Except it’s more like your friend invited you into their house, showed you around, and then their dad decided you were a bad influence and tried to kill you.

Patrick invited her in. At least 2/5 of him had no problems with her being there (and if this is the last part of him, it seems like 3/5 of him were cool with it).

The argument that Alison never had explicit verbal consent for what she did is what convinced me. I believe–and Alison theoretically believes–that messing around with other people’s bodies and brains is unethical without explicit consent.

You say “rape analogy,” but I don’t believe the person I replied to was arguing that breaking Patrick’s brain walls equates to rape. They’re saying that Alison failed to apply the same standards of consent in rewiring Patrick’s brain that we know she does apply to sex.

I understand where you’re coming from. I had a similar reaction when people were insistently equating Alison twisting Max’s arm to rape during that whole months-long debate. I’m just clarifying why I think bringing up sexual consent was relevant in this particular case. It highlights an inconsistency in Alison’s ethical principles.

Yeah, but rape analogies are an easy subject to mess up and say terrible things. Because we don’t have mind control in the real world, rape is the most violent act of intimacy and agency violation we have and a lot of rape analogies manage to both display a serious trivialization of the consequences of rape and poor critical argumentative skills to talk about ethics.

/And/ that’s without even taking into account when it’s done to defend wrong, terrible and terribly wrong opinions. For instance.

Ah, the consideration ad nihilo, in the full grace of its contextlessness and purposelessness. Truly, a wonderful creature, on par with other such insightless questions such as “is this feminist”

JP… I find your analysis deeply flawed. You are talking from your perspective as a sexual assault victim and how you recovered. But not all sexual assaults are the same. Dependent on the level of violence, violation and most important repetition; recovery for some sexual assault victims is not as easy as yours.

A simple pill can not heal multiple contusions, broken bones or lacerations. A few hours of meditations may not clear the threats of further assaults or assaults on family members uttered during the rape to terrify you. You can not take a ‘few weeks’ to recover from a rape if you are being raped every night.

Your quick recover is a blessing for which you should be thankful.

Speaking as a survivor of multiple violent rapes.

*sigh*

Your opinion the trite yet dishearteningly common reactionary one. I’m very glad you were able to move past your own trauma, but all anyone you included should glean from your experience is that you have thick skin, and more power to ya. But claiming you’d rather be raped again than robbed is so misguided, inconsiderate and divorced from reality there’s little I figure my own experience as a child counselor (who’s never been sexually assaulted herself) will do to make you realize. Although I’ll try.

Here’s the thing: what you claim is an over-exaggeration of the consequences of rape and its self-victimization effects, is just absolutely untrue and without a shred of worth. It’s the typical claim of reactionary asswipes for whom the “normal” is the world we lived in (and still very much do to a large extent) a mere few years ago where rape happened just as much and traumatized just as much and the rapists could get away with it so as not to upset the order too much. It’s a normal settled so deeply in cultural consciousness movements like #MeToo could never have happened until last year. It’s a normal in which the US elects a President who has /raped/ /children/, and it’s not the worst thing everybody in the entire world thinks it has done. How happy were the assholes of our world to jump on the self-victimization narrative bandwagon, using the arguments of the opposition to spin lies that benefited their needs.

See, I cannot even give credence to your valid argument that patriarchal attitudes see women as exchangeable commodity and rape is essentially seen as damaged goods if they are to consider it as horrifically as it actually is. Because it just isn’t true. It’s not the real world. In the real world, Brock Turner spent a mere six months in prison and at the time of his arrest, the media were focusing on how a drunken mistake by the poor sod would ruin his life. In the real world, marital rape was legal within /living memory/. The real world took its time to carefully construct a framework in which women are culturally educated to take it upon themselves to cater to men’s desires, it’s nigh impossible to ask authorities for help when you’ve been raped, you’re called a hysterical wench when you do, and when movements finally make a headway into changing things for the better, it’s chalked up to a conspirationist plot of the feminists to self-victimize, quote unquote pussify the world, make millions of “false accusations” (which don’t exist, period), and the smarter assholes of the bunch seed lies to make us who actually care doubt about our principles by stating despicable nonsense such as “Society plays up such a hoopla about the victims (not the perp) to constantly remind victims that it happened to them, and the ‘real’ damages are a self-fulfilling prophecy of nonsense by creating a socital-induced PTSD situation by making them constantly replay the event in their head instead of simply moving on.

