It was just after 2 a.m. on a pitch-black Friday morning when Bernadette Greene-Placentia’s life changed. The Democratic candidate for Congressional District 8 strolled across a parking lot to repair a damaged campaign sign. It was a routine she’d followed all summer. This time, she only made it a few yards.
An attacker smashed her over the head. She blacked out. She woke up to find a strange man on top of her.
Greene-Placentia struggled to open her eyes. She felt a sharp pain below her waist. The attacker was pulling his penis out of her.
She heard him mumble something like, “-ic bitch, not a very good fuck,” which her mind filled in as “Democratic bitch,” she recalled. She wasn’t sure that was exactly what he said.
One leg was out of her jean capris. She wore brand-new tennis shoes and a campaign t-shirt. Another man came over. Greene-Placentia felt his weight nudging her left leg further apart. She began swinging her foot at him. “Not even worth it,” she heard the man say as he moved away. He wore black boots and had small feet, she recalled.
The two men left Greene-Placentia face down in the parking lot. The hatch of her silver Jeep Grand Cherokee was still open. The car was still running. She heard music.
She doesn’t remember pulling up her pants or picking herself off the asphalt parking lot. She doesn’t remember closing her Jeep’s hatch and putting her foot on the gas. She doesn’t remember pulling her car into the driveway and collapsing into her bed.
“It’s just these little tiny flashes of things that I do remember,” Greene-Placentia said in an interview with Phoenix New Times. “As much as I don’t want to remember, I’ve tried very, very hard to remember more stuff. But that’s where I’m at.”
Understood.
“men” is not a fixable problem.
Republican culture is
This is not just in Republican culture.
Feel like you are just trying to be prickly. It’s certainly a big part of it in the US and that’s what the post is about.
You pick what you want to work on, but this is where I will focus.
I’m not trying to be prickly about rape, I am prickly about rape.
This extends far beyond just Republican culture and it does no one any good to pretend like being a Democrat or progressive means one is immune from supporting rape culture.
Don’t fully agree. While rapist are so commonly men (to the point of it being functionally ubiquitous), not all men are rapists or sexual assaulters. The rates of men who are is also not uniform globally (just compare Uttar Pradesh to… basically anywhere). And while correlation isn’t causation, it still heavily implies that there is a cultural element that can be curbed (i.e. Rape Culture).
While I don’t have the hard answers to fix the problem, I don’t really accept the easy “it can’t be done” answers here either. We can change the culture, and that has to start by not hand waving away key statistics like “rapists are predominantly men.”