Two minutes.
One hundred and twenty seconds.
The homemade macrocosmos of her heliocentric philosophy, orbiting amongst her ardent sunshine vitality. Every perfervid comet cauterizing her lacerations; meteors drizzling throughout the chasms within her ribcage like her own intimate cloudburst, her marrow permeated with constellations that are hieroglyphics to her headmost infatuation, her concession of training wheels, her commemoration of that prizewinning spelling bee.
The blockbuster photoplay to her Lifeblood premiering throughout her burgeoning silver screen unanticipatedly destitute—abandoned like an apocalyptic affair—in consequence of a petulant maligner.
Oftentimes, her acreage is that of his kernel, his grapevines intertwisting themselves within and around her sphinxlike cross-stitched consciousness. He is not an outlander to the ultramarine seaways of her peninsula; he has whittled himself into a crackerjack statutette, an aficionado of her interpersonal relationships, her bicycling pathway for Sunday morningtides, and how she bespeaks her cappuccino at the neighborhood coffee shoppe.
Alternatively, he is a tenderfoot of her gala, the partygoers’ undulating ballgowns and chivlalrous tuxedos arcane, the melodiousness of the travailing symphonic orchestra disorienting. To him, she is a fortuitous convenience of allineating hellfire—opportunity for the devil.
A “behind a dumpster” opportunity. A “within a parking garage” opportunity. A “somewhere amidst a university carouse” opportunity.
Two minutes.
One hundred and twenty seconds.
Thereafter, she will involuntarily adopt regenerated portrayals like that of an intelligence operative stationed within a bellicose province: Victim, Fabricator, Statistic, “Asking For It”.
He, howbeit—he will be benevolently casted by their peers as: Terrorized, Nonplussed, the Infallible Victim Himself, “Had a Futurity Coruscastingly Auroral”.
In spite of this overindulged customary of maladministered blame, she, fundamentally, is Survivor.
She is fingertips excavating the terra firma for subsistence—for a reason—the earthen soil and seed cohering to her, and yet, she perdures, treading on throughout the parlous flora. She is unyielding thews contentious against the acidulous downpours and the sweltering incalesence of jungle rays, stymieing her deforestation. She is the monarch of her Metazoa; her healing her diadem, her fortitude her throne.
Albeit, within the feminality of sexual assault contrives a masculinity; his reverberating kettledrum time signature of 1 in 33 synchronized to her 1 in 6 (RAINN).
Societally, we heedlessly assert “MEN cannot be RAPED”, and yet, his 3% of starless twilight perturbed by a pestilence of black-and-blue shamedfacedness and traumatization is parasitical within its contamination (RAINN).
We. At the voltaic switchboard of the collective victimblaming and slutshaming, the treadles hissing to elementary, doe-eyed missies to calibrate the measurement of their polkadotted sundresses throughout arithmetic, and to hearken the grandfather clock’s tick tick tick as the dayspring desiccates—is Us.
“Rape Culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture. Rape culture is perpetuated through the use of misogynistic language, the objectification of women’s bodies, and the glamorization of sexual violence, thereby creating a society that disregards women’s rights and safety” (Southern Connecticut State University).
Internationally, communities are bondservants to this cultural influence, whether by being fettered to subliminal messaging throughout first-world publications and communications, being labored by the sexualization and fetishization of LGBTQIPA singletons—which wherefore germinates their systemic sexual harassment and browbeating—or flogged by the categorical sexual onslaught within regions inclusive of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In summary, we within our communal wholes like organisms of a commonwealth symbiosis are emphatically conscious and subconscious of these preconceptions spoon-fed to us and mollycoddled with.
Brock Turner. Austin James Wilkerson. Ascertainable entitlements that stimulate multifarious rebuttals, and are apportioned to the, “11 percent of convicted rapists [that] were not sentenced to jail or prison time. For those who were incarcerated, the median prison sentence length was 10 years” (The Boston Globe).
We are not eleven percent. We are not the socio-cultural prejudgments of survivors of sexual assault. For them, we are necessitated to be augmented; to be MORE.
Merely as a result of us not being warranted to verbalize its crestfallen reality—whether it’s via the recitation of Maya Angelou throughout standardized homerooms, or being impugned as a “liberal feminist” at familial festivities—does not implicate its falsehood and that it cannot be ameliorated. That it cannot be wholesome.
It is real; it is happening.
Two minutes.
One hundred and twenty seconds.
Contrary to the omnipresent presumption, silence is never a romanticized honeyed golden. Be unapologetically unwavering within your bleeding heart; in each quantifiable scintilla of humanistic atom that is chiseling into your social justice. Be SlutWalk. Be It’s On Us. Be the NO MORE Campaign.
“Every two minutes, an American is sexually assaulted” (RAINN).
Every two minutes, what are you undertaking?
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