Even if you were right (and to be definitively clear, you are not, and there are few things you could be more wrong about), this concern wouldn’t matter. What you see as this wave of over-dramatization is a drop of rain in a infinite arid desert much to the discontent of people who’re here to get a tan while people they do not give a fuck about are dying of thirst. Even if caring as much as I would like us to do about the horrific consequences of rape had this fictional self-victimization effect and it hurt survivors much more than if they were told to get over it, it would still be worth pursuing only because the balance is so, so far leaning in the other direction than the one you’re assuming.

But fuck those utilitarianist considerations.

The fact is you had something many survivors don’t, even if you claim it’s not the case: people who cared about what you had to say. What worked for you was moving forward and not meander here, and people gave that to you. That’s literally the only thing I’m asking. Not all people need the same help, and while you needed little, I’ll let you take a guess at to the percentage of children I counseled who were raped by their parents and for whom the best approach was to tell them to stop thinking about it.

I’m sorry, this is a frustrating topic, for hopefully obvious reasons.
I agree that it’s the hardest thing to visualize. There have been so few and timid step into focusing on emotional, psychological pain very much so because it’s impossible to see, and I can’t make you feel like all these people I’ve seen who still had difficulties with any form of intimacy or trust years later because of having been sexually assaulted, the ones who seemed fine who ended up killing themselves, the ones who blame themselves, the ones who hate themselves because they can’t help blaming themselves and realize how stupid this is, the ones who compulsively clean their bodies until it bleeds, the ones who become perpetrators themselves, and all those fucking imbeciles relatives around them who I sadly never had the gal to murder when they told them to “just get over it”.

Thanks for responding in more detail.

Reading through it though, it appears you are making two of the exact same mistakes that I warned earlier for people to not make.

1. I’m pretty sure you’re misunderstanding what I’m saying. Since I feel we have miscommunication here, I threw together a quick graph to see if it makes things more clear (please tell me if how I thought you were interpreting is correct).

https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/69f31b55e2aa7d8491ef2de391ec2d28ed96022fe64dd46e912b9d68ac77165e.png

2. Just because a crime involved rape doesn’t make rape the only crime. What you describe happening to children, is horrific, and to limit what’s happening to them as simply rape is to trivialize what happened to them. Not only is it rape, it’s pedophilia, and also abuse by a parent and a betrayal of trust. Of course it’s going to be more traumatic because it’s more than one crime being perpetrated. That’s the problem with the hyper-focus on the rape aspect, because it blinds people to the -actual- problems that are affecting the victims even more. It’s obvious from your description that even though you listed out what happened that made it so bad, you’re still -just- categorizing it as rape instead of the multiple assaults on those poor children that it is. The social hype of one aspect of suffering is blinding people to the full spectrum of problems victims are facing.

Response to 1. I’m sorry that you never being victimized and talking on a hard subject is somehow is more psychologically taxing for you than someone who actually has been victimized, and that somehow this makes you angry. Maybe you should check your privilege. And I’m sorry that somehow trying to explain things so you will stop forcing your flawed and twisted preconceptions on others of trying to pigeonhole someone who doesn’t agree with you into some unmatching preconceived mold NOT WORKING somehow doesn’t get through your head and comes across as nonsensical because you somehow can’t comprehend that maybe we should treat rape victims with respect. I have much more reason to be angry than you, and your juvenile responses that get angry about graphs of all things (which are somehow plural when I’ve just made one).

