Sara Tyrrell

“Summary If a boy treats you like you’re special, it’s probably because he wants to come and not because you are a treasure he discovered. You are not a treasure. You are a thing a boy can use to make him ejaculate. This makes sense because you already believe this at your core. You have been taught.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Rape was and is a cultural and political act: it attempts to remove a person with agency, autonomy, and belonging from their community, to secrete them and separate them, to depoliticize their body by rendering it detachable, violable, nothing.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Anger is the privilege of the truly broken, and yet, I've never met a woman who was broken enough that she allowed herself to be angry.”
― Lyz Lenz, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Similarly, he forgot - or never really understood - that we live in a culture where men, as a group, have more power than women.

This isn't a controversial statement, despite the protestations of guys who funnel their frustration that not all extremely young, conventionally attractive women want to sleep with them into and argument that women, as a group, have "all the power." (Bill Maher, repping for his fan base, famously jokes that men have to do all sorts of shit to get laid, but women only have to do "their hair.")

The really great thing about this argument is how the patently nonsensical premise - that some young women's ability to manipulate certain men equals a greater degree of gendered power than say, owning the presidency for 220-odd years - obscures the most chilling part: in this mindset, "all the power" means, simply, the power to withhold consent.

Let that sink in for a minute. If one believes women are more powerful that men because we own practically all of the vaginas, then women's power to withhold consent to sex is the greatest power there is.

Which means the guy who can take away a woman's right to consent is basically a superhero. Right?”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and What We Can Do about It