we will be examining the connections listed above, between rape and other forms of violence, in the interests of standing for a world without rape. Become a paid subscriber to also read Renée’s new, upgraded, Brief Complete Herstory in digestible sections as it completes. Thank you for your support!
!
[1] Rilke, 1903/1984, p.41.