Response to 2. I’m saying what you described IS multiple crimes, and you’re ignoring the fact it is. You’re also very much putting words in my mouth that isn’t there. The problem is YOU are trivializing rape VICTIMS and society trivializes rape PERPETRATORS, and both YOU and SOCIETY are overhyping how bad rape victims SHOULD feel about being raped instead of focusing on RECOVERY and are FAILING to treat MULTIPLE violations of consent and infractions against a person as anything more one infraction.

To put it bluntly, your mindset hurts rape victims.

It’s not semantics. You claim you’ve counseled child victims, but if you’d pull your head out of your sexist arse for two seconds, you’d realize something doctors of ER trauma vistis realized long ago: The same attack can cause multiple injuries, and those injuries all require treatment, and knowing there’s multiple injuries affects the treatment. A victim of a knife-weilding mugger who also breaks bones, the doctor doesn’t look at it and say, “Oh, you’re a knife victim, I’m going to stich up your deep cuts and that’s the end of it.” They treat cuts, then set bones, address swelling, and more.

However, in your little fantasy world “Oh, they’re all rape victims, and it’s various styles of rape.” No. There’s mutlple forms of psychological attack all from the same crime, some is rape, some is physical pain, some is betrayal, the list goes one, but you’re living in your own little fantasy world where somehow all of person’s suffering can somehow be wrapped up in one tidy little word that you can get angry at, and then get angry at other people with they don’t pander to your twisted little worldview that marginalizes and trivializes victims while puffing up one of their symptoms.

I find it disturbing that the hill YOU choose to die on is “Lets treat rape victims with less compassion and understanding.”

I advise YOU to stop ignoring victims of crimes, and to stop labeling them as “rape victims” and start seeing them as people who are hurting from multiple things, and recognizing that one instance can cause multiple problems instead of treating every single instance like it’s the same thing, and stop making the problem worse.

I agree that everything should be taken on a case-by-case basis, but generalizations are needed by society as a whole.

My whole point is that society makes a huge deal out of it to where many equate it on a same level of murder, and that’s a problem, and a symptom of old patriarchal concepts of a person’s value coming from their sexual history.

Although it’s important to get the perpetrators off the streets (someone willing to violate consent for any reason needs to be off the streets immediately and pushed towards rehabilitation, not just sexual consent violations, but all forms of personal self consent violations), it’s important to emphasis to victims that they are still good and decent people, and that their value as a person isn’t damaged in anyway. And although we (hopefully) do this verbally, actions speak louder than words, and the way people act about it says a different story.

The best equivilence I can see in how we should treat it, in short, we should treat rape more akin to loved one getting bitten by a dog.

Deal -very- harshly with the dog, but the loved one should be treated completely like they’re the same person, maybe take some steps so they don’t develop a phobia of dogs, and after they’re healed, cease to view it as an impactful event in any way. It’s a much healthier response.

Yes, and I agree that the perpetrators not being delt with is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. The fact it’s not addressed as much as it should be is a problem, and police departments seem to not bother with rape investigations at all.

And yes, I’m big on suggesting to people that they act smarter and more respectful of people’s consent, and in a way that helps people recover. However telling people they should do something is very different than -forcing- people to do something. My problem with Alison in this arc is she forced her ideals on how Patrick should be on Patrick without his consent. It was fine when she was telling him he shouldn’t be that way. When he was talking with Anima and telling her what she was going to do to Patrick, she should have waited for consent to be given. That is not what she did.

Telling people they need to change is one thing and should be commended as sharing ideas and helping society grow. Forcing that change on them without consent is a very different thing, and is barbaric and oppressive. What Allison did is the equivilent of telling an ADD kid he should go on adderall, and when he refuses, spiking kid’s drink with it. Even if it helps, it’s still violating the person’s sovereignty of self.

That’s a lot’a assumptions

Which is why Patrick is AWESOME!