By Maria Padhila
What is wrong with these sentences?
“Take responsibility for your own boundaries. You must be able to say NO. Be sober enough to be in control or make plans with a friend to have a ‘designated driver’. How you feel is not magically telegraphed to others. YOU are in charge of your boundaries.”
To a lot of people, this sounds like good advice. I get an email every couple of weeks from a paranoid mom who sends along Snopes-fodder about not going to certain neighborhoods, parking under a light, learning the places to hit a rapist so you can do the most harm. She thinks she’s saying something caring. She thinks she’s imparting valuable information.
Oh, we all know about good intentions. Each one makes a lovely paving stone, to throw at the village slut perhaps.
There will be plenty of you who will say that there’s nothing wrong with those sentences on top. That people should take responsibility for themselves. That you just need to show a little common sense. There are so many people that fully agree with what’s above that a comment calling out these statements as victim blaming got hundreds of replies within an hour.
I’m going to try to explain why laying things out the way the above reads is nonsense. Here’s the basics: I could be working with a lifetime of sobriety, wearing a hoopskirt and nun’s habit, holding a sign and a megaphone telegraphing my boundaries, be the roller derby champion of the hemisphere, surrounded by a ninja guard, and strolling on the White House lawn, and I might still get raped if some sociopathic motherfucker wants to do it badly enough. And it would be the rapist’s fault.